Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is a gorgeously-rendered, finely-tuned platform game with fun mechanics and challenging designs. But I have the same problem with it that I had with its predecessor, Donkey Kong Country Returns. It is too hard for me. It wracks my brain to consider that, nearly 20 years ago, a smaller, dumber version of me had practiced and mastered the living hell out of this game's equally-intricate forebears on the Super NES.

If I were to have the same liberties today that I had back then - literally nothing to do all day except retry minecart stages over and over again - then, maybe, I could make meaningful progress in Tropical Freeze. But I ain't got the time for all that, anymore.

Playing A Game Broken Age PC

I've become sour on point-and-click adventure games. What was once, in the early- and mid-90s, a favorite genre of mine; has, in more recent years, become a target for my disdain. I'm cool toward the genre's celebrated resurgence under Telltale Games, in particular, as there's no love lost between me and The Walking Dead or Puzzle Agent. So, having only received it as part of a Humble Bundle, it was with no small amount of surprise that I found myself actively and thoroughly enjoying Broken Age.

In trying to understand this phenomenon, I certainly can't rule out the production values. The game has a very pleasant, slightly eclectic art style; somewhat cartoonish, somewhat cloth-like, somewhat painterly. And the stellar voice cast brings an impressive amount of talent to bear on the game's script. But these values don't exist in a vacuum -- they bolster the impeccable craftsmanship on display throughout the game. The art style underscores the adventure's two protagonists: young, and full of hope, but also full of uncertainty. The voice acting drives home that all of the game's characters, even the least significant of minor NPCs, has a story and personality. The character writing, the visual design, and the plotting all come together to form a world that isn't just fun and bewildering, but also sympathetic and relatable.

And thankfully, the gameplay mechanics at work here are honed to a very fine point. There's no pixel hunting, and there are never any puzzles with completely inappropriate solutions; even the game's most oblique riddles can be answered simply by carefully considering the environment and your inventory. Some players may find these puzzles too simple, but for me they were welcome respite from the incomprehensible absurdity I feel is typical of the genre today.

Although the first act of Broken Age is quite short - about two hours - it's full of enriched, high-quality content. And the ending, especially, sets up a killer teaser for the game's second act -- whenever that might happen to be released.

You had my curiousity, Tim Schafer; but now, you have my attention.

Progress: Finished Act 1.

Rating: Awesome

LEGO Video Game The Movie The Game The LEGO Movie Videogame is a fascinating production. As the LEGO games are wont to do, this installment takes the franchise's well-worn rules and mixes them up just enough to keep things interesting. But as a licensed movie tie-in, it has some additional unexpected benefits, and pitfalls.

First off, the game's theme - not the overused, eventually-grating "Everything Is Awesome!" song, but the overall milieu - is a real treat. Like the movie itself, the game is not only kid-friendly, but adults-who-grew-up-with-LEGO friendly, and the diverse environs based on LEGO sets (construction, cowboys, et cetera) complement characters who are intimately relatable despite being computer-generated avatars for plastic toys. It helps immensely that, in addition to containing lines and video directly from the movie, a substantial cut of the movie's voice cast - Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Ferrell, et al - even recorded original lines for the game itself. (Although Liam Neeson is auspiciously absent.) The look and feel of the game, overall, is really impressive.

As an aside: I completed the game before seeing the movie, and despite following the same plot and using the same cutscenes, the game actually manages to not spoil the film's ending. So that was a fun surprise.

Unfortunately, being a simultaneously-released movie tie-in means that there are some obvious gaps in the game design. Like recent LEGO games, this one has an open world to roam around in, inbetween missions; but unlike LEGO The Lord of the Rings or LEGO City Undercover, this game's world is subdivided into thematic sub-worlds (again- construction, cowboys, et cetera). As a result, each sub-world is fairly small, and doesn't have a whole lot going on. While there are still 15 story missions, per the LEGO series standard, several of these are brief essentially-on-rails sequences; and there aren't as many collectibles, either in missions or out in the world, as other LEGO games typically have. Overall, The LEGO Movie Videogame is short on content, compared to its peers.

The really interesting new mechanic in this one is sort of an extension of LEGO City Undercover's "superbuilds" -- but instead of merely collecting items and bringing them to a location, this game actually makes the construction process semi-interactive. Most of an object will build itself, of course, but at key points the build will pause and demand that you select the appropriate piece from a radial-menu of eight choices. It's more engaging than a quick-time event, and certainly more fun than just watching the build happen all by itself.

Otherwise, the game is packed with the same kinds of basic puzzles and destroy-LEGO-things challenges you'd expect. Technologically, it's as polished as this series has ever been, my friends and I having encountered only one or two hiccups from start to finish. (One in particular was a character getting stuck in part of a level, making the mission unwinnable. So, there's still some room for improvement.)

On the whole, The LEGO Movie Videogame is a surprising success for a movie-license tie-in, and a good (albeit brief) entry in the LEGO game franchise. It's not going to blow anyone away, but it serves the movie and the game series well.

Better than: LEGO Marvel Super Heroes
Not as good as: LEGO City Undercover
Also: The movie is pretty good. Watch that, too.

Progress: Finished the game, didn't get 100%.

Rating: Good

Rocksteady's back at the helm, so that's definitely good. Playable Batmobile ... could go either way. Otherwise, there's sadly little in the Arkham Knight reveal to go on -- other than the obvious, like that it'll be packed in with Nvidia's newest GTX line, and that there'll be retailer-specific costume packs, and that I'll pretty much buy it no matter what.

Honestly, though, I'm a little disappointed that we won't be seeing a retro-stylized Silver Age game from Rocksteady instead. (Whatever happened to that? Was that what turned into Arkham Origins after all? Man, that would be a shame.)

c. June 6, 2012

Apparently, it could be made not fun by introducing hilariously stupid stealth sequences. I mean... really?

The lynchpin of the original was its God of War-styled combat, which some people apparently loved, even though I could never get into it. MercurySteam almost certainly would have been better-served by iterating on that, with legitimately new enemies and techniques etc., than by introducing half-baked mechanics like sneaking or Uncharted-ing. By all appearances, this sequel reeks of the same kind of harebrained scope-creep that made the middle Assassin's Creed installments so disorienting and awkward.

Looking Forward To It Thief

Every time some new promotional news comes out for Thief, I keep waffling on my opinion of it. This 17 minutes of gameplay footage, which seems to thoroughly illustrate the moment-to-moment experience of playing the game, ... is no different.

On the one hand, the meticulous, even tedious stealth exploration and collection shown here strongly resembles the way I tended to play Dishonored, and Skyrim, and BioShock. Although it looks dull as dirt, I can see myself becoming really engrossed in sneaking around and pilfering the hell out of everyone's vaults and bedrooms.

On the other hand, is that really all that's going on here? Dishonored, Skyrim, and BioShock all had a number of other major gameplay components going on, too, all of them much more bombastic and thrilling than gradually relieving a mansion of its valuables. What else does Thief have? I really don't know, but if you can go 17 minutes without seeing any of it, I'm not sure what significance it could have.

So: inconclusive, still. At least there isn't much longer to wait for real reviews, which will hopefully enlighten me on what else Thief brings to the table.

Playing A Game 10000000 Android

10000000 has a few immediately-interesting things going for it. It has a difficult-to-communicate title (see also: VVVVVV), it has a genre-bending hybrid formula, it has distinctive big-pixel graphics. At a high level, solving a puzzle to execute actions is certainly a ... fascinating, idea.

Unfortunately the game has a foundational formula problem, which happens to be very similar to Clickr's. To wit: game progress is dependent on you being lucky enough to have the game give you the right tiles, in the right arrangement, to put the right thing together at the right time. What's especially irritating about 10000000's puzzle mechanic, is that you can't just put like tiles together; when you 'slide' a row or column, you can only stop sliding if there's a direct match. Some potential matches may appear simple, except that you can't perform a perpendicular move to complete them. Unless you find an intermediary move to get closer, and then another incremental move, and another, and by then you've already passed the treasure chest or been killed by a skeleton or otherwise missed your opportunity.

Hey -- maybe I'm missing something. I certainly didn't put enough time into the game to feel confident in my grasp of it. But my impression is that 10000000's puzzle formula is predicated on making rapid, meaningless matches, without any sort of contextual strategy; and I'm completely unexcited about that.

Progress: Basically none.

Rating: Bad

When a character's name is something like "Aldous Orwell," you pretty much know where to set your expectations.

Epoch doesn't have much of a hook -- its dystopian-future setting is stale from the outset, and the story (at least as of the halfway point) utterly fails to develop. And for as much visual fidelity it gets from the Unreal engine - which, to be fair, is a good amount - the art style is similarly dishwater-dull. There are robots, there are scrap-heaps, there are guns and lasers. Nothing radical here.

The gameplay is ... well. On the one hand, it's very well-thought-out for a mobile game: shifting between cover positions, and strategically choosing attacks based on enemy patterns, feels like a real game mechanic. Epoch avoids the bear-trap of trying to shoehorn precise aiming into a touch-based game. But on the other hand, it's still shallow; once you've mastered the art of dodging enemy attacks, there is no variety or challenge left in the game. New enemy types and new equipment upgrades do nothing to switch this formula up.

There's also a frustrating quirk in the cover controls, where swiping upward from the bottom of the screen will sometimes be confused with the Google Now (Android) swipe. Sure, this isn't really the game's "fault." But it should know well enough to avoid conflicts with OS-level gestures.

I have to give props to Epoch for pulling off a mechanic that's playable on a mobile form-factor. But the game's lack of depth and unengaging content give me little reason to continue playing.

Progress: Finished five missions.

Rating: Meh
Playing A Game Journey PS3

Yeah, I'm a bit late to this party. And frankly, the party is something of a letdown.

First off: I'm really impressed with how well-executed the anonymous multiplayer is. I expected this to be irritating at first - and it was, in the earlier, simpler areas - but as the journey itself became more trying and nuanced, my happenstance companion conveyed an implicit sense of camaraderie. It's great, because the limited methods of interaction and communication keep the whole thing very subtle. The effect is surprisingly cool.

Journey's presentation is also sublime. The craftsmanship of the game world, the splendor of the visual effects, and the awe-inspiring soundtrack are really wonders to behold. At times when the camera is drawn to on-screen action, Journey has the aesthetic gravity of a Peter Jackson / Middle-earth joint.

The game itself, though, is overall tepid. Of its eight chapters, the first four are pretty much interactive screensavers; the only gameplay to speak of is collecting jump-boosting upgrade items, which are also totally optional and unnecessary. Eye-catching, but pretty much a non-game. Then, in the final four chapters, there is an enemy which can remove your jump upgrades by hitting you -- so, an additional challenge factor, but one which nullifies the only semblance of gameplay up to then. The last few chapters also show glimpses of movement puzzles, but only barely and briefly.

As for narrative, there are cutscenes inbetween the chapters which provide some backstory for the game world, and are just arcane enough to be intriguing. But the ending, an abstract and artsy flourish, doesn't wrap anything up in a satisfying way.

By and large, Journey is a trudging-through-sand simulator; although some of its ideas are clever and memorable, the act of "playing" it is mostly passive. It's okay as an experience, but still falls short as a game.

Better than: Dear Esther
Not as good as: Unmechanical
If Journey isn't enough of a game for me: I guess I may as well forget about flOw and Flower.

Progress: Finished, didn't collect everything.

Rating: Meh

Previous information about Shadow of Mordor (open world, Ranger, unrelated to the Fellowship) didn't really register for me. But this new trailer has my interest piqued. Sure, between the climbing, stealth, takedowns, and counters, this tends to look like a Tolkienized Assassin's Creed, but hey -- that sounds pretty awesome to me. The "wraith powers" thing sounds pretty awesome too, but narratively weird. I'm definitely curious about that.

What has me a little concerned, though, is the buildup around the "nemesis" system of unique enemies who remember previous encounters. Frankly, I expect this to be more Mass Effect than true open-endedness, e.g. there are a few variables that can change based on random chance or player decisions. So ... we'll see how that plays out, I guess.