Michael Walbridge

Retro Game Challenge

April 1, 2009

DS / Reviews / by Michael Walbridge Make a comment! / Tweet it!

I don’t know how to label “my generation”, but it’s certain that someone in marketing has: Retro Game Challenge caters entirely to those spent a lot of time gaming in the 80s. If you don’t know what it was like, RGC will show you. If you do know what it’s like, there are plenty of laughs and subtle references to the era that will make you giddy with nostalgia.

In Retro Game Challenge, a crazy Japanese man sends you back to the 80s to be friends and play games with his former self so you can understand what it was like back in the days where you had to use printed manuals and magazines in order to succeed. In this game, you are playing as a kid playing video games. The entire time, you will hear your friend cheer you when you succeed and boo you (or the game) when you fail. At any time, you can pause the game and rush to the manual or magazines to use one of the cheat codes if you forget it. You can even write down notes in a blank notebook using the stylus.

So it’s all very literal. Your first game is a clone of Galaga called Cosmic Gate. Upon beating all the challenges, you then will play Haggle Man, a platformer. Throughout the game you can always go back and play one of the previous games, if you so desire. Two of them, the RPG Guadia Quest and the ultimate sequel, Robot Ninja Haggle Man 3, let you save the game within the game.

The games themselves are distinct. On the plus side, they are actually good and manage to improve on old formulas, which is a necessity considering the games are simple and patterned after games that are over 20 years old. Fortunately, the designers know their design history, so the games feel both old and new, letting you appreciate the game as a relic while understanding what it was like to anticipate and be excited for an 8-bit game.

On the downside, some of the games are repetitive. The two versions of Rally King are essentially the same (in order to make fun of an exclusive edition of Super Mario Bros. that was only released in Japan), Cosmic Gate is very simple, and the second Robot Ninja Haggle Man makes only minor improvements and features. The last two games, Guadia Quest and Robot Ninja Haggle Man 3, take quite a while to play through, but the game feels drawn out only from the challenges. If you were to sit down and just play through all the other games, it would only take a couple of hours, assuming you know how to play old-school games.

Retro Game Challenge is highly clever; it successfully melds past and present, and upon closer examination, it makes the sly commentary that with the exception of the Internet and online gameplay, very little about playing video games has really changed. But if you don’t really care for satire or commentary, or if you don’t miss or care about retro-gaming, Retro Game Challenge may not be for you. The game is one huge inside joke and half the fun is from getting that joke. If you don’t, though, you may feel unincluded and wanting to ditch the party.

ESRB: E for everyone. Extremely tame. The children of today probably can’t even tell what the images are supposed to represent in some parts.

Plays like: old but good 8-bit Nintendo games

Pros: Lots of hidden humor and metacommentary, games feel old and new at the same time, games are mostly better than the old ones they emulate. The magazines, manuals, and what your friend says are funny if you get them.

Cons: But the games still feel old, and some of them are repetitive and grinding and occasionally the challenge feels arbitrary. That arbitrary challenge and that grind are true to the way things were, yes, but would someone walk through the snow for miles just to see what it was like for his grandparents?

 

Inkheart

March 28, 2009

DS / Reviews / by Michael Walbridge Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Some games just aren’t good ideas. A game is first conceived in theory in mind and in document and then shown in presentation to an agent, producer, publisher, or whomever, and if that person has any sense, he will automatically know not to make certain bad games.

Inkheart had one thing going for it in that instance, and that is the fact that it is based on a movie. However, that movie is based on a book, and that book is about books and reading and literature and the ideas they promote. It is a metaphysical book. It is over 500 pages long. There is action, but the characters are caught up in it.

So in the game, the first thing you do is ride a sled to get away from some guy who wants to talk to Brendan Fraser’s character, Mo, the dad, a guy who has superpowers enabling him to make books literally come to life. You ride the sled and dodge cars. When that’s over, it’s another long cutscene.

And that’s the irony: it’s a game based on a movie based on a book about a book, and the result is that there’s still a lot of reading.

There’s nothing wrong with reading or text in a game, but it shouldn’t be the majority of the game. The game should be a game. Why make this product? Read the book instead! If a game were based on a movie and had two hours of cutscenes and little gameplay, the criticism would be to go watch the movie and ditch the game.

Go read the book.

Inkheart is garbage. No matter how evil, virtuous, sexy, young, old, and no matter the size, the characters walk at the same speed and with the same animation, arms flopping around long and wide. The screens make you hold your DS the wrong way. That means that an already tiny screen that is dedicated to a point-and-touch text style adventure is covering an entire room. Meggie, the young girl, has a bedroom that is likely no larger than 10×12 feet. Yet you have to scroll to see it in its entirety.

There is very little action, and the point-and-touch plots are dull and contrive. Twice within the first 15-30 minutes of the game, Meggie sets out to eavesdrop on a conversation, and twice she must collect her own personal belongings. This isn’t just repetitive and lazy, it’s boring.

Inkheart for the DS is attempting to capture the magic of the movie based on the book (about a book), but the problem is that a video game, especially one with such terrible graphics, isn’t an appropriate medium to do so.

Pros: pictures of characters really look like the actors, lots of reading and attempts to preserve the movie’s message, reading level seems appropriate for the targeted kids
Cons: more text than game, and what little game is boring; graphics and animation are minimal and horrendous, controls are not intuitive, DS must be held sideways and vertically to play
ESRB: E. If the movie or book is fine, this game is fine. A little broody and dark in some parts.

Lock’s Quest

January 9, 2009

DS / Reviews / by Michael Walbridge Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Lock’s Quest is one of those games that crosses the boundaries of genre; in the strictest sense it is only strategy, but it also has elements of action, resulting in it being a “strategy-action” or “action-strategy” game. Whatever you call it, Lock’s Quest manages to amazingly blend turret-building, wall-repairing, character-positioning and special move attacks into a you-versus-the-world frenzy.

Lock is a young, blond, plain, Japanese-RPG kind of fellow who is branching out: he bears no sword, amnesia, magic, or great regrets, but he does have his village come under attack. Somewhere in the madness he loses track of his sister, but no other tragic events occur except the needed evacuation of the village.

Combat is patterned after tower defense games: hordes of robotic clockworks attack Lock’s position, making the selection and placement of towers and walls an important strategical element. Lock has 2 or 3 minutes to place these in the building stage. After this, the fight commences, which also lasts 2 or 3 minutes. Unlike in typical tower defense games, however, Lock himself remains on the battlefield to repair or to clash with the clockworks in person.

This is all done using the stylus. Lock’s Quest is commendable for managing to feel like a computer strategy game when everything about it takes advantage of the platform. Sometimes placement is a little uncomfortable, but the building stage gives enough time to make up for it.  Pathing, the system through which game units know the shortest route from point A to point B (and how to get around walls) is a bit flawed, at least where Lock is concerned; look away, and you may find he’s still in the same spot, running in place. Combat is also stylus-driven and requires a lot of coordination to really excel at it. Lock has four different kinds of attacks, all of which require unique stlyus manipulation. One of his later moves is a life-stealing attack: to perform it, a bar will appear with a tab on it. The direction the tab needs to be pulled will be random, so reflexes are key. After the first attack, two bars will appear, then three, and then it resets to one. All the moves are, in the strictest sense, easy to perform–but it is much harder to do them quickly when there are 4 towers that need to be repaired and 3 other sets of clockworks that are unattended.

The level of challenge here is one of the best features of Lock’s Quest. For a DS strategy game that is going for broad appeal, Lock’s Quest manages to nail it. Success is not out of the reach of children, at least intelligent or older ones, and adults can still find it challenging. I managed to find strategies that worked consistently, but learning those strategies took time, and it was time well-enjoyed. I’m 27 years old, I’ve played over a thousand matches of Starcraft online and won over half of them, and yet a few of these levels beat me more than once.

The icing on the cake for Lock’s Quest is the story—Lock and his sister Emi lack depth in personality, but the rest of the characters are surrounded in mystery. There are 100 “days” to get through to get to the end of Lock’s Quest, and at day 96, I thought I knew the rest of the story, but the plot twists and surprises continue through to the very end. There’s nothing deep here, but it was engaging enough to keep me curious as to what would happen, and there were some armchair philosophy and juvenile-lit lectures to boot. This is likely the only other game this year besides The World Ends With You that tells a tale you hope teenagers see; if Final Fantasy feels like a soap opera, Lock’s Quest feels like a darker Disney Movie.

Lock’s Quest manages to cross strategy and deliberation at the speed of pencil and paper with live combat, then add an involving story where every single character has a secret or surprise. To do all this and make it appealing and fun for a broad audience across genre-preferences and age is no small feat. Lock’s Quest is one of the best reasons to buy a DS.

Plays like: Zelda, PC real-time strategy, and tower defense all at the same time.
ESRB: E for everyone. Some serious themes here, including death and life, but nothing offensive.
Pros: Good for both extended and quick play, story is unique and well-told, lots of opportunity for creativity, very well-balanced challenge that engages both young and old, newbie and expert
Cons: Lock’s pathing is sometimes off, placement is awkward, seems like there are only six music tracks, and they get old quickly; sprites hardly have faces

 

Tomb Raider: Underworld

December 22, 2008

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Michael Walbridge Make a comment! / Tweet it!

I volunteered to review Tomb Raider: Underworld knowing full well I’d have to explain to my wife why exactly I was playing a game that does little but show digital booty. Within 5 minutes the TV was full of swimsuit and legs. “Why isn’t she wearing pants?” my wife asks.

“She’s Lara Croft,” I tell her. “She’s like, the female version of Indiana Jones, with all the hotness that brings.”

“She’s not wearing pants though.”

“She’s been swimming. That’s a swimsuit.”

This, gentlemen, is the next generation of Lara Croft. Now, with great advances in technology, we can aid the lack of imagination of those whose mothers do not allow them to see M-rated games. There is realistic dirt on her arms and shoulders and legs and butt and when she goes in the water or has the dirt wiped off, the glean of muscle and fat reflects perfectly; you can almost see the pores! Her face, on the other hand, still doesn’t look realistic, and even the breasts are kind of strange in a way that’s not attractive.

Of course, that’s not the point. Because if you embark on this exploration that requires you to visit Thailand and Mexico in order to get all the ingredients in the summoning of a Norse God, you will be traveling the world every step of the way behind her, and if one embarks on such journeys, one wants to have a nice view.

Seriously, it took me half an hour to realize that much of the scenery was very well-decorated as well. That water is some of the best I’ve seen. But Lara, she takes up all the space of the game! You can see her flex, jump, grope, hug, hang, push, squat, grapple, balance, flip, pull…she’s got a lot of flexibility and range. You forget what you’re even doing, or why you’re doing it. That may also have something to do with the obscure, absurd plot, wherein Lara investigates her parents’ disappearance but spends most of her time fighting the supernatural or talking into a recorder, and it may have to do with the fact that there is little fighting in the game though she has over half a dozen guns to choose from.

There’s supposed to be a game in here, but it’s hard to find. You can’t do anything without Lara getting in the way, and the times when you have to look away are not enjoyable. Mostly, it is a game consisting of how to get from point A to point B; occasionally there are sorry excuses for “puzzles”, but they are so simple they feel just like the journey; instead of looking where to go, it’s looking for the next object Lara can pick up or move. It’s not even that long a game, but twice within the first two and a half hours I had puzzles that involved putting a heavy object onto a pressure plate; twice also I had to kill sharks as my first act in the level; twice I had to run from a burning vessel, and twice I had to run back through an area that I’d just come through.

Worst of all, sometimes you might fall, and you will survive these falls instead of dying, and it will take you one to three minutes of concentrated effort of going through difficult jumps just to try the jump again. Also, it will save the game when you fail in progress. Let’s be clear about this: take a crude line, shown in the sentence to the right. A————B————C————–D.  Let’s say from C to D, you jump and fall in some water. You must go from A to C again. If you accidentally die at B, that is where you’ll restart–not C.

The bosses and fights hardly feel like fights either. Early on, there is an enormous octopus, (kraken, excuse me, this is mythology after all) that takes up more than half the volume in a little pool. It’s stuck there, with nothing to eat, and nothing to do but get angry if you get close to it. But it’s not a fight, it’s an obstacle. It could have been an awesome fight; the set up got my hopes up. Instead, I was required to simply figure out where the buttons are to set up a spiky chandelier, then make it fall on the kraken’s head. Again, the visual spectacle is the only worthy element of this “battle”; the kraken’s death, like Lara’s ass, was magnificent.

Then there are Lara’s abilities, which become even stranger when she boards a ship and guns down every man on it. She has a swimsuit; they have body armor. Both Lara and goon can take multiple bullets, but only Lara (who is not a female Indiana Jones, we’ve since discovered, but a superhero) can throw multiples jumpkicks and spinning kicks that do more damage than pistol bullets. There is no way to dodge. Instead, you trade free hits. You can avoid getting hit simply by running out from a wall, shooting, then going back behind; there is no official cover system but the one you invent. Forward, wait, left, right, RT, left, right, RT, wait, forward, right, RT, left, right, RT, and BAM! that’s a free thirty guys not in reserve. It’s an easier code to remember than it looks. Also, Lara looks hot while she holds a big harpoon, shotgun, rifle, or pair of pistols, which add to the large catalog of positions in which you can pose her.

The saddest part is how transparent the game design is to those who are capable of satisifying their sexual urges elsewhere. Tomb Raider: Underworld only seems truly intent on doing two things: finishing the story from the previous Tomb Raider games and making sure you have a nice view. The view is indeed nice, but viewing is all you’ll be doing.

 

Metal Slug 7

December 22, 2008

DS / Reviews / by Michael Walbridge Make a comment! / Tweet it!

The vast majority of people interested in Metal Slug 7 have already played a Metal Slug title and are wondering if it technically transitions well to the DS. It does, especially in the audio department. The characters, animations, screams and tunes are so close to the typical Metal Slug experience that anyone playing it will immediately feel they have been given a legitimate Metal Slug experience. The hokey horde of goblin-nosed soldiers and their nose-picking, donkey-laughing, “oh-my-God-a-chick-in-cargo-pants-with-a-pistol-run-billy-run” antics have been copied and pasted into the DS in full essence. The look and sound of Metal Slug is here.

The Metal Slug standard is followed and it does try to be a sequel—there are new slugs (vehicles), and new quirky challenges oblige us again; examples include pumping a pump so you can outrun an orange ball of flame in Indiana-Jones-style, and a level where you float down a long passage in a parachute. A couple of bosses are unoriginal, but most of them retain the distinct Metal Slug challenge. The enemies are mostly pasted from other slug games, especially the soldiers and vehicles. The DS’s small screen may be the reason why the creativity and difference factor is not as high as it could be, but it’s still solid and true-to-form as you play it.

An important thing to note is that somewhere in the development process, Metal Slug 7 lost its soul. Unlike the rest of the family, this Metal Slug is a tricky fellow who shows up at a family reunion and has convinced everyone he is a relative when he is in fact merely showing up for the free food and alcohol. The exact moment that 7 lost its birthright is when it was determined that it would have no multiplayer capabilities at all, which is one of the stupidest decisions I’ve ever witnessed. For why do people play Metal Slug? Do they play it so they can get the highest score? Is there pure joy in its action? Is it like Donkey Kong, Pac Man, or Geometry Wars? 

If you’re not convinced Metal Slug 7 could possibly go the Geometry Wars route by trying to pass itself off for its sheer joy of unsocialized, brainwashing play, check out this list of features:

—You can start the game at any level that you reach. If you make it to level 3 and die, you will be able to start a new game at level 3. It is not actually challenging to get to the end of this game. It will take you not hours of mastery, but 90 minutes of perseverance; fewer if you’re highly-skilled.

—It asks for your initials to keep track of scores, just like in an arcade game. Only Metal Slug 7 has no online or multiplayer capabilities, so the score stays inside just the cartridge. It can’t even get the score system part of Geometry Wars right!

—There is a training mode comprised of two parts; one involves tons of dialogue where a cute (by anime conventions) officer pretends to have a conversation with you and then tells you to train. The training involves playing points of the levels, made available as you beat them; they have different objectives, sometimes. If you beat them all, she’ll open up more to your implied come ons! I did not beat every single challenge, so no word on what she actually does if you fully impress her. The master and servant or leader and soldier ways in which she talks are covertly sexual. Maybe you find interaction with cute anime characters interesting, and you’ll buy Metal Slug 7 just to see this, which would ironically be a more justifiable reason since it’s the kind of feature you will most definitely want to work toward alone, unlike the rest of the actual game.

So there it is: Metal Slug 7 is supposed to make the player think “sure it takes an hour to beat it, but I’ll play it a lot, again and again.” But this is not why people play Metal Slug!

It pains me to spell this out: Metal Slug is played for the challenging uphill climb on the way to the thrill of victory, especially when it is the thrill of victory with a friend who didn’t use up all the continues. But hey, if you want to play the same Metal Slug over and over again just to best your own score without showing it off to the world, or if you want to win over some drill sergeant by beating timed challenges, you can be pleased with the drastic differences all you want, by your lonesome self. 

 

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