puzzlin’ through glow artisan

it seems like i’ve only been playing handheld games this year (esp. downloadable ones), but i’ve been busier than usual and have a couple of longer games that are taking time to finish. although it may make for less varied blog material, i rather like playing shorter games, although in general i’ve also been much less compulsive about finishing games if i know that i’ve seen everything it has to offer.

in this particular case, i recently finished glow artisan which is downloadable but like other puzzle games is virtually limitless in the amount of extra content via its level-creation features. the game had gotten great reviews on both nintendolife and ngamer, so i got the DSiware version that was released in december 2009 (although in retrospect it looks like the iphone version is $2 instead of $5 and essentially identical).

the game is very much in the same vein as picross and sudoku. in this game, however, instead of numbers the focus is on coloring squares in a certain order to make the target pattern. you can remove an entire row or column and colors mix in the way you would expect, but although the mechanics are simple it soon becomes apparent that the developers, powerhead games, have come up with a very clever puzzle system that is as robust as picross and sudoku. like both of those games, however, glow artisan has the same drawback which is that once you’ve mastered the mechanics there’s not a whole lot of variety and, for me at least, the lure of earning medals (for completing a level in the fewest moves possible) isn’t compelling enough to keep playing through all the stages. the game features an electro-chic exterior that has become the norm for puzzle games (and which frankly i’ve gotten quite bored with) and it includes a slew of tacked-on multiplayer features, but otherwise this is a good release for anyone craving a completely solid, if not surprising, puzzle game.

puzzle through these glow artisan links:
- developer’s official site
- apparently the game is available on other platforms, including windows phone and XBLA. here’s the list of XBLA achievements.
- the free version on itunes includes the first 12 levels, making it useful as a demo version

dawn after castlevania: symphony of the night

the much-lauded castlevania: symphony of the night has long been on my list of games to finish partly because it’s so iconic and partly because i want to check out the rest of the series which has been a major presence on nintendo platforms. it’s kind of hard to believe that the last castlevania game i finished was the first N64 release (which i enjoyed) more than five years ago, but somehow the gothic theme of the series just doesn’t really appeal to me that much. i had gotten a fair amount of the way through SOTN years ago but had gotten stuck at the part with the wooden bridge in the caves, but this time with a little help from gamefaqs after a long hiatus i finally barreled my way through to the end.

i can see why the game has been well regarded. there’s a lot of polish (great enemy design; the overall aesthetic reminded me of classic sega games), and the coupling of the traditional action-oriented castlevania gameplay with the exploration of the metroid series is fairly successful (although as a long-time metroid fan the gameplay can’t help but pale in comparison). the RPG elements definitely help with the pacing. the upgrades include some pretty standard ones (e.g. one opens all the blue doors), but there are also some more-unique ones involving alucard’s three transformations. the other unique addition was the introduction of “familiars” who follow you around and generally help fight enemies and who also level up and gain new powers (although their development is much slower than yours). although there’s a lot of content overall, much of it falls into the “so useless you’ll never even bother with them”, such as the bevy of single-use items, spells that you can execute with complicated button sequences, and a bestiary that tracks the enemies’ item drops that you’ve encountered that could be a major time suck if you tried to complete it. i appreciated the little details that were put into the game, such as your bat familiar being confused when you change from a bat back into a human, and so i suppose you could think of all that “useless” content as extra details that help flesh out the game’s world.

the thing that made the game really worthwhile to me, though, was the huge surprise halfway through that by now probably everyone knows about but must have been mind-blowing at the time. like final fantasy 6 it comes just when you think you’re finishing up the game, and also like that game it still feels fresh today. the second half, again as with FF6, doesn’t completely fulfill the potential of the initial reveal, but it still made the game a unique and memorable experience for me.

in terms of putting the game into its historical context, jeremy parish’s write-up on gamespite was the most informative. he presents it as a game intended to be a swan song to the series, a 2-D game during a time when 2-D was shunned in favor of the new chunky, polygonal 3-D games. he writes that the creators “were crafting a game for love, not churning out an assembly-line product” and says:

That’s where historians get it wrong. These days, Symphony is seen as the first modern Castlevania, the moment where the franchise broke loose of its legacy tethers. … No, Symphony simply embraces some of Castlevania’s less familiar traditions, highlighting the series’ underlying concepts — and it does so strictly for the sake of creating the ultimate Castlevania game, the culmination of everything the games to that point had embodied.

In short, Symphony of the Night is a tour-de-force: the summation of a classic franchise, crammed with self-referential fan service yet bursting with new ideas. It strikes a perfect balance between old and new, faithful to the series’ essence while unafraid to forge ahead.

i definitely wouldn’t rank this among my favorite games of all time since the core gameplay is so familiar, but the game is significant as it marked a new direction for the castlevania series. the only problem there, though, is that it seems all the subsequent games of the series have strayed minimally from the formula of SOTN. i’ll have to see for myself if that’s the case since you could say that about pretty much all series, but i’m not too optimistic since parish says, “the series has limped along for more than a decade since Symphony’s arrival. … Igarashi managed to wrangle Symphony into a template, a formula, but the original game’s greatest success was that it so boldy defied expectation, that it so elegantly exceeded preconception.” stay tuned …

the sun rises over these castlevania: symphony of the night links:
- there’s certainly no shortage of links to info on SOTN. the section at vgmuseum.com and the entry at castlevania.wikia.com are a good starting point
- FAQ at gamefaqs and walkthrough at shrines.rpgclassics.com
- PDF of instruction manual at replacementdocs.com
- wallpapers at castlevaniacrypt.com

geometric galaxy wars

i picked up the wii version of geometry wars: galaxies kind of on a whim after reading a lot of good things about it being a pure, retro shooter. i hadn’t been familiar at all with the game, which began life as an extra in the xbox game project gotham racing 2 before getting more mainstream attention with updated releases on XBLA and PC. the game has received several sequels since then, although none of them seem to be as full an experience as the wii/DS versions, as far as i can tell (and both of those versions include the original XBLA retro evolved version as well). the basic core design has stayed pretty much true to its pure shooter roots throughout: guide your ship through a finite playing field (spanning a few screens at most) while shooting at the satisfyingly large variety of enemies that come your way. the original game takes a lot of its inspiration from other shooter classics, most notably defender, although the greatest design decision in this game is that the enemies don’t fire bullets. so instead of dodging hard-to-see bullets and getting cornered by waves of them, you’re focused on the enemies and their predictable behaviors, which leads to a very satisfying playing experience involving more strategizing; when you lose you feel it’s more your own fault than any cheapness from the AI.

in general i agree with the review at videogamecritic.net which praises the game for its core gameplay as well as its new features. there are several key differences in the wii/DS versions is terms of features compared to the other releases. the main addition is the campaign mode, which has you tackling planets with different characteristics, such as the kind and frequency of enemies that appear, the shape of the board, and the addition of various obstacles such as mines, corridors, and moving, impenetrable blocks. the second difference is the addition of an upgradable “drone” with various behaviors you can choose from, including the “defend” drone, which shoots behind you; “turret”, which takes a position and then shoots 360 degrees; and “collect” which collects “geoms”, the all-important point multipliers you get for defeating an enemy and can also earn you extra ships and bombs.

for the most part there’s a nice variety in both the planets and the drones, and for each planet there are bronze, silver, and gold medals (i.e. “achievements”) to earn for high scores. although it isn’t hard to get bronze medals on every board, gold medals are much more of a challenge and will require more strategizing, and there are times where you’ll find one drone works better for you on a particular board. fun as they are, though, in general most of the drones don’t feel particularly useful, even at their maximum upgrade, which makes that feature feel a bit superfluous. having to unlock the planets is palatable, but having to upgrade the drones seems a bit of a chore since getting a gold medal with a less-than-maximized drone doesn’t usually seem worth even attempting. also, getting the gold medal on every planet does get repetitive after a while, especially since oftentimes you’ll find you just end up relying on using the most basic drone, “attack”, which basically doubles your firepower. perhaps it would’ve been better to have specific tasks, such as “get a certain score on this planet using this drone at this level”. also, the pacing on a lot of the boards feels tedious, as too many times you have long periods of very slow action that ramp up to levels that are just too overwhelming too suddenly.

anyway, despite all the criticisms this is a highly enjoyable game and i’ll definitely be picking it up again to get more of the gold medals. be advised, though, that i, along with all the other reviews i’ve read, agree that using the wii remote to aim is unnatural and tiring; you’re much better off with the classic controller. at the time of its initial release bozon’s main complaint in his review of the wii version for IGN was that the game was overpriced at $40. it seems a bit unfair to say that since there were so many worthwhile additions, but in any case now that both the wii and DS versions are about $20 each there’s really no reason why fans of old-school shooters should hesitate in picking this one up.

geometric links:
- entry at wikipedia
- the wii version lets you beam a demo of the DS version to your DS. i tried it out, and the stylus control is much less awkward than aiming with the wii remote, although it could get tiring. although the galaxies are the same between both versions, if for some reason you don’t want to get the wii version the DS version should definitely be a viable alternative, and bozon at IGN gave it a similar score to the wii version. i’ll probably be getting the DS version at some point anyway b/c if you have both versions you can unlock some more stages.
- great drones strategy FAQ at gamefaqs
- FAQ with basic info on the scores for medals at gamefaqs
- 1up and IGN‘s reviews of the latest game in the series, geometry wars: retro evolved 2, for XBLA
- and just for fun, in case you’ve forgotten where it all began, here’s a video on youtube of the game asteroids on atari

lumines illuminated

i’ve had a PS2 for a while, but nintendo fanboy that i am i really haven’t been motivated to spend much time playing it; it just doesn’t have many games that i’m interested in playing. the first one that i ended up spending a significant amount of time on was actually the PSP port of lumines, called lumines plus. i’m even less interested in the PSP’s library of games, but the original lumines got such glowing reviews that it piqued my interest, despite my lackluster response to the same company Q entertainment’s second puzzle game, meteos for DS.

i came across a review of the PSP version on living social that says the following, which i completely agree with (apologies to him, but living social doesn’t include links to individual reviews):

There really isn’t any variety to Lumines’ gameplay. Every level is the same, just with different songs and rhythms (while these make the difficultly variable, it makes the game feel repetative. There are very few ways to unlock new skins, and once you play until you lose it’s hard to beat your high score and open the higher skins. If you are a completion gamer like my self, you will find it hard to sit down for over an hour with your PSP just to unlock 1 or 2 skins. Also the Multiplayer experience, while innovative, is absolutely retarded. By dividing the same play screen in two and lettting the players fight over who has control over the majority of the level, it effectively criples the lossing player causing them to crash and burn way to quickly.

i’m a fan of tetris-like puzzle games in general, so there was a lot i enjoyed about lumines. the gameplay is satisfying, much more so than its sibling meteos, and its presentation is successfully hypnotic. both games are stylish and have a lot of polish, but both suffer in terms of their core gameplay which just isn’t deep enough to sustain the lack of variety inherent in all tetris-like puzzle games. meteos is more shallow, but it’s helped by the amount of (mostly trivial) unlockables. in the end neither has nearly as much longevity as the games that have become the lodestone against which all other puzzle games must be compared, namely panel de pon and puyo puyo. both of those games have sophisticated combo systems that provide a depth that lumines just can’t match. lumines includes a puzzle mode, where you use the blocks to create pixel art, that is mildly diverting but doesn’t really add anything to the whole package. so all in all the game is enjoyable, but it’s definitely not one that inspires rabid devotion in me; i won’t be tracking down all the sequels to this one anytime soon. which is just as well, considering the ever-increasing stack of games i have to get through …

some luminous links:
- reviews of the PS2 version at 1up and IGN. for comparison, IGN’s review of the original PSP version can be found here.
- lumines plus doesn’t include any tutorial on puzzle mode, so if you’re like me you may be at a loss as to how they work. there are a ton of videos of that mode on youtube, and here’s one from the XBLA version of the game.
- the page at strategywiki.org has a listing of all the skins. not sure it’s completely accurate, though, b/c parts of it are inconsistent compared to this list of unlockables at gamefaqs.com.
- FAQ of the PSP version at gamefaqs, inc. the puzzles from puzzle mode
- review of the newest iteration, lumines supernova, for PS3 on IGN. doesn’t look like much has changed, though.

how to spot a video game deal a mile away

still slogging my way through this endless game (which i hope to be done with in at least two weeks). so i just thought i’d post about a site i find useful and end up wasting time on, videogamepricecharts.com. if there’s one thing i love almost as much as lists, it’s charts. haha. the numbers seem to be fairly accurate, so it’s a great way to find out if you’re getting a deal or not; although keep in mind that they’re tracking averages, so if you’re patient you should be able to get a better deal than the average price. what i find interesting (and this is my geekiness coming through, prepare yourself) is seeing how particular events are reflected in immediate changes in price. for example, the chart for fire emblem: path of radiance is interesting b/c you can see the huge spike in price from november to december 2007 right before brawl was released; the game, of course, showcased path of radiance’s central protagonist, ike. and when you look at the chart of clubhouse games for the DS you see how the price stayed pretty high as the game became more rare, but then dropped drastically when the game was rereleased recently. it boggles my mind that publishers don’t use tools like this to rerelease games that are clearly in demand, e.g. tetris DS.

something that could use some more study is how the release of a game on the virtual console affects the selling price of the actual game. from my random spot checks it doesn’t seem like it affects it much at all, which leads me to believe that the people who are buying these retro games are for the most part retro fans who want to buy the actual cartridge to play on their actual systems (i.e. geeky people like me). the original harvest moon, on the SNES, was released on the VC in february 2008 and its price continued to rise steadily afterwards, the same as it had been doing before. the price of castlevania: symphony of the night, available on both XBLA and PSN, has been dropping steadily, but it was doing so even before the rereleases (march and july 2007 respectively). in contrast, though, the price of zelda: ocarina of time dipped sharply a couple of months after its february 2007 VC release, which could be b/c of all the un-nostalgic people who were happy with their VC copy and sold their old N64 copies. clearly there are a lot of factors at work here, but it would be, dare i say it, fascinating to see a more in-depth study that tried to make sense of at least some of the many variables. i read somewhere that annually video game prices tend to be their lowest during the summer, but i’ve forgotten where i read that, so if anyone has that link handy feel free to email me. [update: the vg price charts man himself posted a message saying that november is actually the best time to buy used games. i also just found out that he's been running a whole series of articles on price trends on the site's blog. sweet! more time wastage!]

the creator of the videogamepricecharts.com put together an article for vintagecomputing.com that looks at how much of a deal VC games are overall, given that they’re all consistently priced per platform on the VC even though some have become much rarer than others in the non-virtual world. his conclusion?

“The original Nintendo is the only system where buying the cartridges would be cheaper than buying the virtual games because many games for the NES would cost less than a dollar. Every other system, especially the TurboGrafx-16, boasts higher average prices for the cartridges than the Wii’s VC downloads.”

ah, if only i weren’t such a retro gamer i’d buy way more of these VC releases instead of shelling out $40+ for used copies of games like super mario RPG (only $8 on the VC!). but there’s nothing like the smell of dusty old nintendo cartridges in the mornin’! mm hm!

galaga’ed

i’ve been playing the original NES version of the 80′s arcade classic galaga for a while now. there doesn’t seem to be much info specifically on the NES port, but there are some interesting differences. one trivial difference is that the game was subtitled “demons of death” on the cartridge for no apparent reason other than to titillate would-be purchasers i suppose. aficionados will also notice that the graphics take a minor hit compared to the arcade version, and there’s also a notable difference in gameplay in that your ship is only allowed two bullets onscreen at any one time. this change, no doubt due to limitations of the hardware, makes the game a bit harder and will cause those used to the arcade version to have to adjust their strategy, but to compensate there’s an additional feature where if you press the A button you’ll automatically fire two bullets in quick succession. this really saves your thumb, and i found myself switching back and forth between the two-bullet fire and the regular one-bullet fire, depending on the situation. one other minor change is that the stage and # of ships remaining info has been moved from the bottom of the screen to the right side. this also takes a bit of adjusting since it’s harder to see exactly where the right edge of the playing field is, but i found i got used to it after a while. all in all even for die-hard fans of the original version this is still a very good port of the classic game we all know and love.

as for galaga in general, call me a retro gamer but to me this game truly stands as a monument to practically perfect classic gaming. the controls, graphics, and music/sound are all great; the pacing at which the difficulty increases is spot on; and the gameplay is simple but beautifully clean and elegant. there’s also a constant variety within these parameters that keeps you coming back for more. the most obvious are the challenge stages interspersed throughout, of which there are eight total, and most of which take some mastering to achieve perfect scores (i.e. 40 out of 40 enemies defeated). but there are also other variations as well. there are several different enemy entrance patterns, and if you do well (i.e. defeat a lot of the enemies as they enter) the main part of the stage in which you face off against the enemies you didn’t defeat is significantly easier. then there’s the main part of the stage in which you dodge the swooping enemies and their bullets, with the added event where one enemy morphs into three special enemies that give a sizable bonus if you defeat all three. the most eye-catching feature is the ability to win back a captured ship to double your firepower, although i ended up not using it that often and i doubt most hard-core galaga players do.

galaga seems to be one of those games that everyone’s played but it seems it hasn’t been given enough love lately. if anyone’s hesitating about getting the NES port on the virtual console i can recommend it wholeheartedly, and i hope it renews your love for this classic as much as it did for me. my goal this time around was just to break 200,000 (which seems to be fairly modest, since i’ve seen scores well over a million and as high as 3 million, according to sources such as nintendo power v. 13). my next goal is to make it to level 31, which is the last challenging stage before they start repeating. isn’t it nice to have goals in life?

galaga links attacking from outer space!
- great fan site that details strategies for all the challenge stages, complete with animated GIF’s
- some misc trivia at gamefaqs
- review of VC release at IGN
- list of galaga xbox360 achievements
- entry at wikipedia

exploring the genesis of sonic

another gaming first (this year has just been full of ‘em) was beating my first sega genesis game, sonic the hedgehog which i played via the sonic mega collection on the gamecube. as you can guess this was also my first sonic game. like super mario world (which in NA came out just two months later) i’d tried out sonic 1 in the toy stores but o/w had never actually played through it. i have to say that i’d never actually even been that interested in sonic, but i got more interested due to a friend of mine in college who was a sega fanboy and obsessed w/ him, so much so that he dressed up as him for halloween. it’s gotta be a pretty rare sight to see a black guy w/ hair dyed blue and wearing red and white shoes running around, bumping into walls and dropping change. and of course my interest took a big leap when it was announced that sonic would be joining super smash bros. brawl, and so being the completist that i am i figured to begin my closer acquaintance w/ sonic i should start at the very beginning.

my mostly unbiased opinion is that overall sonic 1 isn’t a great game. one of the things that i never understood about why people liked sonic so much is that people always talk about how fast the games are, but in fact there actually aren’t that many opportunities to let loose and really zoom through a stage, especially since a lot of the time if you zoom past something you end up having to backtrack anyway. and without the speeding ball of hedgehog gimmick the game pretty much becomes just another platformer. and even after playing through the game i’m still not into the “get hit once and lose all your rings” setup, which isn’t much of a step above ghosts ‘n goblins’ get hit twice and die MO.

there are several “moments of brilliance” in the original, though, such as the bonus stages and some pinball-esque parts w/ sonic bouncing off of bumpers, and particularly the star light zone which does a better job than most of the rest of the game of making sonic’s speediness work w/ the level design. but in general aside from some great character design and graphics and music there wasn’t a whole lot to keep me interested. being a little disappointed i read up a bit on sonic 2, which generally seems to be regarded as the best in the series and seems to do a fair amount to remedy most of the problems i felt were in the original. i actually spent some time taking a “spin” through sonic 2, and already i can tell that i’m going to like that game a lot more. so w/ that said, hopefully the sonic fanboys won’t hate me too much until i post my assessment of sonic 2 and either see the light or give up on sonic completely.

some sonic links:
- walkthrough at IGN that includes the info on how to get continues
- cheats at IGN
- recent reviews on IGN of the XBLA release and the wii VC release, the latter of which also has a good review at vc-reviews.com
- endings at vgmuseum.com and video of the good ending at youtube
- list of the xbox 360 achievements for the game
- entry at strategywiki.org including a guide to the badniks
- entry at wikipedia