balanced might & magic: clash of heroes

i’m always on the lookout for a good puzzler, and might & magic: clash of heroes for DS had gotten good reviews. the game is apparently tied into the might & magic series, which i know nothing about, but the setting had all the typical generic fantasy trappings including demons, elves, and necromancers. although the setting and story leave something to be desired, the game’s core puzzle mechanics are pretty solid.

in the un-timed, turn-based battles you move pieces between columns in order to form groups of 3, with bonus moves given for achieving groups of five (three vertical and three horizontal) and chains. vertical groups provide attacks, while horizontal groups provide defense in the form of walls. in addition, pieces can be combined with more powerful pieces in order to launch stronger attacks. the game is so carefully balanced that there is virtually no advantage or disadvantage between favoring an offensive vs. defensive strategy; similarly, choosing to use many smaller attacks instead of building up a stronger attack is almost as equally balanced. one of the main things that keeps the game interesting is that each of the game’s five sections features different protagonists, and each protagonist has a different set of pieces. the first protagonist (an elf) has walls that can regenerate and deer that can jump over walls, while the second protagonist (a knight) has walls with higher defense and a priest who can restore health every turn. each character also has a unique special move that can be unleashed after a certain amount of damage has been given/taken.

although it was interesting to get acquainted with each of the sets of pieces, by the third chapter the similarities were so outweighing the differences that i had to stop. although balance is usually a good thing in a puzzle game, in this case the game is so well balanced that no matter what strategy you adopt you can still win. this lack of risk and reward makes the game curiously dull and predictable once the core mechanics have been mastered, and rounds tend to drag on because attacks are set to a number of turns until they activate and stronger attacks take longer to activate. the game tries to tack on RPG-like elements (somewhat like puzzle quest, a game that it is often compared to) by letting you choose which pieces to bring into battle, having them level up after battles, including items that provide minor bonuses, and including a map with fixed points that you navigate through to advance the story, talk to NPCs, and take on optional battles for coins to buy extra pieces, but none of these trappings distract from the slowness of the main puzzle mechanics for long. boss battles and the occasional mission battle with different objectives do provide a nice change of pace, and i found the optional puzzle modes included in the story mode to be much more worthwhile than in the usual puzzle game.

while i started off being completely addicted to the game, once i mastered the mechanics my interest dried up pretty quickly. not one of the greatest puzzle games, but a fairly solid diversion, at least for a while.

balance these might & magic: clash of heroes links:
- a pair of useful FAQs at gamefaqs
- entry at wikipedia

movin’ to just dance 2

i picked up just dance 2 awhile back for several reasons. one was to see how well it would go over as a holiday game with my family and the other was just general curiosity about a game that has sold millions. the first game got mediocre reviews, with common complaints being the movement recognition, but the second game seemed better received, and watching the videos on youtube of people of all kinds playing its predecessor intrigued me in a similar way as when i first saw videos of people playing wii sports. this game in turn has had more than its fair share of youtube videos, including everyone from twin toddlers, dad, grandma, and everyone in between.

on the family front the game succeeded pretty well in keeping us all entertained, although my personal experience with the game was slightly more varied. although you have to learn the choreography as you go along, the stick-figure prompts certainly help and the moves repeat enough so that even on your first playthrough of a song you can still score fairly high. the game’s scoring was initially a bit frustrating until i realized that moving your hand to mimic the on-screen dancer will only cost you points. once i got past that the recognition actually did feel quite accurate and i was scoring within the 4-star range (out of 5). getting 5 stars feels attainable (i.e. it doesn’t require absurd levels of perfection), although by the time i had 4-star ranked the majority of the songs i wasn’t too eager to continue.

the game’s aesthetics have personality, although it feels limited. part of the problem is that restricted to a neon palette, everything looks a little bit too much the same, and it’s sometimes hard to see what the movement is supposed to be since so much of the on-screen dancers’ bodies are white. i would’ve hoped that they had done something different with the presentation for the series’ third outing, but it doesn’t seem that they have.

the variety in the songs is admirable and includes latin dances, a charleston, a bollywood track, duets, and in an especially amusing surprise an african dance track. as with altered beast, i love the idea of people all over the world unwittingly being exposed to something completely foreign through a “mere” video game. this compilation video of random people stumbling their way through that song is highly entertaining. and even though the game’s choreography is by necessity focused on arm movements, there’s not too much repetition between songs (although there’s a fair amount of “miming”-type movements) and the foot movements, which aren’t specifically tracked by the game, help keep replays from getting boring.

overall this was a surprisingly fun foray into the world of massively popular video games. ubisoft (specifically ubisoft paris) deserves credit for redefining the dance video game, and although i’m still somewhat annoyed that my free download that comes with the game didn’t work after numerous attempts, i enjoyed the game enough to plan to seek out its expansion pack and sequel (and possibly prequel) at some unspecified point in the future. i don’t doubt that some people have used this game to shed a few pounds, and it’s nice to see that wii’s initial promise (and premise) of getting people off of their couches has been fulfilled in such a notable way.

sweat to these just dance 2 links:
- E3 trailer from 2010
- entry at wikipedia
- official website for the series

japanese coached

i’ve been playing my japanese coach for DS for a while now. i had played my french coach at the beginning of last year, and despite its limitations i had enjoyed it enough that i was quite looking forward to my japanese coach as japanese is a language that i’d been interested in learning at least the basics of for quite some time.

there was a lot i appreciated and enjoyed with my japanese coach. first off, i was looking forward to learning the three writing systems (hiragana and katakana, the two syllabic scripts, and kanji, which is based on chinese characters), and in general the game accomplishes the task decently well. the handwriting recognition works well and the characters are taught sequentially and in manageable groups. people have commented that the stroke orders aren’t completely accurate, but outside of that fact on the whole this isn’t a bad way to learn the characters. (in case anyone’s interested, i ended up looking through some other books to reinforce the writing i was learning in the game, and for katakana i came across a really great book called easy katakana that instead of teaching the characters in order teaches them out of order so that you can write a whole slew of actual words right off the bat. i highly recommend that book, although i didn’t find its companion book, easy hiragana, to be as useful.)

the biggest complaint i had about my french coach was its emphasis on vocabulary over pretty much anything else within its 40ish lessons. my japanese coach is a definite improvement and includes 100 lessons and explicitly goes through many grammatical concepts, including verb forms, adjectives, and honorifics, although the game is still far from a perfect teaching tool. for one thing, some of the games are carried over wholesale from the previous games and don’t really apply to japanese as much (e.g. the spelling game and the seek-and-find game), particularly when they use romaji (the english romanization of japanese characters) instead of the actual japanese characters. the game also doesn’t move much beyond flash cards, and exercises that require more usage and comprehension of the language and actual construction of sentences would have been great. even simple fill-in-the-blank exercises would have been helpful. also, as with my french coach there are some noticeable bugs (although nothing major that i encountered), and after the lessons are all completed the rest of the game consists of random vocabulary which is fairly useless. but in this game 100 lessons will keep you busy for quite some time.

all in all i’m definitely happy i picked up my japanese coach, although as with my french coach i’m disappointed at the missed opportunity. MJC is definitely a step in the right direction, and hopefully the series will continue to improve. i’m not counting on ubisoft to ramp up the quality much, but maybe i’ll be pleasantly surprised, as i was with MJC. regardless, you can bet that i’ll be picking up my german coach and my korean coach when/if they come out.

coach’s japanese links:
- most of the reviews don’t get that far into the game (e.g. don’t even mention the kanji lessons, which start around lesson 50). a typical example is this one from joystiq. but here’s a nice review of the whole game. also, here’s a glowing review from diehardgamefan.com.
- apparently one of the developers of the game has a blog. he even includes a cheat to unlock all the lessons (or however many you want).

wayman’s wascally wabbids

finished the story mode of rayman raving rabbids a couple weeks ago. the story mode supposedly contains 75 mini-games (5 for each of the 15 game days), but for every day one of the activities is always the music game, and the final game of each day is almost always the shooting game. so that brings the number of unique games down into the 40′s; and since all of the games repeat at least once, the number of unique games is really more in the 20′s. needless to say this is disappointing, and i found myself quickly getting bored both of the incredibly shallow gameplay and the juvenile humor. the difficulty level was also randomly inconsistent. all in all i can see how this game could be popular among certain age groups (e.g. eight-year-old boys), but for me this was def. not a keeper. after the disappointment that was cooking mama this has made me appreciate the warioware games that much more and made me much more leery of mini-game collections in general. but i suppose this is a case where the hard-core gamer in me can’t help but turn up his nose. ah well.

some rabbid links:
- the UK review at IGN is pretty accurate
- great walkthrough at gamefaqs
- summary of unlockables at gamefaqs

mon professeur de français

i got my french coach on the DS for my bf for xmas in my continuing quest to get him to play video games. brain age had opened me up to the possibilities of “brainy” games, and this is a decent game/edutainment title in terms of production and content, although it’s severely limited. there are relatively few mini-games, and the focus is almost solely on vocabulary and short phrases. several verbs are introduced, but there’s very little reinforcement of how to actually use them, and conjugation is never fully explained. after you get to lesson 35 or so the rest of the “1000″ lessons consist of completely unrelated groupings of often useless vocabulary (e.g. “quarry”). there are tons of cognates (e.g. the french word “cookie” which means, you guessed it, “cookie”) which could’ve been spaced out a little more, and there are more than a few notable mistakes (e.g. one lesson skips over presenting half of the word list and still tests you on them, and there are places where a word is presented as the translation, but then a different word is used when quizzing). all in all this is a good, but def. not great, package. clearly a quick money-maker that with a bit more time and effort could’ve been truly indispensable. regardless, you can be sure that if a version for german or japanese comes out i’ll def. be picking it up.

links de français:
- dsfanboy: a day-by-day account of a week’s worth of gameplay
- good review at ign.com
- entry at wikipedia

prince of persia sanded down

finished prince of persia: the sands of time a week or so ago. yet again i find myself disagreeing with the popular opinion. i enjoyed the game elements that others have praised the game for, including good graphics, fluid animation, well-designed controls, decent story, and good gameplay mechanics. and i didn’t mind one of the main complaints people seem to have, which is that the fight mechanics (which, with their “finishing move”, reminded me a lot of eternal darkness) are too repetitive.

what most people don’t seem to find fault with, however, is how utterly repetitive the game is in general, and how it’s not enough of either an adventure game or a platformer to maintain much interest. the game, with its fluid controls, feels like it could’ve been a great platformer, but it lacks most of the things that make platformers interesting. instead the game is set up to be a sort of hybrid “puzzle” platformer, in that you’re supposed to figure out how to progress from one place to another. however, because there’s only one way to progress and there’s such a tiny number of things to try, it’s pretty much always immediately clear what to do. so most of the gameplay actually boils down to typical “pick up key, put in lock” mechanics, but as a platformer, where it’s “run along this wall to that ledge” or “climb the ladder” or “swing from this pole to that one”. where’s the puzzle in that? the majority of the rest of the “puzzles” are of the mind-numbing “push block to fit in this slot” variety and are hardly worth mentioning. in true platformers like super mario bros. at least you get to collect coins and powerups along the way, interact w/ enemies, and, more importantly, actually have to have some skill and good timing to get to the goal. in this i rarely felt like there was such skill required, although there were moments scattered throughout where i felt there were glimmers of the brilliant game this could’ve been.

so all in all not really a keeper, despite the high scores i’d seen. apparently the second of the trilogy wasn’t as well received, but based on what i’ve read the third might be more worthwhile. i guess i’ll have to work my way through the second before starting the third, although it’s going to be a good long while before i’m willing to pick it up and have to suffer through pushing more blocks around. may give the original game a go some time though (included as an unlockable in this version). oh, and apparently there’s going to be a movie from disney??

links! times three!
- good walkthrough at ign
- cool fansite that has artwork, screenshots, and the screenplay of the entire game
- info on the original game at wikipedia.org