My Brain Died...

Animal Crossing makes me angry.  On one hand, it is really, really stupid.  On the other hand, I played it for far more hours than I would admit.  I'm lumping in the GameCube and DS versions together since they are basically the same game with minor tweaks despite the DS version being called a sequel.  Given that I am known the world over for my riveting reviews of Tamagotchi Corner Shop Connection 2 and Kururin Splash, who better qualified than me to review this momumentally idiotic non-game?

Reasons why this game sucks:
1. The graphics:

They are overly cutesy and kinda bad.  Given it was ported from a Japanese N64, this is not surprising.  Regardless, they are targeting directly toward 10-year-old girls who love talking animals with big heads and short tempers.  At least the DS version knew how to compensate for its weaker engine by scrolling the world up or down over the horizon as you walk.  Of course being the DS, the textures are even blurrier and crappier.  Oh well...
2. Arranging furniture is stupid:

This is seriously one of the primary focal points of the game.  You decorate your house, and earn money to make it bigger so you can cram more junk in it.  I found myself trying to decorate with the most grim, depressing stuff I could find.  For wall and floor covering, I settled on a cold, hard stone motif to give it that dungeon vibe.  Going for a while without cleaning causes spiders to build webs in the corners which further enhanced the mood I was going for.  The only other way I was able to entertain myself was by amassing these weird-ass cacti things that made bizarre noises when you walked by them.
3. The townspeople are jerks:

Half the bums in this town are outright rude to you at times and stomp around angry for no good reason.  Even when they aren't sulking and whining for no reason, they are sending you off on dumb errands because they are apparently either incredibly lazy or shut-ins afraid to leave the immediate vicinity of their house.  On rare occasions, you do find them out wandering around in the middle of nowhere for no particular reason.  It makes me just want to shake them violently and demand to know why they needed me to deliver their stupid letters.  Additionally Tom Nook is a shifty slave driver.  As soon as you get off the train to go this town, he greets you, seemingly with no ulterior motive.  He goes so far as to find you a house to live in.  But guess what? Nothing in life is free, particularly when dealing with a sketchy raccoon out to plunge you into severe debt in order to use you as his personal slave in his general store.  Then once you do manage to pay off your mortage, what does he do?  Cons you into buying a bigger house, thereby plunging you into even bigger debt, dooming you to plant flowers and pick fruit for him for years to come!  Tom Nook is Satan.  This is the only conclusion I can draw.  I just kept waiting for the proposition where he offers to completely erase my debt, and all he asks for in return in my immortal soul.  No dice, Nook!
4. Fruit selection is lame:

Why can't my town have the good fruit?  I want coconuts, dang it!  How dare you expect me to get a Gameboy Advance and that stupid link cable just to get them!  Fools!  At least in the DS version, they randomly wash up on shore.  although the "Scour The Beach For Coconuts" game gets old real fast.

Reasons why it's actually kinda neat:
1. It plays in real-time:  This is actually pretty neat because a)It allows spiders to infiltrate my house if I forget to log in after a couple of days, which I envariably do, b) neat stuff happens on holidays like the major giving you random junk to throw in your house and various celebrations and c) people in the village remember your birthday, and I always get a warm and fuzzy feeling when people remember my birthday.
2. NES games!!:

 This is the PRIMARY reason I bought and played this game.  You can actually find items that look like NES's, and once you place them in your house, you can actually play the old NES games right there. It has such awesome stuff as Excitebike and Punch Out!!  In the DS version, you can't really find NES games, but you can find special items that are Nintendo references like the Master Sword and Triforce, which is kinda neat but much lamer than actual Nintendo games.
3. My brain sucks:  My brain compels me to collect things.  Ask my wife.  Our house is full of CDs, DVDs, games, books and all matter of other nonsense.  As a result, I played this game a crap ton more than I had expected to due to all the junk you can collect like bugs, fish, fossils and paintings.  The DS version has more junk to collect, so I actually ended up putting more time into it.  That owl in the museum is annoying though.  I just wanted to mention that.

4. convenience: This is a game that is very easy to pick up and put down.  It requires very little time put into in a single game sitting, so it allowed me to just kind of play in my spare time at my leisure.  I only feel like playing for 10 minutes?  That's ok.  I'll just go dig up a couple of fossils and be done.

To summarize, this game is horrible.  As a result, I recommend it to hoarders and people who hate themselves.  I'm not sure which camp I fall into.  Probably a little of both.

Rock Band 3 Review FTW!

For those who know me, they are aware of how big a fan I am of the Rock Band games.  As a result, I was anxiously anticipating Rock Band 3.  Not only were they refining and improving the series in small ways to make the whole Rock Band experience work more smoothly, but they were adding the keyboard and Pro Modes for the rest of the instruments.  Needless to say, the game lived up to all my expectations.  I feel that it is pretty much the best music game on the market and has completely blown away the Guitar Hero series, who have started concentrating more and more on silly features like character mutations and boss battles rather than on the reason people play these games: music.

The thing most people have been looking forward to are the keys and Pro modes.  The keyboard is an actual 32-key MIDI-based keyboard that, with an adapter, can actually be used as a real keyboard.  The game has both a standard and pro mode for the keyboard.  The standard mode uses just 5 keys on the keyboard and works very similarly to the guitar controller where the player just presses one of the five colored keys as the colors scroll down.  I found the standard mode to be pretty fun but a little less engaging than most of the other instruments since I only used one hand to play it.  The pro key mode uses the full 32 keys and displays ten keys (as well as sharps/flats) on the screen at a time due to lack of screen real estate.  It shifts the screen left and right to move up and down the keyboard.  To start off, the pro keys mode is really freakin' hard.  It is essentially like playing a real keyboard, albeit a small one.  I could only manage to play a couple of songs on Easy difficulty without constantly missing notes (the INXS song is your friend).  The hardest part of playing on pro keys is finding your place on the board to start out and keeping track of where you are when it shifts the screen.  It definitely takes some getting used to, and since I typically play the game with my wife, I doubt she will have the patience to just sit and watch me try playing the same song over and over until I've got it down.  I honestly don't see a lot of long term use in the keyboard.  Others who are more serious about than myself may find it very beneficial as a jumping off point for learning to play a real keyboard.

The pro drum mode adds cymbals and an extra bass pedal for hi-hats.  I actually didn't have an extra pedal that wasn't broken, so I wasn't able to try the hi hat pedal out, but I did get the cymbal expansion and have played with them quite a bit.  Overall, I found the pro drum mode to be a fun addition.  Since I already played on expert, for most songs they weren't that big a leap to adjust to playing. On the screen, cymbal notes are displayed as round instead of the typical thin rectangle notes, making it very easy to distinguish between regular and cymbal notes, unlike the Guitar series where both the cymbals and regular notes are round.  The only real complaint I have about the cymbal expansions is that they don't fit on the drum set very well and have a habit of sliding down the poles as you play them.  I basically had to anchor them with duct tape. Once I did that, they seemed to be fine.

Pro guitar mode apparently uses a full 6-string guitar controller by Mad Catz or a real Fender guitar to control with the note chart looking not dissimilar to guitar tab.  I personally haven't tried this mode, so I don't really have anything to say about it other than it seems like a really awesome idea.  I have a feeling I will have similar feelings to it as I did with the pro keys mode in that it will be very difficult to learn since it is essentially learning to play a real guitar.  For vocals, they've carried the vocal harmonies feature over from Beatles Rock Band which brings the grand total number of possible players at the same time to eight.  The vocal harmonies work as well here as they do in Beatles Rock Band.  If you have the people to play it, they can present a pretty daunting challenge even for those with perfect pitch.

As far as game modes, Harmonix seems to have kept what they felt worked and added some extra, very much needed features.  The biggest addition to the game is that it is now driven by Career Goals which work similar to the Xbox achievement system or PS3 trophies in that it is a massive list of objectives for the players to achieve that are spread throughout all the various game modes including even the download content.  I found the goals to be pretty cool, extending the life of game well beyond the regular modes are exhausted.  As far as regular modes, taking the place of the Tour mode from the previous games are the Road Challenges.  They play out in a very similar way with your band basically rising in the ranks, getting cooler stuff like buses and jets while playing through various gigs (gigs are comprised of a setlist of songs).  To throw a little variety, sometimes the challenges have different objectives like using as much overdrive as possible or getting long note streaks, not unlike the challenges in the Guitar Hero series.

Speaking of which, with this game Harmonix seems to have studied the recent Guitar Hero games and taken what has worked best.  One of the biggest examples, other than the challenges, is the much needed and greatly appreciated (at least by me) revamped menu system for character and instrument selection.  In previous games if you had multiple people wanting to play, you had to exit all the way out to the first menu of the game to add or remove a player or even change difficulty.  Now it can all be done on the fly: adding or removing players, changing instruments, changing difficulty.  It can all be done in mid-song regardless of what mode you are in.  Another interesting little feature that some achievement hounds who are less than skilled at the game will appreciate is that you can now get achievements with the No Fail Mode turned on.  It works great for when you have that one guy at a party who demands No Fail Mode when everyone else is wanting the multiplayer achievements.

For those of you like myself who have a boatload of download content, the sorting and filtering modes for the song list are vastly improved, giving a lot more flexibility in the way you can scroll through and select songs.  Although I found myself still wanting a filter or two (like filtering out songs you've already played), it is definitely leaps and bounds beyond what was previously available.  The Battle of the Bands and Custom Setlists from Harmonix in Rock Band 2 are still here with the additional ability for players to create their own Battle of the Bands challenges that they can link to on Facebook.  I thought this was a pretty neat addition and had wondered why it wasn't added in RB2.

And even if you didn't care about any of the new features or modes, RB3 also comes with a whole new 83-song setlist.  I can definitely tell an effort was made to pick songs that shined on keyboard.  As a result, you now have stuff like Elton John's "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting", Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" and Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4" which all feature very prominent keyboard parts.  They have also released download content after the game has come out that do not even have guitar like John Lennon's "Imagine".  I find the setlist overall to be a good cross-section of music from every decade with some stuff that genuinely surprised me by their inclusion like The Flaming Lips' "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1", which happens to be an awesome song I never expected to show up in Rock Band.  Of course, with their still continuous release of new download content every week and with the Rock Band Network, there are a lot of songs I never thought would be in Rock Band that are now readily available.

In the past, real musicians have seemed to turn their nose down at the music genre in general with claims that they'd "rather play a REAL instrument".  With the Pro Modes this game adds, their scoffs of derision have much less merit than they once did.  In a nutshell, this is a freaking awesome music game.  I understand that the music genre is general is starting to die down in popularity, but if you have even the slightest interest in music at all, give this game a try.

Minnesotans Creep Me Out

Puzzle Agent is an odd bird of a game.  Based on the characters created by Graham Annable of Grickle fame(?) and tipping its hat to the Professor Layton series, Puzzle Agent positions itself as a story-driven puzzle game featuring the exploits of Detective Tethers as he solves various puzzles to unravel a bizarre mystery involving secretive cults and sinister lawn gnomes in the frozen wasteland of Scoggins, Minnesota.

The gameplay consists of an interface not unlike many a point-and-click adventure game. Your primary interactions when not solving puzzles involves mainly having conversations with people and collecting chewing gum which acts as the game's hint system.  As for the puzzles themselves, they are, as one would expect, a hodge podge of various puzzles of varying degrees of challenge.  The biggest positive is that no sliding puzzles are to be found!  The puzzles in general are I would say slightly more difficult overall than Professor Layton's but the challenge level seems to be a little more consistent.

The graphics are nothing amazing but get the job done, enhancing the offbeat mood of the game.  The sound and voice acting go a long way in making the game seem more off-kilter as well.  The denizens of Scoggins are an odd bunch indeed.  In fact, the game seems to go out of its way to be as odd as possible.  Anyone expecting a loveable and adventurous romp like Professor Layton will be disappointed by the generally bizarre and vaguely creepy mood of the game.

Overall, I enjoyed the game and while it is rather short (I was able to finish it in roughly 3 hours or so), it is inexpensive.  I would recommend it to those who have enjoyed the Professor Layton games and don't mind a more strange storyline.

This Game's Title Is Way Too Freakin' Long

Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game Of The Movie


With such a long unwieldy title, one would assume that the game would focus on the exploits of the titular giant ape gallavanting through the jungle, smashing villagers and invading film crews.  In reality, a more appropriate title for the game should be Adrian Brody's Sweaty Death Romp since the majority of this game is spent as Jack, Adrian Brody's character from the film, stumbling around the jungle and running from everything including, but not limited to, all manner of dinosaur, giant millipedes, mutant eels and, of course, Kong himself.

The gameplay as Jack is a standard FPS style, and this is where you will spend the majority of your time in this game.  Most levels involve either rescuing/protecting someone, collecting a thing to proceed further into the game, escaping from something trying to kill you or just plain ol' going from point A to point B.  As a nice, and far more awesome, diversion, you additionally will get to play as Kong occasionally.  This involves chasing after things by running along walls and swinging across branches and beating the living bejeezus out of dinosaurs.  The Kong sections use a modified Prince of Persia: Sands of Time engine to facilitate the fluid acrobatic and fighting sections.  And this is what befuddles me the most about this game.  The developers had to know that the Kong sections were more fun, so why didn't they have more of them?  Perhaps they doled the sections out in more bite-sized nuggets so that when you get to them, you are much more appreciative of how awesome they are.  My biggest complaint is that there isn't a Kong section closer to the beginning.  You probably have to play for at least an hour or so as the ho-hum Jack FPS before getting to the Kong action, which could present a deterrent to those wanting to get immediately engaged in the game.  I believe this is the reason they made the achievements so easy.

I'm betting a good 80% to 90% of people who played this game did so to get a full 1000 achievement points with little effort.  Basically you just have to play through the game on any difficulty, which takes roughly 5 or 6 hours.  Although the game can get very challenging in places, the knowledge that another 100 point achievement is just around the corner will keep driving many a player.

The graphics are actually very good if you are playing the Xbox 360 version, particularly the Kong sections.  and while the sound is fairly uninspired, the music cues work very well within the context of the game to give you a sense of ominous foreboding or panic when appropriate.

I dumped on the FPS sections quite a bit but only because they seemed dull in comparison to the Kong sections.  They are actually fairly serviceable FPS sections, presenting a pretty high challenge due to the stinginess of the game in trickling out weapons.  More often than not, I had to rely on throwing spears and bones at vicious, man-meat craving dinosaurs to fend them off due to constantly running out of ammo. Spears?  Against velociraptors?  Seriously? you can see how effective the game is in creating a sense of panic.  Overall, I'd recommend the game to anyone looking for a pretty good way to kill a Saturday afternoon or to anyone who hordes achievements.

Ninjas + Reptiles = Easy Game

TMNT, based on the CGI-fueled film of the same name, involves you playing as four different yet almost identical turtles who have been graced with the freak mutant powers of walking upright and speaking and have been trained in the ways of martial arts by a freak mutant rat who was apparently a big fan of Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid movies.  Given the fact that they look identical, they've been given colored headbands and different weapons to tell them apart.  They also each have their own two-dimensional personality trait to further define them.  Unless you randomly clicked this review because of your intense love of acronyms, you probably already know the differences, so I will skip the in-depth profiles.

The gameplay is like a hybrid of Crash Bandicoot and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.  For the first few levels you alternate through the turtles, giving screen time to each and learning their special moves.  Later it gives you the ability to switch between turtles on the fly and perform special combos with two turtles at once.  The game has you running, jumping and flipping through one highly linear level after another with intermittent breaks to punch and kick street hoodlums and foot soldiers.  Every once in a while you have the requisite boss fight.

The storyline pretty much follows the movie and basically acts to fill in a couple of gaps *as if anyone was wondering how exactly Ralph got from the bottom floor to the top floor of some building.  The whole game is also in flashback, narrated by the turtles, so you are fully aware than none of them suffer any undue consequences of recklessly parading through the city with deadly weapons.

Complaint number one: why do we play through 11 levels before we ever actually play as Raphael instead of his stupid Batman ripoff character?  Complaint number two: the camera is a fool.  It succumbs to the 3rd-person platformer syndrome pretty early.  I found it really irritating not being able to see exactly where I needed to go because the forced camera perspective wouldn't let me.  Far too many times did I find myself leaping randomly into space, hoping a platform was somewhere ahead that I could grab onto.  At least they put a lot of checkpoints everywhere.

Now a few comments that some may find positive and others negative.  First off, the game is incredibly easy and can be beaten in less than five hours.  I'm sure many out there prefer more of a challenge, but if you just want some really easy achievements, this is the game for you.  Also, I mentioned earlier that the game is extremely linear.  Did you notice I compared it to Crash Bandicoot earlier?  THAT is how linear it is.  There is NO deviation from the path the game wants you to follow.  Some people may actually like this so they can focus on speed runs (the game does indeed time you and score you based on how fast you get through the levels).  Any sandbox fans will find it very restrictive and probably lose interest quickly.

I personally found the game to be a pleasant diversion while recovering from surgery and therefore will hesitantly recommend it to people looking for a break between tougher games or for achievement whores.