Flock

You can diminish almost any game to a laughably low level by reducing it to its bare essentials: Harvest Moon's focus is manual labor, Brain Age is portable homework, and Animal Crossing is about paying rent. These games defy their lame concepts and successfully maintain an interested fan. Similarly, while herding livestock may sound like a thankless chore, Flock's delightful style and brilliant puzzles will charm and engage folks willing to game outside the box.

Flock is ridiculously cute and cuddly.

As a colorful flying saucer, your job is to corral hordes of lovable livestock to the suspiciously named Motherflocker, a towering UFO that does who-knows-what to the collected creatures. Each of the wee beasts reacts differently to your hovering menace, but Flock does a solid job of teaching you their properties as you progress. The easily spooked sheep do their best to keep away from you; cattle will knock over fences in a stampede if you follow too closely; chickens can glide across gaps but are reckless and unpredictable; and the roly-poly pigs frequently stop to roll in piles of impassable poop (yes, really). Their qualities are simplistic, but nothing in Flock is as straightforward as it seems.

Navigating your herd across Flock's 55 single-player stages in a quick and orderly fashion earns you medals. But each of the brief brainteasers has a hook, trick, or secret to be uncovered in order for you to achieve a perfect abduction score. One level in the latter half of Flock can be completed in 10 seconds flat, earning you a shiny gold prize, but perfecting it requires you to herd the massive number of extra animals that are isolated on a half-dozen islands. Another puzzle requires you to scare off nighttime predators with illuminated objects, but running the gauntlet and rushing your flock to the mothership without doing so can save substantial time. Rallying a group of animals together creates a flock, and huge herds yield massive multipliers, adding a coating of strategy. Yes, Flock is accessible, but succeeding requires a bit of brain-scratching.

Thankfully, Flock does a good job of training you one step at a time. You'll gradually learn new gameplay mechanics that keep everything feeling fresh. Just when you've figured out how to knock obstacles down, you'll start launching animals over them. When you're used to shrinking woolly beasts with water, allowing them to pass beneath fences, you'll have to force them to blindly follow a female. You'll also learn to plug holes with hay bales, crush fields to create crop circles, and build bridges to avoid dangerous, unguarded cliffs. These nuances periodically come together in a sort of final exam stage that implements everything you've learned to that point, forcing you to efficiently use your abilities together to solve an especially challenging area. It's a satisfying buildup, and you'll have a sense of fulfillment when you complete a milestone stage.

This pace keeps up throughout. Flock consistently rewards you with well-built puzzles with cleverly plotted paths, as well as tangible items for use within the level editor. Ideas for levels will constantly flow from you as you advance through Flock's solo mode, but properly implementing them into a map, which you can upload and share with others, is a taxing process. Adapting to building on three vertical planes, each complete with its own identifying color and grid lines, takes patience. But the payoff is proportional for those willing to put up with the learning process and clunky controls. Combining perilous pitfalls, piles of poop, and pinball bumpers in a way that rivals the developer's puzzles will require an understanding of how the game's physics work as well as what makes a level fun to play. Don't be surprised if you invest an hour into a massive stage full of failed ideas before buckling down to create a puzzle with substance. It's an unnecessarily unwieldy addition that nonetheless holds a lot of potential.

If a chicken gets this close to the edge, it's already dead.

Unwieldy editor controls aren't the only thing that can get under your skin in Flock. For instance, like designing a level, learning the creatures' behavior requires patience. Frustratingly, the occasionally unpredictable animals can occasionally be seen inexplicably jumping to their watery death, getting hung up on obstacles, or ending up stuck in corners. Losing track of your herd or watching it die unfairly results in some seriously annoying situations when your fast track to a gold medal comes to a grinding halt. You'll also endure repetitious music and chirping animal noises, so keep your personal playlist and a pair of headphones close by when you're repeatedly retrying flubbed abductions.

Surprisingly, the cooperative mode is the least appealing part of Flock. There's no online support, so you're stuck sharing a screen with your partner in a local multiplayer mode that, even overlooking that, simply doesn't live up to the standards set by the single-player game. Cooperatively moving rocks and lifting gates on maps specifically designed for co-op doesn't compare to the intelligent level design and challenging requirements you'll experience elsewhere in Flock, and the regular levels are needlessly off-limits to partnered players. The entire addition of co-op feels tacked on, and is barely worth the 30 minutes it takes to complete.

Flock's single-player puzzles are fun while they last, but around three hours after your first successful abduction you'll almost certainly be finished. That lack of solo longevity, along with the limited multiplayer mode and unwieldy level editor unfortunately make this quirky and entertaining puzzler a tough sell at $15.

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Posted in: Puzzel

Saints Row 2

When the original Saints Row came out two years ago, it served to placate fans until Grand Theft Auto made its next-generation debut. Saints Row's deviant destruction didn't push the boundaries of what to expect from a free-roaming urban assault game, but it did provide an enjoyable outlet for consequence-free chaos while never taking itself too seriously. Since then, Grand Theft Auto IV has injected a dose of maturity into its typical sandbox fare, removing many of its outlandish behaviors to create a more grounded portrayal of the gangster lifestyle. Saints Row 2 is not concerned with growing up. It is a morality-free alternative to GTAIV, an unremorseful descent into mindless mayhem. The lack of any major advancement in gameplay or storytelling may elicit a few flashes of deja vu, and the technical problems will haunt your every turn, but the unrepentant joy of terrorizing this humble metropolis makes Saints Row 2 a viable palate-cleanser for anyone willing to embrace the role of immoral dirtbag.

Never has one measly trashcan caused so much trouble.

Unleashing unprovoked havoc on the streets of Stilwater can be as much fun on the PC as it was on consoles, but while the core elements have made the transition intact, the visuals have taken a serious hit. On a PC that exceeds the recommended requirements, Saints Row 2 has a choppy frame rate and jarring pop-in that make driving around this busy metropolis a pain. The forgiving driving physics make it possible to get from one point to another without too many of crashes, but vehicles and even buildings pop in and out of view with regularity, and any element that requires precise maneuvering will torment all but the most patient players. Firefights are particularly agonizing--trying to mow down a target from afar, even a stationary one, is a matter of luck more than dexterity. If you're running a machine that far exceeds the recommended specs, you'll experience a sometimes choppy but ultimately playable thrill ride through this open world, but anyone with a more modest configuration should proceed with caution.

The story begins in a jail hospital, where you've been in a coma ever since a gigantic explosion at the end of the first Saints Row nearly ended your criminal actions permanently. After easily escaping from this lightly guarded compound, you set off to recruit more people to your gang and retake the city of Stilwater. The overarching story is derivative and not easily relatable, but there are some interesting episodes. The Brotherhood missions in particular are dark, documenting a tale of vengeance that is sickly satisfying. After putting nuclear waste in their leader's tattoo ink, you find yourself in a constant battle of one-upmanship. Deaths are taken lightly, propelling you to even more outrageous behavior, but it fits within the context of this over-the-top gameworld. The story never reaches beyond the barbaric needs of its protagonist, but the missions do contain a few worthwhile cinematic payoffs.

While you may not be able to affect the outcome of your story, you can design your conqueror in whatever image you desire. The character creation tool is quite extensive. You can drastically change the weight and age of your character, pick from four different races, mold facial features in whatever manner you desire, and even choose if you want a male or female protagonist. With only six voices to choose from, it can be difficult to accurately match one to whatever look you happen upon, but it's a small price to pay for the wealth of creative options. You can visit a plastic surgeon at any time to tweak your features, but the process is so in-depth that it's easier just to choose a look at the beginning and stay with it.

Even a sluggish frame rate can't prevent you from hitting someone from point blank range.

The missions are predominantly of the drive-and-shoot variety that has become commonplace in the genre. Though there are three gangs opposing you, as well as various law enforcement agencies, the only difference between them are the colors they wear and the scumbags who lead them. The majority of missions boil down to raiding a building and killing everyone who moves. While these excursions are usually entertaining, taking place in a variety of locations against increasingly ridiculous odds, the repetition of the actions is undeniable. Some objectives do provide an opportunity to do something a little different, though. For instance, when asked to rob a bank, you find out your prize is not a vault of money, but an even more valuable hostage. This leads to a strong detour in both the story and gameplay and serves to keep things fresh. And since most missions have a midway checkpoint, you'll rarely have to start at the very beginning if you make a mistake.

The controls that were so smooth in the console iterations feel uneven on the PC. You'll have no problem running around the city using either a controller or a keyboard and mouse combination, but the subtle combat maneuvers that were possible in the console versions have been hampered here because of the inconsistent frame rate. Before, it was possible to target specific parts of your enemies' bodies with ease, letting you cripple your opposition with a happy smile on your face. But long-range fighting is now a painstaking affair, forcing you to make the fights much more intimate. Because the aiming is unreliable and there's no lock-on ability or cover mechanic, fights generally devolve into running up to enemies and seizing them for temporary cover or to quickly dispose of them. It is still extremely fun to grab enemies and hurl them 20 feet in the air, but the other aspects of combat are too inconsistent to be rewarding.

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Posted in: Action

Tunnel Rats

Tunnel Rats: 1968, inspired by the movie of the same name, is the brainchild of infamous German director Uwe Boll, who has made a name for himself adapting video games into movies. A single-player first-person shooter set during the Vietnam War, Tunnel Rats attempts to express something terrible and disturbing about the horrors of war, and in a way, it succeeds. After spending an hour with the game, you'll begin to understand how terrible it is, and after two hours you'll be profoundly disturbed that you bought it. In fact, the game gives itself away from the start. "You tunnel boys like things real deep," remarks a GI during the opening cutscene, "like deep down in your own dark tunnel of the soul."

War is hell.

You play as Brooks, an American soldier stranded alone in an inhospitable Vietnamese jungle. Brooks is one of the least sympathetic heroes you'll ever play as; he's a cruel, foul-mouthed jerk who is often deranged but never witty. He is apparently supposed to be on a character arc that sends him to the cusp of madness, but in reality he's insane from the start. Brooks' eccentricities are revealed primarily through frequent, awkward monologues, which vary schizophrenically from antiwar rants to "That's what you get, you commie bastards!" The other glimpses you get into your character's psyche come in the form of images from Brooks' childhood and life back in California. You discover, for instance, that he has a bizarre neurosis related to hunting with his father, which never makes much sense.

The character's voice acting is just as clumsy and inconsistent as the writing, and his inappropriate attitude is reflected throughout the game. From one perspective, Tunnel Rats deserves credit for daring to defy political correctness. However, a consequence of Tunnel Rats' zealously anti-PC approach is that it will offend just about everyone. For instance, the game's portrayal of American soldiers goes from bad (Brooks) to worse when you encounter a GI who has turned into a shrieking cannibal, and to offend the other side, your character issues a steady stream of anti-Vietnamese slurs and goes out of his way to desecrate every Vietnamese corpse. Granted, ripping the ears off of your slain enemies is optional, but since it increases your total health, only the most principled individuals will be able to abstain. In addition to the obviously poor taste of this "feature," the game makes the experience (and its less disgusting counterpart--taking dog tags from dead GIs) especially painful in two ways: first, you can't interact with just any part of the body; you have to find the right pixel to "use" in order to get the ear. Second, for each trophy you collect, you have to listen to your character's insipid, psychotic ramblings, such as, "Beats your precious stag heads, eh, Pops?"

Most of the game takes place in the tunnels, a dreary, subterranean world of endlessly repeating dirt-brown walls, one-hit-kill traps, and Viet Cong, with the occasional addition of a room, usually consisting of several boxes and a portrait of Ho Chi Minh. Navigating the tunnels can go from wearisome to downright nauseating as you spend what feels like hours staring at the floor and looking for unavoidable traps. You disarm one variety by completing pointless, irritating quick-time events and the other with the use key, but once again your cursor must be in exactly the right spot, so attempts to traverse the tunnel at greater than a snail's pace will frequently be rewarded with instant death. Easier to outwit, but equally deadly, are a handful of tunnel-dwelling snakes, who have, for all practical purposes, forged an unholy alliance with the Viet Cong. If all the instant-death obstacles aren't sufficiently frustrating, the checkpoint-only save system forces you repeatedly through the same trap-infested tunnels, unless of course you get the loading bug, in which case you'll have to restart the level entirely. Another bug will send you clipping into forbidden areas from which you can't escape, and additionally, every time you die, you lose the ability to throw grenades for the remainder of the level, so do adjust your strategy accordingly.

Aboveground sections are a welcome relief from the underground torments that make up the majority of the gameplay. Although the jungle is still full of traps, you can jump over them or avoid them entirely, and the Vietnamese enemies are more plentiful out here, so you can indulge in some typical linear shooter action (sans grenades, in all likelihood). For your aiming needs, don't bother using the iron sights; the crosshairs are much more accurate, particularly on the "commie" weapons. As for your enemies, they'll have no trouble shooting you, but that's about the most advanced tactic in their arsenal--some will even charge you with a knife as they stare down the barrel of your AK-47. Graphically, the outdoor scenes are beautiful in comparison with the tunnels, but objectively they don't come close to modern standards, most notably in the character and weapon modeling departments. Sound is likewise underwhelming throughout the game, and you may even notice that the ambient bird sounds from the jungle occasionally filter deep into the tunnels, as if to mock you.

Exploring the tunnels is every bit as exciting as this screenshot suggests.

Tunnel Rats: 1968 seems to have a strange notion of what constitutes "fun." Does anyone enjoy searching for booby traps in repetitive, brown tunnels or listening to a psychotic man-child rant about his father? The whole concept is fundamentally flawed, and the game's brevity, its suicidal AI, and its exasperating bugs and other annoyances only compound the problem. Don't blame Uwe Boll--he merely inspired the game--and don't expect the developers to take responsibility, because they don't even mention the game on their Web site. Perhaps Tunnel Rats mysteriously emerged from somewhere hellish and deep, "like deep down in your own dark tunnel of the soul."

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Posted in: Horror

Damnation

Damnation's biggest accomplishment is making steampunk look bad. Even the usually cool mashing up of fantasy and sci-fi can't save developer Blue Omega Entertainment's mess of a third-person shooter. Aside from the intriguing alt-history setting that combines robots with the Civil War, everything about this game is inept. Combat is a dreary repetitive-motion exercise where you clumsily gun down enemies who have the intelligence of ducks in carnival shooting games. Ugly, convoluted levels see you acting like some kind of cowboy take on Spider-Man and leaping around buildings that make about as much architectural sense as the girder levels in Donkey Kong. And the remaining minimal entertainment has also been bled out of the game by hideous graphics, choppy frame rates, and screechy sound effects.

Combat in Damnation is ruined by dumb enemies, awkward shooting mechanics, and too many ambushes.

The steampunk storyline is poorly set up as well. You play an outlaw named Hamilton Rourke, a member of a rebel gang at large in an alternate 19th-century America where steam-powered high-technology robots and weapons were introduced during the Civil War. An evil industrialist named Prescott has taken charge of the country thanks to legions of robots and a serum that gives soldiers super strength, and it's your job is to take him down. All of this gives the game's settings a sinister atmosphere akin to that of a Wild West take on the ruined City 17 in Half-Life 2. Some levels even feature Prescott speaking on a loudspeaker, waxing philosophically about the destruction of whole cities and how he is the only way back to peace. Lots of steampunk trappings litter the levels, including giant airships, powerful sci-fi weapons, robot soldiers, and creepy enemies that look like a combination of WWI trench grunts and the Combine storm troopers from Half-Life 2. But these elements are never formed into a coherent whole. The background story behind these fantastic events remains a mystery. All you get are a few flashes of strange newspaper articles and photos, along with some quick cutscenes that depict Prescott as a bad, bad man.

But you won't care much about the story behind Damnation for very long. The gameplay is so trite and repetitive that you quickly go from curiosity to get-me-the-hell-out-of-here boredom. Instead of the fluidity that characterizes the best shooters, the pace here is choppy and awkward. Most of the time, you simply race along unopposed, with the main source of interest being the ability to leap up or down the faces of buildings and shimmy up flagpoles. This can be intriguing in spots. Intuitive controls make it easy to pull off some amazing leaps and backflips. With just a quick two-button combo, you can fly through the air backward and flip around to grab hold of a ledge or bounce off one wall to leap up to a ledge. Many levels are structured like erector-set puzzles, with you having to figure out how to vault and climb your way to the top of teetering towers. Still, it's all absolutely absurd. Many buildings are so gutted and wrecked that they would collapse long before you got perform your Cirque du Soleil stunts in them, while others simply couldn't stand up because of the way they were designed even while totally intact. All you can really say for the ability to leap around and the odd architecture is that, at least, the developers tried to move beyond the generic linear shooter.

But in the end, it doesn't work. All of the mildly entertaining derring-do is constantly interrupted. It's as if the designers realized at the last minute that they were supposed to be making a shooter, so they brought all the leaping and gallivanting to a crashing halt by stocking the levels with dumb ambushes. As a result, one moment you're dancing about like an acrobat in buckskins, then the next moment, you're hunkered down behind cover for three or four minutes, only peeking out every so often to rip off a couple of shots at the dozen bad guys who have suddenly popped up in front of you. None of these shooting sequences are the least bit enjoyable. Enemies simply stand in one spot blasting away at you or move mindlessly in and out of shelter like targets in shooting galleries. Baddies also take a stupid amount of punishment, leaving you to blast away a dozen rounds with the game's small selection of wimpy weapons before they finally bite the dust. The only challenge is to your patience. You can easily get so annoyed with constantly taking cover from the barrage of enemy bullets that you jump out into the open to try to get things over with quickly...but instead, you just wind up getting killed.

Controls are screwy whether you're playing on a console or on the PC. Aiming is awkward with both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 gamepads because the movement of the sticks is imprecise when targeting enemies. PC controls are even worse because you never know when you'll be able to use the mouse or have to hit the keyboard. This is particularly annoying in the menus because it seems like the developers flipped a coin when deciding how to activate buttons. While one function is available by hitting the left mouse button, the very next requires you to hit the Enter key. Also, some standard shooter controls are unavailable, such as using the mousewheel to select a weapon. None of this really gets in the way of controlling Rourke, although that's probably because the underlying gameplay is so irritating it's hard to niggle over a few control flaws that are minor by comparison.

Rourke's ability to scale buildings like Spider-Man is about the only enjoyable part of Damnation.

Visuals and sound are loaded with problems on all three platforms. Each version of the game regularly chugs during gameplay and cutscenes. The Xbox 360 and PC versions are probably the worst offenders, with the 360 stumbling through cutscenes and the PC displaying a lot of tearing. Textures are embarrassingly behind the times, many buildings display a jaggy, blurry wallpaper effect, and special effects are terribly animated. Enemy heads explode in a shower of gore, yet intact skulls are clearly visible when the bloody spray clears. Enemies caught in explosions are gibbed a split second before the kaboom even goes off. The voice acting is atrocious, although it's hard to imagine even a reincarnated Olivier doing much with the script's cast of stereotypes. For example, there is an Indian mystic who speaks generic Indian gibberish about his destiny; a cowardly, chauvinistic Mexican; and a stock shooter babe who wears a ludicrous top that reveals a good inch or two of bottom breast. Sound effects are arguably even more annoying than the voices. Enemy weapon fire frequently consists of an obnoxious, metallic noise that sounds a whole lot like somebody dragging a chain over a sewer grate. Oh, and the multiplayer is worthless. Co-op support is present--although it's absolutely wasted on a game with so few merits--along with a bunch of standard shooter game modes, such as Deathmatch and King of the Hill. At any rate, nobody is playing the game online, so you'll have to use some other way to find out if misery really loves company.

You have to give Blue Omega credit for trying something different with Damnation's steampunk story and its leaping-around action, but that's about it. Everything else here is painful to experience.

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Posted in: Action

Delta Force: Xtreme 2

Delta Force Xtreme 2 is a first-person shooter where, as a part of the Delta Force Special Operations team, you must protect US interests by parachuting into various third-world countries and decimating a hodgepodge alliance of terrorists, drug smugglers, and Uzbek separatists. The game's primary appeal lies in huge multiplayer matches with vast, sprawling terrain and support for up to 150 players. However, in DFX2 even the multiplayer experience rarely rises above mediocre, while the single-player never even comes close. With gameplay and graphics that lag behind other military-themed shooters, Delta Force Xtreme 2 offers little to distinguish itself.

The essence of DFX2: Large ugly maps with death waiting behind every polygon.

DFX2 follows the Delta Force formula of large, open maps and subpar graphics with a limited variety of simplistic textures. Even budget game caveats won’t prepare you for these graphics, which compare negatively to older military FPS games that sell for even less. Technically speaking, the game doesn't seem to have advanced much beyond 2005's Delta Force Xtreme, which certainly wasn't ahead of its time. As a result, the absurd physics destroy any sense of realism by making vehicles feel like bumper cars, while weapon recoil is comparable to your average super soaker.

In multiplayer, nobody plays the terrorist; instead, everyone looks the same, and you can only identify your teammates by the presence of names above their heads. The advertised 150-player limit for games seems to be mostly theoretical--you'll be lucky to play on a server with one-third of that number. Similarly, the 40 multiplayer maps are mostly variations of the same batch of maps for the five different competitive game modes. Highlights include the King of the Hill and Capture the Flag game modes, in which good teamwork allows you to dominate the competition. You can hop into a vehicle even while carrying the flag, which is great fun, but given how tough it is to knock out any vehicle larger than a dirt bike, it's not so fun when the tables are turned. Helicopters are powerful, especially in the hands of a dedicated team, and are actually easy to fly, which makes them a favorite among vehicles. In general, death is waiting for you behind every polygon, and it will likely find you without warning and from long range because the giant outdoor maps are a sniper's paradise.

Although you can choose among 22 different weapons, including such accessories as flashbangs and satchel charges, the sniper rifle is supreme in DFX2's large, open settings, so be prepared to keep your head down. One minor multiplayer annoyance is the minimap, which can get cluttered and confusing, more so than in single-player. Speaking of single-player, the campaigns are also available for cooperative play, but the difficulty doesn't seem to scale, which makes the co-op mode too easy and no more fun than playing the campaigns alone. On the whole, multiplayer can be a fun experience, but it isn't anything special or new for the genre.

The single-player game consists of two campaigns that pit you against the culturally diverse members of the aforementioned international narco-terrorist network. The story that binds them together is barely coherent and revealed almost entirely in the pre-level mission briefings. Meanwhile, the enemies themselves seem similarly confused--you'll occasionally see them decked out in desert gear in the middle of a snowy map. Furthermore, the artificial intelligence, although preternaturally effective at long range, is a pushover up close and can be amazingly stupid in certain situations. For instance, if you shoot the driver of a vehicle, the passenger will calmly remain in his seat, apparently unaware of the certain death waiting nearby. Your AI squadmates aren't much better, given that they prefer to cower in the relative safety of a building while you single-handedly battle tanks and accomplish every mission objective.

Xtreme enough for you?

The single-player game inexplicably uses a checkpoint save system, which thankfully becomes a bit less annoying when you realize that enemies tend to stay dead when you respawn. Even worse, you can't scavenge weapons from enemy corpses, so if you want a different weapon, such as a rocket launcher, to take out a helicopter or an armored personnel carrier, you have to die and change your weapons loadout to get it. Several times the game leaves you wondering what to do at the end of a mission. For instance, in the "oil leak" mission, you must kill every enemy on the map, but once that's accomplished, you'll be stuck until you realize that you have to destroy every unoccupied enemy truck as well. The final campaign mission is appropriately massive, but command's declaration that "the fate of the world" rests on you blowing up a fuel depot in North Africa is decidedly unconvincing.

While the real life Delta Force only recruits the best of the best, DFX2 seems content with mediocrity. It just doesn't excel at anything, and given the multitude of exceptional shooters on the PC, there is no reason to recommend it, even with its budget price tag. Unless you are a diehard fan of the series and just can't wait for next year's Delta Force: Angel Falls, you'd be better off spending your money elsewhere.

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Posted in: Action

Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper

Even a century after his brutal crimes, Jack the Ripper is such an immense figure in popular culture that you expect big things from any game bearing his name. Toss in the world's most legendary fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, and you up the ante even further. Given all that, it's perhaps a little disappointing that Frogwares' newest addition to its long-running adventure series starring everybody's favorite detective feels sort of generic. Although Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper is mesmerizing in spots due to a fantastic blending of the serial killer's crime scenes with Holmes' rigorous investigating, too many stock adventure quests interfere with your eerie wanderings around Whitechapel. It's hard to get involved in the great story and sleuthing while being constantly interrupted to run mundane errands.

Breaking down the evidence gathered at each murder scene and making deductions are necessary if Holmes is to track down saucy Jack.

That said, there are some real strengths here. The story is a brilliant retelling of the real Jack the Ripper saga that unfolded in the slums of East London's Whitechapel district in the summer and fall of 1888. Much of the script has been adapted from police and newspaper records. As in real life, Jack murders five prostitutes in grisly fashion, slashing their throats, often butchering their remains, and even taking away organs as trophies before vanishing into the London fog. The only fictional additions are Sherlock Holmes and his trusty companion, Dr. Watson, who decide to get involved after reading about the first murder in the newspaper. From this point on, you control both Holmes and Watson by turns in their endeavors to stop the murders and identify Jack.

Some aspects of your investigations are absolutely riveting. Holmes and Watson show up to inspect each crime scene after the murder takes place, so you get a close-up look at Jack's work. This isn't quite as gruesome as it sounds, because the bodies are replaced with cartoonish dummies that bear just the slightest imprint of the murderer's attentions with his knife. Slashed throats, for instance, look like they could have been drawn on with lipstick. Still, the ability to visually inspect such famous murder scenes as the "Double Event" killings and run a magnifying glass over the bodies of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes is creepy and involving. Each crime scene also lets you reconstruct what happened, taking the pieces of evidence and linking them together until you can form conclusions. For instance, when checking out the body of Anne Chapman, you discover such pertinent clues as blood on a fence, bruises under the right side of the jawbone, and a bloated tongue, which allow you to deduce that the victim was killed while lying down after being choked with a left hand. These deductions are chosen from pulldown lists, though it still feels like you're actually investigating crime scenes as you do all the work of gathering the evidence. In addition, you also take on sleuthing back at Holmes' famous 221B Baker Street flat. You comb through dialogue and documents to establish murder times, and you even work up detailed theories about why the murders are being committed. If the real London police had had Holmes on the case back in 1888, Jack wouldn't have stood a chance.

But too much of Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper has been drawn out with conventional adventure quests. In between murders, Holmes and Watson roam all over gloomy Whitechapel attempting to run down suspects and keep up with the police investigation. Most of these actions are eerie, due to the shadowy alleys and streets of the impoverished London district you patrol. Pleasing character art along with a great script and impressive voice acting that bring to life Holmes, Watson, and a cast of Victorian lowlifes really help to sell the atmosphere as well. Unfortunately, none of these things do much for the quests themselves, which are almost universally routine errands where you do odd jobs for people to gain their help. Most of these tasks are linked through a few characters in Whitechapel, which makes them seem artificial, in complete contrast to the nitty-gritty of the actual murder investigations. When you need the help of a cop to get a look at official police reports, for instance, he asks you to first regain a lost folder of documents. Then, when you track down the folder, the person who assists you asks for something in return. And so on. You spend far more time playing Good Samaritan in Whitechapel than you do hunting Jack the Ripper. Puzzles are also typical for a traditional adventure. You piece together torn-up notes, assemble objects, and take on sliding-block challenges. Most are reasonably tough and entertaining, though again, they don't quite fit with the much more interesting murder-scene investigations.

The gruesome inspection of murder victims is the most involving part of your investigations.

Some bugs also interfere with Sherlock's sleuthing. The game doesn't seem to handle PhysX properly on installation, causing crashes on startup until you manually install these drivers. We had to download the PhysX drivers from Nvidia before we could get past the opening menu screens. A couple of crashes to the desktop took place after that, both when trying to save the game after finishing particularly lengthy puzzles. And the gas-fitting puzzle where you weld pipes to stop a gas leak took forever to register as complete, even though all of the correct steps were taken. Loading an old save was the only way to get the game to register that the problem was solved.

Your enjoyment of Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper likely depends on how much you appreciate story over substance. Anyone who has read about the serial killer's gruesome crimes will find it just about impossible to put down the retelling of this dark era of London's history. At times, it really feels like you've stepped into the Jack the Ripper investigation. But anyone who favors innovative adventure gaming might find that the quests and puzzles are a little too orthodox.

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Posted in: Intelegent

Spore Galactic Adventures

The new adventures are accessible on their own via an in-game menu, but they work better when integrated into Spore's space phase. Adventure missions are available along with other mission types, and when you take one, you fly to the target planet and beam onto its surface. Adventures are somewhat akin to Spore's creature phase: You maneuver your space captain about and have access to movement, social, and attack abilities as you do in the earlier phase. However, adventures are generally short and focus on role-playing-game-like tasks. These include talking to other creatures, fetching them items, attacking and befriending them, protecting them from harm, and so on. You can also take a crewmember (or two or three), whom you can recruit from your allies in the space stage. It may be simple, but it's also charming and engaging, thanks to the hysterical sound effects and appealing visual style. The game's best built-in adventures have you accomplishing tasks from learning how bills become laws in a cute Schoolhouse Rock! spoof to getting a band back together just in time for its big concert. Some of them aren't quite as good, and a few are a little buggy, such as a Godzilla-themed adventure in which pathfinding issues may force you to exit. However, adventures give the space stage welcome charisma and variety, which are qualities the game needed more of in that portion.

If you were into Spore's crafting elements, you now have a new, extensive, and incredibly robust toolset at your disposal: the adventure creator. Warning: There's a much bigger learning curve here than in any of Spore's other creation tools. However, if you take the time to experiment with it, you'll find that this exciting toolset offers incredible possibilities to players with an imagination. The ways you can customize the planet alone are astounding. Using the extensive terraforming and atmospheric options, you can mold the environments as you see fit. Populate the world with creatures of your own or download what you need from other players; create themed villages and drop in any building you can find or make; throw in special effects, music, and objects. Then, use behavioral buttons and sliders to make them act and interact as you like and give them dialogue. Drag and drop goals onto each, separate the adventure into acts, and soon you'll have an adventure to call your own. Before, you got to play as God and architect; now, you get to play as game designer too.

The toolset takes some getting used to, but it's intuitive and fun to use, and you may find yourself glued to the screen for hours at a time watching your vision come to life. In our time with the tool, we created a short adventure at a school of magic, as well as a more extensive one that re-created the story of Perseus and Medusa from Greek mythology. The game makes it easy to test as you go, so while it is possible to make mistakes that render your adventure unbeatable, the game gives you helpful tools to keep things on track. You can't think too big, however. Levels can only be so complex, and the eight-act limit keeps you from getting too detailed. Thus, act-based limits in how you can order tasks and set creature behavior may hinder your pie-in-the-sky daydreams. Getting the bottom of large buildings to be flush with the terrain can also be a chore, even when you take full advantage of the terrain-leveling tools. Other drawbacks become obvious when you play out your adventures, as well. Sensitive collision detection can make it a hassle to move around in areas with lots of objects, and mediocre pathfinding can make using the "follow" command on AI creatures an iffy proposition. And clearly, not every object was created to be seen up close. It can take a few moments for some textures to pop in--an issue that becomes more noticeable as you add multiple larger objects to the planet. Thankfully, Spore's fantastic animations and friendly visual presentation make that a relatively minor gripe.

Playing the best adventures is good cause for celebration.

The other main addition to Galactic Adventures is less exciting than the adventure creator, but it's still appreciated. Now, your space captain will level up as you roam about the galaxy and take on adventures. When you earn enough points, you can choose from a variety of cool upgrades to equip, such as weapons, social accessories, and armor. This adjunct provides a nice sense of progression to the space stage, and it ties into the adventure portion of the game because harder adventures require a more powerful (and properly equipped) captain. There's an inherent disadvantage to the way this assimilation works, however: You may not always be able to finish an adventure at a particular time. If you choose to play a stand-alone quest from the main menu, your captain of choice may not be equipped in ways that allow you to finish it. Provided you are leveling up your captain within the space stage, however, this won't be much of a problem.

And just like with creatures, buildings, and so on, your adventures can be shared online. As you fly about the universe, you will experience player-created adventures, and your own will be pulled into the galaxies of other players as well. The integration, as expected, is excellent. While getting a search error is all too common when looking for new goodies, Spore's online assimilation is still unsurpassed in PC gaming. The community is still going strong, and judging from the number of comments we received on uploaded adventures, players are eager to try out as many adventures as they can. If you're one of them, Spore Galactic Adventures is a must-play, some obvious issues notwithstanding. It's as charming as you would want from a Spore expansion, but more importantly, it offers something truly new, rather than more of what came before.

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Posted in: Action

Terminator Salvation

If you've ever wondered why movie tie-in games have such a bad reputation, Terminator Salvation can provide an instructive example. Though this third-person shooter is technically sound, it seems to rely entirely on the presumption that you'll be so jazzed to be playing as characters from the movie that you won't notice how boring and shallow the action is. Most of the game has you jogging from skirmish to skirmish, fighting the same three enemies and using the same cover-and-flank maneuver. This quickly becomes repetitive despite the fact that the environments are diverse and detailed, and the few on-rails sequences fail to inject any substantial excitement into the proceedings. The campaign is only about five hours long, there is no online component, and the only multiplayer option is playing the campaign in split-screen mode. It's a sparse effort, yet it is brazenly offered at full retail price. Suffice it to say, it isn't worth it, and even Terminator fans looking for a futuristic fix should prepare for disappointment.

It's like shooting clay pigeons, only without the difficult trajectory.

The game is set two years before the events of the movie, and though it features some of the actors from the film, Christian Bale is notably absent. The story chronicles a particularly foolhardy mission, and it does a reasonably good job of depicting John Connor on his journey from foot soldier to leader of humankind. There are a lot of cutscenes (sometimes too many) that help lend the game a cinematic feel, but the not-so-great character models and general blurriness keep them from feeling dramatic. The thoughtful and detailed environments do a better job of setting the postapocalyptic stage, the PC sports higher resolutions than its console counterparts. Unfortunately, the system requirements are relatively high, and the video options are laughably limited. You can tweak your resolution, aspect ratio, and brightness, leaving players hoping for scalability out in the cold.

Regrettably, the action isn't as diverse as the environments. You spend the majority of your time in Terminator Salvation on foot, moving from location to location and dispatching mechanical menaces along the way. You move at a light jog unless you are sliding between cover positions using the clever radial movement menu. A semicircle pops up when you are in cover and point yourself toward another cover position, allowing you to select a new spot to move to. This mechanic makes maneuvering around the battlefield slick and easy, though it is plagued by inconsistency that can leave you exposed to enemy fire or trapped in a corner. Your AI teammate(s) can get you out of a jam by distracting the enemy or firing at its weak point, but they too are prone to inconsistency and aren't fond of using more-powerful weapons or explosives.

So it's up to you to grab the rocket and grenade launchers when you come across them and use them to take down tough enemies, such as the flying Hunter-Killers. With the exception of these HKs and a few other special guests, you fight only three types of enemies throughout the entire game. Each of these is weak to a specific munition, of which there are three loose categories: bullets, shells, and explosives. The three enemies match up to the three munition types, and this simple correlation makes combat very formulaic: destroy the flying drones with shells, shoot the crablike robots with bullets in their weak backsides, and blast the humanoid T-600s with explosives. You can obliterate weaker enemies with explosives, of course, but then you'll have to expend a huge number of bullets on the tougher ones to bring them down. This combat design essentially forces you to use the same simple tactics throughout the entire game. You get into cover, blast the enemy with the appropriate weapon, and flank when necessary. The only real threat is getting caught out in the open and riddled with bullets, or getting meleed by a T-600 (which can kill you with a swing of its arm even if it's five feet away and there is a barrier between you). With some light maneuvering, these threats are easily avoided, and enemies are more than happy to vigorously shoot at your cover position, waiting for you to destroy them.

At least the plants are thriving amid the apocalypse.

This repetitious combat is broken up by a bunch of on-rails sequences that put you on the back of a vehicle manning a weapon with unlimited ammunition. These sections are a good change of pace, but they are too lackluster and awkward to be fun. You never get to drive the vehicle, which could have been a thrill on the perilous ruined freeways of postapocalyptic Los Angeles, and it seems that the coolest stuff that happens is conveyed by a cutscene that disconnects you from the action. Shooting your enemies in these sequences is a bit tricky, and not just because you are both moving at high speeds. Your targeting reticle will often drift inappropriately, as if you were standing on a Roomba in the back of your vehicle instead of hunkered down in a fixed position. The struggle to compensate for your vehicle's motion, your enemy's motion, and your mysterious drift makes these sections more challenging and less fun.

Terminator Salvation is a completely linear adventure without any collectibles or hidden goodies to search for. Every weapon is highlighted with a green outline that is visible through walls, so you won't spend any time dillydallying. You can complete the story in under five hours, at which point your only options for replay are to play it in split-screen with a friend or to try it on a harder difficulty setting. This no-frills attitude runs throughout the whole game and reveals Terminator Salvation for what it is: a stripped cash-in attempt packed with dull, uninspired, and repetitive action.

Editor's Note: As detailed in this news story, the retail PC edition of Terminator Salvation is being recalled because of a problem that prevents it from being installed successfully. This problem doesn't affect the Steam version of the game that we reviewed, however.

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Posted in: Action

Art Style: PiCTOBiTS

Blocks rain from the sky, blotting out the sun with their odd shapes and vivid colors. Your only hope to survive this onslaught is to match colors, banishing these blocks with strings of carefully constructed combos. But they just keep falling, faster and faster, until the screen is a blur of colors and you end up buried under the unrelenting mass. It's a formula that has been imitated and tweaked countless times since Tetris introduced the world to the horrors of geometric shapes. Art Style: Pictobits is unique, taking advantage of the touch screen to make block removal feel fresh, but it lacks the addictive quality that keeps you glued to the screen for hours, or even weeks, at a time. At only 500 DSi points ($5), it's an affordable way to check out another twist to the classic formula, but Pictobits doesn't have the verve to become a classic in its own right.

Run! The blocks are falling!

Pictobits isn't as immediately accessible as other games in the genre, so the six-stage tutorial is necessary to get a handle on how you must dispose of the falling blocks. The levels begin with a few rows of blocks on the bottom of the screen that serve as your tools of disposal for the incoming waves. When you tap any of these 1x1 pieces, they get stored in your queue, and you can deploy these blocks by tapping any blank space on the screen. To destroy falling blocks, you must match four or more colors in a row or form a 2x2 square. Matched blocks disappear, and blocks that you don't manage to get rid of crash to the bottom of the screen and split into individual pieces, ripe for the gathering. As you destroy blocks, a picture of a Nintendo character slowly takes shape on the top screen, and you pass the stage when the picture is completed. There are a few twists to this formula as the game progresses, such as certain blocks that cannot be picked up once they hit the ground, but the basic tap-and-bust structure continues throughout.

The first couple of levels ease you into the touch-based gameplay, slowly streaming a predictable pattern of blocks to get you used to juggling colors and stringing together combos. But the difficulty quickly ramps up and, depending on how adept you are at block removal, it could take only a few levels before you hit a wall. The simple shapes that were so easy to dispose of in the beginning quickly become larger and more abstract, making it difficult to completely remove them before they crash into the ground. As the speed ramps up, some problems also surface that make it even more challenging to destroy the mass of blocks. The controls are not precise enough when the pressure is on, which makes it all too easy to pick up the wrong color or place a block in an inopportune location. The different colors in certain stages are also unnecessarily similar; thus, choosing the correct color of blue in a wall of three different shades can be tricky, especially when every second is a luxury.

As in most puzzle games, when the blocks reach the ceiling, your game ends. In Pictobits, the obstructed blocks will flash when they can't enter the screen, and you have only a few seconds to clear a path or be hit with a game over. You can manually coral these obstinate blocks into your queue, but it's much quicker to tap a POW block, which topples your tower to the bottom of the screen. The penalty for using this ability, though, is that your queue shrinks by one, which makes it more difficult to remove the next wave of blocks in a timely manner. By chaining big combos together, you can buy that space back, but the harder stages move so fast and contain so many randomly shaped blocks, that you will need to rely on the POW block too often, making it harder to dig yourself out of the mess. The cycle of failure can be frustrating, which makes it important to balance your POW usage.

In just a few more combos, you can turn that indistinct mess into a pint-sized Mario.

The reward for clearing a hard-fought level is a picture from a vintage Nintendo game. As you destroy the different colored blocks on the bottom screen, a picture slowly forms on the top screen, and it's pretty cool to see a familiar character slowly come into focus. There are a number of different games represented here, and they run the gamut from such classics as Super Mario Bros. to import-only obscurities, such as Devil World. The pictures are a much-appreciated reward, but without multiplayer or online leaderboards, there is little reason to play these levels again once you see the hidden pictures. Although you can unlock dark versions of the standard levels, they are even more difficult than normal, which mean anyone but block-busting aficionados will feel immediately overwhelmed.

Pictobits lets you destroy blocks in a unique, rewarding way, but it lacks the staying power of better games in the genre. The steep difficulty curve will scare off anyone looking for a relaxing puzzle game, and the lack of multiplayer limits the replay value. It's really neat to slowly construct pictures of well-known Nintendo characters, but that isn't enough to push this game over the top. At only 500 DSi points, it's worth checking out if you have a hankering for block-bashing action, but the many flaws keep this from being an addictive classic.

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Posted in: Intelegent

Lux-Pain

Video games have come a long way since simply urging you to save the princess, and these days they increasingly present stories with complex, mature themes and social commentary. Lux-Pain, from publisher Ignition Entertainment, is a novel-style adventure game in the vein of the Phoenix Wright series, and it attempts to deliver a poignant experience to Nintendo DS owners. Instead, it is quickly tripped up by a plethora of embarrassing localization miscues, and what little exciting gameplay there is cannot break its fall.

The general concept is easy enough to grasp. An infection known as "Silent" has been spreading around the city of Kisaragi, causing citizens to organize group suicides, commit delinquent and criminal acts, and basically just go nuts in one way or another. As Atsuki Saijo, a member of an anti-Silent group called "FORT," you're charged with going undercover as a high-school student to ultimately uncover patient zero: the original Silent victim. Bestowed with telepathic powers, you'll spend the next few weeks reading the thoughts of your classmates, teachers, and neighbors to deduce who Silent has infected and, hopefully, remove the infection.

Scrape at the screen to uncover her emotional worms.

Powerful emotions within people as well as residual emotions lingering in the environment--both referred to as "shinen" and represented as parasitic worms in the game--are the keys to uncovering the thoughts throughout the game. Atsuki automatically senses these, and when he does, a probing minigame is activated. In it, you simply tap at the touch screen to determine where a hidden shinen lies, scratch away at that area to reveal the shinen, and then hold your stylus on the worm to remove it.

The results of a successful probe are nothing short of baffling: The worm manifests itself into a "term," which is just a short phrase consisting of no more than a few words (such as "dumb kids," "kill them," or "nice guy"), which you must then "imprint" back into the characters' minds to discover what they're thinking. These thoughts range wildly from homicidal, self-loathing, and even flirtatious. Armed with the knowledge that you're supposed to gain from reading these thoughts, as well as information that you pick up through normal dialogue in school and on the street, you can track down Silent victims, have FORT examine the extracted infections, and find the original infection.

Sadly, this interesting idea never really pans out. A large portion of the dialogue is poorly and inconsistently localized, giving off the impression that multiple translators used different criteria in determining how to express given lines in English. It also seems as if the source material was scattershot. What you're left with are lines of dialogue that seem slightly out of sequence in relation to each other. You're also exposed to long chats that simply drag out the time between important plot points, such as the 30-plus lines about hunger and homemade cookies before finding out that a friend just landed herself in the hospital. This all makes the story harder to follow than it should be, and detracts from your ability to think about where to go and who to contact to achieve your goal.

Even worse, at the most basic level, you're showered with grammatically incorrect and confusing sentences such as, "Seeing such joy is what is to some people," or those that were simply translated too literally such as, "I ate his mind." Colloquialisms such as "wanna" and "gotta" are followed inexplicably by single apostrophes. Finally, it's almost guaranteed that you'll encounter an egregious spelling mistake nearly every hour. Taking the most basic plot points into account, it's pretty clear that Lux-Pain's story was inspired by serious social issues (parental negligence, serious depression, and suicide). It's a shame that the botched localization results in too much unintentional humor to take any of Lux-Pain's commentary seriously.

I wanna erase your MIND.

Despite the localization's best efforts to thwart your progress, proceeding through the game is never really a problem because Lux-Pain is a very guided experience--so much so that it ends up a bore. You simply tap on active points on the map to visit an area and talk to anyone standing there, but half of the time, the game dictates specifically where you can go. In addition, you rarely get to choose what to ask of whoever you encounter. More often than not, the person will show up, spit out reams of irrelevant dialogue, and leave. Thus there's little need to try to sift through the (largely useless) information that you've accumulated, given that progress is reduced mostly to visiting every possible place until you find a Silent victim.

When you do encounter someone who is infected by Silent, Atsuki detects this (without any effort from you, naturally) and the game launches into Silent-Removal mode. This is the most mechanically involving portion of Lux-Pain's gameplay; one of several minigames make you poke, slash, and chisel away at white blobs on the touch screen to successfully remove the Silent. These sections are only occasionally challenging and don't make up at all for the game's other deficiencies. To add insult to injury, one Silent encounter resulted in a Game Over screen without any explanation--even after the Silent was defeated.

With neither thrilling gameplay nor an immersive story, the presentation in Lux-Pain simply goes to waste. The anime-inspired character art is colorful, if not all that well animated. The English voice actors recognize how awkward the translation is and paraphrase much of their dialogue such that you're actually able to understand and appreciate small pockets of the story. Your in-game cell phone can receive optional news broadcasts, e-mail, and ringtones, and the local Internet cafe has a message board that's updated with information every day (though you can't post on it yourself). There are even multiple endings based on whose Silent infections you've removed. Sadly, the game fails to deliver on the most basic element of a novel-style adventure so any added features are wasted, much like any time you'd spend with Lux-Pain.

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Posted in: Funny

Avalon Code

Avalon Code is an action role-playing game with an innovative mechanic that lets you instantly modify the world through the use of a magical tome. The game holds some initial promise but is bogged down by tedious dungeon filler, mindless button mashing, and a general lack of refinement. While it's not a painful experience, Avalon Code is a thoroughly mundane adventure despite some interesting, but poorly implemented, concepts.

The storyline is uninspiring and follows a heavily linear, predictable path. You're cast as a young warrior who stumbles upon the Book of Prophecy, a sacred text that selects you to create a new world. Your goal is to record what you want in your ideal world, which amounts to whacking everything--from flowers to townsfolk--with the book to scan data. You're guided by cute elemental spirits that offer brief tutorials and a little extra firepower, but they're largely unnecessary window dressing.

The Book of Prophecy, the game's most unique and fascinating feature, is creatively integrated into the gameplay, serving as more than a simple menu system. The book resides on the bottom screen and allows you to quickly jump between weapons, health items, and monsters at the tap of the stylus. It also houses a convenient detailed map for each environment screen that includes marked entrances, which is vital for navigating through dungeons. The book's most intriguing ability is its power to modify the world and its inhabitants as you like; you do so by scanning targets with the book, which allows you to adjust their elemental codes--tiny puzzle pieces pieces that fit into boxed grids--to modify them. For example, stocking a monster's grid with illness codes makes it sickly and vulnerable. Code manipulation is the game's strongest, most addictive aspect, and it's quite satisfying to instantly weaken monsters in the midst of battle.

A robust item-creation system further capitalizes on the enjoyable code-manipulation system, offering countless recipes so you can forge your own superior weaponry by modifying elemental codes. This enables you to create anything from fiery swords to frosty assassin daggers in your quest to wield the ultimate gear. Item collectors, meanwhile, should especially appreciate scouring the world for hidden recipe tablets that unlock prime equipment.

The novelty of code adjusting begins to fade as boring button-mashing combat and unchallenging gameplay move to the forefront. Most foes are easily dispatched, either rushing you or standing still while you pummel them from behind. As you master combos, you'll find that enemies spend more time on the ground, locked by your combo prowess, than attacking, because they can't stand up to counter. Moderately low monster variety and the fact that you fight enemies in batches of the same monster type further drain the fun out of battle. Bosses, however, use strategic tricks for more enjoyable combat segments, though their attacks are pattern-based. A handful of weapon types--including hammers and projectiles--provide some much-needed variety. Judgment linking, a combat minigame in which you juggle opponents as the camera zooms in and out, adds some spice but is slow and unnecessary.

Enjoy swapping monster codes, but don't forget where you put them all.

One of the greatest disappointments is that dungeon areas operate as little more than tedious filler, offering simplistic objectives in between dull mini-puzzles that detract from the game's adventurous spirit. Dungeons are divided into one-room segments, with most of their repetitive objectives requiring you to slay all enemies, flip a switch, or light a torch, reducing dungeon exploration to monotonous mazes. It's a little difficult to judge depth during platform portions because you can't maneuver the camera's isometric view, but this is a relatively minor complaint; you might also encounter some trouble pushing objects or searching the environment for tablets, because you have to be positioned at just the right spot to do either--another irritating quirk.

Though the Book of Prophecy is creatively incorporated into the gameplay and offers an innovative alternative to menu navigation, its cumbersome execution is highly vexing. Initially the book's index takes you within a few pages of the object you're seeking, but as you fill the book with data, it becomes a distracting, time-consuming hassle to muddle through it for what you need. This is mostly because you're harshly restricted to four active code slots, which practically guarantees that you won't have the codes you need on hand, so you'll have to dig through the book to locate them. This is a nuisance because it's difficult to remember just where you stashed which code, and there is no handy code search function. You'll frequently need to use the book to switch or modify weapons to solve puzzles, routinely disrupting the action since there's a short delay each time you access the book. You're also stuck resorting to the book for simple items such as health potions and keys, which leaves you constantly bouncing back and forth between pages.

While the game isn't much of a visual delight, it boasts some expansive 3D environments, vivid colors, and cute character designs as well as mildly entertaining cutscenes. Unfortunately, texturing is relatively poor and it's difficult to make out structural details. The audio quality is also questionable, with obnoxious attack sound effects and monster growls; however, you can turn off ambient sounds if you don't mind missing out on crucial audio cues. The game's music is one of its better traits, and its infectious backdrops properly set the mood despite their generic overtone.

Code-scan everything you want to modify, even townsfolk.

The main adventure is roughly 20 hours, which is a moderate length, though much of that time is spent flipping through the book for codes. Judgment link tournaments and a local lottery are interesting diversions, though a cute friendship game is more impressive and fun. By giving the townsfolk presents you increase their affection level, which adjusts your relationship. As you become closer, you'll unlock intriguing character subplots as well as side quests, though most of the side quests involve boring item fetching and routine monster hunts.

Avalon Code isn't a bad game, but its quirks and overall mediocrity prevent it from realizing its potential, leaving its quaint adventuring style best approached by the patient.

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Posted in: Funny

Jagged Alliance

If you want to take a trip back in time to 1994, there are plenty of better options than playing Jagged Alliance for the Nintendo DS. Developer Cypron Studios has ported the PC original to the Nintendo handheld in its entirety with few--if any--changes, and sadly the game has not aged well. A few design tweaks and a revamped control system would have made this blast from the past a lot more enjoyable.

Loads of mercenary details give Jagged Alliance a serious role-playing-game feel.

What made the original Jagged Alliance so compelling back in the day is still present, however. You take on the role of an unseen military advisor to scientist Jack Richards and his daughter, Brenda, on the tropical island of Metavira. Nuclear tests conducted on the island in the 1950s have resulted in a mutant generation of Fallow trees producing sap that can cure all manner of diseases. Yet kindly old Jack (who looks like the "Most Interesting Man in the World" from the Dos Equis commercials) and his leggy Latina daughter are robbed of their chance to save the planet. They're bamboozled by a former research assistant named Lucas Santino, who takes the island over for his own nefarious profit-making purposes and stocks it with soldiers.

In the real world, this is where the story would end. But in video game land, the Richards refuse to take this lying down and call you in to fight back. You do so by hiring mercs from the Association of International Mercenaries (A.I.M.) who battle it out over the 60 sectors on Metavira. All combat is handled in traditional turn-based fashion, with you leading teams of mercs into enemy-occupied sectors and fighting set-piece tactical battles using action points on all activities. This gives every movement a strategic dimension because you can't approach an enemy without planning out how many action points you are going to burn when you walk over to him, crouch down behind cover, and squeeze off a couple of shots. Individual fights are just part of the strategic challenge here, though. Each sector comes with a crop of trees that can be tapped to make money, which is necessary to keep your mercenaries happy and to hire new, more expensive goons with superior skills and equipment. At the same time, you have to expand in a careful fashion because expensive guards must be hired to protect conquered sectors, along with workers to harvest the sap.

Fifteen years ago, this all added up to a brilliant experience on the PC. Battles were tough and compelling. Even at the very beginning, you had to carefully manage your action points and approach firefights very carefully to keep all of your mercs in one piece. Metavira was massive. Each sector was a grueling slog through gangs of enemy soldiers. Detailed biographies, skill sets, and equipment for each A.I.M. mercenary gave the game a strong role-playing vibe. So much detail was crammed into each character that it felt like you were hiring real people. After three or four sectors, your gangs of cruel thugs turned into your buddies, making it easy to empathize with such murderous goons as Ivan, Tex, and Larry. You might have even shed a tear (or at least reloaded a save) whenever one of them was gunned down.

The shots can be precise, but the controls rarely are.

These positive characteristics are still present in the DS version of Jagged Alliance, although they are hard to appreciate nowadays. For starters, you cannot ignore the passage of time. Only the well-acted and numerous voice samples have weathered the years well. Visuals are ugly and dull. Every sector looks the same, and your mercs are multicolored blobs. More importantly, though, turn-based strategy gaming has undergone a lot of changes during the past decade and a half. This evolution is not reflected here, which leaves the mechanics clumsy and boring.

Controls are the biggest issue, particularly when it comes to managing the camera. Instead of allowing you to pan around by dragging the screen with the stylus as in many other DS games, you need to use the D pad. This is amazingly awkward because you can do everything else with the stylus. Sector maps are huge and enemies can be found patrolling all over the place, so you need to constantly move the camera manually to avoid being ambushed. Scaling down the size of the maps might have made fans of the original game howl, but it would also have minimized the need to fiddle with the camera and given the game a punchier pace. A frequently unresponsive touch screen makes matters even worse. The game frequently refuses to register that you've taken control of a mercenary by tapping directly on him, which then forces you to touch the menu bar and select team members by name. The end result of these control deficiencies is some serious juggling, especially if you're trying to play the game with a handheld system that you actually hold in your hands.

This Jagged Alliance revamp for the DS is for purists only. Even then, it's hard to imagine diehard loyalists having much patience with the clumsy controls and awkward camera system. A few minutes with this "new" Jagged Alliance is all you need to realize that while you may well be able to go home again, you shouldn't assume that you can do so on a completely different platform.

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Posted in: Action

Ghostbusters

Ghostbusters for the Nintendo DS has everything you'd expect from a great Ghostbusters adventure: the Ecto-1's iconic siren, a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man rampage, plenty of smarmy Peter Venkman one-liners, and more scientific spectral lingo than you can shake a proton beam at. Unfortunately, many of the gameplay elements tying these things together are about as solid as the ghosts you spend your time busting. While this action role-playing hybrid certainly improves on the series' poor video game track record, these Ghostbusters probably shouldn't be first on your call list.

You'd be afraid of ghosts too if they were always outside your field of vision.

Set not long after the second movie, Ghostbusters follows the famous ghoul-trapping pack of entrepreneurs on a new adventure through a haunted New York. The story, penned by the films' writers, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, contains a few memorable moments and chuckle-worthy lines, but it pales in comparison to the first two films. The return of some of the enemies, characters, and locations from the movies feels less like fan service and more like laziness in most cases.

Unlike the console versions, the DS game has you controlling the four original Ghostbusters instead of a nameless new guy. You move your team with the D pad, zap ghosts and whittle down their energy by holding the stylus on them, and then slide out traps with the left shoulder button. Most of the game is played from a top-down perspective, like in the action RPG games Baldur's Gate or Diablo. Ghostbusters borrows more than the camera angle of those games, though: the gameplay and overall structure should be familiar to anyone with hack-and-slash RPG experience. You pick up quests from the station, upgrade your weapons and characters, grab loot from some downed enemies, and even solve a few puzzles. It's a perfect genre for the Ghostbusters, but the execution is flawed.

Most missions are straight out of the action RPG playbook, but instead of killing rats in cellars with a rusty axe, you're zapping ghosts in sewers with a proton beam. These diversions serve as filler between main story missions, which are offered every few in-game days. Tackling these boring tasks is optional, but ignoring them costs you reputation points. If you lose too many reputation points, you lose the game, so you'll have to take on at least a couple of "go there, shoot this" jobs in between the more interesting story missions. The story missions feature more dramatic set pieces, a few simple puzzles, and a bunch of witty banter from the busters. Though they offer more entertainment, the story missions aren't without problems. Some of them require you to split up your ghost-busting team using simple commands (stop or follow), which leaves your allies to rely on their equally simple AI. It can be a pain to switch between your team members to make sure they continue to do what you need them to, especially when their courage meter--an arbitrary bar that measures their bravery--is low, which sends them running around out of control for a few seconds.

Each Ghostbuster has several abilities and skills to upgrade and develop, but you're rarely prompted to do so. To make matters worse, neglecting your level-up duties has little impact on the missions until the last few. Even if you do spring for some extra abilities, activating them requires you to switch to the appropriate team member and press the B button. That sounds easy, but during hectic battles when your team is spread thin and you're scribbling away on the screen, it's far from convenient. You can also have new weapons and gadgets researched and developed using the money and slime earned from missions, but again, you're rarely encouraged to. You could easily finish a number of missions in a row without ever exploring these extra bits (all are accessible by visiting different areas in the station, your main hub), which is a shame because they add some much-needed variety to the game.

Horrible draw distance and annoying time limits suck the fun from the Ecto-1.

Getting to missions involves taking a spin in the Ecto-1 through the dark streets of New York. You're given a small chunk of the city to cruise through, with a map on the top screen showing your target. Occasionally you'll come across a stray ghost you can zap with your mounted turret or a haunted building you can take care of by parking and going inside. The Ecto-1 controls like a radio-controlled car, spinning on a dime and thudding to a halt at the slightest obstacle. You can free-ride it through the streets between missions, but it costs reputation (because you'll be missing missions to do it), and the draw distance is so abysmal that you'll feel like you're driving through dense fog with your lights off. It's best to drive the Ecto-1 only when you have to.

Things can get hectic in a haunted museum, and when they do, you'll find yourself wishing for controls that could keep up. The basic movement and ghost-zapping/trapping controls work well enough, but things start to fall apart when you need to tap on team member's portraits to switch between them. The portraits also have the stop and follow commands on them, and sometimes tapping a portrait switches commands instead of characters. Other times you won't switch characters when you tap but will fire a random burst of protons in their direction.

Adding to the frustration of the picky controls is the top-down view, which does a great job of keeping your team in the center of the screen, but little else. You're constantly bombarded by offscreen ghouls while you frantically trace the outer rims of the touch screen in hopes that you hit something. Making matters worse is an obnoxiously long falling animation. By the time your Ghostbuster gets himself off the ground, he's ready to get hit again. It's extremely frustrating to die without ever getting a chance to move your team out of the line of fire.

If only the gameplay was as good as the graphics. The famous squad has the same stylized look as in the Wii version and looks good here. Aside from the shabby exterior scenery during the Ecto-1 bits, the environments look clean and detailed. There aren't many of them, but the interiors you visit have nice lighting and even have a fair number of destructible objects for you to zap. The effects from your various ghost-snagging weapons are spot-on representations from the films. The twisting streams from the proton packs and the light beams emitting from ghost traps both look great.

Occasionally, the ghost busting is as good as it was in 1984...but it doesn't last.

The sounds are also quite authentic, from the sizzle of a captured ghost to the mind-numbing Ecto-1 siren. The music, on the other hand, is bland and repetitive, with only a handful of tracks, one of those being the Ghostbusters theme song. At first it's fun to cruise the streets as the song (complete with "Who ya gonna call?" lyrics) blares through the speakers, but it quickly gets old. Have you ever gotten out of the car listening to a song on the radio and come back later to find that same song playing again? That's what it's like to drive the Ecto-1. Every single time you drive the car you'll be treated to another round of "Ghostbusters!" Mercifully, the developers seemed to know this would get annoying, because you can turn off the song by hitting the select button.

Ghostbusters has some fun moments--zapping and trapping ghosts is a blast when it works right--but those moments are few and far between. Compared to the Ghostbusters games that came out around the same time as the movie, this game is great, but so is a burned steak compared to rotten meat. There are some great concepts and interesting mechanics here, but you have to chew through a lot of gristle to find them.

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Posted in: Horror