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I needed something to do during travel- and down-time for GDC last week, and I had never gotten around to trying Puzzle Quest before. I love stat-building RPGs; I love puzzle games. Unfortunately, what Puzzle Quest taught me is that if you put a half-assed puzzle game together with a half-assed RPG, all you get is a full ass.
The RPG component of the game isn't "bad," per se, just very uninteresting. Level-ups are very far between. The equipment system is scant and shallow. The story is dreadfully boring. Extra character-building stuff - party members, mounts, captured creatures, et al - are implemented well, but just couldn't get me revved up.
The puzzle engine is where I take serious issue. It's a two player, turn-based puzzle game with a shared field, and you move by swapping two adjacent pieces. Here's the problem: you can only swap pieces if they lead to a three-or-more match. You can't set up forward-looking strategy, unless it happens to coincide with a match you can make right then. You can't even pass, unless you have enough mana to do so in the form of casting a turn-taking spell. Which means that if the only move you can make puts the tiles in a position to let your opponent pound you, you have no choice but to take it. And it really seems like the blocks that fall down when you make a clear almost invariably favor the AI. Most of the time I'm looking for plays not to my own benefit, but to my opponent's detriment.
I really like the concept of the game, but it's executed very poorly. On my flight back north I couldn't find my stylus and, frankly, I wasn't too upset. There was a talk at GDC from the people behind Puzzle Quest, about how they combined 'casual' and 'hardcore' gaming interests; but no part of this game is terribly interesting to me.
After being spoiled by No More Heroes, it's just really hard to get back into God Hand - everything this game does, NMH does better (plus other stuff). I would like to come back to it, at some point, ... again.
Progress: Gave Up -- Stage 2: Human Fireworks = PARTY!
In a word: disappointed. I went to Professor Layton expecting brain-bending puzzles, and a mystery to unravel - but the box says "brainteasers," and in the end, that's all he gave me.
The game's puzzles are not what a veteran puzzle gamer will be anticipating. They are more the stuff of newsprint, or Highlights magazine. They tease the brain; that's all. Of the game's 150 puzzles, a substantial amount are trick questions. They may encourage thinking outside the box, but, by the nature of their answers, are still contained within an only slightly larger box. There are some puzzles that must be worked through methodically, some logical questions, and some math puzzles, even. But on the whole there is a depressing amount of "riddles" in the game.
The story, too, is something of a let-down. It's a mystery, but the player has no part in solving it: progression is strictly linear. Said mystery is ... interesting, at least, but not terribly compelling.
The presentation is very good, especially the magnificent animated sequences, with fairly nice voice-overs.
Maybe I'm being too hard on it. This is not a game "for me" - if I had to guess its intended audience, I would say it's a younger crowd, the kind who doesn't mind losing some "picarats" (points) for stumbling with a puzzle, the kind who enjoys thinking about a question without necessarily arriving at the answer on his own.
Though I intend to finish the rest of the game's puzzles, since I have most of them already; for me, this game is just a tease. Which is not to say it's all bad. I had no trouble tolerating the game, or enjoying its finer moments - but my appreciation for it is leagues away from Picross or Phoenix Wright.
After something of a hiatus, I came back to Drawn to Life to see if maybe I just didn't get it. Suffering through a terribly boring platforming stage was enough to convince me I still don't. And then there was story crap going on in the town!... I don't think I've ever played a game that felt so much like a chore. Everything is insipidly easy, but takes way too long, and is infested with sickeningly cute characters and just plain sickening music. Platforming formula basics like jumping and the viewport are handled poorly, and the level design is really no more than a lengthy sequence of 20-year-old platform constructs.
I'll say it again - if you just want to doodle, this might be your cup of tea, but I hesitate to call this a "game" in any real capacity.
Progress: Gave Up -- Finished snow world (still 100%)
I haven't started the game up yet, but the manual offers some interesting tidbits:
The game's "puzzle master" (the designer of all the game's puzzles), Akira Tago, is a professor emeritus at Chiba University, and a best-selling puzzle book author in Japan
Professor Layton's hotel room can be feng shui-ed with items you earn in the game, and when his Happiness meter fills up, "something good will happen!"
New puzzles can be downloaded weekly from Nintendo WFC
There is a secret in the game that can only be unlocked with a password from the sequel's manual
Where to begin, where to begin. No More Heroes is at once familiar and new; both traditional and wildly unique. You've never played a game quite like it, but if you play games, you'll feel right at home. More than that - No More Heroes is, in so many words, a game about people who play games. It makes Contact's treatment of the fourth wall look like child's play. It's also a damn awesome game. Unless you have a particular aversion to rough language, sexual themes, and hyperbolic violence, there's no excuse for not playing it. And if you like those? You may as well buy the game right now.
No More Heroes has two core gameplay components. One of them starts out awesome and becomes just plain outlandish. The other starts out disorienting, and becomes awesome. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
You control Travis Touchdown, a modern anime nerd who recenly won a Beam Katana (lightsaber) on eBay. Now he's broke and needs to pay the bills. So what's a guy with a laser sword to do? Become a professional assassin, of course. At the behest of a hot chick named Sylvia, Travis goes a little crazy, and decides to take on the Top 10 ranked list of assassins, one at a time. (You don't actually play this introductory part - it's all in the game's opening cinematic.)
The first core component is action. You start the game in the foyer of an opulent mansion, and some guys in suits with cheap iron sticks come at you. Guess you've got to kill them. A thorough tutorial walks you through the mechanics of combat: the nunchuk stick moves, and the Z button targets enemies. Press A to strike, holding the Wii remote high or low to perform high or low attacks. String them together for combos! Strike at the same time as your enemy to perform a blocking counter! Use the D-pad to evade attacks! Wii remote gestures are used for counters and to finish off an enemy. A proper finish activates a roulette wheel that has a chance to activate a special Dark Side power, which is timed on the UI by a tiger walking toward a goal. Charge up your sword's batteries by shaking the remote!
It gets a little weird, but the basic idea is that you can tear shit up by properly deciding when to attack and when to block and evade. The roulette stuff is a little underused, but supercool when it goes off. Anyway, in the end what you've got in the battle system is a great way to send buckets of blood flying every which way at a moment's notice. It's way fun, and in boss fights, can get pretty challenging. There are ten bosses, as you climb the ladder of the assassin ranks; each assassin has a unique personality (from a washed up English rock star to a philosophical army girl with a Planet Terror gun-leg), a unique setting, and unique abilities, making for a completely ... unique fight, each time.
The stages surrounding them are different each time, too. The mansion in the beginning belongs to the rock star; another boss, Destroyman, is holed up in a movie studio protected by a bunch of flunkies wearing paper sacks over their heads. Each stage has an interesting setup, and while the early ones tend toward Killer7-esque level design, the later ones have sweet gimmicks all their own, including a bus ride and a baseball stadium massacre.
So, how do you get to the stages? That's where the second core component comes in: the overworld. The town of Santa Destroy, which appears to be, supposedly, between the California beach and the Mexican border, is a city of the walking dead, people who've elected to lead lives of apathy, where human life holds no value except to take it. In theory, anyway. The actual overworld, which can be navigated on foot or using Travis's "Schpeltiger" rocket-powered motorcycle, is fairly dull, especially in the early game.
Its primary landmark is the No More Heroes motel, where Travis lives (he's apparently got a good long-term deal on his room). Inside, you can heal up, check out items you've collected, take a look at a town map, play with the cat, and save your game. The game is saved by using the toilet. Inbetween ranked assassin matches, Travis will crash in his room, take a call from the UAA (United Association of Assassins?), deposit a requisite entrance fee into a secret account via ATM, and then head to the match site. But how do you make the money to cover that fee? That's where it gets interesting.
Everything starts with an odd job, from the local employment center. These tasks cover everything from mowing lawns to picking up litter, to finding stray cats. They use quirky gameplay gimmicks and some remote-waggling to make the game feel lighter. After doing one of these and earning a bit of scratch, you open up assassination missions, which are timed, paid jobs to flat-out kill people (which is where your real money comes from).
Scattered around town are also Free Mode missions, where you fight until you kill everyone or you suffer a hit, whichever comes first. These are super-hard until you get used to them, at which point they're only mostly hard (especially when they have guns!). Santa Destroy also features a gym where Travis can up his stats by training, a lab where a friend of his works on new and more powerful Beam Katanas, a fashionable but useless clothing store, and a Japanese bar with a drunken Russian martial arts master, among other attractions.
As more things open up in the town, it becomes more fun to run around in; but in the early game, it's about as exciting as untoasted bread. You do get to ride around in the Schpeltiger, but until you get the hang of taking rocket-powered sharp turns, this isn't very fun either. Run-over pedestrians don't do anything except make a cool noise, you absolutely can't run into cars - you bounce off - and the physics in general are pretty sketchy. There are hidden items scattered around town too, but you can't even start getting those until after a couple ranked matches.
I mentioned the music before, but it bears mentioning again. The music is awesome. The sound effects? Awesome. Voice overs? Awesome. Graphical style? Awesome. Graphical quality? Mostly alright... the town, especially when you're speeding through in the rocket bike, can look pretty awful at times. But that's why you speed through it on a rocket bike. The faux-pixelated interface elements and icons that mark important locations (again, think Contact) are super cool. And it comes to a head in a minigame that you can play during the Rank 4 match, a vertical-scrolling space shooter complete with 3D models and chiptune-esque music.
The narrative is reminiscent of Killer7's, in that it's mostly quiet until the final moments of the game, but in a very different way. The game's ending battle(s) serve to make fun not just of the game's story, and not just of Star Wars, but of the game industry as a whole. And the "real" ending caps off with a fight that may have been the most intense I've ever had in any video game. And there's a New Game + mode!
All in all, from presentation to theme to gameplay, No More Heroes is a remarkable package. There are some rough spots in the overworld mechanics, and less intrepid gamers may be inclined to leave the game early. But rest assured - if you've been waiting for a game to really knock you off your feet, this is it.
Progress: Rank 1 (Mild), will return for more stuff later
Take the edgy design of Killer7, then add free-roaming controls and a lightsaber, and you've got most of what I've played of No More Heroes. The combat is, thus far, not hard, but very fun. Motion-controlled finishing moves and the High/Low attack dynamic make the fights really interesting. But mostly, it's just ultra-fast-paced, stupefyingly violent, and awesome.
I take a little issue with the camera, because while its orientation has changed since Killer7 - it's a third-person over the shoulder style view - the level design has not. Running down narrow corridors gets a bit irritating when the camera gets twisted around to watch my back instead of my front. Just a bit, though.
A lot of care has been given to the game's style, including Travis's pad (there's a pet cat), the save system (use the toilet), how you charge the batteries of the beam saber (by jerking it off), and especially the special moves, which are too damn cool, even the ones that don't do a lot. The screen goes dark, Travis yells something intimidating, and all of a sudden you're seeing a totally different sort of carnage than you've ever seen before.
So far all I've done is kill the (previously) 10th-ranked assassin after wrecking up his mansion, so I still haven't touched the game's overworld or its badass bike.
Also: the soundtrack is incredible. There are perhaps toofew games that really pump you up with the music, but No More Heroes is definitely one of them.
I decided to give God Hand another shot, and this time I appear to be stumbling in the right direction. Like I mentioned before, the game has little in the way of explanation for ... well, pretty much everything. So the story is still fairly nonsensical (which isn't helped by awkward voice-over translations). But I'm getting more of a feel for how the game is played.
As it turns out, the level-up meter that goes up when you land hits, and down when you get hit, is not your level - it's the enemies' level. So as you do well, the game becomes more difficult, and as you get hit, it becomes less difficult. In theory, anyway. It's not an especially effective system, but it makes things interesting.
Something that is important to get the hang of is the technique/shop system, because the moves you start out with are super-weak. Keeping up with more and tougher enemies requires you to buy new and more powerful moves. You earn money, conveniently enough, by beating guys up; and you get huge bonuses for minigames, which, so far, have included a rigged boxing match and the Street Fighter-style challenge of beating the shit out of a minivan.
It's pretty quirky, but I'm not sure what else I can say about it at this point. Except that the music really needs to be switched up, because I get tired of it quick (unlike another pretty quirky game).
