Guitar Hero: On Tour

When DDR first hit the local arcade, there were two crowds that loved to play it - the weekenders and the during-the-weekers. On the weekends, all kinds of people would show up, taking turns, laughing as they failed song after song, cheering for the rare victory. During the week, though, it was a whole other event. Read more

Civilization Revolution

Sid Meier is universally recognized as the master of computer game design. I remember playing F-15 Strike Eagle, on my old Commodore 64 when I was a kid. Civilization is his masterpiece, delighting millions of gamers and evolving through several versions. Civ, for the most part, has been exclusive to PC’s and Macintosh’s. However, with the PC market in a decline the past couple of years, it was only a matter of time before the franchise expanded. Read more

Final Fantasy IV

Short on the heels of my completion of Final Fantasy 3 for the Nintendo DS, Square Enix releases yet another remade classic game. Moving slowly down the line to Final Fantasy 4 (soon, no doubt, heading to 5 and 6, but never 7) in order to destroy the time I have only recently freed up. Read more

The World Ends With You

The long-awaited North American release of the heralded (yet largely unappreciated by Japanese gamers) Subarashiki Kono Sekai has brought a new revolution to handheld RPGs, proving that Square Enix is, despite its continued milking of the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts franchises, still capable of original content.

Players take the role of Neku, a young cynic who finds himself in Shibuya’s famous scramble crossing with no recollection of how he ended up there or why. Neku discovers that he’s now part of the Death Game, and over the course of seven days must fight the “Noise” (various creatures that take the form of animals) to survive and complete daily missions. As the story progresses Neku learns more about himself, his allies, and the finer points of human interaction, in-between shopping for clothing, killing poisonous frogs and kangaroos, and reading the thoughts of passers-by.

In combat, Neku’s “deck” consists of 300 collectable pins with unique attack skills such as flame-throwing, bullets, and melee strikes. Attacks are executed by using the stylus in a variety of ways such as slashes and taps, some even integrating the microphone. As the game progresses, pins level up and grow more powerful as they’re utilized. While Neku’s action takes place on the bottom screen, the top screen features one of several allies who also fight the Noise. Allies are controlled via the D-Pad (or the face buttons for you southpaws) in a unique pattern combo system, with combos performed by either character giving bonuses to his or her partner on the opposite screen. For those who would find it hard to manage both screens at once, an auto-assist option is available to help players get adjusted and can easily be overridden by the player.

Designer Tetsuya Nomura (known for his work in the recent Final Fantasy games and the Kingdom Hearts series) has given the game a hip, urban feel, to match the setting of Tokyo’s current hotspot for teens, urban culture aficionados, and bleeding-edge fashionistas. The character designs are both comforting to S-E fans and at the same time a refreshing departure from the fantasy-based settings of its other series; featuring the sort of outfits that, while certainly outlandish by American standards, are a common sight in districts such as Shibuya and Harajuku. The game’s music also matches the mood - essential in a modern setting when the wrong tunes can quickly remove the player from the experience.

World takes steps to revolutionize how players gain XP with a “Mingle” mode in which XP is awarded when the player’s DS comes into WiFi contact with another DS, no matter what cart is in that system, ensuring that World will be slotted at anime conventions, LAN parties, and events like PAX for months to come. This and other in-game innovations are proof that if you’re looking for a change of pace in both the RPG genre and how you use your DS to play games, The World Ends With You is a must-buy.

Professor Layton

I recently tried to explain to a friend about the fox, chicken and the worm.

“It’s a classic puzzle.  You’ve got a fox, a chicken, and a worm on one side of a river.  You can only carry two of them on a boat. If you leave the fox alone with the chicken, it will eat it, and if you leave the chicken alone with the worm, it will eat it.  How can you get all three of them across the river safely?”

My friend, having never played Zork Zero, looked at me as though I were mad.  But now I have my revenge, for I have introduced him to Professor Layton and the Curious Village, which has a variant of this puzzle, and he is completely addicted.

Puzzle games have been a bit outré in the past few years since the PC community recovered from the excesses of the early CD-ROM years.  Perhaps it was a lingering sense of guilt over wasted hours spent playing The 7th Guest.  The typical puzzle in today’s games tends to be a sideshow to the main event and boring to boot.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is all about good puzzles, what are sometimes called “brainteasers”.  Some of them are straightforward, some of them are trick puzzles.  Some are easy, some are hard.  But nearly all of them are interesting, and they don’t talk down to the player.

The eponymous Professor Layton and his apprentice, Luke, visit the village of St. Mystere to assist in a mysterious bequest.  The villagers of St. Mystere spend their days, and nights, trying to solve puzzles.  As Layton unravels the thread of the game’s plot he will also be presented with well over 100 puzzles, of varied difficulties, by the villagers.

The artwork is beautiful: simple lines, and somehow evocative of the animated film The Triplets of Belleville.  The music, likewise, evokes the French countryside, and if it can get a bit repetitive at times, it still enhances the experience.  That being said, I’m a sucker for accordion music.   Your mileage may vary. The inhabitants of the village are by turns awkward, fat, ugly, grotesque-looking, and supercilious, so it looks to me as though the authors actually did carefully survey the inhabitants of small French villages before creating the game.  

Throughout the game you’ll find “hint coins” which can be used to purchase hints on any puzzles.  You’ll also receive different puzzles from the same villagers.  At the end of a given “chapter” of the game, any unsolved puzzles will appear in “Granny Riddleton’s Puzzle Shack”, so there is no way to  permanently miss a puzzle.  It did seem to me that solving a puzzle in Granny’s shack was less satisfying than solving it “on the street,” but that’s entirely a question of mood.

There are also various meta-puzzles along the way that unlock bonus content, and there is extra downloadable content that can be played without impacting the main storyline of the game.

A sequel has already been released in Japan, and work is proceeding on the third game, which I will buy without a second thought.  It’s that good.

Jam Sessions

From the “I never thought they’d localize this” file comes this surprisingly full-featured guitar simulator from Japanese developer Plato and North American publisher Ubisoft, based on the Japanese title Hiite Utaeru DS M-06.

Jam Sessions isn’t a ‘game’ so much as a ’sound toy’ - think Electroplankton but far less experimental. Players first assemble a ‘chord palette’ out of over a hundred authentic guitar chords each of which corresponds to the D-Pad (or action buttons for southpaws). Using the left or right trigger buttons to shift palettes, players can have access to up to 16 chords at a time.

The actual ‘play’ mode shows the chord palette on the top screen of the DS, and a single ’string’ on the bottom. Using the stylus (or a guitar pick, or a thumb), players ’strum’ the string (while pressing a corresponding chord button with their other hand) to produce - yes - music. Once players adjust to the system, they can play any number of chord-based songs to their heart’s content. This means, however, that the realm of lead guitarists (solos, melodies, and the like) are not an option. Most guitar players will point to this as the game’s greatest shortcoming. Players are also “limited” to the chords available. There isn’t a method to create custom chords or power cords, but most will find the available selection more than adequate.

Song Mode includes several built-in tracks with a wide ranges of genres; from Bob Marley to Johnny Cash and even some Death Cab and Avril Lavigne thrown in for good measure. These pre-built chord palettes (and accompanying chord guides with lyrics) allow you to play the songs on your own. Half of the songs include demos so that players can hear the proper tempo. However, these demos are hampered by the lack of anything representing a vocal track (one of the few features in Hiite that wasn’t included in Jam Sessions as opposed to vice versa), and Song Mode doesn’t have any method of making players play the correct stroke rhythm. So, while this mode will pose challenges to players who haven’t picked up a guitar (or a Guitar Hero controller, for that matter) in their lives, seasoned guitarists will enjoy being able to rock out to Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” and other classics.

Significant improvements to the original include 7 unique effects pedals such as distortion, delay, flanger, and tremolo, each with their own settings. Players can also record their pieces for playback (with the ability to store up to five at a time). Audio options have been updated to include a specific output setting for guitar amps. Superficial improvements include several dozen backgrounds and string animations, which are a welcome change from the unappetizing gradients available in the Japanese version.

Jam Sessions is available in three flavors - the standard edition, a special Best Buy-only edition that includes three more tunes in Song Mode, and a Performance Bundle (MSRP $69.99) dated for December that includes a mini-amp. While the casual gamer will likely want to give this a pass, musicians of all stripes will be interested in finally being able to put their DS to productive use, whether on-stage or in the recording studio.