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Chronology is a short game, but it manages to vary pretty widely.
In its first half, Chronology is an amateurish but pleasant puzzle-platformer. The puzzles are fine, while the platforming is a little rough. And the production quality is just good enough to get by -- with its terrible (but not the worst) voice acting offset by some very well-drawn environments.
In the third quarter, the puzzles get more difficult, but not exactly in a good, Braid style of adding mechanics and combining ideas; actually, these puzzles most closely resemble the worst kind of point-and-click adventure, where some pixels have to be hunted and some environmental items have to be combined in illogical ways.
Finally in its last throes, the platforming ramps up into a short series of timing-heavy jumping and switch-pushing. The game is never very good at edge collision, and the last couple chapters just shine a spotlight on this weakness.
The whole affair is a little under two hours. So none of these problems endure long enough to be really grating. But so, too are Chronology's victories short-lived.
On the whole, Chronology is just insubstantial. It barely does anything at all, let alone right or wrong.
I'm disappointed in Smash for Wii U, but not for good reasons. It isn't my kind of game -- but I don't think it was ever supposed to be.
While the Smash Bros. franchise started as a "fighting" game, at some point (the Melee point), someone decided to take it seriously. And I thought that was weird, but, whatever. What I wanted out of Smash Bros. was some multiplayer hijinks, and solo activities.
The core experience of fighting other folks is better than it's ever been, and the insane number of characters to choose from means that multiplayer will never, ever get stale. That's definitely the good news.
Melee delivered a challenging and replayable story-adventure mode, and Brawl upped that ante with its wild and irreverent Subspace Emissary mode. This installment's equivalent is ... conspicuously absent. The closest it really has is the return of All-Star Mode, a brief series of limited-stock fights against progressively-harder teams.
Remember the target-smashing minigame from the past three games? It's replaced here with some Angry Birds knock-off. That's weird, right? Luckily, the home run contest is still here, although that can only hold up for so long. The creatively-fun "Events" scenarios are definitely my favorite offering, but unlocking new events can be a real chore.
Then there's the bizarre boardgame-like Smash Tour, which is like the worst version of Mario Party ever; and even this game's "classic" mode revolves around a weird metagame of moving statues around with other randomly-arranged statues.
While Melee really embellished the bare concept of "Nintendo fanservice fighter," and Brawl added a crazy amount of content to it, Smash 4's extra offerings just feel misguided and unnecessary. The modes that I wanted are gone, and a lot of their replacements are ... inscrutable.
And so what I'm left with in Smash 4 is a good party game. That's not "bad," in fact I'm still pretty happy with it. But I had built up this hope in my head, for some kind of Superspace Emissary story mode, wackily crossing Nintendo franchises together into a grand adventure. (And I was also hoping for more unlockable trophies, and less unlockable customization items that I really don't care about at all.)
I'll continue trying to chip away at its extra content from time to time, I suppose.
Better than: Super Smash Bros. Brawl, as a party game. Not as good as: Super Smash Bros. Brawl, as a single-player game. And, I have to add: that the menus are just awful. The conceptual organization of features is complete nonsense, and everything of genuine interest is like three, four, even five submenus deep. Utter madness.
I lost a month of my life to World of Warcraft. ... It went okay.
It's been years since I was really into WoW, despite Blizzard's "best" efforts to get me back. And I would have gone on ignoring Warlords of Draenor if not for the incessant harping of some of my addict friends. Hey -- no judgments. But they are hapless dregs. No biggie.
I started by making a goblin, hoping to rediscover the joys of "early game" while also seeing some of Blizzard's more-recent narrative chops. That didn't go so hot. Goblin-town is the absurd endgame of the Theme Park design concept, such that not only is everything oriented around shiny baubles and guided-tour attractions, but that there is nothing else besides. There's no room for exploration or curiousity here, just following directions and clicking buttons. And the quality of those attractions isn't remarkable enough to make up for it. It's dull and unengaging.
Things took a turn when I used my free Level 90 Boost. Not an immediate turn -- awkwardly, the game assumes that everyone using the boost is a newcomer, or is otherwise unfamiliar with WoW's current feature set; so having just gone through the starting-area tutorial, the boost put me right into another, mostly-overlapping one. I was certain that my anemic spellbook was some kind of launch-window bug, until quests started unlocking my old spells again. I had to earn them all back. Dick move, Archmage Khadgar.
Anyway. As with all of Blizzard's expansions since Burning Crusade, this intro set the stage for story-driven progression throughout Draenor. And once I actually got on that stage, the leveling content was legitimately, pleasantly fun. My week-long trip from level 90 to 100 certainly wasn't the most enthralling game I've played, but for an MMO it felt pretty fresh: lush environments, tightly-scripted quests, cool solo boss encounters, and even a couple of the cutscenes weren't totally awful. This part of the game was solidly good.
Meanwhile, I started to get acclimated to features and mechanical changes that I'd missed over the past 5+ years. Mostly stuff I didn't care about -- more currencies to collect, more factions to grind reputation for, more daily quests to churn through, more achievements to compulsively check off. I appreciated the change to explicitly note "item level" on all equipment - simplifying the process of upgrading gear - and I liked how the talent system trimmed the fat from the formerly-bloated talent trees. As for dungeons... well, as convenient as the looking-for-group system has become, I just can't enjoy the traditional game of follow-the-tank anymore.
And I was effectively stuck on that punchline for the rest of the month. Once I reached max level, and once I finished Draenor's "story" quests, I wasn't that interested in anything else the game had to offer. I might have gotten more enthused about my engineering profession, but there isn't much new about it -- on top of which, Draenor-level professions are frustratingly time-gated by a whole bunch of one-per-day recipes.
That didn't stop me from playing, though: what kept me engaged was the garrison. It's an utterly transparent feature; this is a Facebook game, in World of Warcraft. I could practically taste the Canadian Devil's presence in it. (Which is why it's so baffling that there isn't a WoW Garrison mobile app!) But somehow this formula really worked for me. Sending my recruits out on missions, leveling them up and getting meaningless rewards, watching them grow in strength and ambition; all weirdly satisfying. And while I slept my way through old dungeons, or button-mashed my way through new ones, the completely-passive garrison was the thing that kept me coming back.
Like an addict, I had to work against myself to really bring a stop to it. If I didn't explicitly cancel my subscription, I'd still be making regular logins today, checking in on my followers and gathering up their garbage quest rewards. ... And if Blizzard does deign to make a garrison companion app, I'll probably fall right back off the wagon for it.
So much of the game isn't fun, though. Tepid, at best. Blizzard has been perfecting the art of mindless grind-play since World of Warcraft's early days, and it's so intense and pervasive now that even a total outsider can see it. As unfair as it would be to disregard the good in World of Warcraft, the story-driven leveling campaign and the lovingly-crafted world itself, it would be naive to ignore the thick, regimented tedium surrounding it.
Warlords of Draenor shows off exactly how good of a virtual pusher Blizzard has become. The fun stuff is "free," in the sense that leveling content feels more than worth the time and money. But then there are so many more days left in the subscription, and there's so much more content to try, so many more things to do. And that first high will never return, no matter how much the game continues to string itself along.
Better than: World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Not as good as: nostalgia; having free time again And, I'm still sore about: having to pay for a subscription on top of the expansion. $50 isn't enough? You really need another $15 from me to actually play the game I just bought? Come on, Blizzard. I'm sure you're good for it.
Humor. That's ... pretty much how adventure games are "supposed" to work, for me. (Chalk that bias up to Sam & Max Hit the Road.) I'm still wary of Telltale's fare, but this combination of Borderlands themes, excellent voice acting, and irreverence just might be enough to change my mind. Maybe.
Professor Layton and Ace Attorney: two franchises to which I am apathetic and enslaved, respectively; their cross-over game, then, was a warily-curious prospect for me. In the end, their collaboration didn't put me out as much as it pulled me in, and is something I'm happy to have played. But the full story isn't quite so simple.
The highlight of each franchise is storytelling, and Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright makes a bold, strong play in that regard. As the game opens in London, some mysterious characters cross paths with both Layton and Wright, and from there the gentlemen - plus Luke and Maya, of course - get wrapped up in a story that blends puzzles with trials, and fantasy with logic. The real story takes a while to get started, but once it does, it presents a genuinely refreshing take on courtroom showdowns: Phoenix adapts well to the fantasy setting, and applies analytical reasoning to magic and witches without breaking a sweat.
That having been said, a slow start is only one part of the game's awkward pace. The first half is a little ponderous, but rich in content and prose; as a side-effect, each "chapter" can be quite long and sprawling. After the halfway point - quite suddenly - the dramatic tension ratchets up and the storytelling tightens, with shorter and more-numerous chapters than before. The previously-open game world is replaced with constricted corridors, and investigative exploration supplanted by linear set-pieces. And for some reason, most of the characters established in the early game simply ... vanish, their personalities dismissed after only just being built up.
Pacing issues come to a head in the game's "ending," which is laborious -- not for the sake of being drawn-out, but because there is still so much story left. In a clear misunderstanding of the term "Epilogue," the game's final chapter contains the bulk of its exposition, and has as many twists and turns as the ten chapters preceding it.
Ultimately the plot is resolved like an episode of Scooby Doo written by M. Night Shyamalan, and the game world's "magic" is explained to be an illusion of high-technology. There is an intriguing backstory behind said technological development, but there's no real hint of it at all until the "Epilogue" chapter. I am not disappointed that Labyrinthia's "magic" was explained away by technobabble - in fact, I prefer this to the mystical alternative - but I am disappointed that this explanation was impossible to detect before being told it, and that it was only foreshadowed by events which just as easily made sense within the game's magical worldview. Without smart integration into the existing plot, the "secret technology" explanation may just as well have been fan-fiction.
But the remarkable thing about Layton v. Wright's storytelling is that, in spite of these problems, it still feels satisfying in the end. The shortcomings are impossible to ignore, but what's left - strong characterization, impressive world-building, compelling dialog, and fascinating story beats - is substantive and entertaining enough to more than balance that scale.
As for the gameplay? Well, I've made no bones about my issue with Curious Village's story being totally disconnected from its gameplay -- while Ace Attorney games have a solid history of intertwining their narratives with investigations and courtroom interaction. And as one might mathematically expect, this crossover game's execution lies roughly in the middle of those two models.
On the one hand, the game is full of Layton's dumb little placemat puzzles. Aside from clicking through conversations, and battling in the courtroom, much of the game is spent solving irrelevant riddles and brainteasers in order to proceed. To its credit, some of the puzzles in Layton v. Wright are actually synchronized with the storytelling, e.g. decoding a lock combination for a door, or rearranging pieces of a key. And a few of these puzzles are even legitimately challenging.
For the most part though, puzzles are either non-sequitur, insultingly simple, or both. That these puzzles' optimal solutions tend toward "guess and check" is clearly no accident, as the game frequently encourages the player - either implicitly in a puzzle's design, or literally, with words - to blindly fidget around until an answer reveals itself. That is to say, the game doesn't care that these puzzles are irrelevent, and just wants them to be toyed with and tossed away.
As for the court scenes, Ace Attorney's over-the-top courtroom gameplay is some of my favorite in any genre, so it's no surprise that I enjoyed these segments more than Layton's. However, the court scenarios in Layton v. Wright still fall short of the bar set by the rest of the series. Historically, Ace Attorney showdowns are at their worst when the expected action is too ambiguous to properly determine - such as when multiple pieces of evidence are rationally connected, but only one of them is the "right" one to present - and that's exactly what the cases in this game sometimes suffer from. There are also a few instances of misleading dialog (or possibly misleading translation), suggesting that a non-intuitive answer might be more correct ... but in fact, it is not correct at all.
In fairness, there aren't very many of these shortfalls throughout the game, and they're rarely bad enough to be legitimately irritating. In fact, Layton's hint coins can even be used in the courtroom to wave away such ambiguities (although I could never bear to use them, myself). Layton v. Wright's court scenes aren't as bad as Ace Attorney's worst. But they aren't as good as the series' average, either.
Every Ace Attorney game has a unique gimmick in its court scenes, whether it's spirit channeling or a robot that detects poker-faces. This game's gimmick is multi-witness testimonies, in which anywhere from one to ten witnesses take turns telling a story to cross-examine. In theory, this means that when one witness says something, other witnesses can be probed for their agreement or rebuttal, revealing new facts and further fleshing out potential contradictions.
In practice, however, this mechanic is only used a handful of times; and even then, witness disagreement only comes up about twice in each case. Furthermore, following up on said disagreement is trivialized by automatic, obvious on-screen indications -- such that it isn't meaningfully distinct from normal gameplay. All in all, the multi-witness gameplay is a fascinating idea that's both underused and poorly executed.
Actually, what multi-witness scenes show off most clearly isn't game design, but technical performance issues. Layton v. Wright apparently stresses the limits of 3D scene complexity on the 3DS, and this becomes especially evident when more than two characters are on the screen at once. The game's framerate suffers visibly in these instances, and it's impossible not to notice the stilted text-typing animations. (The framerate also suffers when there are visible fire effects, which unfortunately covers nearly all of the game's climactic moments.)
Performance aside though, the game's presentation is pretty commendable. The detailed style and thematic appropriateness of background scenes is just as great as any Ace Attorney game, characters are well-animated and expressive, and the soundtrack is really top-notch, with the possible exception of one or two "investigation" tracks that get too tedious too quickly. The game uses more voice acting than I'm accustomed to from a Wright game, and it works ... okay, for the most part. Most of the main characters' voices are good enough, though not great; side-characters' voices are more miss than hit, but are rarely heard after the game's early chapters.
And the proofreading is excellent, too, which is always nice to see in a text-heavy game. Too often, Phoenix's sequels have distracted me with sub-par spellchecking -- the only error I picked up on here was the somewhat-frequent use of "judgement" instead of "judgment," which now that I'm double-checking it, isn't actually "wrong," I guess. So, point to Capcom and Level-5 on that one.
It's impossible for me to ignore Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright's shortcomings. As a Layton game, I was as bored as ever; as an Ace Attorney game, it's clearly not among my favorites. And as such, I doubt I'll have strong memories of this game in the years to come. But just the same, it tells an entertaining story, and does it more than well enough to justify the crossover. And I have to admit that I actually enjoyed Layton's character in this story's context, even if I didn't enjoy his stupid puzzles.
Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is a fine story-driven game with acceptable-to-good gameplay mechanics. And while that isn't the best, it really is plenty good enough.
Drunken Robot Pornography is an Asimov-ian introspection on the nature of humanity, and its remaining relevance in a future of floating skyscrapers and ubiquitous automatons. No, I'm kidding. It's a stupidly-fast-paced shooter about flying around on a jetpack and violently blasting apart robots with lasers.
This relatively-simple premise works because of ... not exactly "polish," but how cranked up the game is. Movement and flight are disorientingly fast, and so are enemies and lasers. Death can come swiftly, but most levels (that I've played so far) take a minute or less to beat anyway. There are only a few power-ups, but getting them is typically crucial, since they increase firepower so dramatically -- and they stack, such that the ultimately-upgraded weapon is some kind of firehose-laser-shotgun.
Some levels just have score goals, where points are gained by killing enemies and collecting martinis, but most levels involve taking down some arrangement of "titan" robots. The basic genius of DRP is that these large, often screen-filling, boss robots have weak points; but those weaknesses are straightforward enough to not significantly distract from fast-paced running and jetpacking. These fights tend to boil down to shooting at a particular side of the titan, then another, then another - while avoiding incoming enemy fire - before eventually shooting at its center, which just further reinforces the game's sense of constant movement.
As a stretch, one could even interpret DRP as a 3D bullet-hell schmup, with a small life bar.
Although the story is totally irrelevant to the gameplay, it succeeds in instilling a sense of humor and irreverence throughout. The artificially-intelligent power suit, whose name is "Suit," will occasionally talk about item pickups, sentience, and bad jokes. The protagonist himself frequently makes dismissive remarks about the illogical swarm of robots attacking him. And "voicemail" audio clips are occasionally unlocked between levels, which provide some insight into the radically (realistically) stupid world that surrounds the game.
There are even a lot of tertiary modes and features packed in here, like community levels?, and titan customization? But that sounds like a bunch of work. I'd rather drink and shoot at robots. Kudos to Dejobaan for going many, many extra miles, though.
To rain on my parade here, though -- I gave up after about 20 levels and an hour of playing. Cutting the game this short (the total level count is at least in the forties) wasn't exactly in my plan, but I could see that I had hit a wall of difficulty I was unlikely to surpass. The life bar is never very substantial, and as levels become more and more full of lasers and explosions and robot parts, death comes too suddenly for me to really deal with.
But DRP is one of a very few games which I feel satisfied with even without completing, even having only played it for a brief time. Maybe I'll return to it someday to give level 21 another shot. At the moment though, I'm totally content with the number of giant laser robots I've demolished.
Minecraft: Java Edition pulled me in with its "craft" component, of which the "mine" component was a formulaic pre-requisite. To me, SpaceChem wasn't just a super-challenging, science-based puzzle game, but a method of implementing parallel, programmatic logic in the form of a virtual assembly line. And many years ago - in the vaguest of my gaming memories - I recall a shareware game, whose title I can't remember, about managing assembly lines on a factory floor, for similar purposes of correctly and efficiently forming inputs into outputs.
If I were to navel-gaze on this, I'm pretty sure it would reduce to the same thing that drives my interest in computer programming, ... which is probably related to a God-complex or some other ego thing. But my point is -- creation is fascinating to me, and so creating things which create other things just makes my entire brain light up. Not in a seizure way, but, you know, in a fun way. And Factorio is exactly that: not just gathering materials, but building machinery with those materials, and using that machinery to gather even more materials, and build more machinery, et cetera ad infinitum?
I am somewhat intrigued by what might be the goal or objective of the final game, re: finding a spaceship, or hunting aliens, or -- whatever. But even without that, Factorio is easily the most fun I've had in a crafting-centric game thus far. Forget building weapons and armor in Terraria, or making underwater cities in Minecraft; industry is what I want, and Factorio obliges.
Croteam isn't a name I tend to associate with fascinating gameplay (sorry, Serious Sam). And the Sigils of Elohim teaser wasn't enough to convince me of ... much of anything, really. Why should I care about The Talos Principle?
Well, the "Public Test" - that is to say, the demo - is about as good as demos get. And now I'm interested.
For one thing, the first-person puzzle gameplay presented here is genuinely compelling. Its puzzle mechanics, and the way in which it implements its game world (at least in the demo), are different enough from the likes of Portal and Qbeh to really justify the game's existence. And the demo's Easy/Medium/Hard difficulty levels are convincingly well-designed.
But it isn't just that. There is something else, something that is subtle enough, and intriguing enough, to really have me hooked. It's inserted into the world design so well; it feels easy to miss, even though it's right there in plain sight. It makes clear that the game's narrative has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. There is something enticing and mysterious in here.
Barring some terrible mistake at release, like a too-short campaign or a lack of puzzle variety, this is one I'll be looking forward to playing.
The thing about Jazzpunk is ... hm. I mean, there's definitely a "thing" about Jazzpunk. It's just that it's hard to describe, or even really to understand. Maybe that is the thing about Jazzpunk. ... I don't know.
Jazzpunk is a radical piece of post-modern-videogame art. It's a love letter to classic games, to sci-fi movies, and to electrical engineering puns. It's the interactive version of a Leslie Nielsen movie. It's a two- or three-hour long comedy act at a nerds-only nightclub. It's an outlandish excuse to parody everything from Frogger and Quake to Fruit Ninja and Twister. It's unapologetically weird, and couldn't care less if the player isn't interested.
But while it succeeds in bringing together a lot of disparate and esoteric elements, Jazzpunk fails to establish a real identity of its own. There is no overarching story, or if there was I certainly didn't care about it. There's no sense of a world or universe at all, except for a prevalence of humorous cybernetics. Characters, in the rare circumstance they're clearly identified, exist only as the means for telling disconnected jokes. Nothing really feels like it fits together in Jazzpunk; it's just a jumbled collection of random gags.
Those gags are crafted well-enough that I wouldn't necessarily call Jazzpunk a "bad" game. But the thing about Jazzpunk is, it really isn't much of a "thing" after all. It's an excuse for a bunch of funny, unrelated moments.
The Wonderful 101 makes a lot more sense when it's played from the beginning, rather than jumping in at the second level (like the demo apparently does). The game's wacky mechanics are explained clearly in thematically-appropriate tutorials, and the narrative scenario is laid out in perfectly-understandable, uh, Super Sentai terms. By the end of the prologue level, Wonderful 101 seems like a totally sensible action game with a unique gameplay twist and a fun cartoony setting.
That feeling of sensibility wavers pretty rapidly, though. As soon as the game gets challenging, it makes some demands: blocking, dodging, mastering the awkward camera zoom, and strategically managing weapon and battery usage. What makes matters worse is, the vital block and dodge moves must be purchased from the item shop between levels; on my first attempt, I didn't even check the shop, which made progressing through the subsequent level (the same one from the demo) outlandishly difficult. I only happened upon the camera controls - using the shoulder buttons to zoom in and out - by accident; and even then, the fixed angle can make it pretty tough to see when enemies are charging in from a distance.
So there are some weird design choices and some basic mechanical problems. But the core gameplay is still pleasantly wacky, and managing weapon deployments is pretty distinctly neat. Plus the attack-block-counterattack cycle makes it feel like a real character-action game, which is cool. When I can measure up to the game's challenge, it's plenty of fun. Hopefully I can continue to do so.
