GeekReads

Who can resist a cute robot game? Not I...

Machinarium is a brilliant, quirky little game by the independent group Amanita Design. It’s a puzzle-based adventure featuring a beautifully drawn and imagined world of robots, but which contains no dialogue. The story is told entirely through animated thought-bubbles, and describes the travails of your character – a small robot whose broken body is dumped into the junkyard in the introduction of the game – as he goes about righting the wrong done to him and his friends. This is achieved a variety of puzzles, mostly your usual treasure hunt for objects and then figuring out what to do with them, but also a few real brain teasers.

The majority of these puzzles are quite fun to solve, but a couple of them are on the extreme side (including one that requires a minimum of 72 moves to solve). Given you have no choice but to complete them in order to progress, nobody will blame you for hunting down a walkthrough. The game also features quite a few little sub-games, such as a Space Invaders clone within the quest itself, but also a cool hint system implementation whereby you play through a brief side-scrolling shooter in order to unlock a hint.

Easily the best thing about this game is its artistic design, in hand-drawn style. There’s heaps of detail in both the characters and background scenery, and the animation of the characters is really cute and endearing. The music is interesting too, very apt to the game world, and not at all repetitive or intrusive.

It’s a very short game – I completed it over a couple of sessions over the weekend – but worth every cent, both for the experience itself and also in support of indie developers.

The game retains the cel-shaded visual style from Wind Waker on Gamecube

I had a minor epiphany while playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii, and it was this: all of the Zelda titles are essentially the same game with different puzzles. About three-quarters of the elements are common to all of the games in the series: Link, the boy with the green clothes and pointy hat (mostly referred to as Link); the eponymous princess; the various races (Gorons, Zora, etc.); the weapons (the sword and shield, bombs, boomerang, hookshot/claw – which tend to accumulate from sequel); and of course the sound effects. The remainder are innovations in either the puzzle design or the interface. As the first Zelda title on the Nintendo DS, it should be patently obvious which way The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass leans.

Gorons... check.

The question is, are these differences enough to make the game fun? Happily for me, the answer is a resounding “yes!” but I now have a vector for understanding why others might not like it. Zelda is not the franchise for you if the story matters, or you find that familiarity breeds contempt. The Zelda framework here – because that’s what it boils down to – is but the thinnest veneer of gloss holding a bunch of random puzzle elements together, making Twilight Princess seem like Lord of the Rings in comparison. At least it’s better than the Professor Layton games where they make almost no attempt to hide the fact that the “story” is an inconvenience that gets in the way of the game’s brain-teasers*.

Fairies... check.

Phantom provides a fresh take on old favourites, for instance the ability to draw paths for the boomerang, and lots of drawing and tapping puzzles making full use of the stylus interface. The cel-shading graphics style borrowed from Link’s Gamecube outing, Wind Waker, is a love-it-or-hate-it affair but are at least functional and reliably consistent in quality throughout.

The puzzles aren’t at all taxing, and if weren’t for the baffling decision of the game designers to make you play through one of the key dungeons several times throughout the course of the game, would be a rather short adventure. The side quests do provide some challenge for those interested enough to pursue them (I did a few of the easier ones and then gave up).

When all’s said and done, I greatly enjoyed the light intellectual diversion provided by Phantom Hourglass, but came away from it with an empty feeling. I do like my stories, after all.

—-

* I’m not saying that these games are bad, by the way. I actually have both the original and the sequel, and hope to get around to reviewing them soon.

Kratos is one angry dude...

A quickie review of God of War 3 to finish off the week. This game probably deserves slightly more verbiage than I’m willing to dedicate to it, but suffice to say that there are many ardent supporters of this ground-breaking series (often literally) that blends together 3D action platform gaming, excessive violence and Greek mythology.

The game borrows heavily, but largely successfully, from other genres: there are bits of Shadow of the Collossus, Street Fighter, and even bits of Echochrome, all seamlessly integrated into the overall narrative structure. This game closes off the the storyline from the previous games, which sees the “Ghost of Sparta” exacting revenge on the Olympian gods for causing him to accidentally kill his own family.

The plot is driven along by crappy, but mercifully sparse, dialogue and finishes with a climax that leans quite heavily on existentialist claptrap. But the point of the God of War series was never the story; it’s about dishing out retribution with extreme prejudice, and in that sense the game delivers in spades. In this final instalment Kratos is not content with  taking down monsters and gods, but also Titans of such immense proportions that they form entire game levels by themselves.

By the way, was it just me, or did the lyrics for the Ominous Latin Chanting in the final battle sound a lot like “Kratos, Kratos, Kratos, ha ha ha…”?

Awkwardly, they've dropped the "4" from "Call of Duty" for this sequel

Imagine somebody put a gun in your hand, and ordered you to kill innocent civilians. Could you do it? The latest game in the Call of Duty series asks the player this, and other tough ethical and moral questions, as it propels you through a narrative of conflict in the context of today’s society. It’s a continuation of the plot originally kicked off in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which paints the US as the saviour of the barbaric ways of Russia and the Middle East.

American hyper-patriotism and ethnic clichés aside, Modern Warfare 2 isn’t merely a game, it’s another example of the new breed of games that offers an interactive experience. The main difference between the two is that while previous video games simply used story as a device to explain a game mechanic or to give the protagonist a raison d’être, these new, more mature offerings are beginning to layer in complex emotions and philosophical considerations, integrating them directly into the gameplay in a more fundamental way, than the odd rhetorical poser in the cutscenes between levels.

The example touched upon in the beginning of this review is a stage, early on in the game, in which the player takes on the role of an undercover agent posing as a Russian terrorist, and on order to progress, must participate in the slaughter of innocent civilians. Even the player refrains from firing and simply watches, he or she will still see their collaborators shooting stragglers, execution style. It’s a heavy moment, and highly controversial.

Having only recently arrived in the world of First Person Shooters through Transformers: War For Cybertron, the pedigree of the Call of Duty series is evident. MW2 takes the spit and polish up a big notch – the interface is well thought out and snappily responsive; the graphics are impressive and the sets amazingly detailed (e.g. in one scene set in an airport, you can shoot pieces of luggage that are strew around, and random pieces of clothing and underwear come flying out); and the game mechanics much more refined.

In multiplayer, there are a wealth of game modes (Free-For-All, Search & Destroy, Demolition, Sabotage, Domination, Team Deathmatch, and Capture The Flag) and several players can play together on a single TV in split-screen mode. Along with the downloadable map packs, MW2 offers exceptional replay value.

I’ve never been a big fan of FPS – especially anything war themed – but I found Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 so imaginative and stimulating that I barely noticed. Definitely one for the collection.

2D Mario up to his usual tricks...

I’ve been a keen follower of Paper Mario since the original first appeared on the N64. What’s unusual about this franchise is that it’s developed by a third party, Intelligent Systems – unusual because Nintendo is as fiercely protective of its core characters as Disney is of theirs. It’s a pretty smart move though, because the outsider’s perspective gave the designers the ability to poke fun at the parent franchise (the core Mario games), and as a result there’s plenty of hilarious references at the expense of the source material.

For those of you who haven’t heard of this series before, the basic conceit and the primary gimmick is that the characters are essentially flat 2D sprites. Therefore when Mario turns from left to right, he literally flips over like a piece of paper. It’s also different to the parent franchise in that the story plays a much more important role in the proceedings (as evident in the Japanese title of the original game, being “Mario Story”).

Super Paper Mario is the third game in the series – with a single appearance on each of the key Nintendo platforms thus far: Paper Mario on N64, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door on Gamecube and now this. Sadly, third time’s not the charm here. The usual schtick has become tired, and is even starting to look a little bit cynical. For example one of the levels pokes fun at geeks – talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

The game suffers greatly from a lack of freshness and innovation – the characters are a bit thin on personality, and the plot was flat (har har). The new gimmick is that now Mario can flip into 3D – at the press of a button the flat 2D background turns into a full 3D world. Except that it isn’t full. It’s sparse, empty and largely devoid of interest or gameplay value other than to force the player to do so at various points just to get past certain obstacles. The game is divided up into sections, mimicking the original Super Mario Bros. “world 1-1″ style of level design, resulting in the majority of the game being a bland and uninspired 2D platformer.

Enemy character designs are unimaginative to the point of being downright bad, and the highly repetitive and very short background music grates after a short time. It also contains a bunch of recycled side-quests from earlier incarnations (e.g. recipes), which are completely superfluous for all except the most obsessive-compulsive fan – it’s a serious step backwards from the fresh, funny and exciting Thousand Year Door.