Review: Not Tetris 2 (Mac)

Tetris has changed, apparently. There are so many versions of the seminal block puzzle title that small variations can make all the difference in selecting which one to play. I have spent my time with Tetris almost exclusively on the NES and Game Boy, and have been surprised at how difficult it is for me to accept how the game controls on other platforms. I gave the recent PSN iteration a spin only to find the change in what the up and down buttons do quite debilitating. I like to think I'm pretty good at Tetris, but faced with the option of reeducating my synapses, I've decided to stick with what I know.

This revelation has left my desires for fresh takes on the Tetris formula to come from games that diverge significantly from the original structure (Tetrisphere, Tetris Attack, etc).  This way I wouldn't have to overwrite any of those twitch instincts I've have developed over the years.  This must be the sort of thing that drives the hardcore fighting game community crazy as their prized title gets tweaked in successive sequels and updates.  I own a copy of Street Fighter: Anniversary Collection which allows you to select 5 versions of Street Fighter II Chun Li's.  To the uninitiated, it's confounding.

In no way did I expect Not Tetris 2 (NT2) to tie into any of these issues, because it appeared to be more of a mildly amusing gag than a real game.  NT2 is visually the Game Boy version of Tetris, monochrome design and all, but with a physics-based play structure.  It's pretty amusing to have pieces capable of 360 degree rotation, bouncing and spinning off one another, and ultimately building an unfixable mess that fills up the entire space.  When I first began playing NT2, it was just that; actually playing well seemed not only impossible, but against the tongue-in-cheek spirit of the game.

But I kept playing it.

The goal shifted from simply figuring our how to play NT2 to how achieve a higher score.  This is something that in the long term, my old Tetris games never truly provided because they're lacking an internal battery to retain leaderboards.  I developed various strategies to best tackle NT2.  Firstly you have to approach block stacking with greater patience and care than classic Tetris because of the delicate rotational balancing required to place pieces in specific crevices.  You can press a piece up against the side wall to get it in a "right angle" position, which is helpful to maximize your early game before things get messy.  If you've got a decent pile built up at the bottom, I found that holding the "down" button as you place new pieces will slam them with extra force that can occasionally trigger a line clear somewhere below (line clears are based on horizontal block density).

I could continue divulging my strategies, but I should note that I reached a point where my feelings toward the game turned about face: I hit a 9999 point cap.  This made me feel conflicted about the whole play experience.  It seemed like maybe I had been playing something that wasn't really meant to be played.  I come from an art background, which has taught me that you shouldn't always believe what an artist says about their own work.  Artists have every right to lie about what a piece means or what their inspiration was.  Heck, maybe the explanation is its own separate piece of performance art!  Was NT2 a game, despite itself?

The amount of time I spent with NT2 dropped dramatically after reaching the cap.  Modern story-driven games add meta-game achievements, side quests, and multiplayer modes to flesh out their worlds, which also keeps us playing them longer.  Old arcade games like Tetris need that high-score mechanic to incentivize replay.  I suppose in this regard that I've "beat" NT2, but that's not something I'd quote in the game's favor, even if it's cool to say about a Tetris game.

Not Tetris 2 is definitely worth experiencing, but as for seriously playing it, that depends on personal discretion, and perhaps a releveling of what to expect from a free, interactive experiment.  Download Not Tetris 2 for free here.

Review: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii)

The appeal of the Metroid series has long been the isolated adventure through uncharted worlds. It's surprising then in the final chapter of the Metroid Prime trilogy that Samus Aran spends so much time listening to other people tell her what to do and where to go. This is the case in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption because Samus is basically a federal contractor; a one-woman cleaning crew assigned to rid the universe of the glowing, corrosive element, Phazon.

The game opens strongly with an intense Ridley set-piece, but quickly turns chatty with the introduction of military commander types, sentient computer brains, and a butt-ugly cast of tag-along bounty hunters. Samus, like fellow Nintendo mascot Link, remains quiet through all this, coming off increasingly like a silent film actress who's just been cast in a talkie. I could relate to Samus' stoicism though, as it seemed the less said, the sooner conversation would end and exploration could begin.

While Retro Studios may have taken some of the implicit appeal of a Metroid game off the table with the tone of their third go-around, they have made additions in other places, most notably their informed integration of motion controls. One could look at the way MP3 asks you to interact with switches and levers by rotating and pushing the Wiimote as a concession to some kind of mandatory waggle clause, but I found these movements almost universally satisfying; none moreso than the Grapple Beam which is implanted in the Nunchuk controller. You can grasp onto labeled grapple points by locking onto them and them whipping the Nunchuk forward to unleash your electrified lasso. Then you can throw your wrist back to pull shields away from enemies, rip loose panels off of walls, or remove any other such precarious object from its perch. It's hard to call this motion a novelty when it comes in handy so frequently and feels like a natural part of the game.

The impressiveness of the motion controls actually comes through pretty wholesale, which leaves me dumbfounded as to why there weren't more FPS-type games on the Wii. MP3 decoded a fluid way to use the Wiimote/Nunchuk combo to turn a Prime series entry, traditionally referred to as "first-person-platformers," into a legit shooter. MP3 is still a shooter in a different class than modern military fare or even closer-in-setting Halo mechanics, but an action oriented game nonetheless. This is especially prevalent during the Leviathan boss encounters, which require you to use most of the tools at your disposal and, most importantly, to actually aim. When fighting tougher enemies you can lock your sight onto a particular weakpoint, but you still must free-aim Samus' arm cannon, which makes for some welcome wrist-cramping difficulty spikes in an otherwise breezy title.

I'm not one to berate games for being too easy if it still does a good enough job of incentivising me to keep playing. Corruption keeps pace on its main quest line pretty well (a little too narrowly perhaps), leaving the trickiest puzzle solving to missile pack and energy cell upgrade retrievals. While the additional life bars came in handy on a couple occasions, there is absolutely no functional need to have a stock of 200+ missiles since I never had an encounter where I used even 50. There's nothing inherently wrong with having collectibles, but when those items serve a purpose in the game world, it's a shame that their usefulness caps off so early.

The worlds of MP3 are in the same vein that you've come to expect from this series: lush organic environments juxtaposed with bio-mechanical factory garb, but the linear pacing of the plot and the ability to fast-travel with your dropship often leave you feeling like you're following orders instead of exploring the worlds to figure things out for yourself. One could lodge a complaint against the previous Prime games for the amount of time spent backtracking and walking through already-cleared rooms to get where you want to go. Prime 3 admirably solves this problem by allowing you to secure dropship landing sites to quickly move across the map. What this adds in ease-of-movement it loses in isolated immersion, a franchise keystone. Samus is never really stranded anywhere, she's just a tourist, popping in to have a bit of fun before taking off to do the same somewhere else. Mission objectives are boilerplate space marine droll too (power down the enemy defense shield! again!) leaving the moment-to-moment gameplay to hold your interest. Only the wrecked Valhalla space barge left me actually asking questions instead of simply pressing a button and moving on (though you do just that at the end of the Valhalla too).

Thankfully, shooting and double jumping through MP3's admittedly narrow corridors hits its Prime series high point here. There aren't much in the way of alternative weapons (your beam upgrades stack), which gives combat tactics precedent over pre-engagement strategy. Retro Studios must have known the Wii's weaknesses well enough to make sure their AI did not exploit them. The most prominent systemic hindrance is Samus' sluggish turn speed. For most traversal your stiff neck actually helps keep your trajectory steady, but when confronted with speedier foes, there's a delay in how quickly you can rotate to face them. Rarely in these cases will you be blindsided though, resulting in skirmishes that always seem fair.

MP3 is extremely balanced and well-polished, so much so that it can feel like Samus is toying with some kind of virtual training simulator instead of actually going out and being a hero. The action is tightly executed, but in an attempt that appears aimed at easing more casual players into the series, the dialogue-heavy mission assignments negate some of Samus' independent spirit. I'm not saying I think games need to be self-congratulatory, but Samus is supposed to be a rogue bounty hunter, right? Where's the grand reward?

Review: Pokemon Puzzle League (WiiVC/N64)

Unlike most of the games I review, I actually spent time playing Pokemon Puzzle League (PPL) back in 2000, when it was current. However, that was only a singular rental that, for whatever reason, didn't prompt me to purchase the full $60 game. On the Wii's Virtual Console, that price has been significantly reduced, effectively eliminating my barrier to entry on a title that I vaguely remembered being pretty fun. Turns out that faint inkling was pointing in the correct direction as PPL is a deceptively deep and satisfying puzzle experience.

The core gameplay of PPL is a tile swapping puzzle game, known to long-time importers as Panel de Pon. You are confined to a rectangular column wherein tiles ascend from the bottom and you must switch them left and right to match three same colors in a horizontal or vertical row, making them disappear. From that basic mechanic you can also chain combos together for a higher score or to dump junk blocks into your opponent's column in head-to-head competitive mode. If you played Tetris Attack on SNES this is probably sounding familiar.

Of course the big draw here is that this is a Pokemon game, right? OK, maybe not, but the game is enhanced if you can derive some sort of amusement out of that material, ironic or otherwise. Every time you turn on the game a FMV clip (extremely rare for a N64 title) featuring characters form the original Pokemon cartoon series prompts the "story" that sets up the game. There isn't much of a plot to speak of, though each mode does take a slightly different angle on the Pokemon world. In the 1P Stadium mode, you defeat a ladder of CPU competitors that are recognizable from the animated TV show, and in Spa Service, Team Rocket, appearing in various cross-dressed regalia, tries to trick you into something-or-other in between line clear challenges. The toon-representative, voiced audio during matches can be grating, but since sound is largely inconsequential to this game, I usually had it muted and listened to something else.

What I'm trying to get at is don't let the Pokemon name scare you away from this superb puzzle game. The PPL developers did everything short of retro-actively adding online multiplayer to expand and enhance the simple gameplay needed to justify this as a full retail product. Some of these work better than others but the range of options is encouraging since the game feels too easy at the outset. It became clear before long that I should have been utilizing those easy stages as training grounds for combo building because I hit a wall in the unlockable Very Hard difficulty where I could only win on pure luck. If you hit that wall or just want a change of scenery, you can check out Puzzle University instead and tackle block elimination puzzles at a more methodical pace. In this mode you are presented with a small amount of tiles and a limited number of swaps to clear them all from the board. In theory you could translate these combo triggering skills to the competitive modes, but the frantic nature of those battles just drove me into a mindless, button-mashing panic.

Other modes in PPL include Practice, Endless, Time Attack, and the aforementioned Line Clear. These can be nice distractions, but they aren't where the real action is, so I doubt much time will be spent there. Plus, with the lack of online leaderboards, these score-focused modes lose a lot of their incentive since I'm the only person with access to my copy of PPL that spends any time playing it. Additionally you can switch on 3D mode which turns your rectangular game board into a rotatable cylinder with tiles emerging from the bottom all the way around. The cylinder is clear so you can see through to the back if there's an area requiring immediate damage control. This, like the other modes, goes a long way in showing the effort that was put into extending the Panel de Pon play experience, but always feels like an aside to the "real" head-to-head mode. Sure, doing the puzzle thing with polygonal graphics in a 3D space works fine, but like Tetrisphere, it doesn't measure up to the addictive nature of the basic 2D structure.

It's a relatively common thing for Japanese developers to take classic puzzle franchises and reskin them for Western audiences (think Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine), but PPL seems to go that extra mile with its supplementary content. The resulting world is pretty silly, with its paper-thin premise and goofy cartoon tie-ins, but it does serve to bulk out the puzzle gameplay, and do so with a sincere charm.

Review: Cave Story (WiiWare)

For a long time I've been wanting to build an art piece that centers around "cave themes" from videogames. The eerie ambiance has been handled in many different ways over time, each composer setting the correct mood for the cave level from an individual game. This had me extra excited for Cave Story, as I imagined a boatload of variations on cave tunes I'd looked into previously. Going in with that expectation, I ended up a little disappointed to find that the cave-yness is often downplayed in the soundtrack in favor of a wider-spanning action/adventure score. Ultimately this plays to the strengths of the game's action, which is fast and frantic, instead of the sleepy, subterranean atmosphere of cave dwelling in itself.

For most people who play games, the side-scrolling shooter/platformer, Cave Story, came at a time when it could provide a superbly constructed retro experience, serving as a welcome deviation from Call of Duty and Gears of War clones. I've actually spent time playing 8 and 16-bit era titles more than anything else lately, which makes for an interesting juxtaposition. Since Cave Story gets by a lot on its old-school charm, I felt like the nostalgic hook didn't quite grab me as I assume it did for others; the soundtrack being one example. This did allow me to judge the gameplay and story more on its own merits though, and directly compare it to its latter day in-genre competition.

On that line of thought, Cave Story actually feels pretty unique. Sure it looks and sounds retro, but they way it actually handles is unlike any side-scrolling colleagues I can put my finger on. I haven't played Super Meat Boy, but the two seem to stem from a similar school of thought about what it means to make a new old game. Parts of Cave Story are extremely difficult (I played on Normal), but save points are frequent, and the post-death reloads are snappy, making subsequent attempts at tricky boss encounters challenging exercises in learning from mistakes, instead of frustrating retreads (though that does happen on occasion).

One of the more outstanding aspects of Cave Story is the weapon system. Once you acquire a gun you can upgrade it by picking up the flashing triangles that drop out of defeated enemies. Seems simple enough, but the trick is that taking damage when attacked not only sucks your life bar, but also reduces the level of your equipped weapon. This places a premium on agility and long range shooting accuracy, since trudging through enemies will leave you twice as weak as other similar games. This lead me to play pretty conservatively, constantly topping-off my weapon stats to maintain their max level. The payoff is that the blasters are extremely satisfying to use. Beams and rockets burst out in rapid multiples, dwarfing their humble pea-shooter source. These blasts demolish enemies by turning them into animated tufts of cel-shaded smoke. The result is that gunplay is cartoonish, but weighty and believable within that cartoon setting.

What's more nonsensical is the story, which is hard to get behind as the serious dramatic epic it seems to be attempting. You play semi-amnesiac Quote, a humanoid robot and post-war relic who finds himself on a strange floating island inhabited by a race of talking rabbits. Turns out an evil doctor has kidnapped most of the rabbits and is turning them into rabid killing machines with the intent of unleashing them on Earth proper, and it's up to you to stop him. I've never really seen Lost, but I like to imagine that plot plays out similarly. There's quite a bit of dialogue here, and it seems like the game's developer really wants to to feel for these characters, but ultimately when we're talking about preventing a glorified rodent infestation, the impact just isn't there. There was a time during my playthrough when a prominent character died, and I only found out by reading online that the sword he gave me was his dying gift. Who knew. Unfulfilled gravitas aside, I did enjoy the emphasis on mystery and detail-unraveling in how the story is told. Things play out like a talky version of Metroid, a narrative approach of which I'm a large supporter.

Cave Story is also a game that pushes you towards multiple playthroughs in order to see all the weapons, and ultimately the best ending, assuming you didn't do everything perfectly the first time. I can say undoubtedly, that if you don't use a faq, it's very unlikely that you will get the best ending on your first try (Spoiler: there's and even meaner, more powerful guy behind it all!). I'm not one for multiple playthroughs unless the game is short and arcade-y or is Chrono Cross, thus I found the specificity of the win conditions to get the most out of the game needlessly contrived. I'm sure to the player that figures out the correct sequence of events to trigger the best outcome, he/she must beget some degree of grand satisfaction, but for me it's not worth the unfun trial and error process, especially when I'd rather just play a new, different game.

As a love letter to classic videogames, elegantly crafted by a single individual, Cave Story stands as a tremendous achievement. Sure you can download this as freeware on your computer, but I think the WiiWare pricetag of $12 justifies itself with additional modes and enhanced graphics and sounds. Since the 8-bit pixel art doesn't really do it for me all on its own, I appreciate the higher fidelity of the upgrades. Though I'll probably never play those additional modes, I'm happy to see the effort put forth to add value to this as a purchasable product. Cave Story is a pretty unique retro adventure title that, lack of "cave music" aside, pleases much more often than disappoints.

Review: Super Mario World (WiiVC/SNES)

Having only ever played Super Mario World in brief spats on friends' SNESes, I went into my full playthrough with skepticism. Sure, I had confidence that this would be a satisfying game, but many enthusiasts herald this as the best Mario title to date. From what I had touched previously, this hardly seemed the case. Now, with numerous castles, ghost houses, and another Bowser battle under my belt, I can see where that stunning appeal comes from, even if it doesn't strike my fancy to quite the same degree.

I possess a long-standing fascination with floating platforms in games, and even though SMW doesn't really dig into that meta-game analysis, it does make you think about platform placement and level construction. Maybe it's just that the era when the platformer was the dominant game genre is behind us, but SMW is a perfect poster-child for what a well-honed 2-D platformer can achieve. This is something that modern games have a difficult time replicating without exuding nostalgia or at least coming off as largely referential to historical material. It's hard to think back to a time when Yoshi made his first appearance, and was brought on for broad gameplay variance, instead of existing as a callback or one-off power-up for use with an individual sequence.

What I liked best about SMW was the way it mixed elements of action, adventure, and puzzle solving in a fashion I don't recall another Mario game doing. The action side is largely what you'd expect if you've played a Mario game since Super Mario Bros 3. There are power-ups that let you fly and throw fireballs, and, for the most part, jumping on enemies heads still does them in quite well. That said, if you've somehow only ever played the original Mario Bros, you might be surprised at just how complex the action system has become. On the adventure tip, you navigate levels via an overworld map, complete with branching and reforming paths. The map is good at letting you know when there's something secret in a level without giving away the answers. Every level doesn't need to be completed to beat the game, but since you can save progress, you have the luxury of taking your time to explore and replay levels without fear that the electricity might go out. A significant part of the adventuring is intertwined with the heinous puzzles that meter out the exploration phases in ways that require strategic item gathering. The most difficult puzzles are totally optional, but are pretty satisfying brain teasers that taunt you to give them a shot. Part of the reason I like the puzzles so much is because at their core, they can be solved by intelligent platforming. Thus SMW doesn't balloon it's gameplay by bolting on other genre mechanics, but instead, expounds upon the intricacies of its core conceit. The result is a game that justifiably places itself on top of the platformer pile, and serves as a substantial step forward for game design at the time.

This dedication to form is what often makes Nintendo games great, but I could have done with some tweaking to particular elements of SMW. In comparison to SMB3's raccoon tail, the feather cape seems needlessly complex to control, especially in parachute mode. Coupled with the fact that none of the puzzles I completed seemed to require the gliding function (82% completion), it seems unnecessary. Then of course there's Yoshi, who I do not outright dislike, but find that I prefer not using him unless I have to. For me, using Yoshi changes the game a little too much, to the point where I'd rather just have a Yoshi game instead of putting him in a Mario one. I ended up more or less using Yoshi as a shield since you can sustain a hit while riding him and not take any damage other than losing your mount. You can wager a guess that I don't care for using the feather cape in conjunction with Yoshi either. Maybe it's the blatant disregard for physics, but, yeah, not a fan. As a small aside, the designs of most of the new enemies unique to SMW seem pretty uninspired, and it's no wonder that they haven't really shown up again since.

I appreciate Nintendo taking these risks though. They wanted to increase the complexity of their platform hopping game while also iterating on the blockbuster success of SMB3, all while positioning itself as the killer app for Nintendo's new 16-bit console. The list of games that have even been in that situation is pretty small, and shorter still for those that actually deliver on the bulk of their ambitions. SMW is such a game, but in some ways it actually feels remarkably humble. This feeling could have more to do SMW standing in contrast to the modern Mario's franchise-driven market saturation. Name a genre and there's a Mario version of it. SMW was Nintendo building upon an already solid foundation, but also venturing into innovative territory that so much iterative design is afraid to do. Sure, not everything works perfectly, but a lot of that is user preference. The brilliance of SMW's design is that there are multiple options for how to play a level, and one of those almost always feels spot on.

Review: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (GC)

Zelda games don't come around terribly often, and when they do it's with extremely high expectations. Looking at Twilight Princess now, it's easy to forget what this game's release was in response to, and why it was framed as the "mature" Zelda the way it was. Though the previous GameCube Zelda, Wind Waker, was highly regarded, series purists discounted its cell-shaded cartoonish style as childish. Thus Nintendo, in a move reminiscent, but thankfully not as extreme, of Ubisoft's Prince of Persia sequel (Warrior Within), gave Zelda nerds what they wanted in a grown-up, more darkly toned game. At least that was the billing. The reality is that TP pretty well matches the teen-Link portions of N64 favorite Ocarina of Time in terms of "maturity" and "grittiness," which is to say, it's a better looking version of what you've seen before.

Unfortunately, for as good a game as Twilight Princess is, a lot of the systems and story beats also feel like they're something you've played on an older system. The "dual worlds" theme was done back on the SNES, and the gameplay and items systems are heavily based on Ocarina's well trodden inventory. You'll be none too surprised to find out that at some point a mystical object is broken into several distinct pieces and scattered across the land, and the only way to recover them is to navigate a corresponding dungeon for each. Forget Ocarina, if you've played the original Legend of Zelda on the NES, you know how this is going to go.

Not that TP doesn't throw interesting change-ups your way, it's just that they simply add to the formula rather than innovating it. The most distinctive new feature of TP is that you'll spend part of the game as a wolf version of Link. Playing in lupine form is fun for a little while, but since you can't use items or alternative weapons, I found myself racing through these portions as quickly as possible to return to my full arsenal. Once you reach the point in the game where you can shift between human and wolf on the fly, being a beast is a little more fun to mess around with, but I often wished I could just have used my wolf abilities without having to change shape since it becomes just another item, albeit a multifunctional one.

For most franchises, the preceding list of grievances would have you believe this game was nothing but a disappointment, but Zelda is a series with such time-tested gameplay structure and clever design, that drawing heavily from the well guarantees quality that at least approaches the genre's high-water marks. Functionally, most everything here flat-out works. If you've played a polygonal Zelda before, you'll feel right at home with TP's Z-, er, L-targeting, its lack of "jump" button, and its item usage. These aspects may not have changed, but everything does feel a little suped up. As examples, you can combine bombs and arrows to shoot exploding projectiles, use not one, but two hookshots (called "clawshots' here) to cling from wall to wall, and learn a series of helpful sword techniques that make dueling more dynamic than it's ever been in a Zelda game.

TP's aesthetic style turns out to be one of the game's highlights, and is for more subtle and nuanced than labels like "mature" or "dark" imply. One of my favorite visual components was the Twilight Realm, a light-bloom filled, desaturated world of eternal dusk. It might not seem like much, but the very idea that there aren't antithetical light and dark worlds, but instead two dimensions that correlate with a more complex relationship was quite refreshing. The Twilight Realm feels bizarre but not entirely foreign since it's just a different version of the regular one. The beings that reside within are a combination of Metroid Prime 2's Ing and computer glitches straight out of Tron. Creatures emit sounds of formerly organic beings that at some point mutated and had their vocal cords filtered through computer garble. There's a part of the game where you have to flee from a group of gigantic "birds" in the Twilight Realm that squawk hair-raising bellows akin to a modulated foghorn, to terrifying effect.

The list of stellar design choices carries beyond just the Twilight Realm. There's the gorgeous Snow Peak mansion dungeon which is like no "snow level" I've ever played before. I'd also like to note the "Hyrule Field Night Theme", which perfectly embodies the feeling of adventuring out into the woods in the dark, both calm and tense at the same time. Then there's the addition of the plucky, occasionally devilish sidekick Midna, who not only acts as your reference guide, but also brings plenty of color to the game's business-as-usual narrative. These pieces are just a small smattering of the ways in which TP successfully avoids a full-on retread of franchise trademarks, and in turn, offers something new to the Zelda-faithful.

I sincerely hope the next console Zelda game (Skyward Sword) significantly changes the way we play this series the way Ocarina did, because I don't think another incremental addition to the franchise is going to do it any favors. At TP's best it's as smart and polished a product as one would expect. But at it's worst, that expectation is met to a very predicable end. I hope this review doesn't sound overly harsh, since I genuinely enjoyed playing through this game for 50+ hours. I just think with Twilight Princess, Nintendo gave fans exactly what they asked for, instead of something they didn't know they even wanted. That sense of wonder is important to Zelda games, and when it shows up in TP here and there, that's when the game felt like something special.