Though I have played all of its spiritual successors, I have only just gotten around to the one that started the Metroidvania movement: Symphony of the Night. This was the first Castlevania designed by Koji Igarashi, now known as IGA, That Crazy Castlevania Guy.

Take the classical sidescrolling Castlevania formula, and add Metroid-style overworld navigation, equippable weapons and items, and all-around badass Alucard as your main character. Throw in a pinch of good musical composition and some awful voice overs and you've got yourself SotN.

It's clear what a giant leap forward this was in Castlevania history, but playing it now I can't help but recognize points of obsolescence. It is interesting to see features like the two-handed equipment system that have not recurred in the series, but it is also easy to see why, as it does not really contribute much to the game.

Progress: Level 16

Call me late to the party, but this is my first excursion into the world of Fallout. I knew going into it that I would be playing an RPG set in a post-WWIII world rife with dry humor. What I didn't know, or rather, what I didn't really think about is how much it has aged. Fallout was first released in 1997: the same year as Diablo, and in many ways their antiquities are parallel.

Fallout is heavily inspired by classical Dungeons & Dragons RPG concepts, and unlike the simplified character system in Diablo that instantly drops the player into a click-and-kill dungeon, Fallout actually allows a full character sheet customization process (there are also premade characters available). Some of the character attributes, like Strength, Intelligence, and Charisma, are just what you might expect; but then there are other cool thematic abilities, such as Science and Repair.

I'm not very far into it yet, but the mood is definitely morose and suitably post-apocalyptic. There is not much depth of gameplay so far, but I'm assuming this will change when I actually begin to gain levels. Surprisingly, the voice acting isn't bad, and could probably be evaluated as above average by today's (blech) standards.

Progress: Shady Sands

You should know going into Hotel Dusk that it's not very action-packed. Everyone's favorite attorney game has a certain flair to it, an ever present excitement to solving cases and grilling witnesses. But Hotel Dusk, though covering similar territory, is much more subdued. Throughout the whole of the game, which I suppose took somewhere around 8-12 hours, I felt pressured for perhaps a total of two minutes. This isn't necessarily "bad" depending on one's tastes. Ultimately, it is less like a video game, and more like a book. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this was Cing's mantra all along, as the game-like portions are somewhat rough around the edges while the storytelling is highly refined.

Yes, it is very well written. Hotel Dusk is a surprising example of how a good detective story can be told outside of a thick novel or an abridged film. Figuring out the running plot was rarely what I would call difficult, but was nevertheless intriguing and enthralling. By the last few chapters I simply couldn't put my DS down; I had to keep pushing toward the truth.

Which brings me to my final point - casual play. As I said, the "game" elements lend themselves pretty well to a casual player. But at the same time, I think if you were to take long breaks between loading save files, you'd be at a disadvantage. This is because so much of what happens in Hotel Dusk is reliant on your attention to and memory of past events. If you do decide to play this game in spurts, be sure to make extensive use of the in-game notebook.

Progress: Complete

Forgot to mention - the presentation is pretty cool, depending on how powerful your system is. Stuff like full screen glow and ambient sound effects can make for total Tron immersion but they are a huge performance drain.

In the end I am pretty bitter about Tron 2.0. All the pieces are here for a fantastic title, boring plot be damned, but the lack of appropriate difficulty balance (and my subsequent necessity to enable God Mode to get anywhere) makes it a non-game. I bet there are real FPS pros and masochists out there for whom this challenge is perfectly feasible, but Easy Mode was not easy enough for me, and that's simply not fun.

Progress: cheated

I tried, tried, and tried again to get past the Legacy Code chapter in Normal Mode. I even tried a few times in Easy Mode. In the end I had to use the God Mode code to get anywhere. Forgive me, Gunpei, for I have cheated.

The Tron nostalgia is cool. The gameplay mechanics (subroutines) are cool. The environments and enemies - Oh and did I mention the tanks? - are cool. The plot is ... pretty vacant, though it at least loops back into the Tron nostalgia. But Tron 2.0's difficulty balancing is far and away the worst I've seen in any game, ever. This isn't a case of being thrust into a Contra style apocalyptic battlefield, but a case of being requested to arrange drive lenses and activate I/O nodes while taking fire from all sides from weapons that can bring you from full to dead in two seconds flat.

I know I'm awful at shooter games in general, but I also know that being outmatched in Easy Mode at less than 20% of the way through the game is a huge problem. I'll continue playing in God Mode just to see how it plays out, since it's still marginally fun (some things like jumping puzzles and timing challenges are difficult even with total invincibility), but it's already lost any possibility of being a real, fun game.

Footnote: lightcycle races are a recurring theme, so it turns out that I wasn't done with them after all.

Progress: Master User - Remote Access Node

Hotel Dusk is a detective novel in a DS game card. As ex-cop and main character Kyle Hyde, you'll walk around a 3d-rendered hotel, looking for clues, interviewing guests, and solving puzzles to unravel the riddles around the mysteries around the enigmas. The plot involves not just a mission from Hyde's current employer, and not just peculiar hotel guests, but Hyde's old partner and a raw deal from his past on the force.

I've only finished Chapter 1 so far, so the mind-bending is pretty simple. But I did manage to get a game over already! One of the neat things about Hotel Dusk is the choose-your-own-adventure inspired narrative. For the most part your decisions will just alter some dialog, but if you make a bad one you'll end up being kicked out of the hotel and staring at a Game Over screen. Of course you can go back to where you made the mistake and try it again, but it bolsters the importance of saying the right things and asking the right questions.

The dialog so far is really well written, and though I've barely met a few of the hotel's cast of characters, they're all shaping up well. There's a little girl, staying with her father, who doesn't know where her mother is; a woman who talks hardball, but gets nervous at the mention of police; a sophisticated author who gets a little too wrapped up in his reading; even a bellboy from Kyle's time on the beat who has a few secrets of his own. It's not just what they say, either - everyone's manner of speaking and vocabulary is precise, and intentional. The scripting is excellent.

I haven't been blown away yet, but the remainder of the game shows tremendous promise.

Progress: Chapter 2

It's easy to harp on the Metroid Fusion similarities (which are numerous), but Scurge: Hive stands on its own as a solidly fun title. The game took me about ten and a half hours all told, and once you complete Normal mode, you can go on to play Hard, then Super Hard, then Bleeding Eye Sockets modes, if you're into that sort of thing (these being the only forms of replay/unlockables).

It's not going to win any graphical awards, but most things look crisp and clear (there are a few perspective-related visual glitches). Likewise the soundtrack isn't epic, with level themes ranging from "pretty good" to "meh," but sound effects are surprisingly effective, especially given the hectic nature of the game's pacing.

The infection timer is a really cool gimmick, and really the feature that makes it more than just a Metroid knock-off. It, along with hordes of enemies, alters the whole game atmosphere significantly. Your goal isn't exploration: it's survival. The levels aren't designed for the player to probe the minutiae of crumbled walls, but for the player to shoot the fuck out of the weird monsters in the way and get the hell out of there. As such, backtracking isn't a research expedition but a liability, and if you miss a keycard (required to open some doors) going back for it is a royal pain.

Whether the "To be continued" at the end of the credits will be fulfilled remains to be seen, as Scurge was a fairly low budget project from a fairly low budget studio, but at the same time it is living proof that the small development team is not dead. I admit that my initial expectations were quite low, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Kudos to you, Orbital. (Give me Pirate Battle!)

Progress: Beat normal mode

I hate to say it, but the Tron mystique is beginning to wear thin. Plot related text and cutscenes are few and far between, and the light cycle arena is way behind me, with the vast majority of the game yet to come. The subroutine and light puzzle elements are still here; but the shooting challenges are becoming very hard for me to keep up with.

Progress: Legacy Code - Alan's Desktop PC

As the game goes on, it becomes more and more like Metroid. Jenosa (the bounty hunter)'s power suit gets capability upgrades, including a grapple beam, and her "projectile gauntlets" (power beam) get new powers, ranging from new abilities like time slow to rock-paper-scissors elements. This is one of the differences to the classic Metroid formula.

A combustion shot burns biological enemies but powers up mechanical enemies; an electric shock shorts out mechanical enemies but powers up energy-based enemies; and an energy dissipator shot vaporizes energy-based enemies but powers up biological enemies. When you use the right shot on an enemy, nearby enemies also take damage, and enemies come fast and frenetic enough that you need to keep switching to keep up.

There are two other things that make Scurge distinct from Metroid. One of them is the perspective, which as I've mentioned, makes aiming a bit trying. Dancing around in order to hit enemies is aggravating to begin with but later becomes the main challenge of the game.

The second difference is that Jenosa can level up, gaining experience points from items picked up from exploded enemies. Though the effects of leveling up are apparent as the game goes on, they come slow enough that grinding is pretty pointless. Instead the effect is making backtracking slightly easier, which is pretty cool.

The story is beginning to become more interesting than it was, but is still not very much. Thus far it's a fairly predictable military-versus-botched-research-installation plot... like, say, Metroid Fusion.

EDIT: I forgot to mention another difference between Scurge and Metroid, which is probably the most important one. In Scurge: Hive, Jenosa is vulnerable to the titular scurge, and becomes gradually more infected until she reaches a decontamination room (save point). When infection reaches 100%, your health will begin to deplete. If you move fast this should almost never happen, but it does persuade you to ... move fast, and keeps the pace of the game very fairly exciting.

Progress: Excerpt 5 - Before we knew it...

Thematically Scurge is a definite Metroid ripoff. Female bounty hunter, hired by an intergalactic military, fitted with a high-tech powersuit, sent to a secret planetary installation to fight a rapidly-multiplying alien organism. But it plays somewhat differently: there's very little jumping and puzzle solving, but a great deal of isometric 8-axis laser firing. Yes, now that you mention it, the 8-axis laser firing is quite difficult to aim.

It's pretty simple so far, but in that there's a certain charm of dumb shooting action. I wonder if it will last...

Progress: Excerpt 2 - Marooned