PSP Haven

E

2008-10-01T06:44:00.000-07:00

» Echochrome
» Eragon
» Every Extend Extra
» Exit

Exit

2008-10-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

It's not too often these days that you find a puzzle-focused game that doesn't feature blocks, triangles or some sort of gem. When they do come around they can be great, as in the case of something like ICO or even The Sands of Time. Exit stands to make a case amongst these classics, combining puzzle solving with side-scrolling platforming. But while the game can provide a fun puzzle-solving experience in both theory and practice, it has enough quirks to keep from ranking it amongst the greats.

The basic premise of the game is that you're to help trapped victims escape buildings that are burning down, frying with electricity and are otherwise very nasty environments. As Mr. ESC, an escapologist (that's a real word, by the way), you need to navigate a two-dimensional building, find all of the various persons trapped within and have them help you find others and escape.

There are some rather simple puzzle and platforming elements at play here, like pushing boxes, jumping over ledges and such, but the most interesting stuff has to do with the abilities, and inabilities, of the people you need to save. Children, teenagers, adults and patients are all scattered about, each with their own shortcomings and skills that you'll have to take advantage of to finish each area. Children, for example, can't jump over gaps and need your help getting up and down platforms, but they're able to crawl through very short tunnels and walk over weight-restricted blocks. Adults aren't very agile and can't climb boxes and such without help, but they can push the larger boxes on their own. Patients are the biggest problem of course as you'll need to either carry them or cart them via a gurney. So again, managing and utilizing the strengths of each victim is key to the gameplay, and it generally works very well.

Now, while using each person's strengths is cool, there are a few problems with their AI. The computer folks sometimes have a problem figuring out how to correctly follow you. For example, if you head down a ladder and they're closer to another one, they might take that ladder instead just to stay on the same level as you. The problem here is when there's a wall, large gap or otherwise in-between the two of you, which is very often the case. And though you can issue commands to people, they sometimes get confused if they need to do more than one thing to complete the task. Telling an adult to jump over a gap and then push a box might work, but telling them to move down a ladder and then push a box might not. You first need to tell them to climb to the bottom of the ladder, and then push the box. It's not an experience killer, but it can be a little annoying.

One of the biggest mixed experiences in Exit has to do with the platforming elements, or specifically, the related character control. The game very heavily borrows the original Prince of Persia control scheme where you move from invisible block to invisible block, jumps must be planned and most every movement requires stopping and then executing. You can't just walk up stairs, you have to stop walking in front of them, press to climb and then watch Mr. ESC ascend. And if you change your mind, you have to wait for him to get all the way to the top before you turn him around.

While this sort of control scheme worked well in 1989, it feels quite awkward in 2006. It feels as if you're constantly giving over control to the animation routines, and as good as they are, it can be frustrating. Luckily the game's focus is on the puzzle elements and platforming-heavy levels are few and far between, but even the most puzzle-centric levels feature a fair amount of platforming and navigation, requiring you to sit through numerous stair climbs, ladder ascends, stop-and-jump routines and more. And if you happen to mis-time a jump at the wrong point in Mr. ESC's animation routine, you'll have to start all over again.

Aside from the awkward controls, another thing we had problems with was the amount of trial-and-error levels towards the later sections of the game. While you have access to an overview map, it's very rudimentary and only gives you an idea of how things are laid out. And since you can only scroll a certain distance from your character, you'll have a hard time planning out your attack for the level as you can't see everything at once. There are many times where you'll push a box, only to find out that you need to wait until you've gotten past where it's headed before you have someone else push it. Once things like this are done, there's no going back, so you have to restart the level over again and start from scratch. Unfortunately, these trial-and-error tasks really build on each other later in the game, so if you think you've solved one thing correctly, you might realize you still haven't done it right and need to start over yet again because, as mentioned, there's rarely ever any going back.

Visually-speaking, Exit is a fascinating game. The levels and objects are somewhat cell-shaded and rather cartoony in nature, but the characters are a very odd, yet extremely cool, mix of flat black with white highlights to point out their limbs. The character design is something we honestly think we've never seen before, and it's awesome. Matching that, the animation in the game is simply fantastic. Though Mr. ESC has the most robust animation set, every character moves with liquid fluidity and looks about as natural yet stylish as possible. Cool animations like when Mr. ESC changes direction mid-run and skids out and crouches while turning is perfect. We wish we had more control over Mr. ESC during these animation routines, but if we're forced to watch him do something for a second on his own, we're glad everything looks this good.

One last very notable thing is that even though the game ships with 10 levels that each contain 10 stages (for 100 puzzles total), you have the ability to download new levels online. An in-game Network option allows you to snag new content that Taito has put online and take on new challenges. As of this writing, only the first level (with 10 stages) was available. After a quick play through, it seemed that some of the stages weren't quite finished yet as the required finishing times seemed way too short to actually complete the areas, but hopefully this'll be fixed. Regardless, there's more content coming in the future, evident by the "coming soon" levels listed on the download page.

Closing Comments

Exit is a rather mixed bag. In theory, and even in practice, the person-centric puzzles are laid out nicely and can really challenge your noggin towards the late stages of the game. But at the same time, there's a whole lot of trial-and-error going on here. Add in the awkward old-school controls and things can be quite frustrating. As a bonus though, the look and animation quality is stellar and downloadable content should keep you going for some time.

Every Extend Extra

2008-10-01T06:29:00.000-07:00

The original Lumines made quite an impression on mobile audiences. It offered a splendid mix of addictive gameplay and infectious tunes. For a while, it sat proudly atop the rest of its PSP brethren as the best of the best. No other puzzler came close. Ever since then, developer Q Entertainment has planned to outdo itself, primarily with the direct sequel to Lumines, titled Lumines II. But it also has other titles in development craving their own time in the spotlight.

One of these games, titled Every Extend Extra, offers a wholly different experience. Where Lumines and its sequel adhere to the basic Tetris formula, Every Extend Extra is an action puzzle hybrid. It plays a lot like an arcade title in that regard, only it offers an experience far deeper than the average twitch fest. A player needs to think ahead and plan every move and motion, not just run in guns blazing. Do that and it's curtains in a matter of seconds in Every Extend Extra. So what kind of puzzle game actually lets a player go in guns blazing? Not many, but this one certainly does. Though it's closer to running in with bombs blazing, since Every Extend Extra is all about explosions.

Players actually control a little ship, which actually looks more like a three-dimensional compass. They move it around with the thumbstick and detonate it when close to enemy ships. The goal is to create massive chain reactions. It's not as easy as it sounds. In order to set off a reaction encompassing 40-plus detonations requires a decent amount of skill. But that's where a majority of the satisfaction and depth sits in Every Extend Extra. Having said that, this is where most of the frustration sits, too. As awesome as forming these screen-sweeping explosions can be, Every Extend Extra will brutalize any gamer who can't ascend its learning curve. Anyone can jump in and play for a while, but it takes patience and skill to make it through just half of the game's nine stages.
Nine stages may not sound like a lot, and truthfully, it's not. But for some cosmic reason it satisfies nonetheless. Each one provides such a distinct arena, complete with unique musical tracks and background animations, that moving through the game gives players an actual sense of accomplishment. Each stage also comes with mini-bosses and full-on boss encounters, too, which require players to form chain reactions of a specific count. It's a lot of fun to do so, though the difficulty ramps up incredibly fast. First, a boss calls for a string of five, then a string of 12 and then a string of 30, and so on. Not only that, each boss (and mini-boss) squirts out little balls of energy that make the player's ship explode into a thousand pieces.

Which brings up another point: time. Each stage in Every Extend Extra has a strict time limit. Like everything else in the game, it's a source of frustration and exhilaration. The time constraints force a novice player to jet around wildly, which inevitably ends in death, but seasoned players know just how to maximize every second. Until a player finds himself in the seasoned camp, managing time is a serious pain in the ass. The game would be challenging without the time limit, but asking players to increase their time by killing specific enemies lends yet another layer of depth and strategy to the mix. So yes, it blatantly sucks at first, but doing things quickly (and effectively) makes it a better experience in the end.

In addition to the main Arcade mode, players also get a Boss Rush mode, which stacks every boss encounter one on to of the other. There's also Caravan mode, which presents completed stages for the choosing "a la carte" so players can just play their favorites. There's also multiplayer mode, which is as fun, stressful and addicting as the main game. Plus, there's this extra layer of competition. Setting off huge chain reactions adversely affects the opposing player - much like what happens in every competitive puzzle game. It's great fun and a groovy addition to the rest of the game.

Closing Comments

Every Extend Extra does a fine job of mixing arcade action with the depth of a serious puzzle game. It could use more stages, not to mention a greater range of difficulty modes, but these complaints fail to make the game any less appealing. Throw in a collection of catchy tunes and trippy visuals, and Every Extend Extra provides just about everything a puzzle fan could want.

Eragon

2008-10-01T06:27:00.000-07:00

Flying a dragon needs to be unquestionably awesome. It's one of those things, just like using a lightsaber or flying a jet. Few game developers get it right, though. Such is the case with the PSP version of Eragon, which is based off the recent fantasy flick released by FOX. It succeeds in a few areas, but overall the thrill of flight action simply never appears. This is especially disconcerting considering the premise of the game, which swaps the swashbuckling action of the console versions for strictly air-centric missions.

Eragon stars not Eragon from the movie, but the dragon, named Saphira. Players take control of the winged creature in a collection of missions. These range from protecting the all-important rider, Eragon, from enemy attack and protecting villages and other noble locations. Players will also spend plenty of time blasting enemies out of the sky with fireballs and fire breath, as well as clearing obstacles from the environment using magic and makeshift bombs. It's not a bad selection of activities, though it could have used a little more variety. Mission objectives aside, the game has other problems that matter far more. The biggest issue is control.

Flying a dragon, or anything else in a videogame, should take priority if flight itself is the main attraction. Sadly, that's not the case in Eragon. Steering Saphira through narrow corridors and ancient vistas should offer a sense of empowerment, but it comes off as slightly aggravating instead. The game has one of those fake ceilings so whenever a player wants to ascend into the clouds they inevitably "crash" into the glass wall and bounce back a little. There's little more someone can do to ruin a game about flight than trap players in a tiny box. And while Eragon's box is long enough (players can soar straight for a good while) they will quickly run into the bottom, sides or top.
Along the same lines, the design of the levels tends to get in the way. Since players aren't given mastery over Saphira through intuitive controls, they'll bump into ridges, outcroppings and other obstructions. It's easy to see that developers tried to solve this somewhat. Players can have Saphira slam on the brakes, for example, letting her turn a little easier. They can also have her reverse course in a matter of seconds by double-tapping the "X" button. Finally, Saphira has a boost ability that comes in handy when needing to travel long distances. But even with all these abilities, the poor lil' dragon still has plenty of problems getting around. Slamming into things is a constant problem. In short, flying in Eragon is never graceful, which is the one thing it needed to be.

Still, the game has a few good ideas. It's possible to swoop in and snatch everything from goats and wolves, to enemy archers other unfortunate folk with Saphira's talons. She can then munch on them to regain health. She can also grab large objects, such as boulders, and go on bombing runs to destroy enemy strongholds and other targets. There's also a collection of magic spells, both offensive and defensive, that come into play in many of Eragon's missions. Also among the positives is the multiplayer mode. As expected, it has a number of dogfight-like match types where players ride their own dragons and blast each other out of the sky. It's possible to use magic during multiplayer too, and it's actually a good bit of fun.

Closing Comments

While fun in short burts, Eragon lacks the wings to really soar. Much of the experience is hampered by shoddy control, and the mission objectives could use more variety. The multiplayer aspect provides plenty of entertainment, though. Plus, torching hordes of enemies and eating goats for health is always fun.

Echochrome

2008-10-01T06:23:00.000-07:00

Typically when you play a puzzle game, you are given an objective and perhaps a few different ways that you can accomplish this task. However, you're not frequently asked to readjust the reality of the world simply by manipulating the camera to close gaps between platforms. The same could be said about erasing pitfalls by changing a camera angle so a column appears to cover a hole. These optical illusions form the basis behind Sony's latest PSN title, echochrome, which asks players to constantly tweak, bend and change their perceptions to solve deceptive puzzles. While the choice to use optical illusions is a unique one, the decision to focus upon a simple wireframe presentation adds a surprising amount of depth to this spatial puzzle title.

echochrome hosts an extremely basic presentation: a series of platforms are suspended in "mid-air" against a backdrop of pure white. Among those platforms is a wire frame figure which continually walks along the platform its on, as well as up to four shadowy "echoes" of that figure scattered across the rest of the stage. The goal of the puzzle is to start at one point with the wire frame figure, collect all of the echoes in any order that the player chooses, and return to the starting point before time runs out. That might sound relatively basic, until you realize that most of these platforms are separated by large gaps in space, riddled with holes that can make the figure fall, and jump pads that can propel the figure away from its intended path and in a new direction.

Fortunately, before you're thrown into this potentially confusing situation, you're placed into a tutorial that explains the five laws that govern the world of the game and how they can be applied: Perspective Travelling, Perspective Landing, Perspective Existence, Perspective Absence and Perspective Jump. These laws dictate exactly how the player can manipulate the camera and, by extension, the world, to solve the various levels that you play on. For instance, players can use the concept of Perspective Travelling by moving the camera to make distant platforms appear to be connected to one another. Similarly, players can swing the camera so that a piece of a platform blocks the obvious appearance of a gap, virtually "erasing" it with Perspective Existence. It may take some getting used to for some players, and some people might not be able to wrap their heads around these concepts, but it does open new dimensions for people to explore.

While these laws define the world, they provide an incredible amount of flexibility which you can discover after a little experimentation with the game and some of its provided tips. For example, it can be somewhat tricky at times to cleanly line up different platforms because of their relative distance. However, by using the Snap feature attached to the Square button, players can trigger Perspective Travelling rules on these structures and help you connect the two. Players can also hit the triangle button and stop the wire frame figure, giving them a chance to rearrange the environment without feeling as though the character will walk through a hole and fall off the screen. However, even if your figure starts plummeting towards the edge of the screen, a player can save them with some agile rotation of the camera (and the game world). This can even be sped up by holding down the R1 button, which can let you "catch" the figure on another section of the world. With enough practice, players can even use the jump pads and holes to propel or drop their characters from one section to a previously unreachable area.

To fully explore the world of echochrome, players are presented with three different modes: Freeform, Atelier and Canvas. By selecting Freeform, the computer will randomly select eight levels from the game's standard set of 56 stages for players to test their perceptive skills with. You have a chance to influence the difficulty of the chosen puzzle by using the directional pad to select from one of five levels, which you do at your own peril -- just kidding. If you make mistakes, you can always retry the stage, but if you happen to get in over your head, you aren't forced to remain on that stage at all; the designers thoughtfully provided a skip feature that allows you to bypass that level and move on to the next brainteaser.

Some people might consider that to be something of a crutch that makes the game too easy, but I beg to differ: it makes the game much more accessible to those players who are intimidated by the perceptional adjustments you need to make to play the game. It also gives you a chance to get a sense of other stages randomly so you can work on your skills.

Now, if you'd rather work on conquering or beating each stage, the Atelier mode is for you. It's broken into two different sections: Gallery and Portfolio. The Gallery visually displays all 56 stages and allows you to individually select one level and explore it, trying to complete it as quickly as possible to set your own level best. Alternatively, you can select an entire group of eight levels and try to set a course best. These courses are split up across seven levels from A to G (A being the easiest of the stages and G being the most complex), so players will automatically know just what kind of challenge they're setting up for themselves.

By contrast, the Portfolio section displays stages that you personally create, whether that's by modifying any one of the pre-existing stages or new creations from the Canvas Mode. Canvas mode is extremely flexible in that you're provided one of six separate elements to help you build your level maps: basic cubes, stairways, echoes, the wire frame, jump blocks and blocks with holes. While you're limited by some specific dimensions (38x38x38 boxes on the PS3), the construction of these stages is only constrained by your imagination, which means that you could conceivably make as many new levels as you want. Once you've finished these, you can test the viability of these stages to make sure that they can be solved, and title these stages before you upload them to the Sony servers or trade them with friends.

Unfortunately, unlike the PS3 version of the game, where you can quickly and easily download new levels from around the world or other users, PSP owners have to rely upon trades with other friends via Ad Hoc that have echochrome. While that's a decent system, it's somewhat disappointing that there isn't Infrastructure support, especially considering the small download for the game. In theory, this could be included since this is a PSN downloaded title, but right now, it's a detraction. Even though the PSP version has completely different stages than the PS3 version, it would've been nice to have the same functionality as its console sibling.

While I haven't really pointed out the visuals because of their simplicity, there's something to be said about the classic lines of the wire frame figure and the stages that it traverses in the game. It essentially highlights the fact that while the power and visual strength of this generation of consoles is impressive, engaging gameplay can be made easily and creatively with basic elements. What stands out more is the sound presentation for the game, which is truly excellent. A hauntingly melodic violin soundtrack continually plays across everything from menu screens to level creation and gameplay, which helps ease tension even as you rack your brain trying to solve a hard puzzle. Combined with simple sound effects and a pleasant female voice that provides soothing words of support as you play, echochrome is a pleasant aural experience.

Closing Comments

echochrome is one of those puzzle titles that doesn't come along very often, but immediately strikes a chord for its unique gameplay and incredible depth. While its optical illusions and its challenge to a player's perception of the world will potentially scare off some players, the flexibility of each level and the simplicity of its presentation is incredibly effective, and should appeal to anyone looking for a challenge. At $9.99, echochrome is a great value for PSP owners, and shouldn't be passed up.

D

2008-09-29T07:10:00.000-07:00

» Darkstalkers Chronicle: Chaos Tower
» Dave Mirra: BMX Challenge
» Daxter
» Dead Head Fred
» Dead To Rights: Reckoning
» Death Jr.
» Death Jr. II: Root of Evil
» Def Jam Fight For NY: The Takeover
» Destruction Derby
» Diner Dash: Sizzle & Serve
» Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness
» Downstream Panic
» Dragonball Z: Shin Budokai
» Dragonball Z: Shin Budokai - Another Road
» Dragoneer's Aria
» Driver '76
» Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of Ancient Arts
» Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground
» Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony
» Dungeons & Dragons Tactics
» Dynasty Warriors
» Dynasty Warriors Vol II

Dynasty Warriors Vol. 2

2008-09-29T07:08:00.000-07:00

The seasons change, you get a little older, and there's another Dynasty Warriors game. Like shortening of days, the Warriors games are now an established way that we know that our ball of dirt is still spinning around the sun. And like many, many other games in the series, Dynasty Warriors Vol. 2 on the PSP provides some incremental improvements, but it's still the same old game. You're a badass of the old days and you will not rest until you've secured the land and shed the blood of thousands along the way.

The console versions of the Dynasty Warriors games featured massive levels that could take ages to cross even on horseback. This bit of realism helped to establish the feeling of an epic battle as armies collided. For the PSP the missions have been chopped into bite-size chunks as the game progresses across a board game setup. Battles take place in mini-arenas with up to a couple hundred enemies. While the battles don't move from one to another like on a big map, the clock is still running and so success still depends on destroying enemies quickly.

Instead of having to kill everyone in a level, finishing a section is more about getting the key goals done. This can mean taking out an enemy leader or simply demoralizing the army. This is done faster by taking out the officers first and destroying the scrubs by the dozen. Quick battles can be a minute or two while the bigger ones can be triple that. On their own, these battles aren't a huge time commitment.

As much as the bite-size approach helps out the pick up and play aspect of the game it also emphasizes just how repetitive the mechanics can be. This is nothing new since the hack-and-slash gameplay has been a staple of the franchise from the beginning. The kill counts can be in the thousands, but the vast majority of those are thanks to the hundreds of soldiers who just stand around waiting to be taken out. They're the filler and it gets real old slashing through peasants armed with sticks who rarely fight back. Combine this with similar battle areas and the gameplay starts to feel like Groundhog's Day.

The real battles, the ones against the other officers and leaders, are spaced far out and when there's finally a good reason to put the combos to use there's still some thrill to be found but it's not enough. Instead of making the generic action feel like less of the same old stuff, the changes are in refining other aspects. It's as if the developers have given up on re-establishing the franchise and are just keeping it on life support.

The changes are more of interest to those who feel like obsessing over bullet points instead of actually playing a game. You can now choose your horse, but who cares? There's more of an emphasis on morale, which helps to speed up some matches, but it's not a huge difference. The engine runs more smoothly, the nicest change, but it's still Dynasty Warriors to the bone.

Closing Comments

Dynasty Warriors Vol. 2 cleans up its act a little bit, but it's nothing to bring back anyone who's become bored with any of the previous games. If you really want more of the hack-and-slash action, then here you go, you know exactly what to expect. The game still delivers a huge amount of gameplay, if not variety, and there's value in that, but it's time to grow up a bit, too.

Dynasty Warriors

2008-09-29T07:07:00.000-07:00

It seemed like the plan for perfect conquest: one of the great destroyer games, having long ago conquered action fans but overstaying its reign of power with too many continuing skirmishes, finally takes on the handheld realm, giving roaming fighters the battle they've been praying for. A portable game system is the perfect place for the kind of unthinking button-mashing, body-smashing that Dynasty Warriors perfects, and divorced from the television set, gamers could explore the tactical strategy of this epic war game at their leisure. Both elements, worn out and losing its compulsion with every sequel, spin-off and add-on pack, could be refreshed on this new platform. Best of all, the PSP game would introduce new concepts and gameplay that would drastically diverge this edition from its past.

Dynasty Warriors on PSP, unfortunately, is a forced treaty in a battle that could not be won in the time had. Koei hurried this PSP game out for the Japanese launch in December, and gave little more resource to improving the North American edition. Its roughly-planned attack on PSP gamers is badly bloodied by strikes that the PS2 game suffered, and its new additions fail to take command over the offensive. The game is still enjoyable, but mostly because the PS2 game was so rousing that this handheld edition takes more glory for itself than it is due.

Wounds from the PlayStation 2 game become gashes on the rushed-out PSP version. Fog was once a hindrance, but here it is a wall. Levels are divided up into small chunks for easier play-and-go portability, but even these chunks are so bogged down in pea soup that no area feels real. Camera control on PlayStation 2 was an unruly partner, but with the PSP game not having accurate and easy access to view controls, the camera becomes your adversary. This PSP edition could have backed up and away from the battles to give some peripheral view (and with the visual detail cut down such as it is, the picture could afford to lose some of the close-up intensity.)

This is a game that deserved a lot more time to have been done right. Soldiers blink in and out of existence -- the fog eats some, others are just clipped away. The English-language menu leaves so much more to the manual than a gamer on the go needs (and is bafflingly difficult to simply click through, with pop-up description windows that don't lead back to a choice and a pointlessly hidden button combo for quitting out to the main menu.) There are no cinematics or voice-over (not even in-game story sequences.) Slowdown occasionally catches the action in a crawl. There are options to play Musuo Mode and Free Mode, but since Free Mode doesn't allow more traditional DW free-roaming, there's really only one Mode and a Stage Select feature.

The game's chief addition to the formula in the PSP game is called the Battlefield Area System -- given more time and weight, it could have been a powerful new way to play this series. By dividing up the game map into smaller stages, and by having enemy officers make maneuvers across the map while you are in combat, your decisions on where to attack next and how much time you spend earning kills and increasing your fighting powers all affect how the battle plays out. But consequences and successes of those decisions don't have nearly enough impact. All you have power over is your own warrior, and much of the battle will play on without you while you're busy cracking skulls. You can't exit an area quickly if there's something you need to respond to, but enemy generals can leap onto your space in the middle of a battle and wail on you before you can gather the forces and power-ups to take them on. You still have just one lifebar , so unless troop morale is so low that your allies flee the battlefield (which does happen, but too rarely -- usually when we were close to losing a space, we were also about to be beaten to death by a bloodthirsty general), there is not much strategy adjustment to learn from a defeat that destroys you. It's a herky-jerky experience, as mini-battles are won and lost before you're done fighting them. In the end, it comes off as a more restrictive version of standard Dynasty Warriors than it does a more strategic add-on -- you can't go wherever you want, and you can't reap many benefits from brilliant decisions.

More commendable is its Second in Command system. Your Officers from previous Dynasty Warriors now serve a purpose, acting as bodyguards by your side and also enabling special abilities in your own warrior and your squad. One Officer may give you a horse every time you enter a battlefield, another might give you ice arrows or a flaming Musuo attack. Each Officer is ranked for the battle abilities that he will give you, as well as the types of units (bombadiers, archers, soldiers) that they bring with them. You can equip only a certain number of total Officers, and each is also rated against a cap -- a favorite special ability may cost a lot, so you will have to decide between having four good Officers or one weak one and one with devastating powers to make use of. An army of 200 soldiers (including a few hidden ones from Koei's Samurai Warriors) are enlisted to collect and trade between other PSPs, and while the system replaces some of the cool item collecting of other editions, it also simplifies things while still giving players lots of options over how to deploy their incredible collection of Officers.

Closing Comments

This won't be the last we hear from Dynasty Warriors on Sony's portable. Unfortunately, this one was rushed for the launch and went into battle unprepared, leaving the intriguing Battlefield Area System squandered (honestly, if we're not going to get more strategy out of it, just give us regular old DW and a good auto-save.) In the meantime, Koei already has a 2D GBA version and an upcoming Nintendo DS edition of this series in the works -- maybe with time to train a more system-tailored graphics engine, those alternate takes will give this series the will to fight. The PSP Dynasty Warriors has its moments, but every one of those has been experienced dozens of times on PS2, and since this PSP game has trouble with the graphics and the stage design, there's not a lot worth rushing back into. Dynasty Warriors a great series to bring to a portable, but it needs to be a great edition to earn its command.

Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics

2008-09-29T07:04:00.000-07:00

The grandfather of all RPGs has to be Dungeons and Dragons. The pen and paper game has been going strong for more than thirty years, and has evolved from the earlier pre-packaged modules to massive campaigns that spanned vast worlds. For the most part, players looking to unleash their inner barbarian had to jump onto computers if they wanted to digitally form parties and gain experience points. However, Kuju Entertainment and Atari have boiled down the tabletop experience onto UMD with their latest release of Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics. While it does a faithful job of shrinking down the arcane details of the game to portable size, much of the translation suffers from a cluttered menu system along with crucially missing information that most veterans would require.

The one complaint that most newcomers to the Dungeons and Dragons universe often levy against the game is based around the high level of detail and complexity with its rules. Off-hand proficiencies, encumbrance limits and armor class rankings frequently merge with saving throw die rolls and attack modifiers in a blur of statistics and numbers. What's more, most of these details are spread across multiple rulebooks, which can sometimes make finding the specific info you're looking for a massive process. Although it focuses upon the most recent and intricate ruleset for the game (the 3.5 rules that were created a few years ago), D&D: Tactics does an incredible job of boiling down a large amount of information down onto one UMD. In fact, Kuju provides a glossary that covers most of the random details and obscure facts that you might not necessarily know anything about.

However, while it fits a ton of elements into the game, it either leaves out key information or standard features of the D&D canon, which can be extremely important as you're navigating your way through dungeons or battlefields. For instance, one of the most important features when it comes to D&D is having the die rolls available for you to gauge how well your characters are doing in battle. This covers everything from successful attacks to making your saving throws, as well as any potential modifiers that your characters might have that would apply to the roll itself. However, with this feature removed, you find yourself somewhat in the dark as to why your characters fail at spellcasting or flanked attacks, even if they should be able to successfully land a blow without a problem.

Even information that you have access to has to be waded through via an extremely convoluted menu system that forces you to often navigate more than three screens before you find the details you need. For instance, you can pick up an item on the battlefield, but you have no immediate idea what its weight is so that you can check its effect on your character's encumbrance stats. As a result, you either take the item, hoping that the extra weight doesn't slow your character to a crawl, or you try to examine the item stats by scrolling through multiple menu options on a menu wheel. This often involves scrolling down each menu window to check out your backpack via party management to see what you may want to keep or get rid off. After you've fought with this system a few times during battle (as you try to use the multiple options during a fight) or you've wrestled with the menu system during exploration, you'll quickly find yourself wishing there was another way to control your party members.

Speaking of your party members, there are some interesting quirks with the character creation setup. Players can either use pre-created warriors or create their own, manually adjusting their stats or leaving things up to the game's AI. You'll need to select a main character, who will essentially be the hero or villain of the plot as they lead their friends around the lands of the Vinsaxi trbe. Since the game takes your main character's alignment heavily into consideration, players will need to be careful of the decisions that they make along the course of the adventure because it will actually affect the course of the game as well as their personal development. That means that paladins can fall from grace and become simple fighters, or true neutral characters can make a shift towards either good or evil.

However, there are some hiccups with the character development system as well. First of all, there's no multi-classing available within the game, which is a D&D standard. Kiss those Fighter/Mage or three class combos goodbye, which is rather disappointing. In their place, D&D Tactics included two new character classes to the video game realm: Psions and Psychic Warriors. While the ability to use mental powers are somewhat intriguing, their usefulness on the Tactics battlefield is frequently more miss than hit, particularly at earlier levels. I found that many of the other classes were more useful than these warriors, whether that was because of their varying power levels for their mental attacks or unpredictable strikes. One of the psion characters I created, for instance, didn't consistently land psychic attacks until she was at least 5th level, and even that was frequently a toss up.

D&D Tactics tries to balance the gameplay experience by providing a static overworld map before every battle that expands as you complete adventures and open up new paths for your party to explore. Each location has a couple of options available to players, such as acquiring new weapons and items, hiring or resurrecting party members, and trading items between allies. All of this is preparation for jumping into an adventure and searching your surroundings for items and killing monsters. Each mission is classified by a recommended party level limit as well as a set number of party members that can be used for each fight. It's a good indicator of what you're facing so you have a sense of just how strong the odds are that you're going up against.

Unfortunately, there are some random issues that you run into when you're trying to explore or fight your way through each adventure. The first one is the camera, which is awkward to manipulate with its limited angle tilts and tightly zoomed in on your party. Since you don't really have the option to pull the camera out very far to see even on illuminated battlefields, much less darkened dungeon pathways, it can frequently be tricky to gain a sense of where your enemies are until they're right on top of you. What's more, depending on what angle the camera is pointing when you're moving your party members, you'll be somewhat prevented from moving to a specific space or section until you readjust the camera positioning.

Another issue is the fact that you have to determine whether or not you're going to go after monsters or treasure in every single fight. Obviously, gaining items from treasure chests will strengthen your party, or potentially give them an edge against a future battle that they otherwise wouldn't be able to win. Unfortunately, if the goal for the mission is accomplished, the mission immediately ends without providing you with extra time to collect items. Even worse, you can't return to that dungeon for those items, so you often find yourself splintering your parties up to gather as many items as possible, turning those party members into pack mules while the other members fend off attacks. That, or you slowly move through every single area one square at a time, trying to allow everyone to gain access to the chests, which drags the game down to a crawl.

This doesn't improve when you try to play multiplayer games either. There are five separate multiplayer modes, ranging from deathmatches to dungeon exploration where players control individual warriors. However, not only do you have to deal with the wonky gameplay issues that you find from the single player experience, you also find that you can't use any of your individually created characters from that single player game either. Only the pre-generated characters that came with the game can be used in multiplayer games. It can be really dismaying to build up your party to, say, level 10, hoping to take them online, only to find them restricted from that system.

Visually, the game is okay, although it can be somewhat difficult to determine what each one of your party members happens to be doing at any point in time. There are limited melee animations that seem to apply for everything, whether that's from hand to hand weapons or ranged items. The same can be said for spellcasting, which seem to have the same basic spell animations and effects. Character models are okay, but somewhat bland, which definitely stands out against the rather impressive backgrounds. At least the soundtrack for the game is rather nice and sweeping, albeit somewhat limited.

Closing Comments

What's impressive about D&D Tactics is the fact that the game manages to cram almost every aspect of the pen and paper franchise onto a small UMD, but that comes at a price. The menus, combat issues and other exclusions really hamper the experience. If you're a D&D fan or veteran, there is an interesting game to be found here, but you are definitely going to have to wade through some issues to find it.

Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony

2008-09-29T07:02:00.000-07:00

Fans of hack-n-slash games have few choices when it comes to Sony's handheld. Like first-person shooters, most developers have shied away from them. Players have a choice between Untold Legends and, well, the Untold Legends sequel. Which is strange considering the portability of action games. No matter - players have a little more choice now, thanks to Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony.

Coming out of SuperVillain Studios, Throne of Agony takes the original Dungeon Siege formula from the PC original and tweaks it for a portable audience. And it did a good job of it, too. It still plays like a Dungeon Siege game, which should please old-time fans, but it also welcomes new players through a few critical changes. This makes Throne of Agony play differently than its predecessors, make no mistake about it, but it certainly feels like an extension of the series, and not something completely different. It also looks and sounds damn good, so it definitely shares in the high-quality presentation of its older brethren.

Chief among the changes is the way characters actually fight. Instead of simply clicking an enemy and watching the hero attack him, players now execute each blow manually by pressing the appropriate button. This makes combat far more dynamic and visceral - something that mobile gamers will really like. Throne of Agony also grants full control of characters through the analog stick. Players can access everything from magic spells and special attacks to healing items and map control from within the game. Aside from serious micro-management of items and inventory players never need to pause the action. All that matters is beating the snot out of demons and assorted evil things.
The game starts with a choice between three characters. Players can choose between the mage, fighter and ranger archetypes, and thankfully each plays very differently. After choosing a character class, the game offers secondary choice involving pets. Every bit as important as character selection, pets can greatly swing the flow of battle. The developer made them an essential part of the experience and it's therefore a super important decision. They all make sense, too: if a player choose to play a mage, for instance, their pet selection will include a total bruiser, like a giant goon made of a stone. Conversely, should someone choose the brawny fighter, then their pet selection will include a mage for healing.

And it doesn't stop there. Each pet gains experience just like the main character, so that opens a new venue of customization. Each pet, from the agile archer to the powerful mage, has their very own set of special attacks and abilities. It's entirely up to the player which attributes and techniques to enhance, which is done through a simple point system, like in the average role-playing game. Players acquire multiple pets, too. Eventually there's a small army of pets to choose from, each with individual strengths. It's then a matter of choosing the right one for a specific situation, which adds a good deal of strategy to the game. True, it would have been cool to have a greater selection of main characters, but the game makes up for it through the in-depth pet system.
Combat itself is fast-paced and just the thing for hack-n-slash fans. In addition to a character's main attack, Throne of Agony lets one assign special techniques individually. Players can define the circle and square buttons, as well as a combination of face buttons and shoulder triggers. This helps maximize the potential for each ability since they're all super easy to use.

Enemy characters use a combination of range and melee attacks, like in the PC version, so no surprises there. Discerning fans will even notice a few familiar faces in the enemy roster, too. For the most part, enemies aren't too tough. Players will roll into a dark forest or barren desert and generally lay waste to everything in site.Not so much when it comes to boss characters, which actually look pretty snazzy in Throne of Agony, but overall enemy difficulty isn't too tough. This is due to a combination of good loot, which enemies drop constantly, and the ease of which players acquire new weapons, armor and items. And again, pets help a whole lot.

Accessibility happens to be one of the most impressive things about Throne of Agony. Anyone who played the original Untold Legends knows how sluggish a game can get when there's tons of information, such as inventory, to access. This is simply not a problem here. Pressing the left shoulder button uses a healing item, while pressing both shoulder buttons uses mana potions. It's also possible to press right on the D-Pad to call up a mini-menu with important items, which includes consumables and miscellaneous stuff. This helps keep a player focused on slashing bad guys and not struggling to drink a health potion. And accessing everything happens quickly, too. It's not instantaneous, but there's very little lag.

The in-depth menu, called by pressing select, organizes objectives, maps and characters stats very well. It's a tabbed system, like in many games of this type, but the information is thankfully easy to read and easy to cycle. Sounds like an odd thing to praise, but it's something developers haven't really nailed so far on the PSP. And speaking of quests, Throne of Agony offers a ton of them.
Many of them deal with similar circumstances - players will need to investigate strange disappearances and retrieve items quite a bit. The good news is that each quest usually has a fair bit of story to go along with it. Throne of Agony rarely gives out fetch quests arbitrarily. It happens, just not as often as in many action role-playing games. Plus, the locations and environments help keep things fresh - especially the visually rich overworld map and locations found later in the game.

Throne of Agony includes multiplayer (ad-hoc wireless), which lets players join friends in the main quest. This is far better than just offering a simple dungeon to play. Every player can bring in their pets, too, so parties can get rather formidable. And yes, it's as fun as it sounds.

Closing Comments

Throne of Agony offers the Dungeon Siege experience, albeit tweaked for a mobile audience. Combat is more dynamic and visceral thanks to these changes, though old-school fans may long for the point-and-click interface of the original. Along with great presentation and accessibility, Throne of Agony offers a lengthy quest filled memorable locations and snazzy enemies. Some of the quests will feel a little shallow, but overall the game’s strengths outweigh its weaknesses.

Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground

2008-09-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

Customization can be an extremely cool thing. You can tailor make your experience the way you'd like it to be, adjusting things like the difficulty of a game or strategy the AI uses. However, if it's not rigidly constrained, it can sometimes wind up wildly spiraling out of control, turning just about any facet of gameplay into a random mess of occurrences. Such is the situation with Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground, a new simulation/action RPG title from Global A Entertainment and Xseed Games. While the ability to construct your dungeon however you would like gives you a load of flexibility with the game, this same leeway will often wind up crippling your progress and the adventure aspect of the title, bogging down its enjoyment in the process.

The premise behind the game is unique amongst strategy/RPG games: you take on the role of a nameless young dungeon maker that arrives in a town and decides to use his talents to save the town from monsters in the surrounding area. He purchases a cave outside of the town and quickly sets about turning the limited space inside into a labyrinth of rooms, corridors and other areas. The plan is to layout the floor plans of the dungeons in a manner that attracts monsters, establishing territory that will allow the architect to enter and exterminate the beasts safely without endangering the townsfolk.
While killing off minor creatures like goblins and bats are helpful, the builder is trying to make a lair large and complex enough to attract a monster known as the Wandering Demon. By defeating the demon, the dungeon maker can free the town from the monsters forever.

The town acts as a hub, which gives players a way to equip themselves with new gear and floor plan layouts, which they'll use to build their fledgling dungeon from a hole in the ground to a massive complex. Thanks to an armorer and a magic shop, players will be able to gain weapons, spells and other protective items to give them a chance against the beasts that collect in the dungeon. You'll also be able to acquire potions to heal yourself at an apothecary, ingredients for food recipes at a market, and even reward items based on your progress at the town's castle gates. The town is also where players will receive quests from townsfolk, asking for certain items or to defeat beasts you've brought in your dungeon.

There's a slight limitation placed upon the dungeon itself, which is that a player can only enter its walls once a day, meaning that a player needs to be prepared to explore and expand its boundaries whenever they enter the structure. As soon as they leave, they're barred from re-entering for another day. This often turns into a hunt and destroy mission at first, clearing out any potential threats that have accumulated after each day before you safely start construction. Assuming that you happen to have the blueprints in your inventory for an intersection, corner, room or corridor, you can place them down in any layout that strikes you. However you wind up planning your particular floor, you'll need to leave a little room to make sure that you can set stairs so you can expand to lower levels for your dungeon. You'll also want to make sure that you don't constrain yourself prematurely with your building, but you're not pinned down in a particular arrangement -- if you don't like a previous section that you've placed, you're allowed to destroy that built area and reclaim the elements that you used on that section of the dungeon. Not only does this provide for a ton of replayability, but it also allows for one of Dungeon Maker's interesting multiplayer features -- via Ad Hoc play, players can trade designed dungeons and explore what spaces your friends have designed.

Once you've started laying down the initial pathways, nooks and crannies for each dungeon, you'll be able to upgrade its interior thanks to different d¿cor elements. For instance, players will be able to change the hallways within the subterranean sections from dirt floors and walls to wood paneling, stone or even marble finishes. This isn't simply a cosmetic change to the dungeon; players will need to make these subtle changes to attract monsters to come to your space. Some monsters, particularly ones for quests you're received, will only appear once you've placed some of these remodeled sections in your cave. So, like a landlord looking to attract prospective tenants, you'll need to fix up your territory with amenities like water fountains or treasure rooms to increase the creatures interested in your dungeon. (Sure, it's a demented landlord looking to slaughter his tenants, but that's a minor issue...) As you expand your dungeon and improve its appearance, you'll receive a score for that floor, which is supposed to relate to the attractiveness to monsters that want to live on that floor.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems with the score, the dungeon construction and the monsters within. First of all, there isn't a quantifiable way to ensure that you'll receive monsters of any number on any floor on any day. You can make a large floor with a number of enhancements and find a horde of monsters one day and almost nothing the next. With such randomness attached to the numbers of beasts that you can defeat, it can often be impossible to evaluate whether or not the floor plans that you've created are actually working in your favor, drawing in the monsters you want or need to successfully complete quests or gain items for townsfolk.

The haphazard nature of the number of monsters also carries over to the location of the monsters as well. You won't be able to pin down exactly where these creatures are either, so good luck knowing if that treasure room or study that you've blown money on will attract any monsters, much less the ones they're supposed to. In most dungeon construction games, if you build a location or a room and put a monster there or something that attracts them, they're generally in that spot. With Dungeon Maker, there were a couple of times I built specialized areas to lure beasts or quest monsters and those rooms simply sat empty for multiple days. This feels like a huge waste, especially considering that you won't necessarily find a lot of money readily accessible to you throughout the adventure. Not every monster will drop an item that you can sell when you defeat them, nor will they drop money. As a result, you can frequently enter a dungeon, kill the monsters inside and only emerge with one or two hundred gold pieces, which is barely enough to purchase two basic corridors or a bare bones wallpaper.

Apart from not always being able to purchase the construction materials that you need, you won't be able to adequately equip your character. Many spells or necessary items that you'll need will be out of monetary reach, forcing you to either abandon your construction goals for healing items, equipment or spells that you might need to survive some encounters. Even when the townsfolk give you construction items as gifts attached to a quest, you may ask yourself, "Do I need to use this, or should I sell it for that sword or potion that I need now and repurchase it later?" Even having a feature like that attaches a sense of drudgery to combat that isn't particularly enjoyable.

Speaking of combat, players do have a certain amount of flexibility when it comes to killing enemies. You can perform light strikes, which you can turn into a combo based on the number of times you hit the attack button, or perform a charged attack that inflicts more damage. If you acquire a bow, you can fire arrows at enemies from a distance, and you'll be able to cast magic spells that you've purchased to also weaken some monsters. To protect yourself from incoming blows, you'll be able to guard, but there's a slight caveat to this: the guard button also engages the camera control at the same time, which can be somewhat distracting during the real time combat. It's not exactly great if you're charging into battle, protect yourself and find the angle you're looking at go spinning in one direction or another on accident.

Dungeon Maker isn't a horrible title to look at -- it's just not overly impressive either. Part of that can't be helped: whenever you put down a corridor or a room, its plain dirt walls and floors are pretty generic. The various wallpaper treatments and room spaces definitely improve the areas, but it's not anything too significant. The same can be said for the character models for the monsters. They're fine to look at, but nothing extraordinary. In fact, the smaller monsters come across better than some of the larger ones. The griffon really stands out as a creature that's pretty forgettable. With no voice acting in the game either, you're left with some passable music and sound effects that aren't groundbreaking either.

Closing Comments

The large amount of replayability thanks to the flexibility of building your own dungeon works extremely well for Dungeon Maker. Similarly, the premise is a definite switch in the dungeon arena, which has easily been dominated by more malevolently themed titles like the classic Dungeon Keeper franchise. However, the fact that players can never rely upon monsters you're trying to attract, the features they design or money within the game that you need to enhance yourself or your dungeon is a huge exercise in frustration. As a result, this game will only appeal to a tiny audience of dungeon designers.

Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of Ancient Arts

2008-09-29T06:55:00.000-07:00

You can. You can absolutely go wrong with Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of Ancient Arts. I'm not going to claim that this game is awful, because that'd be an overstatement. Rather, Dungeon Explorer is a completely mediocre game that just barely scrapes and claws its way into the passable realm with at least a few functioning RPG elements. Otherwise, this UMD is filled with hours of bland hacking and slashing set in an entirely uninspired world. Those of you looking to stir the nostalgia that the original Dungeon Explorer invokes may want to reconsider grabbing this one -- it's a long and laborious ride.

Warriors of the Ancient Arts is, not surprisingly, a dungeon crawler that encourages you to fight waves of demons in the name of three uneasy kingdoms. After a poorly translated/poorly written opening sequence, you're taken right to the character creation screen where you can select your warrior's race, gender, class, color, attributes and assign him or her a name. Although there have certainly been more robust creation systems, your choices are somewhat varied and the classes are interesting enough. You can pick from the human-like Izark, the elf-like Ist and the reptilian orcs known as Olff.

In regards to classes, you have a handful of options: Fighter, Hunter, Monk, Thief, Shaman and Bishop. Although each class has a slightly different feel, the overall gameplay mechanics are so dull that all the character types begin to blend together into one apathetic mess.

Below average gameplay can sometimes be supplemented by a phenomenal story, but that's not the case with Dungeon Explorer. Not only does the game's narrative lack any real poignancy, it's also borderline unintelligible thanks to sketchy text and a disorganized cast of characters.

Things actually made more sense to me after I started a character from each of the three races, because all three start in different locations and provide slightly different perspectives. However, each journey starts in just about the same way: the sorcerer Deldren urges the King to supply him with resources and two able-bodied adventures so he can place a seal on a nearby dungeon. The dungeon is a veritable breeding ground for monsters and has become a threat to the wellbeing of the kingdom. Well, you're one of those adventurers and thus your journey begins.

The majority of the game is spent running between the town hub and the dungeon. That's really all there is to it. You buy supplies and sign up for quests in town and then lead your eager team of four (or less) into the dark depths, hoping to not only slay some foul beasts but also make a pretty penny in the process.

Warriors of Ancient Arts does have a few positive elements. Some of the character models have a bit of detail to them, which is nice to see in a PSP game. More importantly though: Dungeon Explorer has a solid, elaborate RPG mechanic built into the gameplay. Your character has plenty of stats to consider and is fully capable of equipping all sorts of items, gaining skills and building levels. There's always an intrinsic sting of satisfaction when you level up your warrior, but that just comes with the reward of playing an RPG.

The primary issues that plague Dungeon Explorer inhabit the gameplay outside of these standard RPG elements. Despite the number of skills you acquire, battle always seems to return to the mundane hacking and slashing that pesters so many dungeon crawlers. I just wasn't enjoying the experience, even with the promise of level-building looming over my head. Furthermore, aiming with a long range weapon is inaccurate and any computer-controlled characters in your party seem to be consistently slaughtered by the dungeon bosses, even when you set the party strategy to "Recover" so they take better care of themselves.

And it doesn't help that the menu and organizational systems are hugely unintuitive, making item management a colossal pain.

If you don't feel like tackling these dungeons on your own, there are a few multiplayer aspects to try. If you're the only one with a copy of the game, you can send it to two other friends and jump into a trial version with pre-made characters. The bulk of the multiplayer, however, comes from having multiple copies of the game.

You and up to two friends can use a particular location in the game (the Rift) to team up your created characters and explore any dungeon available to the host of the party. This is certainly a nice feature for those interested in multiplayer modes, but I'm curious as to why you can only have a party of three during a multiplayer session when you can have up to four throughout the single-player campaign.

Multiplayer runs perfectly fine, as far as I can tell. This mode definitely enhances the game, but unfortunately you can't gain experience during Rift Multiplayer -- you can only collect items. Of course, this is assuming you actually enjoyed the single-player campaign, which is questionable.

Closing Comments

Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of Ancient Arts isn't a broken game, it's just boring and unoriginal. However, the thorough character stats and the wealth of dungeons to plunder make this title a little more than just tolerable. I'm hesitant to recommend this to anyone, but if you're hardcore about dungeon crawling and you want a portable game to pass the time, I suppose this might float your boat. After all, it does have a charming blue-skinned elf girl with glasses. It's tough to say no to that, right?

Driver '76

2008-09-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

If the Driver series was a car, a mechanic might say that it has been riding a bit rough ever since the first title was released. Plagued by horrible controls, lame on-foot sections and stupid AI, the franchise has been mired in mediocrity for a long time. What was needed was a serious change, and so last year, the old formula behind the action title was scrapped in favor of a GTA-light style experience. This produced last year's somewhat improved Driver: Parallel Lines, and gave a little hope that the series was headed back to prominence. Hoping to capitalize on this turnaround, as well as some of the characters from Parallel Lines, Sumo Digital and Ubisoft recently released Driver '76, a prequel to Parallel Lines. Unfortunately, this portable version resurrects just about every issue that previous games in the series have suffered from.

If you've played Parallel Lines, you might expect Driver '76 to provide more information about the earlier years of TK, the wheelman who gets set up, imprisoned and embarks on a mission of revenge many years later. That would be a good guess, but a wrong one, as Driver '76 is about Slink the Pimp and Ray the mechanic, two supporting characters from that console title. Set two years before the start of Parallel Lines, the story focuses on Ray's start as a wheelman on the streets of New York, racing cars and getting into trouble. However, Ray has a major problem, because he's fallen for Chen-Chi, the daughter of the city's Triad boss, Zhou. Knowing that Zhou won't consider Ray worthy to date his daughter, Ray attempts to gather presents and money so he can impress the mobster.

To fulfill his quest, Ray will hit the streets of New York City and New Jersey, looking for various jobs to take on. You won't actually jump into a car and ride around looking for missions to take on; instead, before each job you'll consult a map that will provide you with a briefing on the task that's required. Some of these are pretty simple, such as getting to a specific point before time runs out, while others can be somewhat complicated, like getting gang members to follow you to police headquarters so both sides can shoot it out while you get away. As you're taking on these jobs, you're supposed to keep an eye out for your heat meter surrounding the mini-map at the bottom right hand side of the screen. This is supposed to give you a sense of whether or not the police are after you for vehicular or on foot crimes, for those moments when you jump out of the car and start attacking people.

I say supposed to because the police in Driver '76 are quite possibly some of the stupidest AI controlled characters that I've ever seen. You quite literally have to perform something egregious in front of them to make them chase you, such as cause a head-on collision or fire multiple bullets at someone. On the other hand, speeding, reckless driving or crashing through fences, lampposts or barriers literally receive a blind eye. However, once you've actually gotten them on your heels, it's pathetically easy to get them to drop their pursuit. If you can establish a lead of two blocks, the police will quickly decide that they've lost sight of you, even if you're immediately in front of them and they happen to have a police helicopter providing support above them. How the hell are you able to confuse the copter which should be able to tell the cops on the ground where you are? This can be a bit more time-consuming with some of the earlier cars, but as you start unlocking some of the various sports cars, you can blaze through police chases in ten seconds flat.

Anyway, regardless of the mission difficulty or cops that you leave in the dust, you'll receive a default vehicle that you will use to perform your crime, which is often added to your garage at the end as a reward for your service. You'll also receive cash for your pains, which can only be used to upgrade your vehicle or acquire weapons and ammunition that you'll use in gunfights. Money has no impact on Ray's chances to impress Zhou, so you can easily collect more than you'll ever hope to spend, making it relatively worthless. You won't be spending it on new vehicles, and the vehicle upgrades aren't particularly useful. For one thing, the handling of most of the machines doesn't radically change if you buy new shocks, springs, brakes or body work, so muscle cars and trucks will still be more unwieldy on the road compared to sports cars or motorcycles. What's more, while you can boost the speed of your vehicles, you don't really need to, nor do you need to purchase nitro boosts either to accomplish a majority of job objectives. Even the slowest machine is good enough to get you from point A to B with enough speed.

You won't constantly find yourself behind the wheel though. At any point in time, you can jump out of cars and hijack other vehicles, as well as get out and blast opponents with any of the firearms that you've acquired. To help you out, the game provides a target lock for opponents that you can use to pick off enemies. The biggest problem here is that you'll rarely find that the weapons pack any serious punch -- it's possible to pour more than thirty bullets from an AK-47 or Uzi knockoff into someone that's literally two or three feet away from them and they won't go down. The ineffectiveness of the weapons are highlighted when you are trying to repel incoming enemies from the back of a car and you empty four or five clips on only two gunmen that appear to resist head shots and other targeted fire. Even worse is the fact that the majority of story missions that require you to kill enemies on foot will only throw three armed combatants at you. This isn't a challenge; it's a waste of time as you see how many bullets miss you and how many you can fire before they fall.

If you happen to get tired with flying through the main quest missions over the extremely short six chapter storyline, which can be beaten in less than six hours, you can take on some of the various side missions scattered around the city. These include tasks such as delivery missions, checkpoint and lap races and demolition derbies. Again, these provide heaps of money, much more than you will ever be able to spend in the game, so after a while, you'll quickly lose interest in performing these tasks. Unless you've got a need to complete every single aspect of the game, there's really no need to ever enter one of these events.

What's slightly more interesting is the collectible system implemented in Driver '76. Scattered around the world are stars, such as suspended over ramps or hidden behind corners. Driving over the items will randomly unlock various items, like keychains, t-shirts, paint jobs and other objects. But the novelty quickly wears thin once you realize that, apart from the paint schemes, there's no reason to ever grab these items. They have no impact on either the character or the game: even if you managed to get different shirts or jeans, Ray and Slink won't ever wear them in the game. They're also presented more like baseball cards, which can be traded with another owner of Driver '76 if you're so inclined. In fact, the game's limited multiplayer is set up for buddy play, with four different game types over Ad Hoc play. While you can play a standard game, players will have the opportunity to race for pink slips if they're interested, potentially giving them an edge on their story mode competition when they start playing the regular game.

One thing that players will have to become accustomed to, regardless of whether they play through the story, side missions or multiplayer are the absurd load times for Driver '76. Part of this is because the game features two separate load screens: one that can take up to a minute to load initial data, and a secondary screen with a UMD access logo on it. The game isn't exactly pushing the envelope as it renders New York or New Jersey. It's also not trying to stream the cities either, as the game will freeze for up to five seconds as it accesses the UMD during lengthy drives. Plus, if you need to retry a mission for any reason, you have to reload all over again, which is ridiculous. It's a mystery as to what's taking so long: the game can't be tracking the limited car deformation, and the streets aren't exactly teeming with pedestrians or vehicular traffic.

At least the presentation of the story, told in graphic novel format cutscenes, is visually engaging. The situations that Ray and Slink manage to get into are pretty unbelievable, but it feels just right within the graphic novel context. While the visuals aren't overly strong, the sound is probably the standout of the game. The dialogue is decently presented, and the soundtrack, with songs from David Bowie, Blondie and Iggy Pop, is great to listen to as you drive around from place to place. It's just too bad that a lot of the other sound effects, like the guns and various engines, are really weak by comparison.

Closing Comments

Driver '76 needs to have the keys and car taken away from it before it does harm to PSPs everywhere. Idiotic police AI, an extremely short story mode, useless collectables, weak on-foot combat and appalling load times all conspire to make this the weakest installment in the franchise. Don't do this to yourself if you need a racer or action title; there's plenty of games on the PSP that will appease you better than this one.

Dragoneer's Aria

2008-09-29T06:43:00.000-07:00

In RPGs, very few things are larger, more awe inspiring or terrifying than a dragon. The legendary beasts are often much more powerful than playable characters, and can obliterate entire parties with magic, melee attacks, or their breath. So it's really interesting when the concept of a game revolves around these incredible creatures rely upon mortal creatures to guard their survival. NIS America and Hit Maker's most recent release of Dragoneer's Aria takes such an angle, placing the survival of the several dragons into the hands of your party. Unfortunately, the extremely slow pacing of the title, coupled with the predictable plot and skewed battle system really reduces any enjoyment for this adventure.

The story behind Dragoneer's Aria places a new spin on the standard save the world format that many RPG games have become used to. Centuries earlier, the Holy Dragon Grinlek was killed by a Black Dragon, but his soul spawned six new dragons to take his place. With the help of dragoons, powerful human warriors, the dragons protected the world and banished the Black Dragon from the land. Years pass, and the game begins with Valen Kessler, a young Dragoon in training who's getting ready to graduate from his academy. During the graduation ceremony, the Black Dragon suddenly descends from the sky and destroys the capital city of Granadis. Tasked with discovering the reason for the Black Dragon's reappearance, as well as the status of the other dragons, Valen embarks on a huge adventure.

Fortunately, Valen isn't alone in his adventure. He'll slowly acquire new party members that will help him out along his quest, including Euphe, a mysterious young woman, Mary, a young pirate captain and Ruslan, a cynical swordsman. For the most part, these characters fall along stereotypical lines - Valen is the latest scion of a legendary line that takes on a coming of age journey, Euphe is a girl with a hidden past that acts as a support role, Mary is the spunky kid forced to go it alone in the world, and Ruslan is the loner. While you've probably heard all of these typical character descriptions before, what is somewhat different is that all of these characters essentially have their skills and abilities predetermined for them, which don't really change over the course of the game.

These are broken up into three main categories: Field, Battle and Dragon. Field skills are abilities that can be triggered to help your party in exploration, such as sprinting across the land at a faster rate of speed or improving the recovery rate of health. By contrast, Battle skills are tactical abilities used to support other teammates in the middle of combat, such as curing status ailments or protecting allies from incoming blows. Finally, Dragon skills are dictated by orbs that each character equips which impart elemental abilities to weapon attacks, giving your strikes extra damage. Depending on the monster you face, your characters can potentially use these skills to exploit weaknesses and eliminate them faster. There are also two minor skills: Rush attacks, which lets you trigger multiple attacks with your character's weapon, and Guarding, which allows characters to try to block incoming damage by turning a certain number of spinning icons blue.

Unlike skills or abilities in other games, players can't always trigger them whenever you want. To use these powers, players have to earn energy from either successful attacks in battle, guarding against attacks, using an item or encountering a mana point on the map. Every 100 points you store equates to 1 mana point, which is required to use a basic skill. More powerful forms of the skills require more points, which forces players to determine whether using a lower powered ability is a good idea, or if it's better to save your points up for a much stronger skill. However, the mana system really is poorly implemented. For one thing, the power meter that you collect energy with is permanently capped at 10 mana points.While that might not seem like a problem at first, you'll quickly discover that as you continually use your skills, you gain new power levels, which require more and more mana points to be used. If you exhaust all of your points over the course of an attack or support skill (which can easily be done, particularly during difficult battles), you'll find yourself forced to rely on basic attacks until you can regain your energy. Since your primary method of gaining energy is attacks which only generate 50 points of energy at a time, you'll find yourself quickly frustrated by this setup. It's not particularly fun or useful when you have skills that you can't ever do anything with because you ever have enough energy to consistently use them.

That frustration carries over to the battle system in a big way, which sucks because while you need to constantly grind to build up your characters, you'll hate every aspect of the battle system. While you can always see your opponents on the battlefield in front of you, you never get a sense as to what the creatures are that you'll face. For some reason, you only see a generic floating eye icon with wings, and while you can target them to see their relative strength to your party, you can't ever initiate contact to take an unaware monster by surprise or gain an advantage. What's more, since you can often be snuck up on because the monsters have an incredible ability to disappear and attack you from behind or off camera, you frequently have no idea about what you're fighting until you're in the midst of battle. But the most unforgivable sin with battles in Dragoneer's Aria is that the entire thing is as slow as molasses. It can easily take more than ten minutes or more to kill a group of monsters, and what makes it worse is that you never seem to have the ability to avoid or completely escape battles. This sets up a situation where you can have a fight with overpowered monsters that eliminates much of your party and miraculously escape from battle (which is a rare occurrence in the game), only to have the same group follow and kill you at another location on the map.

Of course, as you defeat enemies, you'll gain experience, which is completely unrelated to your skills and only affects the amount of health that you acquire over the course of the game. You'll also acquire money and at times items, which can be collected for various uses. Obviously, if you manage to gain a health potion or an energy restorative, you can use those at any point you want, but there are other objects that you will have to either sell back in town to the various merchants, or keep and craft into new materials. Dragoneer's Aria features a crafting system to allow one man's junk to become another man's treasure, but you need to have the recipes for each item that you want to create or you won't be able to do anything. Since the stores that sell recipes don't always update with new formulas, you'll often find yourself dragging a ton of crap around without necessarily taking advantage of this system.

The visuals of Dragoneer's Aria, while not particularly horrible, aren't incredibly impressive either. The generic monster icon before battle gives way to a variety of 3D monster models, many of which are presented decently, but there isn't particularly anything that's awe-inspiring or noteworthy. In fact, even the titular dragons look rather bland and tame. The same can be said for attack animations and visuals, which aren't incredible in the slightest bit. Even worse, any and all visuals are drowned by incredibly generic menus and menu options, which pulls down the graphical strength of the title.

Sound for Dragoneer's Aria is somewhat stronger, thanks to some of the sound effects for monsters and attacks which aren't too bad. Creatively, there are some nice piano solos as a closer to a fight or as a player levels up, which is a pleasant, although somewhat unexplained touch. What's not particularly solid is the voice acting, which ranges from decent to horrible across the entire game. Part of this can be blamed on the dialogue that the voice actors were given, which isn't the best that we've ever seen or heard. However, a certain portion of the blame for the voice acting falls squarely upon the actors themselves, who miss a lot more than they hit.

Closing Comments

Unfortunately, Dragoneer's Aria takes a lot of clichéd characters and tries to spice up the standard RPG fare with some adjustments to the skill and battle formula. While the concepts behind them are interesting, the flawed implementation of energy and mana as well as the interminably slow battle mechanics really drags down the game. If you're looking for an RPG for the PSP, you should really look elsewhere instead of this game.

Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai - Another Road

2008-09-29T06:42:00.000-07:00

Goku and company just won't quit. The DBZ gang is back at it again with the follow-up to last year's PSP release, Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai - Another Road. The game is largely a refinement over what we saw last time out, with better controls, a tighter camera, better character development and more. Gamers looking for an overhaul of the formula need not apply as many of these changes are slight, but those who had fun with the last effort will once again find plenty to enjoy here.

Another Road marks the first time in the franchise, be it television, movie or game, that an alternate, non-canon story takes place. Supposing that Goku has a heart condition and dies, Trunks is the only remaining fighter in the world that can stop the evil from destroying mankind (or is that Dragon Ball-kind?). While this sounds rather solemn, the rest of the story is strictly the kooky and corny DBZ storytelling that we've come to know.

One cool element of the story and overall game progression is that it often splits off into multiple branches. Be it via either your choice of action or how you perform in a certain scenario, the game will branch off into different paths and you'll encounter different enemies, boss fights and so on. It's actually possible to see an ending after only two fights. The storyboard shows you where these paths split, so you can easily go back and pick the different path to see everything there is.

Aside from the main Another Road story option, you also have access to a new Z-Trial challenge mode. This features three different challenges types, including a survival and time trial mode. Beating these will earn you cash for purchasing different backgrounds and character upgrades, rewarding you for playing them over and over again. They're a little more interesting than the basic Arcade mode and help to mix things up a bit, though we hope to see more variety here in the future, like what you'll find in some of Soulcalibur's challenges, such as starting in a weakened state and so forth. The third main Z-Trial challenge type is similar to this, except that rather than setting changes they're set up as goals, like needing to perform a certain number of special attacks. It's decent, but not quite the same.

Once you jump into a fight, much of what you'll find here is just as what we saw in the first release, though again, pretty much everything's been tightened up and tweaked a bit. The camera is situated at a better angle, for instance, and zooms and pans appropriately to allow you to see what's going on from interesting angles while still giving you great control over the battle. The control scheme largely works the same, though button presses seem to be a little quicker and more responsive than last time out.

As has been the case with each successive release over the past couple years, Dragon Ball Z has stepped up its fighting mechanism just a tad and remains a rather fun fighting engine. It's basic, to be sure, though there's enough strategy here that you can get reasonably deep with tactics and such. While the number of basic fighting moves is comparatively small, the use of power charges, energy attacks, form changes and so forth give you plenty to work with. Some advanced moves, like Instant Transmissions and counter attacks, require split-second button presses, calling out for practice to perfect, but also don't get in the way of first-time players. We doubt we'll see the game in any sort of high-profile competition leagues, but it is good fun.

Closing Comments

Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai - Another Road is more of the same, but for DBZ fans, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It certainly won't draw any new fans that the last game couldn't have, but it should appease fans for a fair bit of time, especially with its multi-tiered storyline.

Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai

2008-09-29T06:39:00.000-07:00

Holy crap there are a lot of Dragon Ball Z games -- typing the name into our search engine returns no less than 44 results. Granted, some of these releases are multi-platform and so really only count as one game, but even after you consolidate those you're left with what is easily one of the largest franchises in gaming's history. Though it's hit nearly every platform to date, PSP DBZ fans have been chomping at the bit for a Saiyan fest since the handheld's release. Z fans may finally rejoice however, for the fight has come to the PSP in Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai.

Loosely following the story behind the DBZ movie "Rebirth of Fusion" (or "Fusion Returns!", "Fusion Reborn" or "Resurrection of Fusion", however you take the translation), Shin Budokai features nearly 20 characters from said adapted storyline and offers both a standard Arcade mode as well as a fleshed out Dragon Road story aspect. Adding in a Z Trial mode that pits fighters against certain conditions, like Time Attack or Survival play, 2-player Network Battle over Ad Hoc and unlockable goodies in a shop, there's plenty of stuff here for DBZ fans to fight over.

The main combat system is a fair bit simpler than the most recent release on PlayStation 2, Dragon Ball Z Budokai: Tenkaichi. All of your main (non-power) attacks are tied to two buttons, and move variations are made by using the D-pad in any of the four main directions. That is, you have quite a limited basic attack system, and since each of these attacks play out largely the same (aside from slight damage or possible toss distance differences), there isn't a whole lot of strategy here. The melee aspects of battles generally devolve into simple tradeoffs between button-mashing and blocking, with much more emphasis on the button-mashing portion.

Part of the problem is that it's quite difficult to recover from any sort of juggle or block combos once you're caught. Luckily, sort of, the combat system doesn't rely on either of these too much, which means that while it isn't a problem for you while you're on the defensive, there isn't a whole lot to do on the offensive to put someone away.

Really, the main focus of the combat system here is the ranged attacks via Special Technique, Super Ki Blast and Super Attack moves. The Ki energy required to pull off these attacks comes from either being involved with close combat or by holding L to charge your Ki meter. Because of this, the two main tactics in combat are either to run away and charge your Ki or knock your opponent down with melee attacks and then charge while he's down. In either case, the main tactical aspect of each battle is knowing when to charge and when to unleash your attacks.

Like the original anime releases, Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai is most rewarding to see and actually land each character's Special Attack. Tossing giant balls of energy that resemble a small moon at your opponent's face is always funny, and the game does pull off this "power" aspect of the series pretty well.

Much of it is due to its capable graphics engine which renders the characters and their special attacks nicely. The art style matches the show really well with great cel-shaded characters, thick outlines and all, and flashy power effects. Since you're usually fighting in wide-open areas and high above the ground, the environment doesn't have a whole lot of detail to be shown, but that's how it is in the series, anyway.

The story mode itself is pretty damn beefy, offering a rather lengthy run through Shin Budokai's adapted storyline. Each chapter is broken down into multiple sections, each of which contain a fight of some sort, be it for sport between two friends or as part of a story point. One cool thing about this is that as these fights are directly tied to the storyline, you're constantly switching characters and even taking on the roles of the bad guys from time to time. It does pretty well to mix up the pace, even if the only major differences between many of the characters are their Super Attacks. You'll also find branching story arcs here, letting you choose whether you want to let a character run away or finish them off, for example, which then changes the next few story segments. Luckily for hardcore fans, you can jump back into any finished chapter without starting from scratch, so you can run through the finished segments with ease and check out the alternate story arcs if you feel so inclined.

The story itself is completely cracked out. Characters will fight each other for no other reason than just to fight, and some of the conversations that take place are almost nonsensical, especially if you're not already a Dragon Ball Z fan. Some of my favorite quotes are:

"Goku? He's my dad and my dad's biggest rival!"

"Your Instant Transmission is incredible."

"Anyway Goku, I've been looking for you; I need you to come to hell!"

Hmm, indeed. Speaking of Hell, in Shin Budokai it is apparently made up of a purple, barren wasteland with floating Peanut M&Ms in the sky. No, it really doesn't make any sense.

The game's storyline plays out like a B-movie, something along the lines of what Mystery Science Theater would make a mockery of were it a fully animated film. This isn't a bad thing however, and to an outsider like myself it actually enhances the experience. Were it some trivial story about collecting Dragon Balls and defeating some enemy I didn't care about with serious dialog I'd have been bored mindless, but it was so entirely stupid that I couldn't help but be constantly amazed at how ludicrous it progressed.

Again, I mean that in the most positive way possible as I'm pretty sure all of this was intentional. Granted, I'm no Dragon Ball Z fan by any stretch of the word, but while I don't "get" much of what makes it tick, I can appreciate what the fans see in it.

One thing that Shin Budokai does handle quite nicely is the portable nature of the PSP. Fights are rather quick of course, but so are the story segments, each of which ends with a save opportunity. Playing through each of these segments only takes about a minute or so, meaning that the game is great for bite-sized gaming sessions. You need to manually turn on the autosave to make things easier, but coupled with the reasonably short load times and quick segments, this is a great example of how games should scale down play sections for on-the-go ease.

Closing Comments

Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai is a very simplistic fighter with a "so bad it's good" storyline wrapped in an extremely portable package. It's not great by any means, but hardcore DBZ fans will find a whole lot to like here.

Downstream Panic!

2008-09-29T06:36:00.000-07:00

Puzzle games are arguably the most inventive genre found in gaming these days, with developers deftly blending new and existing features into original titles. Last year's Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords was a great example of this, a game that managed to blend match-three gameplay with RPG elements and a storyline.

Developer Eko System has done a bit of mixing of its own, blending elements of LocoRoco with Worms to create the rather fascinating Downstream Panic! The game's use of water simulation mixed with destructible environments and a limited tool system has resulted in a challenging, unique and, at times, fairly complex puzzle game that's sure to test your problem solving skills.

The goal of Downstream Panic! is simple. A blob (or two) of water starts at the top of the screen, and when you press Start, it begins flowing downward into the environment. It's your job to make sure that the fish contained in said water make it to the bottom of the stage in a safe manner, with sectioned-off areas of the lower water filled with vicious piranha. To clear the first level, all you need to do is use your trusty rockets to blow holes in two sections of the land, and your fish will gracefully flow into the ocean below.

After that, things start getting much more tricky. You'll have to use a number of tools, like seeds that grow plants to stop the flow of water or fans that blow flowers to open bridges, but these are hand-selected and very limited in each level. Generally speaking, you start with the exact tools that you'll need to complete the level and no more, so careful planning is necessary to complete the stages by saving the requisite number of fish.

The stage design here is generally fantastic for a number of reasons. First, when a new tool or hazard is introduced, the game scales back the difficulty a bit to let you practice with the new elements, and then immediately cranks the challenge back up to where you left off with new abilities in tow. But more so, the puzzle setups are just great. When you begin a new stage, the first thing you'll have to do is scroll around and see how things are laid out. We tended to start at the bottom and work our way up, but given the complexity here, we imagine that everyone will use different planning methods.

You'll have to come up with some pretty inventive (and timed) uses for your tools. For example, you could use a plant to block a fall-off spot to protect your fish, but the "correct" way to do it may be to save your plant for another spot and instead use a rocket to set a boulder free, and let that roll through the level and settle into the hole to protect your fish. Timing plays a very important part in many of the puzzles as well, as you'll need to get the water to certain levels before releasing it to another section, or you'll have to manipulate elements of the level in a certain order to save your fish. There are times when you'll need to sacrifice some in order to pass a stage, and timing is of the utmost importance here as to not lose too many.

The game is also very good about introducing new tools, hazards and all sorts of things throughout the course of the game. Every few stages you'll find something new to use or avoid, or at least a new way in which you'll have to approach things. For instance, the boulders we mentioned are simply a border to be passed in early levels, but after a while they'll become essential tools for completing the levels.

The thing that makes Downstream Panic! work is its water dynamics system. While it's obviously not of the fidelity that ILM would use it on Poseidon 2, it's pretty impressive for the PSP. Water will run between gaps, fill in craters, creep over crevices as the level rises and so forth. It's a really cool mechanic that really helps provide the game with its unique approach to the genre.

The title's replay factor is extended quite a bit by the Free Play and Survival modes. You need to play through to milestones in the game to unlock them, but each offers up compelling reasons to go back and tackle previously-beaten stages. Free Play lets you use the money that you've earned in the game to buy any amount of any tool for use in each stage. This makes things rather simple, but when trying to absolutely perfect everything, you'll need to be diligent about your purchases on one stage so that you have enough cash left over for another. The Survival mode runs you though most of the game's stages, but you don't regain any fish after each level. Kudos to anyone that can actually manage to finish this mode.

While Downstream Panic! certainly has a number of positives, it isn't perfect. Some of the timing issues are a pain as there's a bit of luck involved with things like the automatically spinning sea shells that let water flow from one area to another. If they don't spin when you expect them to, you're screwed. There's also sometimes a bit of luck involved with how rocks and such will move and roll, and you'll have to hope that they go where you want them to. They're largely predictable, but you can't always count on them.

Our biggest gripe, however, is that you need to be pretty much pixel-perfect with the use of your tools in certain circumstances. For instance, you might need to have a tiny bit of water creep over a ledge to trigger something as to not lose too many fish, but the land that you're chipping away may be rather thin. If you cut just too much away, the game will mistake a thin slice of earth for a gap and the water will flow out. But if you don't cut enough, it'll continue to block the water. And since you have a limited supply of rockets at all times, one mistake generally means you'll fail. In other examples, which relates to the luck thing we just mentioned, you might need to cut a hole for a rock to go through, but if you don't cut it perfectly then it won't bounce or roll correctly and you'll be screwed. There were a handful of puzzles that we knew exactly how to solve, but had to retry them five or six times to get our slices just right so that everything fell into place.

Closing Comments

Downstream Panic! is one hell of an impressive puzzle game. It has a ton of character, and you won't find anything else that makes use of water like this on the system. It can be incredibly challenging at times, though the clever level design rarely makes you feel like something is unsolvable. There are a few issues with having to rely on pixel-perfect use of your tools at times and you'll occasionally need luck on your side, but these fallacies certainly don't outweigh the game's strong points. Be sure to check this one out.

Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness

2008-09-29T06:34:00.000-07:00

In 2003, NIS and Atlus introduced Disgaea: Hour of Darkness onto the PS2. The title was packed with a ton of sarcastic humor, an incredible amount of depth and replayability, and a starling amount of tactical complexity. The result was an instant classic that became extremely rare to find in stores, but spawned a number of equally engaging strategy RPGs from the small developer. Now, one sequel, one system and four years later, NIS America is re-releasing their superb strategy game on the PSP in the form of Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness. Filled with new features, a new game mode and even a new storyline, this title is an incredible package for any strategy RPG fan.

Essentially a port of the original game on the PS2, Afternoon of Darkness is the story of Laharl, a demon lord who is awakened by his vassal Etna after a two year long "nap." Unfortunately for him, much of the Netherworld has fallen into chaos ever since his father, King Krichevskoy, the Overlord of the Netherworld, died. As a result, every demon, devil and spiritual being has decided to stake a claim to the King's title. Incensed at the idea that anyone else would lay a claim to his birthright, the Prince sets out to reclaim what's rightfully his. What follows is a large adventure across a number of episodes which introduces a wide cast of hilarious characters, including an angel dedicated to love that's sent on an assassination mission, a space traveler, his sidekick and their robot.

Like the original game and many of NIS America's strategy RPGs that followed, gameplay is based around a two phase system of planning and preparing for a mission, where much of the story plays out, and actual battle sequences itself. The Preparation phase takes place at Laharl's castle, which is a hub location that you'll return to between fights to purchase and sell items, heal your damage and further level up your characters. Here, players get their initial taste at the depth of Disgaea, as every feature that you can take advantage of during the planning stage has multiple levels within it for players to explore. For example, the more you use merchants, the higher your party's personal level grows, which provides you with stronger and more useful items. You can use the included Item World to further strengthen equipment either purchased or acquired in battle to make them more effective for your characters. The hospital actually rewards you for getting injured in battle and healed with their services, giving away different objects every now and then based on the amount of pain you've taken. Even creating new party members has a subsection associated with it known as the Dark Assembly, where you can make proposals that can affect just about every aspect of the game.

However, what makes this depth so great is that much of the exploration is flexible to the whims of the player; if you're solely looking to scratch the surface and continue along the game, you can with minimal investment of time. On the other hand, if you sink a ton of time into manipulating the systems in the game, you gain so much more depth. One of the best ways of illustrating this is with the various character classes - each character in the game has a specific class they belong to, with their own skills that they can additionally acquire based on the weapons they use. If you're simply looking to move your way through the story, you can, but you gain much more if you try to master weapons and strengthen your skills, continually improving your abilities until you max out the potential for that specific class. At that point, you can choose to remain as that kind of character and merely gain additional levels, or reincarnate that character via Transmigration, keeping their old skills and abilities while returning to level 1 in a new class. When you realize that there are more than 120 different classes that you can acquire over the course of the game, you'll find tons to do with your party members.

Of course, once you get past preparing for battle, you'll select a specific mission and shift to the combat phase. Fights play out in a turn based, chess like system of moving your characters across a battlefield to attack different monsters. Scattered across the field are a number of different colored areas known as Geo Panels, which bestow different effects onto any creature that happen to move onto that location. These can be beneficial or harmful to the individual depending upon the object that powers them, known as a Geo Symbol. For example, you may gain extra attacks per turn, lose strength on your strikes or even find yourself restricted from casting spells. What turns this system on its head is the ability to change the colors of the areas affected by the symbols, or even destroy them altogether. Depending on how you choose to manipulate the Geo Panels and Geo Symbols, you can even use them as a tactic in battle, causing a chain reaction and huge explosion that damages anyone standing on specific squares on the battlefield.

That may sound rather extreme, but Afternoon of Darkness stays true to its PS2 roots by holding onto the concept of throwing tough battles at you from the get go, which may require power leveling by returning to previously beaten areas, or the employment of a couple of unorthodox tactics to survive fights. As a result, instead of fighting one on one or even two on one, you'll discover that the most effective strategies are by positioning your allies so you can perform team attacks and combos, ramping up damage on enemies. By placing friends next to the player attacking a target, you can perform much stronger attacks and even get those characters to chime in during a blow (even if it's not their turn to attack). What's more, if you follow this strike up by another attack on the same monster, you can start a combo, which increases the damage leveled on the target.

For the most part, if you've played the original or heard of Disgaea before, nothing that I've mentioned is anything particularly new. In fact, much of the complexity that is the strength of the Disgaea franchise is also a double edged sword which can sometimes push newcomers away, and that hasn't really changed in the introduction of Afternoon of Darkness. In some ways, the game is still very much for the hardcore strategy RPG fan. However, what distinguishes Afternoon of Darkness from a simple port is that the game does include a number of changes for the PSP version. First of all, Afternoon of Darkness includes a multiplayer mode for people to put their parties up against each other and test the strength of their various characters. It's a great way to see whether you're creating a stronger squad than your friends.

However, even if you're a beginner going up against a seasoned Disgaea player, don't fear. Multiplayer battles include an additional battle feature known as Geo Cubes, which can potentially level the playing field. Many of these can provide you with different tactical advantages, such as strengthening your skills for that fight, summoning creatures or boosting your defense. Since you have the option to determine when you want to use these items, this becomes a battle tactic as well as a statistical advantage against enemies. On the other hand, players can also use the multiplayer functionality of Afternoon of Darkness to trade different items between each other, gaining new equipment that can be used in their personal games. Strangely, you don't actually lose any items by trading, so it's more of a collection feature for friends than anything. The lone downside with the multiplayer aspect is that it's solely ad hoc only. This game would've been phenomenal with an infrastructure feature to set you up against other Disgaea fans across the country. Unfortunately, that's not to be.

Apart from including new characters, such as Adell and Rozalin from Disgaea 2, or Overlord Zetta from Makai Kingdom, the other major adjustment that's been made to Afternoon of Darkness is the inclusion of Etna Mode. This takes a different approach to the story: what if Etna killed Laharl instead of waking him up, choosing to become the new Overlord herself? This alternate take provides a lot of different info from Etna's perspective as she attempts to defeat every other demon in the Netherworld, and should definitely appeal to hardcore fans. However, be warned: Etna mode is somewhat more difficult than the standard story, and you may find yourself power leveling a bit more with Beauty Queen Etna in this mode than the normal story because the fights are harder.

However, even with the inclusion of multiplayer and a new story mode, you'd expect that some of the problems that cropped up with the first title would have been addressed for this game. You might even think that some of the elements that worked well in Disgaea 2 that fixed some of the issues from the first title, such as shops and hospitals in the Item World, would be included. No such luck. At least using the analog nub to place your party members works well. In fact, it works much better than the directional pad, which is pretty crappy within the game. Unfortunately, what haven't been fixed, which is a serious flaw, are the shoddy camera controls, which is still extremely poor. Even though you can rotate the board ninety degrees, you can't raise or lower the camera angle, which makes it hard to see where some monsters are, particularly with stages that have varying heights of environmental levels. As a result, you can inadvertently walk into an ambush and not even know it.

What has seamlessly transferred over in Afternoon of Darkness are the visuals of the title, which look excellent on the PSP's screen. While text can be somewhat difficult to read, particularly some of the classifications on the stat screen, the style of Disgaea beautifully comes through. What's more, it seems like the slowdown that would sometimes crop up during large combos, giant explosions of Geo Panels or certain special attacks has been completely eliminated. The lone downside to some of the visuals is the fact that some Geo Panels (primarily in the Item World) will have their color disappear, making it somewhat difficult to tell whether your party members are safe from damage during panel combos until it's too late.

Sound, however, is truly excellent. While the entire game doesn't feature voice acting throughout every cutscene or mission intro (most likely due to the space limitations of the UMD), the dialogue that is included is fantastic. Full of sarcasm, jokes and other engaging lines, this is an excellent title. This is simply bolstered by the option to buy or listen to various selections from the soundtrack at Laharl's castle, which are full of pieces influenced by a wide number of musical styles. Regardless of whether you play the original or Etna Mode as you go through the game, you'll be pleased with the aural aspects of the game.

Closing Comments

With a nearly flawless port of the classic title to the PSP, Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness is a game that any strategy RPG fan should definitely own. Even if you have the PS2 version of the game, the inclusion of Etna Mode as well as the addition of Multiplayer and Geo Cubes places enough of a spin on the game to improve and strengthen the incredibly deep title even more. While it's a bit disappointing that some of the original issues haven't been fixed, this is still an awesome game that works amazingly well on Sony's handheld. If you're a fan, or even slightly interested in the strategy genre, go out and buy this title now. Stop reading and start planning your conquest of the Netherworld.

Diner Dash: Sizzle & Serve

2008-09-29T06:33:00.000-07:00

There's a plethora of casual games out there on the Interwebs, but only a few of them manage to become viral crazes where everyone's forking out the cash for the full version. Once they hit that status, though, the videogame publishers take note -- a casual hit on the PC can easily convert into the same on the handheld. Just a few months ago Majesco released a handheld version of Cake Mania, and Eidos pounced on a similar game, both in design and in popularity, for both the Nintendo DS and PS. Diner Dash in either handheld form might not be as well-suited on the two systems, but there's a certain energy and intensity in the gameplay that makes this a tough and challenging, but somewhat addictive arcade-style game.

The design of Diner Dash follows Flo as she tosses the business suit and the stressful lifestyle of the white collar workforce, and takes a risk by buying a run-down diner and dons the apron as a short-order waitress. By keeping customers flowing through the door (see? We get the name reference!), fed and happy, you'll score enough points to make it to the next round where the customer base gets more complex -- grumpier, more numerous, and more demanding. It's all about speed -- keep up with the demand and you'll keep moving on.

There are tremendous similarities to Diner Dash and the "other" popular web game Cake Mania, which was ported to the Nintendo DS by Majesco just a few short months ago. But instead of baking cakes, it's about maintaining the demands of the people that wander into the diner. Seat them at the table, take their order, put their order in, serve the food, collect the money, and clear the table...all done at a rapid-fire pace. Do it quickly and you'll score the cash. Take too long and they'll leave in a huff -- and penalize you points (which, in the whole swing of things doesn't make sense since, other than running out on the tab, they didn't exactly steal from you). In later levels additional responsibilities are thrown into the mix: cleaning up spills and grabbing a highchair for the kids are two of the early ones. The pacing is far more intense than Cake Mania, and honestly, even though things can get incredibly hectic really early in the difficulty curve, the speed and energy really does make Diner Dash the better of the two designs.

The original idea was handled on the PC and a simple point, click, and drag interface that could keep up with the pace of the game: click and drag customers from the queue to the table, click on the tables, counter, and dishes to perform the needed task. For the portable, this interface has been converted to the Nintendo DS in a similar fashion, using the stylus in place of the mouse pointer and works pretty well. The downside is that the small screen fails to offer as much game real estate as the PC version, so players have to scroll the screen left and right between the customer line and the diner to keep pace. This doesn't hurt the game that much, or as much as the quirky touch screen sensitivity that'll occasionally get in the way when you're rapidly tapping locations on the screen.

The PlayStation Portable, however, doesn't have equivalent controls so the programmers had to produce something that could give players the ability to keep up with the action: players cycle through locations with the D-pad and toggle options with the shoulder button. This is a far better option than having a virtual mouse cursor controlled with the analog stick, but let's be honest: it's so far away from the intuitive nature of the point and click design. Having to tap through the options makes Diner Dash a much more clunky experience -- you'll eventually get the hang of it, but these controls can't replace the game's original way of playing. The PSP's widescreen gave the designers all the real estate in the world to fit the entire map without the need for scrolling, but that's all the PSP version has over the DS game. The visuals are the same, and the PSP version even has sluggish loadtimes. In a head-to-head battle the DS game wins out.

Diner Dash doesn't have much in the way of variety; it's just a single design that keeps going and going, but like a good old-school arcade game its addictive nature makes it fun to come back to for quick sessions. There's also a multiplayer competitive mode against two systems, but you'll need a second copy of the game...and that's a shame and a little annoying considering how basic the visuals and audio are. It's hard to believe the developer couldn't sandwich a multiplayer version of Diner Dash to fit into a game or disk-free system for game sharing mode.

Closing Comments

The one thing hurting Diner Dash is its price: at the release of the game it's a full-priced DS game and only a slightly reduced price for the PSP. That's far too much to pay for a game you can download in its original form for the PC at a much cheaper cost. In a few months it'll most likely come down to a more acceptable level ($20 bucks), and that's when you should pounce -- the game's fun and frantic, but it doesn't really offer much than its face-value production.

Destruction Derby

2008-09-29T06:32:00.000-07:00

Released back in 1995 for the original PlayStation, Destruction Derby brought chaotic racing to Sony's first console. Reflection's racer has now been re-released for the PSP through the PlayStation Store, and with it a new generation of gamers are able to crash the hell out of their rides in hopes of glory.

Destruction Derby has a handful of play modes, including Stock Car Racing, which is only about coming in first place, Destruction Derby, which is solely about killing everyone else's cars, and Wreckin' Racing, which is a combination of the two. There's also a Time Trial available for single-player purposes, though as is the case with every other PSone release on the PSP, you're unable to partake in any of the game's numerous multiplayer options.

For each of these modes (aside from Time Trial), you're able to compete in a practice event, a one-on-one duel, or enter a championship season. The championship option is obviously the deepest mode here, spanning your racing achievements over a number of races. Unfortunately, you're unable to mix-and-match event types here, so you can't go from a Destruction Derby to a Wreckin' Race in the same championship series, for example.

Though you are allowed a number of options for the challenge type, the most disappointing aspect of the game has to do with the number of tracks available, or lack thereof, actually. With only one Destruction Derby arena (though to be honest, you don't need much more than a large circle) and only about a half-dozen race courses, there isn't a whole lot of variety. It doesn't help that the courses themselves are rather uninteresting as well, based mostly around 90-degree turns on a flat course.

While there isn't a whole lot of interesting variety to be found in the tracks, what makes Destruction Derby fun is the pure chaos that you'll partake in during every event. The game is based around the vulnerability of the cars, and smacking into them while entering a corner and watching them spin behind you is great fun. The Destruction Derbies are also good fun, as flooring it into the middle of a giant pile and watching the parts fly is pretty rewarding.

The driving controls are set up rather loosely, so properly controlling your car can take a bit of getting used to. While they'll tend to over steer in turns, they do respond quickly and accurately to your input, so it is possible to really refine your driving abilities. While overall the controls are a little lacking, as the game is so chaotic to begin with, the lack of dead-perfect controls don't hamper the experience too much.

From a visual standpoint, Destruction Derby still stands as a technically-impressive PlayStation game. The cars take on and show a great deal of damage, and bits and pieces fly every time you crash. There's a tad bit of slow-down here and there, but it's not too often and doesn't get in the way of the game's playability.

Closing Comments

Destruction Derby is a pretty fun racer, focusing on chaos rather than racing refinement. There's a good deal of enjoyment to be had in the madhouse racing, though the lack of track options and even decent track design does hurt its overall appeal.

Def Jam Fight for NY: The Takeover

2008-09-29T06:29:00.000-07:00

The console version of Def Jam: Fight for NY did most everything right. It improved upon its predecessor, Def Jam Vendetta, by adding new characters, moves and fighting venues. On top of this, it took the narrative aspect of the game seriously - an area most fighting games tend to overlook. Then it went and applied a gleaming coat of polish to the whole thing, making it one of the best-looking fighters around.

You can say exactly the same thing about the PSP version, titled Def Jam: Fight for NY: The Takeover. Long name, yes, but so is the list of features and enhancements Takeover brings to the table. Before getting into that, it serves to note these additions are of a subtle variety. Takeover still offers primarily the same experience as the console version, after all. Not a bad thing, mind you, but those thinking Takeover is entirely unique will be burned.

As for the rest of you, just know first hip-hop brawler for PSP offers a fine experience knee-deep in NY grit. Everything from the console iterations shows up in full force, including the overwhelmingly impressive cast that now boasts 68 characters. The roster includes hip-hop artists such as Method Man, Lil' Kim and Busta Rhymes, as well as eye-candy celebrities like Carmen Electra. You need to unlock a vast majority of these characters to play them, but that's not so much a chore in this case. Plus, each celebrity brawler looks, sounds and plays differently, which truthfully is far more important than having 500 fighters with only cosmetic differences to set them apart.
Each claims a specific fighting style, for instance, while some have a mixture of two or three. One character can specialize in wrestling and street fighting, while his combatant may focus on kick boxing and martial arts. This helps keep the fighting experience varied and lends the game a bit of strategy as well. In addition, characters have unique attributes such as upper and lower body strength, speed and toughness. Strength helps you land those powerful hooks and kicks; while toughness and speed let you avoid damage or help you survive a serious beating, respectively. The different styles and character attributes really helps make each fighter special - something desperately needed in any game with copious fighters to choose.

Once in the arena, the differences really shine. Actually, shine may be the wrong word, since there's nothing in Takeover remotely bright or cheery. Fights get dirty, real dirty -- characters crash through cars and get kicked in the face repeatedly. They also get their spines broken in about 1,000 different places and have their faces smashed into concrete walls every other second of a fight. And it all looks and plays just as it should. Not that it's an overly complicated fighting system. Takeover has a relatively straightforward scheme built around grapples, reversals and simple combos. It takes a while to get used to at first, because it blends mechanics from both wrestling and straightforward fighting games, but it's a breeze once you get used to it.

The coolest part about any fight is exclusive to the Def Jam series, though. The Blazing moves at your disposal really set this game apart. They look ridiculously painful, to start, and they're simple to execute. You can also unlock 82 of them, and they all look equally devastating and cool, making getting all of them a worthwhile endeavor.

Just like in the last game, you can only use them when in Blazing mode, which you trigger by filling a special meter located right under your health bar. You then tap one of the direction buttons to initiate of the move. You can assign and re-assign moves to the D-Pad as many times as you want. This lends another area of customization and it keeps the flow of battle brisk since they're so easy to pull off.

When it comes to game modes, you get a number of choices. The first and coolest is Story, where you create your very own brawler and take him through a criminal saga. The process starts with a collection of facial features, such as bone structure and skin tone, for you to define the perfect fighter. You then choose everything from outerwear to eyewear and even jewelry. The most important decision deals with fighting styles, though. Do you go with a wrester/ martial arts hybrid or keep it simple by just choosing an old-fashioned street fighter.
After creating your character, you then go straight to your crib, where you can check your email (through a T-Mobile Sidekick), listen to a collection of hip-hop tracks and change your clothes. The most important area of your crib, however, is the map, where you can travel all over New York. Locations of interest have colored pins on them, and these include the gym, which helps you build your skills, to random encounters with player haters from rival crews. Basically, the story comes through numerous emails telling you to beat the snot out of specific gang members or to protect the locations of gang meetings.

It's a pretty cool drama, though for the most part it never gets much deeper than you breaking someone's ribs for selling his mix tapes in your territory. That and punishing over-zealous cops or thugs foolish enough to steal bling from members of your crew. Still, it's more in-depth than in most fighting games, and it's certainly presented well. It should take anywhere from 8-12 hours to finish it, making Takeover worth the price of admission. Although, if all you want is to beat people up through a one-on-one quick match, you can do that too. Finishing the story and winning quick matches earns you development points to build your character and unlock points, which you use to purchase characters and bonus content.
Takeover offers one of the best fighting packages on the system. It packs a ton of varied characters and modes, not to mention an in-depth storyline that just about any genre fan can enjoy. It also supports two players over a local ad-hoc connection and boasts great production values, making it a worthwhile and surprisingly polished product. The only real gripe are the momentary pauses when navigating menus or traveling between locations. Nothing major, but it does hamper the experience somewhat.

Closing Comments

Takeover offers one of the best fighting packages on the system. It packs an intuitive fighting system and varied characters, not to mention an in-depth storyline that just about any genre fan can enjoy. It also supports two players over a local ad-hoc connection and boasts great production values, making it a worthwhile and surprisingly polished product. The only real gripe are the momentary pauses when navigating menus or traveling between locations. Nothing major, but it does hamper the experience somewhat.

Death Jr. II: Root of Evil

2008-09-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

When your father is the great Grim Reaper himself, you've got a lot to live up to in life. (Make that afterlife, in this case.) And when you're the star of the series that officially introduced the PlayStation Portable to the world, all eyes are on you. Death Jr. is a kid who's felt plenty of pressure in his short time here on and underneath this Earth. At times, he's buckled under that burden, but other times, he's risen to the occasion like a champ. (Those who played through the uneven but aggressive first Death Jr. game know this well.) High expectations are still something that DJ doesn't cope well with, and his second game will probably again draw mixed impressions from those demanding that Death Jr. be the death-dealing platformer maniac he's got the potential to be. But give him a chance to just be himself, and the little creep (as well as his whip-wielding girlfriend, now joined hand in skeletal hand with newly-added multiplayer gaming) may grow on you once again.

What the first Death Jr. did well was put you in harm's way, often and unrelentingly. Death Jr. II: Root of Evil steps it up with bigger beasties, more varied varmints, and smarter snarlies. There are all kinds of evils in this sequel, bringing much-appreciated diversity to the action. They'll come at you from all angles, sprouting out of the ground or swooping down from the air or bursting up from the Toy Crypts to make you more dead than you already are. Fighting back flocks of evil chickens is something I'll take with me to my grave, remembering the burst of feathers floating in the air as my guns cooled down with the last shot fired. Once again, the game engine copes with levels packed with enemies of all sizes without a hitch in framerate. The developers dropped the combo counter on attacks, and there aren't quite as many objects to bust up typically in a stage as there were in DJ1 (we also miss some of the wide-open slaughter yard arenas such as the awesome Suburbia assault mission from the original), but there are now more moves and weapons to play with. There's also an improved camera system, which ditches the manual lock-on of the last game (which took its toll on many gamers' fingers) -- this time, you have more control over your viewpoint, and there's smarter sensing of when the camera should and should swing around in combat for you to attack enemies behind you or to the side without losing your bearings. Here, manual control of the camera is put on the triggers, and if you tap them together, your character goes into a strafe mode for more accurate death-dealing.

This time, DJ is bringing along a friend on his adventure -- the raven-haired, black-eyed beauty Pandora is a playable character this time, doing her part to slay evil instead of just unleashing it as she did last time. The differences in the two characters are unfortunately not all that great, with Pandora's Thorn Whip acting much like DJ's own Scythe and the duo's upgradeable melee attacks often matched by each character (we also wish the game allowed you to switch off characters between levels -- instead, you have to start a new game if you want to play as the other character.) Adding this second playable character also allows for a new multiplayer mode, although this mode feels like little more than an afterthought -- two-player (ad-hoc) mode just has you tripping through whatever stage the host player has unlocked, and the game's enemy count doesn't necessarily jump up when you add a friend (this depends on the difficulty setting you choose.)

What the game lacks in variety from character to character, it makes up for in combat -- there are a good deal of moves to use in fights as well a variety of vicious weapons, with upgrades to be earned for both your abilities and your weaponry as you play. With as many and as varied enemies that this game throws your way, you'll need to work your moves and get the most out of every gun. DJ and Pandora each have a different weapon loadout, beginning with their beginning guns (Death Jr. has his Twin Pistols, while Pandora has a Tommy Gun for faster but less accurate bullet-riddling) and on through the first four weapons they can earn. Each has a type of freeze weapon (and the freeze ability is still that cool slow-mo freeze, slowing down enemies but not stopping them cold when they're on top of you), a flame weapon, and a bomb of some type (Pandora's bomb is an explosive that is triggered when enemies bat at it trying to switch off the awful pop music it's programmed to play; DJ has his trusty C4 Hamsters), and between the characters, there's a mix of which type of weapon is long-ranged or stream-shooting or heat-seeking. The four shared weapons, however -- the Shotgun, Electric Gun, Gas Mine, and Rocket Launcher -- are not all that unique or fun in combat ... which is just as well, since we didn't even know these weapons were unlocked until we had almost finished the game since the weapon-switching mechanism is so screwy. (To be fair, the game tried to remind us to double-tap to switch weapons, but we were a little busy saving humanity and the hellspawn at the time to notice...)

Death Jr. 2 tries much harder to tell its story than the first game (which I'm still not sure I understand ... I know that there was an evil dude, and he turned your friends into gooey puzzle-piece dispensers until you beat him up). It's not a giant success, however -- I think this time, I figured out what the heck was supposed to be going on somewhere about a cinematic and a half before the end boss ... better late than never, I suppose. Funny, the Death Jr. comic book was actually quite good, and there is a ton more work in the storytelling in this game than the original, but it still doesn't work. There's voice-over acting this time, finally bringing to life the rest of DJ's motley crew of friends (including Siamese twins joined at the brain, a bitter bell-jar baby, a goth girl with the truly gothic mark of a stigmata, and a dead guppy named Dead Guppy.) I'm glad to know the team this time, but the audio levels and FMV editing are way off, and a few of the dialog lines are either flat or worse, embarrassingly tacky. (I honestly have a hard time saying anything nice about a game that had Seep the half-formed fetus in a jar say as a joke comeback, "Suck my cork"...)

On a technical level, Death Jr. performs impressively well the second time, even if a lot of its work is more subtle than special. Its claim to fame in this game is the first-ever use of High-Dynamic Range Lighting in a PSP game -- very cool on paper (HDR is a next-gen technique most often associated with Half-Life 2, now running on a portable machine), but don't come looking for PS3-quality shadow effects and crazy lighting tricks. Instead, HDR's strength here is in the beautiful subtlety it lends the game, lending a soft glow to every surface of the game and smoothing out light levels in the game for a moody look that's never too dark to see what you're doing but never too bright to destroy the atmosphere. (At least, not in stages that are supposed to be dark and eerie -- when you step into the light, the game can shine on with brilliant bloom lighting just as well.) Some gamers will still look at the unimpressive texture work and average character animation and take a pass, but there are plenty of moments of impossible beauty in the game to be experienced. The House of Waffles is possibly the most memorably vibrant stages ever on PSP, a funhouse of infinite colors and non-stop effects as you run through a man-sized pinball machine and a kitchen the size of Hell itself. And all of this unfolds on PSP with the speediest loadtimes of any game on the handheld system, taking 5-10 seconds to load gigantic and seamlessly-streaming levels.

Closing Comments

What makes Death Jr. a hard recommendation twice now is how the game is still sloppy in execution despite its best qualities -- it's time for DJ to grow up and scythe straight. The story again makes little sense, despite some funny sequences, and it feels short with only three bosses and little to revisit stages for on your second play. There are some odd design choices in stage design when you're swinging on ropes (why is it that most of the rope-slides in the game seem to go up?), and a few camera problems and control quirks rear up again or anew. The added multiplayer also doesn't make the game much more fun with two than it was with one.

However, as nervous as this game left us for the future of Death Jr. (come on guys -- if DJ's Helicopter Spin jump accidentally pushes me off one more ledge that I'm trying to jump up on, I'm going to be giving this boy another crack in that skull of his), the franchise is strong when it barrels down on the action. The gameplay is more smooth and enjoyable in the sequel, with none of the lock-on tapping from last time (it feels a little less hectic because of the camera change, so some may miss the frantic pace of the original, but just crank the difficulty up and you should have plenty to fight with.) Platforming is more sensible and challenging in the sequel, with some clever stages and rewarding secret spots to find. Death Jr. II doesn't prove this chip off the old tombstone to be on par with the greats, but it does give the kid (and Pandora, his gal doomsday) another good chance to reap some mayhem.

Death Jr.

2008-09-29T06:25:00.000-07:00

The son of the Grim Reaper has already laid his fatal touch on one victim: my right thumb.

Death Jr., the long-awaited PlayStation Portable title from Konami and developer Backbone Entertainment, looks deceptively like a platformer. There's a cute and cartoonish character, there's a jump with a spin-jump double move, and there are floating platforms and fiery pits to leap over. It's Mario with a scythe. Or so it seems. But get into the gameplay, and it's something entirely different.

This PSP game is really an action title with some platform sequences spread in for fun. In terms of combat to platform hopping, it's probably close to 75% fighting, with the player wildly flailing away at the firing button and whipping out the reaper's bladed weapon when the enemy brings the fight to your face. Played with that in mind, it's the probably most manic and furious game so far on the handheld system. For a game starring the spawn of the Grim Reaper, DJ is much more apt to get your heart racing than to stop it cold.

The problem with the game, however, that last 25% of hopping and bouncing is undercooked, with awkward manual camera controls instead of scripted viewpoints. As frantic as it is, the combat could have used a little bit of extra time in the hopper as well. And while the twisted atmosphere of DJ's world and circle of creepy friends is a key draw, the game doesn't feel as if it's been given enough time to come to life. Death Jr. already took more time than expected to get to us (the game was actually the first PSP game ever shown), but the game still feels like it has been sent out into the world before its time.

What Death Jr. does really well is put you under fire. This game is a run through a gauntlet, and every time you turn a corner in the game, you'd better be prepared and packing heat. Although you won't be facing forces on the order of something like Dynasty Warriors, the DJ engine throws as much as you can possibly handle, and then some, without chugging. The combination of critters will often form an imposing challenge. You might enter a room and suddenly find yourself the standing face-to-face with several snarling beasts, while charging Kamakazes dash at you wildly before striking a Jesus pose and blowing up. In the background, towering Etherial wraiths will be hurling bombs at you, and if you duck those attacks, the needle-like shots from the Eyeballer toads creatures will likely be on their way to seek your pale flesh. Another beast will be firing icy homing blasts at you from the distance. And as you try to strafe to survive all of that, the mines left behind by spindly ghost-faced creatures keep your quarters tight. Large spiders will unwrap their legs from the walls and begin their march towards you. Then there are gigantic Shield Demons and mega-sized versions of the regular demon to strike fear in your heart. And all the while, bats are flying down from the sky to pick you apart.

DJ comes ready with some cool weapons to do his business. Although players will try to play the game at first as if it's a platformer, using the scythe blade to beat on enemies, you won't get far just button mashing with that attack, and the abundance of ammo crates should give you the clue that it's OK to waste your stash of weapon rounds. At its heart, Death Jr. is much closer to Ratchet & Clank than Mario, and it often pushes past that -- I haven't circle-strafed this much since the original Doom, and I've never put the target-lock button to so much use since I last played through a Syphon Filter game. While all of the heavy firepower DJ picks up is awe-striking, the balance and mix of weapons isn't all that it could be. You can pick up an electric gun, a flamethrower, a freeze thrower, C4 Hamsters, a rocket launcher, a chain gun, and shotgun, but your standard twin pistols (with their infinite ammo) are good enough for most tasks if you can keep your fingers moving fast enough. We love frying and zapping critters with the electric gun and flamethrower, but they make clearing a room too easy. The shotgun, meanwhile, is nearly useless throughout the game. And while we loved the freeze thrower (it's quite possibly the best ice bomb attack in a game -- enemies are frozen cold, but instead of stopping, they go into slow-mo while iced over), it's hard to work that attack into combos with other moves since there aren't hot-keys for selecting weapons. The D-Pad works for switching guns, but you have to scroll through the menu instead of having instant-selects ala Ratchet, so by the time you've selected a weapon to follow up a freeze, the ice has already melted. You can also power up your weapon by collecting widgets, but there is only one step of powering up -- by the time everything is powered, you will have already been well past the game's ending.

Once the smoke has cleared, Death Jr. becomes more like any other game with a jump button, and while some smart decisions were made in making DJ control well in the platforming challenges, there are also a lot of missed opportunities and underdeveloped features. Camera control on PSP will always be a challenge for developers since it only has one control stick, and Death Jr. isn't the game to solve that problem. We really wish many areas in DJ had featured scripted camera angles like those in God of War (or even Ratchet, DJ's big step-brother), as there are sections of this game that are needlessly awkward. When floating around on moving platforms, you'll have to babysit the camera, tapping slightly in the direction you need to face (but not moving so much as to fall off the edge) and then hitting the manual camera adjust button. A simple jungle-gym structure early in the game, with three platforms stacked askew to each other, became a nightmare to keep track of as the camera spun around and bumped off of the walls.

DJ has a bunch of platforming moves to help him stay on his toes, but some of techniques in his bag of tricks work against him as much as to his favor. The helicopter spin with the scythe, for instance, pushes him off of walls -- if you're trying to do a wall jump and get your timing too far off, you might find yourself pushing into a pit rather than up where you need to go. DJ can also use the scythe as a hook to grab onto ledges, but the same button used to grab is used to shoot down with a diving attack, so if you're spinning through the air and try to grab a ledge, it's easy to miss and dive right into the ravine if the camera isn't right. Not all of the control is tight here, and the scythe becomes notorious for missing ledges that you needed to grab or not hooking onto swing lines and hooks that are in your path.

If DJ had charmed us completely with its characters and story, we might have overlooked some of the more awkward parts of the game -- the control is often there, it's just unforgiving and unbalanced. But while we were pleasantly surprised by the Death Jr. comic book, the game that inspired it is mildly disappointing. Looking at the box, you'd think that storytelling in DJ would have been a priority, but there are very few moments where the story is given time to play out. There's an opening CG sequence, there are a few super-quick sequences showing DJ's friends when they're saved (but nothing of them interacting with DJ after saving their lives), and there's an ending animation. Outside of that, you get some occasional text break-ins where DJ is talking or somebody is talking to DJ, but those exchanges are few and far between. Your friends can be found hanging out in the hub world once you've saved them, but they don't have much to say to you if you try talking with them (especially Dead Guppy, but that's the joke there.) There's never really even an explanation as to who big baddy Moloch is -- you see hands stealing souls, you see your friends lifeless and encased in tentacles, and suddenly you're off to go fight demons until you end up meeting the dude with the hands.

In the graphics department, Death Jr. isn't the cutest kid on the block, but it does have its charms. It's a good thing that DJ is 75% combat, because that's when the game is looking its best. The enemy creatures lack definition in textures (everybody is either red, blue or brown, usually with a white face), but in masses, they make an impression. Especially when you come across the giant ogre-like creatures with masses of tentacles swinging about, these creatures look nice and mean. The framerate is always able to stay smooth even with the screen filled, and the draw distance stays as far as you can see (enemies will spawn in a flash as you enter a room, but pop-in isn't a problem, and often creatures will spawn and attack so far off in the background that you won't be able to target them until you get closer.) The look of the game world as a whole, however, rarely really gels -- there are times that the twisting hallways of a room or skewed angles of a neighborhood give you the kind of creeps that this game should, but more often, you're staring at bland lava textures and repeating theater signs that weren't all that amusing (or legible) the first time. It's meant to be a Tim Burton fantasy world, but the color palette and texture detailing doesn't distinguish this game world from other platformers aside from the fact that dark purples and blues are used more than leafy greens and sunny yellows.

Closing Comments

Death Jr. just needed more "oomph" to it than it has. Not only is this the is the son of Death here, but it's also the game that has become known and "the first PSP game" -- that's a lot for the little fellow to live up to, and he doesn't stand up to the challenge. Back when this game was first shown at GDC in 2004, it was held up as the kind of console-quality next-gen gaming that the PSP would bring handheld gamers after years of settling for less. I'm sad to report this, but DJ still has some Game Boy rush-job rust on it rather than the polished steel of a PlayStation-quality game. The way that the dialog sequences are just text -- not even a face of who's talking to go with the text -- and how the bosses don't even get their own theme song for battles, there are just too many compromises made in the production value to maintain the energy and excitement that this game needs. It's only got about eight hours of gameplay to it, and it takes a long time to get going (it's only really fun when you get the big guns and meet up with the big, big enemies). DJ has got a lot of growing to do if he's going to be the biggest kid on the PSP's block.

That said, there's 75% of the game that's all-out action, and with the summer slump of PSP titles, that 75% goes a long, long way. DJ's gunplay and blade-chopping is fast and furious -- a little repetitive, but if you take chances in charging in rather than locking on and retreating, you'll be in for a good damned fight. Also, as much as we were annoyed by the problems of the platforming, there are some decent puzzle challenges and tasks to play through. This is a fierce game of combat, and whatever ticked me off about how the platforming portions worked, I was glad that cool techniques like the scythe hop and helicopter spin were in there to make these sequences fun when things were going my way. Death Jr. on PSP isn't a killer, but with its frenetic action and mix of weapons, it does draw blood.

Dead to Rights: Reckoning

2008-09-29T06:24:00.000-07:00

Remember movies like Showdown in Little Tokyo? Lethal Weapon? Or how about any Steve Segal movie from the eighties? The only play they get now are on channels like TBS or the USA network. These movies are a testament to Hollywood's short love affair with "action-packed" cinema. These were the days of Arnold and Stallone, and no one cared whether they could act - their arms were huge! And they had massive guns. Oh lord, the guns. These warriors of the silver screen evaded bullets and lethal explosions with the grace and flair of a testerone addled ballet dancer. It was a good time to be a kid during the eighties because movies catered to a boy's most violent G.I Joe imagination with shameless abandon, and we loved them for it.

The Dead to Rights series is a throwback to that golden-age of action-packed cinema. Jack Slate, the main character jumps to the side in slow motion and shoots while he falls. He has these lethal disarming moves that come with all the flair of a Steven Segal aikido maneuver. He even has a dog for a side kick that takes down baddies at a one-button command. In just discussing the elements that make up the game, there is a lot content here to get excited about. Playing the game is a different story.

The last DTR game on consoles fell flat, and unfortunately this PSP iteration is no different. Dead to Right Reckoning is plagued by sloppy controls that constantly force the player to fight for control of the character. Along with that comes a debilitating camera that can't seem to show the threats on the screen when needed. Between the controls and the camera, playing this game is an utter chore. The two problems successfully eroded any hope I had of enjoying this experience.

As the story DTR Reckoning goes, Jack Slate gets called in to save a young girl that has been taken hostage. To accomplish this he's going to have to fight several gangs, dodge bullets, and dive for his life. There are plenty of guns and a variety of disarming moves at his disposal. In theory, all of this could work. Bright spots like the cool sound of the guns and the kung fu style disarming moves give the game style. There is also a lot of detail in the backgrounds worth admiring. I found myself trying really hard to like the game despite how rough a time I was having with the controls. I really appreciate the spirits of the Hong Kong action that the game tries to promote. Unfortunately the flaws here overwhelmed me at the end.

The drunken camera retards your ability to defend yourself in the middle of a chaotic moment. You'll jump for cover in hopes avoiding getting hit. The sad part is that whenever you get near a wall, everything goes into first-person and completely disorients you. I mean really, imagine what everything looks like in first person if your jumping to the side. How the hell are you supposed to see anything? Everything is jumbled and out of control. What's so unjust about this is that the game loves to ambush you with enemies so that they run right up on you with guns blazing and force you to jump out of the way to try and get some kind of bearings. But everything goes to hell if you're in close quarters because of that infernal camera. It's slipping and sliding, even with the autotarget enacted.

The analog nub is used for movement and it doesn't work so well. Moving Jack around the screen ends up feeling like driving a boat. It's just not sensitive enough to make agile movements. There are 3 types of control maps for you to choose from, but all of them have the nub mapped for movement. Also, target lock doesn't intuitively choose the nearest threat to you. You have to press another button to change the target. It get's weird if your overwhelmed with enemies and the camera's going crazy.

When pulling off a disarming move, if you're not careful you'll get sprayed with bullet by the other enemies. They run out of no where and pour on the punishment. You can only really pull off disarming if you have a guy isolated somewhere. But it really sucks if you run out of weapons and you have to go take someone else's. You're forced to run into gun fire and do a disarming move while another enemy stand right next to you and squeezes off rounds right into your neck. If you run out of weapons while going up against a boss, you're really screwed because you can't disarm bosses. Of course, he doesn't run out of ammo, so he's free to fill you full of rounds while you desperately run for your life. It's just a lousy experience that you run into constantly.

There are some odd design issues in the game. For instance, you have to leap to get on top of anything, or get over obstacles. So if your body armor or health pack is on some elevated platform, you can't just climb up to get it. You have to leap up there. This is a real pain if your in a desperate panic with low health and you're trying to the health pack sitting up on that infernal platform.

Ok, I understand that everything is supposed to be explosive to heighten the action of this action packed game. I even understand how being too close to an explosive item when it goes off would cause damage to your character. What I don't understand is how could I shoot an item like this if I'm laying on the ground, pointing away from it! On one such occasion, I was jumping to the side to avoid getting shot and landed on the ground next to a combustible car. When I auto targeted shot at the enemies that were stand away from the car, some how the car was hit, blew up and took health away from me. It sucks because I'm working hard to make progress, and sporadically punished through-out the game for mistakes in the design.

DTR: Reckoning played with my sanity, relentlessly. Ok. What's the point of giving me handguns with silencers in the middle of a firefight? Could silencers be in anymore useless amidst a full-out war. I'm not sneaking up on anyone. Everyone knows I'm there. The dog is cool to use, but it's just odd how he appears out of thin air and kills people at the drop of a hat. He doesn't follow you around. He just sort of pops in when you summon him, and a quick cut scene plays out of him killing your enemy -- he like a ghost dog.

Toward the end, you're finally given a level with a ton of flat open space and only a few obstructions that get in your way. At that point you can dive around better without running into walls that force you into first person at the most inopportune moments. The first few levels have some sections where you get a bit more space to jump around than other levels. But they also have complicating structures like stairs. I would have never guessed that stairs could cause me so much grief in life. How's that? Try pulling off a slow motion dive on the stairs in DTR Reckoning. All I wanted was for to jump off of the stairs so that he could run away from the danger. As Jack desperately tries to auto target enemies and dive away, he's jumping into the rails. It takes several tries to actually get him up and over the rails. Most of the time you see his character model laying in mid-air trying to jump, or first-person mode zooms in and you can't tell what the hell is going on.

There is a multiplayer mode called Wireless Battle where you and another PSP owner can go head to head over Ad hoc. Up to 4 players can participate in either a Deathmatch or Last Man Standing firefight. Unfortunately, the goofy controls that confound everything in the single player campaign proved to do the same thing in multiplayer. If you look at it all a parody of an action movie, seeing everyone leaping in the air like giant frogs, it gets somewhat entertaining. But for the most part this mode requires no real skill because all you can do is blast away as the camera goes haywire once things get chaotic. The skins and maps you unlock in the single player game are selectable here, but it doesn't matter because the game itself is just whacky.

Closing Comments

DTR: Reckoning needed more time in development. Besides the design flaws, it was buggy at times. At one point, the sound effects completely left. All I was left with was the generic action music. Another time, the textures popped out when I used my dog. The game just needs more work. But I should also point out that this isn’t a hopeless title. The screws just need major tightening. I think it's possible to have a success shooter on PSP. But if fundamental elements like a functional camera and control systems aren't there, the game just won't work.

Dead Head Fred

2008-09-29T06:20:00.000-07:00

Life sometimes isn't particularly fair, especially when it starts throwing a ton of curveballs your way. Imagine that your best friend moves from a reliable business partner to a raging alcoholic. Your girlfriend's father, who just happens to the one of the leaders of your town, mysteriously vanishes. Even worse, when you try to investigate his disappearance, you find yourself at the top of a mobster's hit list, with a bad case of amnesia and a jar for a head. It's enough to make you rail against the world and the inhabitants of your town for such a raw deal. That's the basic premise behind Vicious Cycle and D3 Publisher of America's twisted noir action game Dead Head Fred, one of the most creative and enjoyable titles to come to the PSP.

Dead Head Fred is set in Hope Falls, a town that's definitely seen better days: radiation from the nuclear power plant has caused rampant mutation in the livestock and population, the dead have risen from the grave and the city's government is extremely corrupt. Fred Neuman is one of the few good guys left: a detective following leads that point to Ulysses Pitt, a supposed philanthropist who's actually a mob boss. Fred gets too close and Pitt has Fred killed, cutting his head off and dumping his body in a sludge dump behind the nuclear plant. Fortunately for the gumshoe, a mad scientist, Dr. Steiner, finds his body and resurrects him, albeit with two glaring side effects. The first is that Fred's brain and eyes have been placed in a giant glass jar with a mysterious liquid that helps keep the undead private eye alive. The other problem is that as a result of his decapitation and rise from the grave, he suffers from amnesia. Seeking revenge on Pitt, as well as his head, Fred takes off to enact his own brand of justice.

While there are some negative with Fred's head loss, there are some advantages as well: he has the ability to switch heads at will. Initially, he'll start off with his jar head, but he'll acquire eight other craniums that he can use to accomplish his goals. Each head comes with their own abilities, such as expelling noxious fumes, tossing birds or creating decoys. Most of these bestow physical changes upon Fred, such as being immune to fire or allowing you to inhale substances like gasoline or large quantities of water. For example, you may find that there's a power generator that you need to illuminate a barn, but it's out of fuel, forcing you to siphon some from a gas tank. Other heads are more passive; for instance, seeing a guy running around with a skull for a head can be somewhat frightening. Wearing a mannequin head allows Fred to communicate with the denizens of Hope Falls without scaring them to death.

The various heads also provide different attack moves and combos in the middle of battle. For instance, the skull moves provide a lot of fast slashing attacks, while the stone idol head lands slower but more powerful blows. For the most part, you can pull off most of your moves with the Square button, although you can follow up some strikes with the X button to interrupt enemy attacks or get around their defenses. Once you've landed enough damage on an opponent, you'll stun them, which gives you the opportunity to land a finishing blow with the Triangle button. Frequently, these involve some harsh decapitation attack from Fred, such as twisting off someone's skull or smashing them into the ground until their head explodes. The Triangle button is also used to counter enemy attacks provided Fred is wearing the right head, setting them up for a button mashing sequence where you have to fill a meter before landing a killing strike. Pulling off any finishing move provides you with rage, which can be used to pull off either area or hand to hand special attacks that are much stronger than standard punches and kicks.

Unfortunately, combat is one of those areas where Dead Head Fred loses a bit of its luster, partially because of the control scheme for the title. Don't get me wrong - much of the game is excellent when it comes to moving Fred around environments or solving puzzles. But part of the combat is somewhat hampered by the reliance on the R button as an all-purpose modifier in battle. By itself, it's supposed to block attacks, although Fred still takes quite a bit of damage from defending himself. However, the R button is also used in combination with the analog stick to move the camera around as well as trigger focused and area rage attacks. Players can easily rotate the camera away from their current target, which then forces you to readjust the view of the game action so that you can see where you're being attacked from. Considering that the camera will sometimes choose some horrible angles for you in battle or during puzzles, it's annoying to have to fight it as well as mutants that want you dead.

The combat system can also degenerate into button mashing, particularly when you're surrounded by three or more enemies at the same time. However, considering that the jump button and the follow up attack button are the same, you may find yourself inadvertently leaping straight up in the middle of a combo because the game doesn't register your initial strike. Since you don't really have the ability to attack in mid air, you frequently set yourself up for a free attack from an opponent that you were pounding into submission. Combined with the other battle issues, and fights, while not atrocious, can either become tedious or annoying.

What does make Dead Head Fred stand out is that the game encompasses a large number of game elements that have been included in the game. Initially, the game might seem like your standard action title, but it also features a number of platforming and puzzle elements, as well as some adventure aspects, all of which are well done and nicely balanced. For instance, since you're a private detective, you'll receive various side jobs along the way, which you can choose to accept or completely ignore. If you take the task and complete them, you'll gain money and a random assortment of items. For the most part, many of the items are useless bits of junk with hilarious descriptors, but Fred can trade or sell these items for things that he really wants, including enhancements to his heads that give him new powers, like more projectiles during a ranged attack or the ability to regenerate his health. You'll also be able to acquire items and cash through some of the various mini-games in the game, such as pinball, pool, fishing, and even mutant cockfighting rings.

Players will always have access to their inventory and a notebook that points them in the direction that they need to go in the game, as well as how to hints to perform specific actions or head icons to gain a sense of which skull is needed for certain actions. This can frequently come in handy when you're trying to solve a particular puzzle. Considering the incredible amount of depth and quirky character that all of Hope Falls demonstrates, having this help at your fingertips is rather appreciated. The town encompasses eight unique "areas," all of which can be quickly traversed once Fred has visited them via manhole covers. But once you've progressed through areas like Creepy Hollow and Freak Farms, you know that you're not in your typical action title or platform game. Need I even mention the twisted little district known as Zombietown?

The visual flair of the title is incredible on the PSP, with large character models. Fred and his heads really pop off the screen, particularly with the different animation sets that each equipped head imparts on his body. For instance, the corpse head imparts a shambling walk, while the dummy head provides a stiff, bolt upright walking stance. Every character, from the smallest kid crying over his toys to the boss battles, are beautifully rendered, and stand out on the detailed environments. In-engine cutscenes are excellent as well, and transition nicely between game action and plot development. The only downside that crops up when it comes to the visuals are the continual loading times on just about every single area. While they're not horrible, they're pretty frequent - each time you go through a door or enter a new area, you have to wait for at least a good five to seven seconds after a preliminary cutscene. Although you can skip the cutscene, you won't bypass this load time, and after you go through it multiple times (for instance, Doctor Steiner's mansion with multiple doors), you'll notice those extra seconds start to add up.

The sound for the title, however, is fantastic. The majority of it is centered around the voice acting, which is anchored by John C. McGinley of Scrubs and Office Space fame. McGinley expertly brings his dry, sarcastic delivery to Fred's lines and consistently delivers humorous lines across the entire game. Even better is the fact that the dialogue isn't censored, so McGinley could launch an insult without being worried that he was held back. The resulting vocal venom is comedic gold, (particularly as you're reloading after accidentally killing Fred during a game) and it will frequently have you laughing out loud. However, you will definitely want to have some headphones around if you play the game in public, as some people may object to the number of F-bombs dropped by most of the characters.

Closing Comments

Dead Head Fred is an excellent PSP action title for fans looking for an enjoyable title. The tale of revenge in a dark world is twisted, unapologetically humorous and packed with balanced gameplay that should keep players engaged for hours. While people may not have heard of this game, they really owe it to themselves to check out this title, because its one of the more unique stories on the portable console to date. If you give it a chance, you'll lose your head over Fred.

Daxter

2008-09-29T06:18:00.000-07:00

Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and Sucker Punch have become a triple-threat for Sony after having created a trio of trilogies for the PS2. Naughty Dog's Jak and Daxter first set the bar for great platform gaming on the system and very few releases have topped it, with almost all of the series' competition coming from sister companies Insomniac and Sucker Punch. While the Jak series has thrived on its excellent design, humor also plays a large part of its success, most of it coming from Jak's sidekick Daxter. The little orange Ottsel has thus far only lent a helping hand to his buddy, but now the little guy gets a starring role in his own game on the PSP, the aptly and simply-named Daxter.

One thing about Daxter that I welcome with open arms is its strong adherence to old-school platform gaming. While Sony's own Jak, Ratchet and Sly franchises have inched more and more toward straight-up action games with each release, Daxter's gameplay is almost wholly based on platforming. Sure, there's quite a bit of fighting, but it plays a second, drowned-out fiddle compared to the game's platforming aspects.

It's not just the simple return to skillful jumps and level navigation that makes the game so damn good and refreshing, though -- it's the overall design of almost every aspect of Daxter that puts it a tier above most everything else on the system. This is an extremely polished game through and through.

Like its granddaddy Jak series, the game features extremely refined controls. It's an absolute pleasure moving Daxter around the world, as everything from the refined acceleration and deceleration when stopping and going again to in-air movement, input response and essentially the entire control mechanism has been fine-tuned to no end.

Daxter's movement ties directly into his animation set, and this too is rather phenomenal. Every facet of his being moves in some way during every action; from his ears flopping a bit while he runs to his tail wagging to and fro as he scurries about, Daxter's animation set is on-par with his own on the PlayStation 2, which is to say it's some of the best in the industry. The first time you climb a wall and notice the almost lizard-esque subtleties in his body movement, you'll be sold.

Speaking of climbing walls, key to Daxter's gameplay is its level design, and developer Ready at Dawn has created great set pieces to test the little guy's abilities. The level layout really is paramount to any platformer's success and Daxter features areas that not only work great from a gameplay perspective, but they make sense in the scope of the world as well. While things start out rather simple with gaps you need to jump over, or a series of ledges you need to navigate to progress, things get more complicated (and better) as the game goes on. For example, during one section you need to heat up springs that hold platforms in order to rotate them into position, and then hop onto and off of them before the spring recoils to move on. In a fish factory, you'll need to both create and melt large blocks of ice in order to create platforms, making for a bit of puzzle-solving.

One of my favorite areas of the game is a train station sequence where you need to hop from train to train as they speed along, dodging obstacles while picking up Precursor Orbs as you go. It's cool from a gameplay perspective but it's also a visually exciting scene as well.

There are a few, albeit rare, sections of the game where your route is hidden from view, maybe unintentionally so, especially early on before you know what you're looking for. Quite a few areas in the game are connected via air ducts that you need to crawl through, and some of these are situated in areas that are rather hard to spot, like at the top of clothes cabinets and such. I found that it was harder to spot some of these at the beginning of the game than the end, maybe because I'd learned to search for them if I didn't see an obvious way out of an area, but more likely because some of the early placement is a little awkward.

Aside from his skillful jumping and climbing abilities, Daxter's most important asset in the game is the bug spray canister he acquires near the start of the game. Aside from stunning enemies, Daxter's light weight allows him to use it as a propulsion device to reach new heights and float over large gaps. A flamethrower attachment later on turns this into a more deadly device and one with a little more kick for flying, but its original form is equally useful throughout the course of the game. There are plenty of sections where very large gaps separate you and your destination, farther than a single boost could carry you, but picking up green blobs of bug spray refiller mid-air will keep you afloat for longer. The catch here is that you'll find Precursor Orbs along the way, so you'll risk gravity's wrath if you stray to nab them.

One thing that's a slight bit disappointing, at least for the experienced gamers out there, is that Daxter is a little on the easy side for a fair bit of its length. Up until about halfway through the game, I was cruising through areas will little to no problem. Things pick up mid-way and you'll find some challenging moments here and there, but it's nothing that anyone who's been gaming for a while will have any problem passing. That's not to say that it's not fun 100% of the way through, as it is, but the game does feel as if its challenge was toned down a bit to cater to a wider audience.

One thing that makes the game fairly easy is its checkpoint system. You don't have a finite number of lives so you can try a task over and over again until you pass, and the checkpoints in the game are so close together that you'll really only need to cross a small section before you've hit another. But, there's a very bright side to this as the close checkpoints allow you to pick up again from anywhere in the game thanks to the ability to save at any time. There are autosave areas just to make sure you're set, but you have the ability to manually save, restart the game and then pick up again a very short distance from where you left off. This is incredibly nice considering that we're talking about portable gaming here.

Being able to save anywhere is also important because there aren't really individualized "levels" in the game per se, as the entire world is connected and streams as you roam about. Indeed, Daxter is essentially load time-free once you're in the game. Loading areas are sectioned off by doors, so sometimes you'll have to wait a few seconds for a door to open, but a series of moving cranks and gears helps fake the fact that the door is simply in the process of opening rather than that you're waiting for the UMD to spin a few more times. Great stuff here, no question.

Daxter's use of streaming is hardly its most impressive technological aspect, however. This is one tremendously great looking game, and its audio is certainly no slouch either. From a distance and on the PSP's little display, the game mimics the look and feel of its console brethren extraordinarily well. Granted, there aren't passersby roaming about the streets like on the console, nor are there nearly as many vehicles chugging along through the air, but the environments themselves look fantastic.

Rolling out into one of the outdoor missions, you'll find foliage effects for grass, very detailed trees, running water and more, all drawn well off into the distance. Daxter himself looks pretty damn good for what's capable on the PSP, and I've already talked about the animation quality so you know that's top notch. There are occasional moments of slowdown, but these usually only occur when you're progressing through the city as things load and you're only moving from point-to-point, so it never actually hinders any of the action at all. Really, Daxter is just a great looking title and one of the prettiest on the system so far.

And as mentioned, its audio is stellar as well. Sound effects are great for everything from footsteps to the sound of Daxter's electronic fly swatter pounding on robotic bugs. Bass is aplenty and will test your headphones' ability to reach deep into the tactile area of the low-end. The best aspect of the game's audio however is its soundtrack, which is stellar. Matching the feel of the scores from previous games in the Jak series while putting a slight comedic spin on things, Daxter's soundtrack is just cool. It fits perfectly into the game's metallic world while keeping most of the instrumentation to the analog variety and out of sampled synthesizers. Awesome stuff.

Though the Jak series has always had a fairly strong and involving storyline, Daxter has intentionally taken a different approach to things and its story comes off rather underwhelming. After boasting (read: lying) at the local bar about his heroic exploits, Daxter is convinced to squash a few bugs after promise of compensation. This starts him off on his adventures as an exterminator, and that's about as deep as the story gets for most of the game. You're simply sent out time and time again to get rid of a bunch of bugs, and that's it. Now, there are bigger things behind all of this, and the game does stray a bit to culminate in Daxter's rescue of Jak that you see at the beginning of Jak II, but most of the game is simply a series of bland tasks set ahead of you. Doing the job of smashing bugs is great fun, but the bulk of the story really isn't all that compelling.

Though the game is certainly very linear, there are a few asides that mix things up a bit, like Daxter's various dream sequence mini-games. By collecting Precursor Orbs throughout the game, you'll unlock dreams that Daxter can "partake" in by sleeping. Each of these mock some pop culture film, from the Matrix to Indiana Jones to Lord of the Rings, and they're worth a chuckle or two. They all essentially work in the same fashion where you time marked button presses to get rid of incoming enemies, and they sort of wear thin after a while, but you do earn unlockables for beating each one, like an extended health bar or new fighting moves. So, they're cool in short bursts and it's nice that you earn stuff by completing them, but I doubt you'll be trying to top your best scores for very long.

Another diversion is the multiplayer-capable Bug Combat. Throughout the game you'll find hidden bugs for use in Bug Combat, as well as potions and enhancements that you can use on them to boost their attributes. The game works something along the lines of paper-rock-scissors meets Pokemon as you're able to essentially breed a stable of beasts and then use one of three combat types to take down your opponent. It's a reasonably interesting mini-game as the three attacks work in a cyclical fashion (claw beats fire, fire beats shield, shield beats claw), plus you have the ability to change your attack choice at the last second, allowing you to overtake your opponent. You can play this either against the computer or with a friend via Ad Hoc, where both players can bring in the bugs they've earned and upgraded throughout the game.

Closing Comments

Daxter is simply an outstanding PSP game that brings back the old-school platform gaming the industry has been shying more and more away from. Sure, its story is kind of ridiculous and even a little boring, but the events that said story lead into are fantastic. From the great level design to the ultra-refined controls to the excellent production values, Daxter is a game every PSP gamer should check out.

Dave Mirra BMX Challenge

2008-09-29T06:17:00.000-07:00

Since his name was dropped from Acclaim's much talked about BMX XXX, Dave Mirra has been rather absent from the world of videogames. Picking up the license and handing it off to Left Field Productions, Crave brings the biker's name racing back at us with Dave Mirra BMX Challenge. Unfortunately, it should have scrapped the bike for parts and bought some donuts instead.

Much of the game's design seems somewhat similar to Neversoft's recently released Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, a different and rather fun take on its veteran skating franchise. BMX Challenge's Career mode is spit into two main parts, Race and Trick Contests. Though they take place on the same levels, the progression of each is independent in that you can complete all of the race events without touching a trick competition, for example.

This setup works fine, but everything else about the game is downright terrible. For one, the track design is abhorrent. Not only will you fly around corners and hop off of jumps only to wind up smashing your face into needlessly-placed objects, you'll often find yourself wondering which direction leads to the finish line. Halfway through each race, the lap layout will change and you'll take an alternate route that can sometimes cross back over the main lap in a T section or something similar. There sometimes aren't arrows here telling you which way to turn, and you'll have to guess the first time through and hope you remember the second.

Though the back of the box says that there are 17 tracks, this really isn't the case at all. You first play through eight tracks on the Novice difficulty, and then you play through the same eight again on Pro. Beat them and you get the ninth and final track. Playing through the same course twice with different AI difficulties doesn't magically turn it into two different tracks.

Though this mathematical issue really doesn't have much to do with how bad the game is, the extreme ease with which you'll breeze through the game is. On both the Novice and Pro difficulty levels of the Race Contests, we won by what was probably an average of about 40 seconds on every race. The closest race in the Novice circuit was when we won by only about 18 seconds, though the closest Pro race was a little tighter when we only won by 10 seconds. Keep in mind that these were our first attempts (or second while on Pro) at each course, so shortcut knowledge and such wasn't to our advantage. To make matters worse, you only need to finish third out of four to progress, and the last guy is usually way behind the other two.

The Trick Contests will test you a bit more as you progress, but it really doesn't even become a challenge until you get to the last couple courses. You'll find that pulling off one or two strings of tricks within the three-minute time limit is often more than enough to put you into first. This can sometimes be a bit frustrating however as the controls are rather unforgiving. You don't latch onto grinds as easily as you might expect, and sometimes you'll just bail when you should have laid a peg onto the wall. As poor as the track design is for racing, it's even worse for the Trick Contests as they're meant to flow in a linear manner. You also don't even see other tricksters on the course - you just see where your point total ranks up at the end and hope you finish first since you aren't presented with a goal score ahead of time.

Closing Comments

Dave Mirra BMX Challenge a terrible racing game, and it's an even worse competition game. You might as well save yourself some cash and just stab yourself in the eye.

Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower

2008-09-29T06:14:00.000-07:00

If you were expecting PSP to have nothing but a library of 3D mind blowing games, Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower will stretch you straight... kinda. The game is a great-looking 2D fighter (yes, good games still can come in two dimensions) that's still in need of some crucial tuning.

If the title sounds familiar, that's because it's a crisp port of the Dreamcast version back in 2000 of a similar name (Vampire Chronicle For Matching Service), just scaled to near PSP perfection. I say "near" because you can only enjoy looking at it so much once the control issues get in the way. For that, it's just a tease of what could have been and all around great PSP game.

If you were a fan of the Dreamcast version you might miss details like the icon change for characters when you choose different fighting styles, but don't fret because there's a new mode called the "Tower" that'll make the experience worthwhile. It's a tournament-like mode that lets you battle up a never-ending ladder of characters with three of your best fighters. The catch is you don't get a refilled health bar after each fight. Sometimes they even handicap you by taking away your ability to jump, kick, or punch. You'll progress through fights, rationing your health amongst the three, choosing the best match-ups depending on who you fight next. You'll just keep fighting for however long you can survive. So what's the payoff? You'll unlock neat items as you go along the way, like stunning character art, which is actually worth having when you have cool characters like these in a game.

The one thing you can count on with a Capcom title is stylish character designs. Honestly, the Japanese developers (Capcom included) have always been leagues ahead of their western counterparts in this respect. The one thing that has always impressed me about the Darkstalkers title specifically is their interpretation of classic monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and the Wolfman. The Japanese flourish -- making Dracula a muscular bruiser with superman's physique, for example -- makes regular monsters awesome to play with!

In the basic arcade mode you get three versions of the Darkstalkers game to choose from, 18 characters, and seven fierce battles to encounter. The first game, "Darkstalkers," is the run of the mill two-out-of-three to win kind of deal, but you can only fill up one layer of "special" juice, that unleashes a special attack when the right button scheme is executed. Basically pummel you're opponent until all health is depleted and on to the next. "Night Warriors" is the same thing except you can fill up more than one layer of "special" juice. And the final mode is "Darkstalkers 3," which works like Night Warriors, only the round system works by "downs," which means you stick with the life you have left after winning a round, and the loser starts with a full fresh bar.
Now here's the problem: if you consider yourself a Capcom veteran, meaning you grew-up on fighters that relied heavily on your ability to do fireball swivel moves on a directional D-pad, then you're S.O.L. with DC: Chaos Tower. The PSP directional pad is going to be an obstacle for all fighting games. This is even tougher for someone like me who has never been that adept with the fireball maneuver in the first place. I debated with the gravity of this flaw for a while, but after letting a few fireball veterans around the office take a crack at it, it's obvious to see that it's problematic enough to spoil the game. It's unfortunate since almost half of the cool characters Darkstalkers has to offer use fireball moves, so you can imagine the frustration that ensues.

Why is this an issue? Most Capcom fans love to throw a bevy of projectile attacks at their opponents to either bait them into jumping or blocking prematurely. Both instances will leave the opponent vulnerable and open to devastating and crucial combos -- combos that can determine the final decision of a fight. There are some characters that aren't so reliant on fireballing, like Felica for instance (who might be considered the Blanca of Darkstalkers), but using someone like Donovan or Demitri will leave you with a raw thumb and nothing but a losing screen to show for it. Also, the slow load times don't help to improve the experience much, especially when you're eager to continue playing after a humbling loss, and that load screen just crawls to completion.

If things look a bit stretched for your taste, you can reset set the 16 x 9 screen to the traditional 4 x 3 in the options menu. At this point the screen will switch to "normal," and an animated wallpaper will border the sides of the playing screen. You'll have 11 wallpapers to choose from, each with their own theme -- a small but neat way to deal with the black gaps left during 4 x 3 gameplay.

One thing we've learned with our time with the PSP is that size doesn't matter when it comes to sound. The sound on the PSP is nearly comparable to what you'll get out of most full-fledged consoles, and Darkstalkers in particular does a great job of evoking that classic arcade experience. The PSP emulates classic Capcom tones with satisfying precision. DC explosions and battle cries alike are at their digital best.

Wi-fi connectivity is another added PSP plus, as head to head combat is an essential element of any fighter, which you can do from across the room with two PSPs and two copies of the game with no problem.

Closing Comments

As good as some parts of the game are, DC: The Chaos Tower is still waiting for greatness. If developers were able to port some of the console features to PSP, they should have taken the time to make sure that the controls translated as well. If they know their game like the fans do, than they should understand how important an integral move like fireballing is. Not only does this hurt the reputation of title, but also cheats loyal fans out of the experience they deserve.

C

2008-08-12T07:44:00.000-07:00

» Cabela's African Safari
» Cabela's Dangerous Hunts Ultimate
» Call of Duty: Roads To Victory
» Capcom Classics Collection: Reloaded
» Capcom Classics Collection: Remixed
» Capcom: Puzzle World
» Carol Vorderman's Sudoku
» Cars
» Castlevania: Symphony of Night
» Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles
» Chameleon
» Chessmaster: Art of Learning
» Chili Con Carnage
» Code Lyoko: Quest for Infinity
» Coded Arms
» Coded Arms: Contagion
» Con
» Cool Boarders
» Crash Bandicoot
» Crash of the Titans
» Crash Tag Team Racing
» Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars
» Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
» Crush
» Cube

Cube

2008-08-12T07:41:00.000-07:00

They cool drinks, sweeten tea, imprison the working man and star in their own PSP game -- is there anything cubes can't do? Scheduled to roll out next week from Media Interactive Ltd. and D3Publisher of America, Inc., the company behind Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, Cube boasts 135 levels where your goal is to get a movable cube in a 3D world from the start of a level to the glowing exit at the end.

The concept gets all sorts of complicated from there, but it makes for an enjoyable portable puzzler.

Your cube can roll to anyone of its sides and stick to that surface as long as the surface isn't a special square. That means as you navigate the 3D map made of side-by-side cubes, you can roll over the edge of whatever platform you're on and stick to the underside. See a column of cubes? You can roll up it and rotate the camera to turn the vertical stack into a horizontal line. With all this directional freedom, the levels in Cube run from towering staircases to giant cubes to unconnected cube groups, but it won't simply be the shape of Cube's maps that challenge you when you turn on your PSP; it's the shapes combined with the dangers that inhabit the environments.

When you start the first set of "easy" levels -- the game features three difficulties, each with three sets of levels that players need to play through to unlock the next difficulty -- you'll face bombs, simplistic foes that just sit there. These unmoving jokes will be a minor annoyance for you to maneuver around, but then, the rest of the dangers start cropping up. There'll be rotating blocks, squares that force you in certain directions and devices that blow you backward. Soon you'll have an exit point on top of a pillar, three sides will be surrounded by sinking surfaces -- quicksand for cubes-- and the only side with an opening will have a spiked bomb rolling back and forth. Other times finishing a level means using the bombs against one another. You'll move a block to make a path, you'll dodge a rolling bomb and switch a directional arrow, and the bomb will follow the arrow and collide with another bomb blocking the exit. That's pretty cool -- except when you screw it up and send the rolling bomb into a wall and leave yourself with no way to get to the exit.

Add hidden bombs, spiked surfaces, bomb-shooting squares and time limits to the puzzles, and Cube becomes a detailed test to see how quickly you can snatch all the keys in an area and make it to the exit for a gold, silver or bronze ranking. The game gives you a look around the level before the clock starts, but even after your birds-eye view, remembering the map in the heat of the puzzle is easier said than done.

For as much fun as the gameplay can be, the levels can get more than a little repetitive and the game's other aspects are a big old bit of bland. Each group of levels is called a zone and assigned a color. That hue makes up the map and the background the puzzle is suspended over. It might not sound like much, but after a few runs on a pink set of cubes floating over a pink background, my eyes were on fire and I was ready to move on. Beyond the map itself, the obstacles you face have little to no personality. The bombs are jagged gray diamonds with red spikes, the sink squares are just mustard yellow and the other dangers are equally as forgettable.

The other factor holding Cube back from being a breakout success is that the camera and controls don't feel natural. In a timed game with exploding obstacles all around, you need to move fast and be accurate. Cube's sluggish camera and always-shifting controls don't fit the bill. Lots of times I'd be making my way to the finish and rotate the camera. The D-pad direction that was taking me forward suddenly took me left and into a bomb. The subtle camera adjustment I made on the fly rotated the entire control scheme, and I bit it. Even once I figured out what was happening, it was still a guessing game at points as to which way I'd roll. Other times I'd blow up thinking that the bomb was two squares in front of me. There's no comfortable place to keep the camera and see the field, and that means success is dependent on you moving a few squares and stopping to rotate the camera. That can suck the fun right out of a crafty level.

Still, if puzzles are your deal and you can get past the cornea-burning colors, there's plenty of good in Cube. Did you steamroll through the levels and grab all the gold medals? First, see an addiction specialist, and then check out Cube's level creator. It takes some getting used to -- who knew building something in a three-dimensional void would be tough? -- but once you get the hang of creating maps from scratch, inserting dangers and placing keys, you pretty much blow the lid off replay value if you dig the title. Add to the fact that you can send and receive levels with other Cube fans and play them in ad-hoc multiplayer as well as game sharing, and you've got a UMD that just keeps on giving. Players can compete in four two-player modes that include racing each other to the exit, a contest to collect the most keys, a battle to survive the longest and a co-op mode to help each other make it to the exit.

Closing Comments

In this next-gen era, it seems lots of games are all sizzle and no steak. Cube is the opposite. If noodle-scratching gameplay is your thing and you can deal with some repetition, there's lots of steak in your PSP's immediate future, but the lack of varied backgrounds and a weak camera don't provide anything in the sizzle category.

Crush

2008-08-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

If there's such a thing as "striking gold" in the videogame world, then Zo¿ Mode has done it. Out of nowhere, the UK-based developer has given us a fascinating and original puzzler that's as entertaining as it is intriguing. The game is called Crush and it's damn near awesome.

Super Paper Mario players may already be somewhat familiar with Crush's broader premise; that is, swinging between 2D and 3D perspectives as a means to complete a level. But unlike Mario, where players are restricted in how they flip their viewpoints, Crush challenges users to make use of both side-scrolling and top-down 2D angles. When combined with the game's multiple 3D views, Crush's uncomplicated goal of collecting marbles quickly morphs into an exciting challenge of mental fortitude.

The test is this: you must escape an Escher-like dream made up of blocks positioned at varying elevations and distances from each other. The only way to achieve this is to solve a riddle whose answer resides in multiple dimensions. Knowing how to properly position the camera so that you can "Crush" (the act of moving from 2D to 3D) at the right moment is what victory is all about. In addition to the camera's angle, the surface type on which you're standing determines what happens after each Crush. So, depending on your angle and material type, "crushing" can result in the creation of a platform-ladder that moves you closer to your goal, or it could activate a switch that opens up another doorway.

Don't worry; this process isn't as complicated as it sounds. While there are some gameplay subtleties that have to be mastered as players move on (understanding the many uses of boulders, switches, and transparent cubes for example), none of the mechanics are too overwhelming. That's Crush's greatest achievement, actually -- there's always something new to overcome, but they're introduced at an ideal pace and most have perfectly logical solutions... you just have to think "outside the box."

What other game out there puts you in scenarios where you have to climb three stories of varying directions and dimensions while avoiding giant cockroaches, electrified shock panels, and some of the longest gaps between earth and space that you'll ever see? There's nothing else like it.

Another one of Crush's strengths is how it motivates you to keep playing. While its addictive puzzles would certainly be enough for most, Zo¿ had enough foresight to include a pretty interesting storyline as well. So, as insomniac Danny, players must understand why their hero is plagued with sleepless nights. With the help of Dr. Reubens and his "Cognitive Regression Utilizing pSychiatric Heuristics" machine, Danny participates in a brand new type of regression therapy that allows him to traverse the blocks of his very mind. It's clever stuff.

As compelling as Crush is, it does run into a few issues that hold it back just a little. The 3D sections that require longer jumps between chasms, for instance, are bothersome because Danny's leaping mechanic isn't as precise or responsive as it should be. It's also sometimes difficult to see clearly in levels that have densely-packed blocks of varying heights, and some stages can actually take in upwards of an 30-40 minutes to complete (though there is a hint feature you can switch on if you're into cheating). There's a heavy bit of trial and error gameplay to overcome too -- a definite knock for players who like their progression a little more forward.

Then again, given what Crush brings to the table, the negatives are far outweighed by the positives.

Closing Comments

You know you've found a great puzzler when even the earliest levels in the game leave you feeling completely rewarded. Crush accomplishes this feat thanks to its 40 superbly-designed mazes, fantastic art style, and terrific original concept. There are even unlockables and trophy stages to mess around with to boot! Sure it isn't perfect, but what more do you need? It's a must-own.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII

2008-08-12T07:37:00.000-07:00

No matter what words I place here, truly devoted Final Fantasy VII fans will undoubtedly play Crisis Core, the prequel to the original RPG classic. The old PSone title not only heralded the franchise's transition from 2D sprites to 3D, but it has since garnered one of the most passionate followings of any RPG to date. So now that Crisis Core is due to arrive in stores next week, loyal fans may be pondering whether their inevitable purchase will be ultimately fruitful.

I'm pleased to say that Crisis Core is a great game and, barring a few minor issues here and there, will not disappoint.

So if you were planning on picking up a copy regardless of what I say, rest assured that you'll have a colossal amount of fun. But we have quite a bit of material to cover, so let's start with the basics. While the original Final Fantasy VII followed Cloud and company as they attempted to stop Sephiroth from undoing the very fabric of the world, Crisis Core puts a much different spin on the canon. For one, you'll only be playing as Zack Fair, Cloud's friend who only had fleeting appearances in the original game.

Perhaps more surprising (and admittedly for me, more enjoyable) is the fact that Crisis Core is far more subdued and plays out on a smaller scale than its predecessor. Unlike the grand majority of modern RPGs out there, Crisis Core isn't about saving the world or stopping the cataclysmic destruction of the universe. Rather, Crisis Core focuses quite intimately on Zack and his interactions with three principle characters: Angeal, Genesis and Sephiroth. While other characters come into play, including a few familiar faces, this small collection of SOLDIER operatives hold the majority of the spotlight.

Before I discuss the specifics of the game, let me take a moment to explain some of the more general points. Unlike the original, Crisis Core is an action RPG where battles take place in real-time. Your time is also spent traversing 3D environments with Shinra Headquarters acting as your central hub. On the story side of things, the game begins with Zack and his mentor, Angeal, being sent on a mission to subdue hostile forces in Wutai and investigate the disappearance of fellow SOLDIER Genesis. Things get much more complicated as you go, but let's leave it at that.

Unlike Dirge of Cerberus, a different member of the Final Fantasy VII compilation, Crisis Core feels very much in tune with the original game, not only thematically but physically as well. To clarify, Crisis Core has a similar tone and style to its predecessor, including the game's atmosphere, sense of humor and overall design. But also, a number of the locales in Crisis Core are actual 3D redesigns of the original environments in Final Fantasy VII. Any fan who remembers walking through the lobby of Shinra Headquarters will feel nostalgic when they see it so accurately re-created in Crisis Core.

But of course, most of the game will be spent fighting off a variety of monsters, soldiers and stylish bosses, so Crisis Core's combat engine is very important to the overall experience. Battles are activated at certain points on the map, and enemies will fade into view and fight you right where you stand. During this time, invisible boundaries are temporarily set up around Zack creating a makeshift arena for your confrontation. Once the enemies are dispatched, Zack stays his sword and continues on his way, with little interruption in terms of loading or transitions.

During battle, you can move Zack around with either the d-pad or the analog nub. The X button selects whatever action your cursor is on across the small menu at the bottom of your HUD (the L and R triggers are used to move this cursor back and forth). The square and triangle buttons command Zack to roll and block, respectively, while circle resets your command cursor back to the default Attack action.

This straight-forward system works very well and is reminiscent of Square Enix's other high-profile franchise, Kingdom Hearts. Your menu can be customized in terms of what magic you wish to have access to during battle. Equipping materia will enable certain commands to be selected, which I thought worked well for a real-time battle system. It requires a bit of planning and limits the amount of actions Zack can take, meaning players have to think about what to use and what to leave out.

The most unique aspect of Crisis Core's battle mechanics is the DMW, or Digital Mind Wave. This three-reeled slot system is constantly spinning and dictates a number of things: when you perform Limit Breaks, when you summon, when you level up and even when your materia is leveled up. All is decided through various match-ups of numbers and portraits which show up on the reels. This system definitely takes some time to get used to, but I thought it was fantastically implemented and made even the most mundane battles interesting.

The main story and subsequent gameplay is complimented by hundreds of side missions that can be accessed from any save point in the game. Each side mission only takes a few minutes to complete and usually involve Zack exploring a small segment of a larger map, finding treasure and fighting a "boss." As I've mentioned in previous coverage of the game, these side missions not only reward players with great items and materia for use in the main quest, but they're perfectly designed for game sessions on the go, which is (obviously) what the PSP is all about. It's great that there's always a way for you to boot up the game, play for a few minutes and then shut down, while still accomplishing something in the long run.

One thing that I didn't expect when coming into Crisis Core was the usage of cell phones and email. Phones were charmingly used in Final Fantasy VII and they keep popping up in the spin-offs, so they're clearly back in full force here. Throughout the game, Zack will continuously get emails from characters that he meets along the way. As far as I can tell, none of these need to be read to advance the plot forward, but they offer a startling level of immersion into the game's atmosphere. They're not only well written but deliver insight into certain key figures and flesh out the world around you. They make you feel like a member of SOLDIER.

Also, the amount of leveling you can do, both with Zack's stats and his materia via Materia Fusion, is absurdly impressive. Once again, dedicated players have the option of completely dominating in battle by using the system to their advantage. It's always great to see such potential in an RPG.

And how can I not comment on Crisis Core's presentation? As I've made clear in the past, the pre-rendered cutscenes are mind-shatteringly beautiful, looking as if they were pulled straight from Advent Children (some of them are, in fact). In-game cutscenes are also fantastic with detailed character models and finely crafted facial expressions again reminiscent of the style we've seen in Kingdom Hearts -- but more refined. Square Enix has yet again reaffirmed its position as a leading studio in computer-generated cinematics.

However, Crisis Core isn't devoid of problems. The camera can often be very frustrating when trying to explore confined areas. It can easily get stuck on walls and even when you're in an open space it'll slam up against invisible borders. After a while I managed to compensate for this issue and learned to work around it, but the camera is definitely stubborn.

As thankful as I am for the abundance of side missions, they can get extremely repetitive. If you're strongly motivated to collect materia, this repetition fades slightly because the reward will be higher for you, but gamers just interested in exploring and hoping for diversified battles will be disappointed. A good number of the missions even take place on the same map and just follow slightly different courses, and that can be tiring. Furthermore, a lot of the game's environments feel sparse or empty, which can be oddly striking when coupled with such detailed characters.

Also problematic is battle activation. As I noted above, battles begin when Zack moves into certain areas or hot spots, which is just fine when you're moving in a continuous direction. Unfortunately, you'll often glance to the side and see a treasure chest right after battle. Running just a few steps over and then coming back will often re-activate a nearby battle, which is aggravating if you're in a hurry.

During Crisis Core, there are also a number of segments that require Zack to perform certain tasks or mini-games. While these mix up the game's formula nicely, some of them are almost broken. I won't go into too detailed an explanation, but let's just say that the stealth mission Zack must embark upon is one of the poorest uses of "stealth" I've ever seen in a game. It's a shame that such poor segments were included in an otherwise great title, but luckily they don't take too much time to get through in the long run.

My final complaints are less serious but still notable. The load times for entering and exiting cutscenes can be a bit on the long side, but they're within a tolerable range. What I found truly puzzling was the player's inability to skip cutscenes. Even the long ones. You can pause at any time which is helpful if you're interrupted while playing, but there's no way to skip past something. This can be a particular annoyance when you die right after a long series of scenes and are forced to watch them over.

Lastly, I really enjoyed the story in Crisis Core, but some of the character's motivations can be questionable. Everything generally comes together by the end of the game but I often found myself at a loss for why certain characters were doing certain things. This won't bother everyone, but it's notable nonetheless.

Closing Comments

And that's that. Issues aside, Crisis Core is a great PSP game -- no question. It honors Final Fantasy VII's legacy. Even the game's music, while not composed by Nobuo Uematsu, is charming and fits the overall style of the world (though some of Uematsu's pieces do make a return and to absolutely stunning effect). I was sincerely moved by certain portions of the title and I suspect many others will feel the same. I wouldn't dream of spoiling anything for eager players, but I will say that Crisis Core's ending moments are a must see. I'd go so far as to call them brilliant.

The power and emotion of the game is heightened by the raw inevitability of Zack's fate, which is fully explored in the original. I really enjoyed my time with this title, despite the gameplay problems, and I think this is yet another fantastic reason to own a PSP. Enjoy it.

Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars

2008-08-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

Few videogame memories can live up to the time I kicked Adam Brown's teeth in at Crazy Taxi.

Y'know Adam, right? Great guy. Graduated from Purdue. Anyway, back in our high school days, Adam and I were in love with a little machine called the PlayStation 2. One evening, we were hanging out with some friends in my basement when he blew the dust off of Crazy Taxi and started talking trash about how awesome he was at the game. I hadn't played in months, but we popped it in to shut Adam up.

I beat this boy senseless. I was Crazy Dashing in ways this kid couldn't even comprehend and racking up Class S licenses like SEGA was giving 'em away. In the end, he dropped his controller and bowed his head in defeat.

Boo-yah.

SEGA is intent on creating memories similar to the Adam Brown Massacre with the release of Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars this week. The title takes the original game as well as its sequel and crams them onto one UMD featuring ad-hoc/single-system multiplayer, a plethora of mini-games, the ability to save replays, record storage and -- best of all -- customizable soundtracks.

If you somehow missed the glory days that were Crazy Taxi's arcade/Dreamcast/PS2 run, the game revolves around you recklessly piloting a cab, picking up fares, dropping them off as quickly as you can and repeating the whole process. The money you make from the trips -- there's a regular rate meter, but going up on two wheels, performing insane jumps and drifting around corners will earn you wallet-fattening tips -- will act as your score. If you're dropping folks off fast enough, you'll get time added to the constantly counting down clock. When the time is up, the number of passengers you served and your monetary haul equate to a license and rank. Compete for a specific amount of time or as long as you can keep time on the clock.

It sounds (and is) easy to get into, but once you get the hang of adjusting your air freshener and slamming into walls to facilitate turns, you'll start to master the tip-grabbing methods and your own personal route. See, fares range from close, easy jaunts (they'll be people with red icons) to long, difficult journeys (look for green icons). Making the most out of your remaining time means having to pick which is more important: some easy bucks or some additional time. Picking up a green fare with 12 seconds until game over might not be the best move.

Nothing new, right? Well, you're kind of right. Yes, Crazy Taxi and Crazy Taxi 2 are the same song and dance as before (San Francisco- and New York-inspired maps respectively mixed with some balloon-popping and long-jumping mini-games), but SEGA's also added multiplayer modes. If you have a buddy packing a PSP with Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars, you two can face off in three types of ad-hoc battles. Time Trial sees which player can score the most cash in two-, four- or six-minute runs; C-R-A-Z-Y has you face off in a modified game of H-O-R-S-E where one player completes a fare and the other player tries to beat that time; and Head To Head has two drivers compete on the same map at the same time for the best score.

Have a friend but only one PSP? You can pass the system back and forth while competing in Time Trials and C-R-A-Z-Y.

Of course, Crazy Taxi is a game that hinges on being able to control your cab, and the PSP is up to the task. It'll take you some time to get the hang of holding the system while using the right shoulder button to accelerate, X to shift to reverse and circle to shift to drive, but once you find a comfortable spot, it'll be easy enough to master the buttons and weave in and out of holes with the nub -- at least in the original. Crazy Taxi 2's steering has always been a bit too loose for me.

However, the biggest highlight in Crazy Taxi's PSP debut is the addition of customizable soundtracks. If you have songs on your memory stick, Fare Wars will read the tracks and -- after enabling the feature from the options menu -- play them in game. If you don't like the track you're running around the city to, you can tap the select button to go to the next one. Including this should be a no-brainer, but many PSP titles don't. Nice work, Sniper Studios.

Not so fast, though. Fare Wars is all the fun you remember, but it's also all the flaws. These are straight ports of the game, so anything you might have had an issue with in the previous titles will still be prevalent here. The colors are bright and the graphics look good as you pick up priests and deposit them at the baseball stadium, but textures are going to pop in as you reach ludicrous speed; braking is tough; and the gameplay tends to get repetitive.

Oh, and no more Offspring? Weak.

Closing Comments

Re-releases are never easy to review. Sure, a title might have been awesome when it was first released, but times change and game engines age. For a compilation to succeed, it needs to bring something new to the table that warrants a repurchase.

For my money, Crazy Taxi: Fare Ware does this. You're getting two solid games with brand new multiplayer content, the ability to save gameplay footage and a customizable soundtrack for $30. There are tons of games out there with larger price tags and smaller feature lists.

Crash Tag Team Racing

2008-08-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

The years since Crash Bandicoot first appeared way back in the early days of the original Playstation have seen a massive amount of sequels and spin-offs. Some of them sucked. This one doesn't. As a sort of spiritual successor to Crash Team Racing for the PSone, Crash Tag Team Racing manages to expand the scope of the combat kart racing genre. Unfortunately, it doesn't expand the depth of any of its game modes, just the variety. Think of CTTR as a gigantic mall that only has one floor of shops, and most of the shops are shoe stores.

If that mall simile didn't make any sense, then you're probably smarter than I am. Regardless, CTTR gives players access to eight controllable characters like Neo Cortex, Von Clutch, Coco, Pasadena, and N-Gin, and of course, Crash. Across the game's five worlds are a wide variety of game modes, mini games, missions, unlockable content, and collectibles. On each track players are able to select a from five game modes including Race, Crashinator, Rolling Thunder, Fast Lap, and Run and Gun. In addition, there are special tracks where players can participate in battle royal arena combat and a strange stunt mode. Though the breadth of options available is impressive, especially the expansive platforming elements, the game winds up feeling limited. If you're between the ages of eight to 12, however, you'll most likely love this title.

Rotating Gun Turrets Should Be in Every Game.

CTTR's big feature is called clashing. Any time during a race you can hit a button to enter a special mode where your car crackles with blue electricity. When you come close to an opponent, both of your karts, or actually cars in this game, merge together in a slow motion sequence to become one gigantic super car. With the super car you'll have access to cannons that can fire in any direction around you, including behind. Each character has specific turret weapons like shotguns and rocket launchers which can be switched between at will, and players can choose whether or not they want to control the turret or drive the car. While this is initially a cool feature, it soon becomes apparent that it dramatically affects the challenge of the single player mode.

On easier difficulty levels there's absolutely no reason to leave clash mode. All you'll need to do is clash at the very beginning of the race and then blow up everyone else. There's also no reason to ever drive a clashed car since the A.I. does a decent job of avoiding course pitfalls and keeping a good line though the tracks. It's way more effective to blow your opponents up than try to steer around them. On top of that, the clashed forms have can take more damage, it seems, than the regular cars, though they don't move as fast.

Another advantage of the clashed forms is that you'll get boost much more quickly than in regular form. Boost is gained from blowing opponents up, blowing environmental obstacles up, and slide turning. When you have a giant chaingun blasting away at five opponents crowded behind you, it becomes clear that the fastest way to boost is to control the clash turret. When your boost meter is full you'll get a temporary speed burst, and the frequency with which this happens takes away most of the speed disadvantage of the clashed form.

That's not to say it negates the entire speed disadvantage. On the hard difficulty level, which is where anyone looking for a challenge should be playing, you'll have to combine clash and regular forms to win a race. This is mainly because when you disengage a clash, which can be done at any time, you'll get a temporary speed boost. Essentially you'll be looking for the best way to balance clashing, blasting nearby foes, then unclashing and leapfrogging to the next opponent's car, where you'll clash again.

Race physics and proper racing line really take a backseat to all this destruction. You'll be able to slide turn in CTTR, but that's hardly the focus of the gameplay. Clashing decidedly overshadows everything else, essentially making the racing element a secondary feature. The game becomes more about how many cars you can blow up than how effectively you can slide around turns. The importance of attentive racing is even further diminished by some of the course obstacles, which can include things squishing you or blowing you up into the air and are at times unavoidable. In clash form, you're often able to blow these up with your turret for a boost bonus, so there's yet another reason to stay clashed for as long as possible.

One further advantage in the clash mode is the weapon pickups. If you're driving around by yourself you'll pick up explosive chickens and dynamite clutching monkeys, but in clash mode you'll get grand pianos, submarines, and cows, as well as homing dolphins. The pianos and submarines are even capable of taking out several enemies at once since their explosions persist for several seconds, forming a temporary barrier where the item is dropped.

The dependence on clashing to win races takes away from the depth that could have been present in the race mode. There are plenty of other modes for you indulge in if you get bored of racing, but none of them prove to be more than a cursory diversion. They'll have objectives like blowing up as many opponents as possible, nailing targets with turret shots, and getting fast times which can be fun for about five minutes, but wind up being just another way to get more power gems and coins than an entertaining game mode. For anyone interested, the Rings of Uranus course in Astro Land is a huge money maker since it's so short.

Plenty of Fluff.

While it's true many of the race modes prove to be shallow, the game offers plenty of diversions for curious players. There's an extensive platforming element in the game. Though each of the game's stages you'll be able to talk with NPCs, get side quests for extra cars and items, find power gems hidden in levels, activate secret switches, and battle ninja penguins. The game even goes so far as to include secret sequences where from the platforming area you'll be able to drop new shortcuts in to the level's courses.

Exploring the levels and searching for the wide variety of collectibles can be an entertaining diversion from the races, though it suffers from a camera that's too quick to react. You'll often find that viewing your precise position is a challenge and you'll be forced to take several leaps of faith, despite a decent layout for camera control. There are also a range of mini games you can play, such as an outlandish bowling game, a few target shooting games, and two games that resemble missile command. These are fun for a while, but you'll wind up using them as a money maker much like the extra racing modes.

The real appeal of this game is in its multiplayer, especially considering how short the single player campaign is (assuming you're not going for all the collectibles and quests). The game support wireless play for up to 8 players. If you know you're going to be the only one around while playing this game, it might be worth passing on even though there's some entertaining gameplay simply because it's kind of a pain to get a bunch of people together to keep it interesting. If you are able to regularly assemble a group of people, there's plenty to do in the multiplayer, including going into the battle or stunt arenas, or checking out the grand prix mode. In the process you'll be able to unlock more tracks to play on.

While the game's graphics are vibrant and colorful, they don't really pass into the realm of impressive. You'll find a high degree of detail in some of the level designs, like figures frozen in the ice of the Tyrannosaurus Wrecks level and plenty of extra moving parts in many of the tracks' layouts. Occasionally you'll find the game slows down during particularly combat heavy sequences, but generally the framerate remains stable. The character designs are appropriately cartoonish and well animated. It's all very good, just not great. The cut scenes where you'll be performing various actions like killing yourself or killing others are questionable, since they are much lower quality than the regular game graphics.

Sound in CTTR is much more forgettable than anything else. Some of the character voices are annoying, especially Pasadena. Many of the songs and sound effects are entirely forgettable, though occasionally you'll hear funny chirps from NPCs who you spin into and cause them to flip their ice cream cones onto their heads.

What keep CTTR from getting boring is the sense of humor that's squeezed into almost every aspect of the game. Most representative of this is the fact one of the collectables involves finding different ways to kill yourself. There are also completely pointless sequences you can initiate that kill NPCs. None of these get very violent. They're limited mostly to Crash getting squashed by pianos and pop machines or eaten by yetis. On top of that, players will find an entertaining sense of humor infused into character animations, level design, and story sequences.

Closing Comments

Crash has undergone many alterations throughout the long lifespan of Bandicoot-based products. This particular iteration happens to be pretty good, though admittedly not too deep. Although the game is able to provide players with a diverse array of gameplay modes and even some surprisingly heavy platforming elements, they all eventually wear thin. Even so, the game's cohesive sense of humor keeps the game entertaining. The single player is a short experience if you run right through it, but can definitely stretch if you¿re obsessed with grabbing all the collectibles. There are also faster race modes to be unlocked for dedicated players. To get the most out of this game, you¿ll definitely want to bring a few friends over. The emphasis on combat in this title can make for some intense face to face competition, and the stunt mode is an interesting distraction. It's worth a purchase if you¿re seriously craving some cartoony vehicle combat or a game with a good sense of humor, or are just looking for unique title that effectively blends several genres into one.

Crash of the Titans

2008-08-12T07:28:00.000-07:00

Oh Crash Bandicoot, you were never popular enough to hang around with the cool kids like Mario and Sonic, and yet you've still avoided that depressing mascot retirement home where the likes of Aero the Acrobat and Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel reside (look them up if you have no idea who I'm talking about). However, as spotty as some of Crash's adventures have been in the past, there is still something likeable about the slightly deranged marsupial. Maybe it's because he looks like he stuck his finger in an electrical socket while biting into a lemon. Yeah, that might be it.

Ported by SuperVillian Studios (who still have one of the coolest logos in the industry -- you can't lose with a monkey riding a bomb), the PSP version of Crash of the Titans is pretty faithful to the console versions. In fact, since the game is very similar to the PS2 version, you might want to give that review a gander if you want a more detailed overview of the main game. But if you just want the quick version, the main feature of this platformer is the ability to "jack" large enemy monsters and make them do your bidding. Each of the fifteen monsters has their own special attacks, although the vast majority of the critters act the same. Add in a heavy dash of repetition, a largely stationary camera that hides enemies off-screen, and a spotty combat system, and you have a game that has "fun weekend rental for the kiddies" stamped on the cover (probably somewhere above the ESRB rating).

Nevertheless, let's talk about the PSP version shall we? SuperVillian Studios did a pretty impressive job with the graphics: the game has the same cartoony/storybook look of the PS2 game and is quite sharp overall. Although the characters are not as detailed or well-animated as their home console brethrens, they still look good. There can be quite a bit of pop-in going on in the background, and the framerate takes a hit whenever there are either multiple enemies on the screen (which is often) or during the cutscenes. It doesn't make the game unplayable mind you, but it's definitely noticeably. Finally, depending on which PSP you own, loading screens might be an issue: the older PSP takes twenty or more seconds to load an area, while the Slim is under ten seconds -- just something to keep in mind.

Handheld ports are sometimes given an unfair shake because it's much easier to point out what's missing rather than applaud what actually stayed in the game. So let me reiterate that the PSP version is very close to the console one. With that said, there are still some rather odd things missing from the PSP version that do affect gameplay. For one, Crash has no shadow. Now, I'm not asking for some ultra detailed, more-real-than-real-life shadow, but a little black circle under the character would be a large improvement over nothing. Many of the jumps are made much more difficult because there's no shadow to line up on the floating platforms. C'mon guys, Crash isn't a vampire after all (never mind the fact that vampires lack reflections and not shadows ... but you get the point).

But that's not all. The PSP version also lacks a lot of sound effects where there really should be sound effects. It's quite odd to see a monster unleash a special attack without any sound at all (on the plus side, many of the funny enemy quips from the console games made the cut). And speaking of monsters, punching a bad guy isn't quite as satisfying as it should be; combat can be pretty floaty and sometimes you won't know when you're actually hitting something.

Nevertheless, these changes are still pretty minor. The one major omission is that the unique (and more importantly, fun) co-op mode of the console versions has been taken out completely. This co-op mode added some spice to a pretty straightforward and ordinary game, so its absence is very noticeable. Instead, the developers try to make up for it by adding five exclusive multiplayer mini-games to the PSP version. Now let's get this out of the way in a blunt fashion that won't waste your time: these mini-games suck. Here's an overview of them:

Jack-a-Mole: Moles pop out and you punch them in the face.
Crate Crash: Pretty much the same as Jack-a-Mole ... only with crates.
Crash Corral: Jack monsters and lead them back to your corral pad.
Titan Takedown: Jack a monster and ride him around longer than your opponent.
Barrel Defender: Protect your barrels. Attack their barrels.

These games are about as fun as they sound ... which isn't fun at all. In fact, each game is fundamentally broken in some painful way. For one, all of the maps are too large unless you have four players (good luck trying to find three friends with three PSPs and three copies of this game), the objectives hinge on arbitrary and unfair item spawns (Hey look! Those three crates spawned right next to Player 2 and there's nothing Player 1 can do about it because he's miles away! Fun!), and you get a choice of either trying to accomplish the goal or attacking the other player -- attempting to do both will lead to you losing. When you get down to it, it's really just a tacked-on mode to add to the PSP's feature list on the back of the box. We also experienced connection problems, and the game annoyingly boots a player off of the connection when a game ends. This makes an irritating experience even more irritating.

Closing Comments

Crash of the Titans for PSP is a decent port of a briefly entertaining game. But even then, the PSP version loses out to the consoles in a number of areas; especially when it comes to multiplayer. Considering that the PS2 version retails for the same price as the PSP one, I would recommend that you just go straight to the home console game if you have to play a new Crash.

Crash Bandicoot

2008-08-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

In the cutthroat videogame wars of the 1990s, a mascot seemed essential to a company's survival. After all, Nintendo and SEGA built empires around the smiling faces of Mario and Sonic, so it was only natural that the rookies at Sony got a spokesman too. Luckily, the guys at Naughty Dog gave the fledgling PlayStation exactly what it wanted in Crash Bandicoot -- a smarmy, platforming marsupial that set out to stop the evil Dr. Neo Cortex. The resulting game enjoyed unbelievable success and a profusion of copies were sold, sequels were made, and critics ate them up like candy. Naughty Dog had created a sensation.

Ten years later the Crash phenomenon has died down, but it's quite a testament that the original game still holds up fairly well. An obvious star of the first-run downloadable "PS One Classics," the first Crash Bandicoot has made its transition from old-school console to new-fangled PSP with few hitches. And why wouldn't it? Don't forget, the original project was designed around a controller that didn't have any analog sticks, and the trend of creating a huge open environment hadn't taken off yet. It's with that in mind that we get a Crash title identical to what appeared all the way back in 1996, and that means we get some fun right along with it.

To be fair, Crash Senior can't compete with today's bigger and more ambitious platformers in terms of size and scope. The world's dimensions are comparatively small when measured against modern competitors, and it's also an entirely-linear experience. Even with those limitations, however, Naughty Dog has created a solid "pick up and play" mix of side-scrolling and top-down stages. Sure, the gameplay never really evolves beyond the traditional "jump and bump" mentality of yesteryear, but the design that supplements this philosophy is first-rate. The developers did a great job of varying the camera angles and goals that Crash has to face throughout his adventure, and being able to use spin attacks, earn invincibility power-ups, and jump into multiple bonus stage types is just icing on the cake.

Another one of Crash's strengths is that there's a ton of stuff to find. Secret levels, hidden gems, an alternate ending, and a number of unseen crates within each stage populate the landscapes of N. Sanity Island. What's more, the boss battles are typically challenging and the environments and objectives change with regularity (you'll jump-climb a huge mountain, run into the screen to avoid a rolling boulder, and plenty more). Granted, hopping and bopping may take up most of your gameplay actions, but at least it's entertaining.

Ironically, if Crash Bandicoot has one glaring flaw when played for today's fans, it's the very simplicity that makes it interesting. Indeed, it's the age-old case of a double-edged sword. More specifically, twitch gamers will likely gravitate to the game's need for fast reflexes and precision jumps (which can be frustrating if you don't re-map the controls to the analog stick), but fans of platformers like Super Mario Bros. aren't going to like the complete lack of puzzles. Crash is all about avoiding things and pushing forward -- nothing more, and sometimes it does come across as repetitive and shallow.

Closing Comments

Even with ten year-old graphics and game design, Crash Bandicoot is still worth a download (especially at six bucks). It doesn't have the originality or puzzle-solving that most of today's platformers do, but with a nice lineup of extras and more than 30 levels, impulsive gamers with a hint of nostalgia could do a lot worse than this.

Cool Boarders

2008-08-12T07:23:00.000-07:00

In December of 1996, PlayStation owners hit the slopes with the Cool Boarders, Sony Computer Entertainment's take on the popular sport. The title spawned four separate sequels and let players carve their way down numerous mountain slopes. Now, PSP owners can grab some powder with its release on the PlayStation Store.

The focus of Cool Boarders isn't about freestyle boarding, mogul racing or terrain park skills. Instead, Cool Boarders focuses on downhill boarding on various mountains. However, you won't have to challenge fellow racers as you charge down the hill; instead, time is your only opponent as you sprint down one of the three initially available slopes. As you attempt to cross the finish line before time runs out, you'll be graded on two separate criteria - how quickly you finish the race and the points you receive for pulling off tricks on the hill. Depending on how well you perform under these two criteria, you unlock new boards or courses. Plus, if you're looking to improve on your races, you can use the built in Ghost Mode to replay your previous trip down the mountain and give you some virtual competition.

Having a sense of how well you're doing can be particularly difficult. Obviously, as long as you manage to make checkpoints before time runs out, you're in the clear. However, regardless of how long you hold one of the limited tricks included in the game, such as a Tail or Indy Grab, the announcer constantly complains that you can do much better. This can be extremely frustrating, especially if you start pulling these tricks Fakie-wise or land all of your moves.

Of course, successfully managing to navigate the various courses or remain upright is an extremely difficult task thanks to the limited and questionable control scheme. Players only have the option to jump or perform a hard turn to carve their way down the mountain. However, the turn move is way too imprecise - players can accidentally perform full circles that eliminate all forward momentum as they attempt to switch directions. The carving rarely works to prevent you from tumbling over cliffs along each race course as well, because your control over your board is quite imprecise. Even though each board is rated in one of three categories, the stability and control of each board is ineffective with the numerous hairpin curves and sharp turns that you have to maneuver through. As a result, you'll find yourself pinballing your way down some mountain courses instead of cleanly navigating tracks.

Even worse, time has not been particularly kind to Cool Boarders when it comes to the visual department. The original graphics were somewhat harsh, with stiff tumble animations and bland texturing for rocks and other environmental objects. While players could forgive some of these issues at the time thanks to the standard def television screens, the much sharper PSP screens highlight a lot of the game's flaws, such as the numerous black texture seams and rips that run rampant across every single course. The angle of the camera behind your racers can also make it extremely difficult to see when you're coming up on a cliff or a turn, so you'll find that you'll wipeout much more frequently than you expected.

Closing Comments

The courses may have been slick at one point, and the introduction of snowboarding on the PlayStation was impressive 11 years ago, but time has not been great to Cool Boarders. Weak controls, a lack of competition or multiplayer options and rough visuals are just some of the problems that complicate this downloadable ¿classic.¿ If you¿ve got a taste for nostalgia, you may want to check this game out, but if you¿ve got to have snowboarding for your PSP, track down SSX On Tour.

The Con

2008-08-12T07:21:00.000-07:00

Before you drop down and check out the low-blow score on this game, know this: The Con is the kind of fighting game that I'd like to see a hell of a lot more of. It's technical fighting, fists and boots. It's about working the body and socking the head when it sticks out. Stick and move, duck and lean. Sure, it's got super-moves and body-snapping throws, but the fundamentals are very different from the Street Fighters and Tekkens that define the fighting genre. The PSP allows for a unified first-person view of the fight, in single-player and multiplayer, and that allows you to fight the way real fights go down. You're not just button-mashing the quick-hit button for cheap hits or turtle'ing until your opponent throws in a move that'd be impossible to get into a duck-block fast enough. Punches and kicks land where they go on that weaving and ducking body because you put them there.

Unfortunately, you'll spend more time fighting the controls than fighting your opponent...

For everything that The Con does right (and that's not even to mention the cool betting and RPG aspects that make this game "The Con"), it doesn't get the fundamentals right, and it'd be hard as heck for either fight fans or new bloods to get into the game because of that. It's a fighting game that's full of the worst aspects other 3D fighting games have occasionally suffered from, starting with the slow response and chunky canned combos of an animation system that's not fluid and adaptive all the way to the infuriating inability to react well when the opponent somehow lands up behind you. If you try it and like it, much power to you -- I came close to appreciating it here and there as I fought through the ranks -- but recommending you put your money down on this game the way that it plays is something I can't do even for the hardcore.

Rather than bash it outright and complain about what went wrong (it's pretty simple what went wrong -- this is a first-gen fighter on a new play concept that plays rigidly and without the motion fluidity that allows instant access to your reflexes), I'll dial in on what the game does right in hopes that a sequel or new effort is spawned from it. First off, it's a fighting game that's based on 3D boxing rather than 2D slap-fighting. As good as Tekken and SoulCalibur and even Virtua Fighter are, they're limited by their perspective -- at best, they feel like incredibly complex side-scrollers, and at worse, 3D kludges of what should have been done 2D. Publisher SCEA's Santa Monica studio picked Japanese game maker Think & Feel to work with in developing The Con for its experience in making the Victorious Boxers series. The result is that The Con is essentially a more complex version of a boxing game -- you have your left and right blows, your body and face hits, only now with kicks thrown into the mix. It's not something that every fighting game should try -- no need for VF or SC to fix what ain't broke, especially since The Con itself is broken by its attempt -- but it's a promising new way to pick a fight.

What this gives you is control over attack placement and direction. You've got left and right attack buttons, both left and high (playing on the four face buttons) for landing attacks. It will depend on which of the five fighting styles you use (Street Boxing, Wrestling, Jeet Kune Do, Kickboxing or Tae Twon Do) whether you'll punch or kick when you hit the button, something that UFC fight followers may be frustrated by but still gives you control over a variety of moves without button combos or tap/dial specials. Here, you also have full control over your body, using either the analog controller or the D-Pad, so you are actually controlling not only the blocking (which is simply handled with the R Trigger), but also dodging and swaying left and right. From the start of the bout, you'll see your opponent realistically leaning and hunching in anticipation of your opening move. The left-and-right sways allow you to avoid attacks, but they also put you in position for your own blows -- if an opponent is moving to the right, you can sway his way and bring up your right fist to clock him in the ear when he thinks he's in a defensive position.

That's the good stuff, the stuff to build on some other time in some other game. The bad stuff is that it's not responsive despite the simpler and more direct control. Combos are all dial-in attacks, and while you can build sets of your own combos to try and put together adaptive strings (say two left hooks and a big right body blow, followed up by a driving knee), the responsiveness isn't there for the game to react when you make a move. It mostly discourages button mashing, but that's only because the moves are so slow -- there are moves that take timing (such as the parries and extra emphasis shots on throws), but you're not penalized for button-mashing to hit the timing rather than nailing the exact points of impact. Too many attacks are slow to respond when you hit the button, and the timing on combination strikes is often too slow for it to work. Also, while the viewing angle is a keen new way to fight, you have almost no control over your feet, so it feels like a glitzed-up Mike Tyson's Punch-Out rather than a real brawl in the street ring.

The Con tries to get past its weak fighting engine with its betting angle. A whole controller button is set aside just for "conning" fight watchers, so you can fake attacks or suck up opponent strikes with acted-out pain. The trick is to put up a good fight -- or at least what looks like a good fight -- without the crowd catching your fakery. In theory, it's a brilliant addition, as you can bet on your opponent and make bank by pretending to lose a fight you could have stolen, or by rope-a-doping everybody involved by suckering in bets before the timer rolls out and wagers are locked in. Each bout is of the three members of your team (who are matched up with opponents at random), so you have a good deal of play to work with if you want to throw some matches but still progress through the ranks. In the game, it's a little less exciting than it seems. Because your opponent doesn't play for his own wages, you don't see the opposite effect in their tactics. You know when you can blow a guy down, or when you're in trouble and need to fight hard just to make the crowd believe you didn't take a dive and honestly got your ass kicked. There are no surprises, and after a while, it's much easier to just put it all on yourself so you can keep progressing through the game -- you're likely to win just as much money by winning as by faking a loss, so might as well win. Multiplayer doesn't have a "Con" mode (which probably wouldn't have made sense anyway), so you see less and less of this cool feature as it goes on. There is some play in placing a timer on when the bets roll in, and you can make big bucks by "making a fight look believable," but at that point, you're really just toying with your opponent, and you might not find that as much fun as just fighting.

The robust character creation feature also fails to give The Con more fighting spirit. There's a ton you can tweak here, from the body shape of your male or female fighter to the clothes they wear to the combo moves they toss out. It's a respectable character creation feature, and it makes sense in the game's design, because The Con is all about fighting nobodies that are just made up. Your created character may be your own, but most everybody else is literally generic -- except for a number of bosses, the game mostly plays through rounds and rounds of fighting characters that appear randomly generated by the character creator, given a name by the developers but nothing else special to distinguish them. You'll be playing through possibly hundreds of bouts to get to the top (even without leveling up, it'll take at least 5-10 matches to gain enough respect to face the boss of each of the game's five rankings), and they're all the same throughout. Each of the five fighting styles has its own set of intro poses and moves, and the men and women have the same voices throughout, so it feels like you're fighting the same person with a facelift several times over. You can custom-design your combo attacks, but you can't pick exactly what attacks your character uses -- you can't make a kick-heavy kickboxer and a box-style kickboxer. I liked that you can either train or rest your fighter for each of the weeks leading up to your scheduled fight, but this RPG aspect of character building was one-sided in that, unless you were in great pain, you could simply train away and not have to worry about fatigue. There's also a really strange aspect to the outfitting aspect of the game -- because some clothes and hairstyles and accessories have special powers (brass knuckles will improve your power, for example, while a necklace charm may give you more health), it negates the fun of dressing your characters up as you want to. It's better to dress them up in the power-outfits rather than have them look pretty but play weak.

You're not missing a whole lot about The Con as a demonstration of the PSP's capabilities if you skip out on it -- the graphics and audio aren't anything to write home about, and the loadtimes can be as painful as a punch in the gut. There are a couple of cool ring settings (including a fight set in a Hollywood prop house), but you get a better view of the stage from the repeating stage fly-by while loading than you ever see in the fight. (And by the by, how come it only takes a second to load the stage, but to put fighters in can take up to 30 seconds?) The effects used in bringing the stages to life are simple and ineffective, with garbage cans filled with orangish-yellow instead of fire and subways set away from the train tracks. There's also not any interaction with the background, and you don't get a lot of benefit to cornering an opponent. Characters are generic throughout, and the bosses aren't special enough to stand out. I liked the game's music -- by Trevor Gray and Gez Dewar -- but the tunes often sound directly ripped from the record stacks of Fat Jon from Adult Swim fame (in fact, one ambling beat has the exact same beeping emphasis as a tune on the Samurai Champloo soundtrack.) Character voices are non-existent except for the occasional cutscene for bosses. And multiplayer is only as good as the two single players like the fighting mechanics. There is praise due, however, for the inclusion of Game Sharing. Loading on Game Sharing (which includes quick sharing of the applet plus some data transfer before you fight) is mostly quick and painless. You're limited to who you can fight as -- in fact, before you begin, you have to choose only one fighting style to play for both fighters, and each will be the same generic character -- but it's a decent extra to play around with if everybody you know avoided this fighter.

Closing Comments

The Con doesn't put up enough of a fight to earn a spot in most gamers' collections. For casual brawl watchers, its rigid fighting system is just clunky and not fun, and despite the addition of RPG elements and betting, the gameplay isn't enjoyable. Hardcore fighting fans should get a heck of a lot more out of The Con, but whatever it stick right gets blocked by what it does wrong. The cool ducking and weaving mechanism is undone when the wrong move comes out of the simplistic controls and combo chain, or when players charge in and get behind each other as the camera and characters try to right themselves to play again. The precise combo system is still more dial-a-hit than a real combo system, while more basic moves are too slow and undependable to swing when you react to an opening. If you're looking for a different kind of fighting game from what's out there and are into a more technical approach to fighting, something inspired more by the Ultimate Fighting Championship or PRIDE than by kung fu flicks, then The Con might be worth a try. For most, though, it's no contender.

Coded Arms Contagion

2008-08-12T07:19:00.000-07:00

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah Coded Arms Contagion. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Sigh.

No, you haven't stumbled upon an IGN copy editing mistake, I just couldn't think up a better way to introduce a game as mundane, as vanilla, as run-of-the-mill as Coded Arms Contagion from Konami. It's not a bad game or a broken game, but it is a completely sterile first-person shooter.

You'll play through 13 levels as Maj. Jacob Grant, a special agent trained in killing and computer hacking. Grant gets involved with an elite force set to test A.I.D.A., a government combat simulation program that has gobs of top secret data in it. Grant puts on a funny little headset and gets kicked into the virtual world of A.I.D.A.

So, yeah, it's The Matrix with a military spin.

Once Grant's in the Matr … er … A.I.D.A., his training exercise quickly deteriorates into a rescue mission that has him shooting constantly spawning bad guys, hacking computers and upgrading weapons.

All that sounds fun, and you can see where it could be. The controls are -- for the most part -- responsive. The face buttons change your POV, the nub moves Grant around the levels and the d-pad locks on, switches weapons and reloads. It's pretty much the same setup every FPS has on the PSP, and it makes for a solid enough experience. As I popped into new areas in A.I.D.A., I had no trouble locking on to the machine gun-packing bad guys, pumping them full of virtual lead and watching their bodies disappear in a cloud of green 0s and 1s.

My problem was when this process began to repeat level after extremely boring level.

All this title is running into different areas and blasting these bad guys. After a few rounds of generic, darkly dressed guards, pink crabs show up. Then, some blue crabs show up followed by guards in a redder look.

Perhaps the same ol' enemies wouldn't be such a bore if I wasn't running through the same ol' objectives. You enter an area, kill the enemies in front of you and hack a turret or a door to get to the next area and do the same thing again. Now, hacking a turret to turn it against its masters sounds nice, but there's no fun to it -- "hacking" consists of staring at two lines of numbers and picking the number that appears in both. Sometimes there will be up to three separate "hacks" to go through, but they all come down staring and having the basic ability to see pairs. Although this game and Die Hard with a Vengeance would lead you to believe differently, hacking is not this easy.

The game tries to give you a reason to keep playing via Plugins -- weapons that you find in the levels and can then upgrade to make more powerful -- but it doesn't work. Coded Arms is very particular about when it'll let the next level of power be made available to your firearms, so expect to be ready for more bullets long before the title will give you the option of actually adding them.

So, your objectives suck (search the area), the enemies suck (lock-on and move to avoid getting hit while you fire away), the story's practically nonexistent (you're in A.I.D.A. to train for something somewhere and people are trying to steal the data inside A.I.D.A. that refers to stuff), and the upgrade system is no fun (not yet … not yet …). Is this one of those games where the multiplayer functionality saves the ho-hum single-player romp?

Nah.

Don't get me wrong, it tries. Coded Arms Contagion packs an ad-hoc mode and -- saints alive -- an infrastructure system. Both are ready to go for up to eight players and let you have at it on five maps with more than ten weapons (nova generators, lightning guns, etc.), but the gameplay just isn't there.

For starters, your single-player adventure is built around locking onto a foe. When you run into a pack of enemies you lock on to them one at a time and lay down your fire. When you get up to the mini-boss, tank-like guy, you lock on and circle him while using cover to avoid his mega-damage inflicting gun. However, when you jump into your first online game, you'll be alarmed to find that down on the d-pad does nothing.

Lock on is gone. Your go-to-control has been neutered in multiplayer.

Everyone else will be panicking just like you, and the switch will make for some lame firefights. The tiny crosshairs are hard to move quickly on your own, so brawls come down to folks running straight at you while unleashing their machine gun and hoping you stay in the center of their crosshairs or attackers running from side to side while spraying an array of projectiles in hopes of clipping you without opening themselves to attacks. Sounds like fun, eh?

Worse, the multiplayer levels seem even emptier than their single-player counterparts. I participated in a few rounds of team deathmatch this afternoon in The Pit -- a cotton candy-colored world of walkways and big, open areas -- and found myself severely underwhelmed. It was literally three other guys and myself spawning on the top floor, jumping to the ground floor and firing wildly at each other. Someone would die, and the whole process would start over.

Yay!

Closing Comments

I realize this was a harsh read, so I need to say -- again -- that Coded Arms Contagion isn't bad, it's just wholly uninspired. You'll never feel connected to the major (Does he die when he dies in A.I.D.A.?), the enemies (Are these real people or AI like Agent Smith?) or the game (Why am I playing this?). Games are supposed to layout the framework of a story and have you play to fill in the gaps, but Coded Arms unleashes you in a half-baked, story-less world and assumes you'll be happy going room-to-room shooting a bunch of bad guys as they appear for no real reason.

Coded Arms

2008-08-12T07:16:00.000-07:00

First-person shooters are pennies per pound on consoles and PC, but the PSP is a brand new shop to stock that has allowed the developers of Coded Arms to be bold. Konami isn't known for its first-person shooters, aside from some European games with the company's name on the boxes as the distributor. Japanese game makers in general rarely take on the FPS genre -- even Namco's Breakdown on Xbox concentrates more on melee attacks than actual shooting. So it was interesting to see Konami take this partcular step forward. Here, the development had to set a mark for what a PSP FPS must offer in terms of visuals and gameplay. At the same time, the team aimed to put its own distinct stamp on the genre. Adding an aim-assist lock and a random level system might have been controversial on other systems; here, the PSP is a fresh canvas to experiment.

The best aspects of Coded Arms are its original ideas and risky style choices, stacked on top of decent FPS control (which makes do with the PSP's single-stick analog control about as best as possible, giving gamers lots of options to tweak it their way.) Its worst aspects are that the game doesn't have enough of that imagination implemented in this first-generation title. It's a fun and heated shooting experience, but not necessarily an awesome one. Coded Arms gets dry in some spots, enough that its gorgeous graphic style can't liven up the party.

The story takes place in a sci-fi setting, deep inside an overloaded network come to life. Following in the footsteps of movies like The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell, the character you control "jacks" into a cyber universe. You're something of a treasure hunter, seeking out government files that yield huge cash rewards. The only problem is that the program you're "hacking" into is a dangerous military training program named A.I.D.A. It was abandoned years ago, but wasn't quite erased or terminated. It continued to evolve in the cyber world, picking up new information through Earth's networks. Now, A.I.D.A. is a hacker's dream scene that has spawned dozens of security "programs", various bugs and anti-infiltration robots that are programmed to kill any trespasser who's crazy enough to come seeking the files A.I.D.A. has amassed.

This game is all about the aesthetic of the digital age. All the menus and scrolling numbers of code that fly across the screen are constantly reminding players that they're in a computer world. It's stylish, and all the graphical detail holds up. Coded Arms' constant barrage of graphic effects makes for one of the better looking games on the PSP system. On some of the rails that ran along the patios of the virtual buildings that dot the game's city level, you can see wet tee shirts left out to dry. It's a great detail that helps illustrate the urban landscape. When you go through a door, there's a cool digital lighting effect that dissolves in front of you to make it seem like the program is loading the next section into existence. The game's sense of place, even if that place is entirely virtual, bears the mark of its Japanese development roots, and the imagination this team has put into Coded Arms really shines through.

There are cool moments here worth playing for. In the Ruins, there are enemies called stinkbombs that spray toxic gas in into the air that hurt you if you're too close. They're more like obstacles than proactive killers. You can ignore them, but you risk running into them if you're suddenly overwhelmed by the other enemies that chase you all over the place. So a little bit of strategy comes into play, choosing between the spray-and-run approach of hitting the really dangerous enemies or else the tactical approach of eliminating the stinkbombs one by one to give yourself a better fighting chance against the bigger enemies. Sometimes a room is filled with both static stinkbombs and mobile enemies, and things get pretty interesting because you have to manage the different kinds of threats in the best possible way. Sniper rifles also give the game moments of tension, and since this is a game that's often overpowering you with multitudes of enemies, tagging baddies from afar is a welcome release of pent-up pressure.

Being the first FPS on PSP, the controls take a little getting used to. The face buttons control which way your character looks, while the analog nub controls where he walks. If the default setting aren't to your liking, you can map the controls out to whatever works best for you (including the much-requested swap of controls to use the analog controller for aiming, although the button layout doesn't let you "steer and run" on the analog stick the way some single-stick shooters like the N64 Turok games did.) If your character looks around too slow, you can speed up the axis movement. You can even tighten the auto-lock aiming assist to suit your trigger-happy needs.

The first run of the initial sectors isn't that difficult to get through. At this point, the challenges aren't that rough, so the frustrations with the controls aren't exposed yet. But once things step up to sector 2, things get a little more hairy. When confronting six or eight enemies, it was tough getting an accurate shot off from far away, even with the targeting assist. It also didn't help that there was some heavy slowdown in the gameplay with upwards of six enemies battling on the screen. It doesn't ruin the experience, but it sucked when I was running from a frag grenade that was just thrown at me and everything started crawling in slow-motion because of the overwhelming action on-screen.

If things get too tough and you want to quit back to the menu or blow off steam in multiplayer, be sure to manually save! Coded Arms unfortunately does not have an auto-save feature (something that probably should be a standard on PSP games), and while the stat screen at the end of each sector reads out data as if it's on your permanent record, it only saves to Memory Stick when you choose the save option. Although it's only a minor snag in the game (you'll learn quick if you make the mistake once), you'll want to be sure you don't "jack out" after playing for hours and passing a number of sectors without saving -- it's easy to miss on the menu, and it hurts bad if you lose your progress.

The graphic style and atmosphere in Coded Arms makes for an experience of being in the thick of this digital world, but I would have enjoyed it more if their was more of a story to sink my teeth into. It was tough at times to feel motivated and keep going because there was very little driving me to play. The experience meant simply going from room to room, clearing out the enemies, and moving on. Mindless violence is fun, but more character and drama would have made it better.

The game doesn't throw that many surprises at you. If the upcoming Ghost in the Shell game for PSP is the story- and character-based Half-Life type of handheld shooter, Coded Arms is much more of the pure firepower DOOM shooter breed. There was almost little variety in the shoot-or-be-shot formula. There's also little in the way of character development in the game. Coded Arms does have the evolving element of upgradeable weapons and gear to wear, but that's about it. There's not a lot to look forward to as you press on through the game, outside of the pretty environments. There is a nice variety of enemies to shoot, but the way they attack you doesn't change that much. No flanking or retreating, just forward attacks and sniping shots. Some leap toward you, while others just stand and shoot. Put enough of these creatures together in a room, however, and you do feel the heat. Especially when you have both airborne and floor-bound enemies swarming you, while gunmen stand back taking potshots, you will need your trigger finger skills to make it out of most encounters alive.

While the random level generator feature is novel, Coded Arms could have benefited from less reliance on that feature. The outdoor elements here shown in the concept demo two E3s ago (when the game was originally designed for PS2) had outdoor elements, and I really wish they were still in the game. Instead, we get lots and lots of square rooms and corridors that are disorienting even in levels that are permanently laid out. For the most part you're traveling from point A to B, with little variety or exploration in between. There's so much style in the game concept, it's disappointing that this same effort hasn't been put into making equally memorable stages.

The saving grace for me with Coded Arms is the multiplayer aspect. It supports up to 4 players over Ad hoc Wi-Fi. This mode is simply fun to compete with, especially because you have your own screen to battle on. There are three types of Game modes: Deathmatch, Keep the Mark, and Last Man Standing. The Deathmatch works well even though it's relatively simple. Part of this had to do with the fact that I knew I was shooting actual people. I'm was talking trash, building up resentment, and making enemies. Guess what - there's drama in that! After overdosing on nuking bugs and gunmen in single player, the multiplayer mode was a fresh blast. It's drama and it's engaging. I was motivated to keep playing because I wanted to devastate the competition. The fact that the environments remained square and nondescript seemed to evaporate, and the randomness here finally did its job of providing variety -- all I wanted to do was blow-up my rival with the napalm gun. The power-ups and ability to bring in your own collected weapon arsenal add to the fun. It doesn't have the bells and whistles of many FPS multiplayer games these days, but it looked good and its raw energy did me good for a small-screen shoot-out.

Closing Comments

Konami did a great job making their first-person shooter look great. I can't stress this enough – I love this game's sense of style. On the gameplay side, there are over 30 weapons in this game, once you consider all the upgrades. Everything from assault rifles, sniper rifles, pulse weapons and rocket launchers show up and they're cool killing tools. It's just that the square level geometry gets monotonous. I didn't mind it so much in multiplayer, but it's bland in single player. I believe there is still a lot that can be done here if Konami makes a franchise out of Coded Arms. As the first FPS games on PSP, this is a good starting point.

Code Lyoko: Quest for Infinity

2008-08-12T07:12:00.000-07:00

If you're not the world's biggest Code Lyoko fan, allow me to catch you up on the basics. Code Lyoko is an animated television series that debuted several years ago in France. Having been translated into multiple languages and scattered around the world, the Code Lyoko franchise has had a reasonable impact on the US market. This is clear when noting the multiple Code Lyoko games released for US platforms. One of those games is Code Lyoko: Quest for Infinity, an action platformer for the Wii, PS2 and PSP. And although you're supposed to be questing for Infinity, you might end up questing to stay awake.

Code Lyoko has a Matrix-like premise that should be fairly easy to grasp for sci-fi nuts. A group of high school students attending a boarding school in France stumble upon an abandoned factory near the school. Inside the factory, a powerful supercomputer idly waits, holding within it a virtual world plagued by a sentient virus: X.A.N.A. The friends soon begin traveling to this world, called Lyoko, hoping to save it from the virus's clutches and preventing X.A.N.A. from taking over the world.

Quest for Infinity, as far as I can tell, seems to take place during or around the fourth season of the television series. This means people unfamiliar with the show will be completely lost and will miss out on a lot of minor character details, though the more important aspects of the plot can be gleaned from basic guess work. The overall goal of the game is to stop X.A.N.A. and its evil schemes, so that's really all you need to know.

The gameplay in Quest for Infinity is extremely standard and offers very little excitement. After jumping into a level from the main hub (a point-and-click sort of interface on the school grounds), you lead one of the four Lyoko-bound teens through a series of virtual environments, jumping chasms and killing baddies along the way. You can switch characters at any time during the game, though your team shares gauges for health and energy. The purpose of switching is to make use of each character's unique weapon as well as take advantage of his or her character-specific skills. For example, Odd (that's his name) can use his cat-like abilities to climb up certain walls, while Yumi can balance on thin ledges and beams. These skills are unlocked over the course of the game.

I -- on rare occasion -- enjoyed Quest for Infinity, if only because it bears a slight semblance to other standard action-filled platformers. But there's so much going sour here it's ultimately very difficult to enjoy. First of all, Code Lyoko does not look good. Environments and character models alike look next to awful. Even though the actual game runs smoothly, the entire affair is cheap and embarrassingly bland. The PSP version's graphics are forgivable due to the portable nature of the title, but Code Lyoko could have looked better. Pop-in is also noticeable in certain stages.

And surprisingly (for a 3D platformer), you can't control the camera at all, which makes certain segments of the game frustrating. This wouldn't have been a huge concern had Quest for Infinity boasted tight controls, but it does not. Moving your character around treacherous terrain is annoying and unpredictable because the input response just doesn't click. But that's not the worst of it. Battles can be irritating thanks to a highly unreliable lock-on system that makes focusing on particular targets a colossal chore. If you only have one enemy and it's directly in front of you, things go smoothly enough, but that's not usually the case.

Less noticeable but still problematic is the overall flow of both the game's narrative and mechanical structure. To elaborate on the latter, Quest for Infinity's gameplay just doesn't seem to connect as you jump from level to level with almost no grasp on continuity or an overarching goal. A poorly executed narrative is bad enough, but having the gameplay structure feel so loose is a problem.

As I mentioned briefly above, Quest for Infinity has a few enjoyable moments, but they're only enjoyable compared to the rest of the uninspired nonsense that's going on. I like how you gather points from defeating enemies which can then be spent on character upgrades, similar to bolt collecting in the Ratchet and Clank series. It was also pretty neat to switch the audio over to the French language track.

Closing Comments

Code Lyoko fans: If you're tragically desperate to play a Code Lyoko game, I suppose you could rent this one, but I wouldn't recommend it. This title just can't overcome its many mechanical problems and the overall experience isn't satisfying.

Chili Con Carnage

2008-08-12T07:08:00.000-07:00

Chili Con Carnage may have a completely absurd name, but it fits perfectly well with the game's over-the-top style and themes. Focusing on Hollywood-esque kills where you'll flip off a wall, spin around and nail a couple headshots all in one foul swoop, the last thing the game does is take itself seriously. In this way, Chili Con Carnage manages to stand out amongst a "me too" collection of action games and offers a ride that rarely slows down.

While Chili Con Carnage features the same basic action setup as its predecessor, Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico, one important thing to note about the sequel is that it's not an open-world game like the first was. Instead, the game's progression is broken up into a number of individual missions that you can take on one by one. While it would have been nice to see the collection stuff return, this setup does work pretty well on the PSP and arguably allows for more level variety.

The game's greatest strength is the variety of ways that you're able to kill a man. When someone is in your sights and you dive in any direction, the game slows to a crawl to allow you to hone in your shots and put a bullet in his head, sometimes multiple times per leap. On top of this, you're able to use objects to perform flips and score additional points. Clearing out a room while leaping left and right and mixing in some wall jumps here or there is great fun.

Likewise, the special kills that you can pick up are both fantastic and funny. The Tornado move where you spin in a circle with Uzis firing in opposite directions is borrowed directly from Hard Boiled. The bull special where you run head-first into enemies is hilarious, and the pi¿ata move is, well, filled with candy.

While all this is great, it does get a little repetitive after a while. You'll find that you're performing the same "jump, lock-on and nail a headshot" move over and over and over again. Being as the enemies don't offer a whole lot of variety in their tactics, the battles only really change depending upon what weapons they're carrying.

The weakest point of the game however is its control scheme. As you don't have a second analog stick, you're unable to control the camera like you would in a console action game, meaning that you're almost always firing in the direction that you're moving. The biggest problem here is that you can easily become discombobulated after jumping off a wall or performing a reverse dive. Also, it's sometimes hard to target enemies when they're really close to you while they sit there and open fire on you.

While the lack of camera control does mean that there will be some frustrations here and there, it doesn't ruin the game. So long as you're able to play by its rules, meaning that you distance yourself a bit and move slowly through the levels so that you aren't surrounded, things won't be too bad and you can have a nicely enjoyable experience with the game.

Outside of the controls, there are a couple things that we wish had been addressed prior to release, mostly relating to the level design. It's sometimes hard to tell exactly where you're supposed to be going, as ladders and such that you need to take to progress are sometimes not easily noticeable.

Also, a few sections of the game rely on a bit of simplistic platforming. While this mostly only means climbing up and over boxes or jumping from ledge to ledge, these mechanics aren't implemented well. Ram is picky about exactly how high something can be before he'll climb on it, and you can't actually jump up to a ledge. And as you always dive when jumping, you can't simply hop over a ledge - you need to hope that you don't roll off the other side.

Outside of the main game, there's a fair bit of stuff to do. You can earn medals on each and every level if you can manage to score enough points, and the ability to go back and play any level whenever you want will allow gamers to try and perfect everything. Between some missions you'll find bonus sections, like Style or Survival Challenges. These missions give you relatively simplistic (but sometimes difficult) goals, and completing them unlocks new levels for the El Macho mode where you simply try and kill as many people as possible while keeping your combo running. El Macho keeps track of your high scores, which helps it work well as a competitive mode.

Chili Con Carnage has two multiplayer modes, both of which are decent for a few laughs but don't really offer a whole lot of staying power. The Fiesta mode offers Ad-Hoc play for up to four players and throws all of them into a level filled with enemies. The goal here is to rack up as many points as possible. One interesting thing is that while you're playing against each other, you're not actually in the same physical level shooting at each other, so it doesn't actually offer true head-to-head competitive play outside of a race for a score. The Hangman mode also allows for four players but works on a single system. You swap from player to player after each round and compete for the highest score. Again, it's a decent bit of fun, but it does get old rather quickly.

Closing Comments

Chili Con Carnage is a good deal of fun. It's chaotic, funny and unlike just about every other action game out there. The control issues hamper the experience a bit, but don't keep it from being an overall worthwhile experience. There's lots of stuff to go back and do to keep you occupied, so it'll stay in your PSP a while as well, just so long as you don't get bored of shooting dudes in the face.

Chessmaster: The Art of Learning

2008-08-12T07:05:00.000-07:00

I honestly don't think there's a more boring way to learn chess than Chessmaster: The Art of Learning. Screen after screen is a bland white background with music from your favorite elevator piped in while three animations of real life Chessmaster Josh Waitzkin repeat on the side.

In the videogame world, this combination is equal to a bottle of NyQuil and a handful of Advil PM.

But let's say you don't share my distain for the way this game is presented and are only interested in the chess. Well, you're in for a lot of modes, but the substance might be lacking if you already consider yourself a master of chess.

At its most basic level, Chessmaster gives you exactly what you'd expect: chess. There's a Quick Game option that tosses you in against a random opponent, or you can go into Classic Chess and choose from one of four modes. A Practice Game has you choose one of three difficulties -- each of which has eight opponents to pick from -- so you can get down to business in a match where you can ask for hints that show you what move to make; a Rated Game allows you to pick your opponent but drops the hints because the match affects your Elo Rating (chess rank) and your stats for analytical reasoning, focus power and memory; Setup Position lets you create any position on the board and then try to play your way out of it.

You can save your chess match at any time and pick it up later.

However, if this game's title is any indicator, lots of the folks who pick this title up are going to go straight for Classic Chess' Learn Chess option. Here -- with the aforementioned white screens and terrible animations -- Waitzkin walks newcomers through 24 lessons that cover the board, pieces and tactics that make up this tough as nails board game. Basically, Josh stiffly moves around on the right side of the screen while word bubbles pop up and tell you what is happening on the board.

There's no doubt that the information is valuable and can teach you the finer points of the game, but the tedious music that isn't always on, Josh's dead eyes and completely bland look of the feature are so mind-numbing that most chess students are going to quit before they ever figure out what a pin or skewer is.

I don't want another man staring at me like Terminator while I play.

Leave Classic Chess behind, and there's an ad-hoc multiplayer mode to get into with a UMD-packing friend, seven mini-games to delve into and seven puzzles to crack. Now, a mini-game and a puzzle might not sound too different, but in Chessmaster they aren't. Mini-games on this UMD include Fork My Fruit (move pieces to a square so that they can fork whatever fruit is in their line of movement) and Masterpiece (move chess pieces to uncover a hidden picture but don't go over any revealed tiles because they'll be erased if you do), whereas the puzzles are more straightforward chess challenges such as capturing a specific piece or finding a check.

Both sets of tasks are designed to get you familiar with each piece and how it moves. It's not a bad idea, but the mini-games are slow and mop-top Josh will chime in with a move if you leave a piece stationary in Fork My Fruit. All these options and matches get recorded in your player profile so that you can see your high scores, win/loss record and ELO whenever you want.

Yay.

Closing Comments

There aren't a lot of options for chess on the PSP so if you're aching for a game, Chessmaster: The Art of Learning fits the bill. There are a lot of modes and games to get into and the stat-tracking profiles let you see how far you've come. However, the presentation is completely phoned-in and will make you wonder why the hell this budget-looking title is priced at $30.

Chameleon

2008-08-12T07:04:00.000-07:00

What exactly is "color power action?" According to the back of the Chameleon box, this game contains "color power action that's to dye for" (our emphasis). I wasn't quite sure what to make of this, but I went along with it. But after playing the game for a while, one inevitably comes to the conclusion that Chameleon is neither action-packed nor very powerful. And I'd like to stress this by making a quick point. As some of you may or may not know, I'm a huge anime fan. Thus, if a game has anime characters contained within, it's an instant classic. Yet even though Chameleon boasts four magical anime sisters, I still couldn't bring myself to enjoy it. It's just not a fun puzzle game.

Though calling it a puzzler might not be completely accurate because of its structure. Chameleon is actually a turn-based affair with special abilities and other elements, giving it a bit of a strategy feel as well. The overall point of Chameleon is board control. You and your opponent each start with a single hexagonal tile colored one of seven colors. When your turn comes around, you select one of the seven colors from a menu -- assuming it's not your or your opponent's current color -- and any adjacent tile of that color is assimilated into your collection of tiles. In this way, you expand across the playing field in an attempt to take over fifty percent of the board.

That's the game, really. There are two other modes present in the form of the King and Goal rule sets. In a King match, you have to capture over half of the large King tiles scattered across the board, while a Goal match has you racing to one particular tile which you need to assimilate. To add to the mix, each character has two different special moves to take advantage of, like taking two consecutive turns or destroying an obstacle tile, but the game isn't drastically improved with the presence of these abilities.

Chameleon also features an ad hoc multiplayer mode which works just fine. You can either play right away with a friend who has the game or send the multiplayer mode to a UMDless buddy via game sharing -- the results are the same. We didn't have any problems getting a match started, which is one of the only things I can appreciate about Chameleon.

Otherwise, this game is bad. I'm almost at a loss for where to begin. First, the gameplay mechanics have serious issues. This is a turn-based title, yet capturing territory the fastest (especially in a Goal match) is the key to victory, meaning one player will intrinsically be at a disadvantage every round. In other words, if the point of the match is to quickly spread to a spot on the board and someone gets to go first, they already have the lead. And although the colors of all the tiles are randomized to "prolong your enjoyment" of the experience, there are ultimately some matches where you have an incredibly good start and others where you're almost sentenced to lose. There's very little skill involved and only a few basic strategies that require implementation.

What amazed me even more was the fact that a puzzle game -- games that usually require quick thinking, a touch of reflexes and precise manipulation of pieces -- had no direct board manipulation at all. You select a color off a menu and watch the results. Perhaps it just rubbed me the wrong way, but I found this setup to be completely ridiculous.

Oh yes, and the game only takes an hour at most to get through. Once you go against four opponents in a series of rounds, you're congratulated and returned to the title screen. No extra modes or additional challenges to speak of.

To top off this slew of awful aspects, each turn is preceded by a text bubble from your character, where she'll deliver one of maybe two lines total. You see these over and over again and it severely slows down the match's pacing. The real kicker is how apparently poorly translated these text blurbs are, considering such classic battle cries like "Time is Now." Fantastic.

Closing Comments

If you're a puzzle game fan, do not buy this game -- even at its twenty dollar price tag. In fact, even if you're a videogame fan, do not buy this game. Its lack of modes and strategic depth, coupled with several baffling design choices, make it an embarrassment to the PSP's library. Considering the platform's strong assortment of puzzle titles (Lumines, anyone?), there's simply no reason for you to pick up a copy of Chameleon.

Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles

2008-08-12T07:01:00.000-07:00

If you've recently found yourself stalking through the night, shrouded in the darkest of cloaks, and lusting for the intoxicating taste of blood, you're probably a vampire. Fortunately for you, vampires can still play Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles, if you don't mind slaying your own kind in digital form. Does this have anything to do with the game? No, but we thought it would make for an amusing introduction. Let's move on.

Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles is a compilation of sorts, featuring a completely remastered version of a previously unreleased Castlevania game: Rondo of Blood. It also includes the original Rondo of Blood, as well as (here it comes) the original Symphony of the Night, an incredible fan-favorite. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Castlevania series, you're dealing with a side-scrolling action platformer that pits you against a host of demons, ghouls and vampires in an attempt to slay Dracula and his dark minions. Anyone uncomfortable with extremely intense, old-school platforming may want to look elsewhere for their gothic fix - the remastered Rondo of Blood is really hard, and often times it's just downright frustrating. Casual gamers beware: it'll suck your blood.

The majority of this game is all about the remastered Rondo of Blood. The other two games are treated more as extras, even though Symphony of the Night is an entire package in itself (we'll get back to this later). So for now, let's focus on the new item in this package, and what it brings to the table. Rondo of Blood follows Richter Belmont, direct descendent of Simon Belmont, as he charges bravely into the thick of night to kill the legendary Dracula and save his beloved Annette, who has been abducted by sinister forces.

To start, the game looks pretty good. Although the entire title revolves around 2D side-scrolling, the backgrounds and character models are actually in 3D, which gives Rondo of Blood an interesting aesthetic appeal. Just think of a much darker New Super Mario Bros., and you'll have a good idea as to how this game is presented. And while there are very few cutscenes to speak of, we were pleased with what was there, as simple as it was. Most of the dialogue is fully voiced (some of the talent is questionable though), and the musical score is fantastic. At a glance, Rondo of Blood is a well-done remake.

The game itself takes place over nine stages, though one of them is a thirty-second prologue, so that doesn't really count. You make your way through each stage and usually face a boss at the end, but you only have a set number of lives for each stage attempt, and if you lose them all, you have to start all the way at the beginning (as opposed to starting at a checkpoint mid-stage). This system is one of our biggest complaints about the game, but we'll address that soon.

One of the cool things about Rondo of Blood is the branching level design. Stages two through five have varying paths through each stage, which can lead you to different boss fights and, actually, different stages entirely. There are alternate versions of each of these stages that you can find, if you look hard enough. Although you end up in the same place regardless of which route you take, it's nice to have virtually four extra stages to explore and fight through.

Fighting can be done in one of two ways: you can use your whip or you can use a side-weapon. That's all. Although you have six of those side-weapons to choose from, including throwing knives, axes, crosses and holy water, this is a very straight-forward, old-school game. This factor will definitely turn off a lot of people, because they may be accustomed to more refined and complex gameplay mechanics, like those that Symphony of the Night possesses. But Rondo of Blood is all about trucking through the stages and using your very few weapons as effectively as possible. Players who want more than that may be disappointed.

You can also tackle the game with another character, Maria Renard. Maria is a young girl that Richter frees towards the beginning of the game (she's very well hidden), but after you meet her you can select her at any time from the stage select menu. Maria uses, surprisingly, a bunch of animals as weapons, including her main attack which is releasing small doves at the enemy (wicked!). It may sound a little odd, and while she's certainly a vivid contrast to the game's otherwise dark elements, she's a great deal of fun to use and helps mix things up a bit.

Rondo of Blood is a lot of fun, it's challenging, and it harkens back to the mentality that drove games many years ago. Unfortunately, this PSP collection has some issues that we should address. Although the remastered title offers a Japanese language track, not all of the scenes are subtitled, which means you're out of luck if you don't know Japanese. This was a real disappointment for us; even though most of the scenes without subtitles are brief and inconsequential to the story, it still felt like we were missing out.

The biggest problem with this Castlevania title is its difficulty. Challenge is, as we have stated many times before, not a bad thing. But when Rondo of Blood preserved its fundamental, old-school mechanics, it also preserved the problems that were present in many older platformers. For one thing, jumping can be a huge problem. Some of the jumps, even when timed precisely, can still plunge you to your death and force you to start over, washing away the previous fifteen minutes of gameplay. It may not seem too frustrating right now, but we can assure you that it feels intensely unforgiving during play. Furthermore, stair control can be a serious issue as well. If you jump when on a stairwell, you have to continue to hold up on the directional pad when you land, or else you'll fall through the stairs, which often results (once again) in death. Oh dear.

Another concern is the spacing of the checkpoints, which feels very uneven. You could clear massive amounts of space and even pass into different sections of the stage, but sometimes death will set you back all the way to the beginning, even though it may seem like a later checkpoint would have been more natural. Again, this frustration was significant, but didn't ruin our experience. For hardcore fans of older titles, it'll be less of an issue, but appreciation for classic games doesn't necessarily negate mechanical hitches.

Our final complaint is that the remade Rondo of Blood is the only available game when you start; Symphony of the Night must be unlocked, and unlocking it is a very strange ordeal. As opposed to being a reward for beating the game, you actually need to find a very obscure item in one particular stage to play Alucard's adventure. While this isn't that much of a concern, it just seems strange that a major (it not incredible) part of this collection isn't available from the start. But once you do have it, the game runs beautifully and is mostly free of technical issues or glitches. Keep in mind though that the screen will be cropped, but that's to be expected.

Closing Comments

If you're a Castlevania fan and you think that the somewhat short Rondo of Blood is enough to satisfy you (assuming you've already played Symphony of the Night), you may as well pick this one up. Besides the difficulty and somewhat finicky jumping mechanics, it’s an impressive game with a lot going for it. And if you're new to the series, this compilation may be even more worth your attention because of its strong components. Just remember the nature of the challenge, because things can get real tricky, real fast.

We were pleased with Dracula X Chronicles and it'll make a solid addition to a hardcore gamer's library. If you have two copies of the game, you can even face Rondo of Blood's boss fights cooperatively with a friend over ad hoc, which definitely adds some spice to this deal (don't worry, it runs smoothly). If this sounds like your cup of blood, head on over to a vampiric retailer and pick up a copy. Actually, any retailer will do.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

2008-08-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

It's actually debatable why I'd even need to throw a couple words at you about why you need to have Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in your collection in some form. It's arguably the best game on the PS one (rivaled primarily by Metal Gear Solid, No. 1 on our Top 25 PlayStation Games of All Time list), and though for posterity's sake it's probably a good idea to have the original PlayStation disc chilling somewhere in your game library, getting the game in digital form is certainly a close second.

Symphony of the Night represents a rather unique snapshot in the history of games; it's the swan song of 2D as it went the way of the dodo (or at least the California Condor) and 3D gaming rose as the de facto standard. More recent games like Odin Sphere and GrimGrimoire are at least keeping the genre alive, but SotN was the pinnacle of 2D at the time -- even more surprising given that the PS one wasn't really supposed to be a 2D powerhouse.

But the game handles 2D beautifully here with smoothly animated sprites, the odd bit of parallax fanciness and a style that was (and in many ways still is) unmatched. Though the music in the game is synthesized, it has a fullness and range that scoots around the limitations of what you'd normally associate with a digital orchestra as it opts to ladle on generous amounts of breathy choir falsettos while dabbling in more diverse styles like jazz. The result is a game that is technically lo-fi (there's a bit of graniness to some of the sound effects) but feels much more grandiose than the disparate parts would have you believe.
Symphony also kicked off the birth of the so-called Metroidvania style that would eventually see plenty of GBA and DS sequels down the road. The layout of Dracula's castle, though, is arguably better than any of the others. It offers a constant string of impediments that are slowly unlocked as you search the castle for your lost powers. Yes, it's an unapologetic homage to the Metroid style of gameplay, but wrapped in a proper action-RPG setting where main man Alucard actually deals points of damage with every strike and slowly gains more hit points and hearts to use special items, it all feels fresh even today.

There's also the matter of the game's translation. No, the story isn't terribly amazing (Alucard, Dracula's son born to a human mother and his infamous father, rejects his vampric nature to side with the humans in destroying his father's castle before Daddy Drac can be reborn yet again), but hearing hilariously delivered lines like "Mankind can ill afford a savoir such as you" and "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!" is almost reason enough to go for this version rather than the updated, retranslated version available in the Dracula X Chronicles.

The fact that the game doesn't actually end once you've unlocked the "regular" castle just shows how much depth there is. I swear, the game took me far, far longer than the four and a half hours or so that I spent breezing through the normal game, but regardless, there's an entire flipped version of the castle and tons of hidden little nooks and crannies to explore before you finally square off against the final boss.
In fact, one of the biggest reasons why I have such an affinity for Symphony of the Night is because of the way the castle was designed. It's challenging in normal form, but Konami's brilliance in building it to be played upside down as well speaks volumes about the skill of the design team. Throw in much tougher enemies and parts that can only be explored once you've mastered all of Alucard's skills and you have a game that keeps giving long after it would normally be over (literally, you can push your completion percentage to 200+ if you seek out all the hidden passageways in both versions of the castle).

Closing Comments

Nostalgia can be a powerful thing. I've gone back to games from the 8- and 16-bit era that I thought were absolutely brilliant then only to find them quaint by today's standards. It's an issue that's exacerbated all the more by the PS one's almost painful handling of most 3D graphics and gameplay that -- in a very real sense -- was struggling to properly move into three dimensions. Symphony of the Night has none of those problems; it takes everything that was good about 2D gaming and adds a fantastic amount of depth, tight controls and rock-solid gameplay, making it easily the best game you can get on the PlayStation Store right now -- and it'll probably stay that way until Konami decides to release MGS.

If you don't own Symphony of the Night in some form, slap yourself for being so careless and get your butt over to the PS Store to grab you some Castlevania love. Now.

Cars by Disney/Pixar

2008-08-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

When it comes to licensed gaming, "decent" is usually good enough. Games pour onto the shelves from every television show and movie imaginable, and though most of them aren't worth the few seconds it takes to read the title on the box, a few of them manage to surprise us every now and then. When we first heard that Cars was going to be developed by Rainbow Studios, we knew we'd have to keep close watch on the franchise until it hit shelves. While the final product was decent on consoles, combining a simple driving mechanic with buggy - yet entertaining - driving, it wasn't everything we were hoping for from the makers of the MX vs. ATV series. Naturally, when we popped in Cars for PSP we assumed it would be a watered down version of the console game with a few less features and watered down graphics. We were wrong.

To our surprise, Cars for PSP is not only a whole different game than the consoles, but it's actually the best version for any system. Developed by Locomotive Games and overseen by Rainbow Studios, Cars is an arcade-inspired racer that takes hints from games like Ridge Racer and Burnout, while still managing to include all the essentials of the license it represents. Don't be fooled however, as the game quickly drops the learning curve and will have PSP players carving around corners and breaking through shortcut routes in a matter of moments. Though we won't be pitting Cars up against some of the other racers on the handheld, the design does make one heck of a statement: Licensed games can be good.

Cars, as we mentioned, isn't a port of the console versions. Instead, Locomotive Games took their own approach to how racing could be done on PSP, and built their own racer from the ground up. While we do miss the concept of a free-roaming hub like the bigger brothers had, the PSP version instead takes one core design and focuses on it. Whether for good or bad, Cars will feel like an arcade racer rather than a true single-player racing/adventure game. There is no open-ended gameplay whatsoever; just a solid linear progression that follows loosely around a few movie concepts, teamed with an arcade style "Grand Prix" mode to add a little depth. Players choose a character, win races and unlock tracks. Simple as that. The story is amazingly basic, built around a few "evil" cars that have come to take over the tracks, and Lightning McQueen and his friends must beat them one by one in multiple race events. There are 25 events in all, ranging from six-car races to head-to-head "boss battles." After each race is unlocked it can be accessed as a postcard race, which is essentially the same event with a collection aspect included as well.

In creating a solid racing experience, control is key. You can have more tracks and events than any other game, but if the driving doesn't feel right the game is a waste. We saw an issue with control in the console versions, as the power-slide mechanic didn't feel quite right and the basic vehicle control was a bit stiff. Cars for PSP is a different story though, as the control is very tight, and the power-slide has been adapted to more of a two-wheel turn, which feels far nicer than the console mechanic did. Track design follows a more dynamic discipline as well, having the racers navigating far tighter turns, dodging track-specific traps such as lighting blasts, falling rocks and speeding traffic, and on-the-fly shortcuts that are often triggered elsewhere on the path.

In addition, the concept of speed arrows is shared between the PSP and GBA versions, and players can either drive over them to initiate an instant boost or jump them (yes, cars now jump) to pocket the boost power and use for later. Boosting gives off a feel similar to Burnout, and can be earned from drafting behind enemy cars, sliding around corners, taking huge jumps or pocketing the boost from arrows as mentioned. All in all the gameplay manages to stay simple and basic, while still giving enough of a core feel that veteran gamers could actually appreciate what their younger siblings are playing. In short, Cars just feels right, which is certainly uncommon for most licensed games.

Though it's incredibly solid in comparison to other licensed games, Cars isn't without its quirky moments as well. For starters, the collision detection between racers can be a bit odd, and we saw some questionable occurrences while on the track. On a few occasions the vehicles would collide and send the back racer jetting to the left or right in a spin-out, and though the result is expected, the crash seems more like a bug than an actual wreck. In fact, this same collision happens at times with the track itself as well, as cars will nail a wall head on or brush too heavily against a wall and take an odd bounce that just doesn't have the weight or physics that it should. This happens on a very minimal level, but it's still worth noting. In addition, Cars will have players catching some serious air which in turn reveals invisible walls. Any time cars catch substantial height (and believe us, they do) there's always a chance of this occurring, though it also is more of a minor annoyance as opposed to a huge complaint.

The solid gameplay alone puts Cars on the map as one of the highest regarded licensed games we've seen in a while, and though it doesn't blow us away with production value it still holds its own. From a graphical level, Cars looks the part without going above and beyond. The visual style is a tad less detailed and beautiful than the PS2 version, though the high-res PSP screen still provides a ton of clarity which Cars takes advantage of. The entire game has a very crisp look to it, but can often blend colors just a bit too much, as road and rock will often be hard to differentiate on a very minimal scale. There were a few times when we were very happy Cars has an on-screen map to go by, as the darker areas of the game can be a bit treacherous to navigate at top speed. Much like the speed issues in Burnout, Cars can often move so fast that you're practically memorizing the tracks to stay alive, as vanishing points will erupt in hairpin turns that can catch even the fastest players by surprise.

The audio production follows suit as well, delivering above-average sound that could still be improved upon in various ways. For starters, there is far less VO for the characters, so the expressions used will get a bit tiresome after a while. The sound track is built around the same songs as the console versions, and even though there are a few good tracks in there it doesn't have the heart-pumping attitude of racers like Need for Speed or Ridge Racer. The combination of graphics and audio are still quite nice when boosting though, as the sense of speed in Cars actually feels stronger than Need for Speed on PSP through the visual and audio design.

Closing Comments

We’re not going to sit here and tell you that Cars is a must-have title on PSP. It isn’t. There are plenty of great racers on the system that are simply amazing games: WipEout Pure and Ridge Racer being two of them. What Cars does deliver, however, is a great racing experience for fans of the movie that want what the big boys have, while still enjoying the character and light-hearted feel of the Disney/Pixar label. It doesn’t have the free-roam feel of the console versions, but it does deliver far more entertainment with pure driving and tight control. Expect to see a lot more from Locomotive Games after this, as they’ve set the bar for what licensed gaming should be all about. Cars is simple, fun and delivers entertaining gameplay to its target audience. Enough said.

Carol Vorderman's Sudoku

2008-08-12T06:54:00.000-07:00

If you're reading this, you're either a Sudoku fan and want an honest review of this game or you're some sick bastard hoping I'll tear Carol Vorderman a new one for bringing cleavage-exposing blouses and math into video games.

Sorry to disappoint you, jerks, but this is going to be a pretty positive review because as far as video games about Sudoku go, Vorderman is tops. This title from Empire Interactive features four single-player modes including a career with seven skill levels, tutorial videos and the chance to create your own Sudoku puzzles.

With the print version of Sudoku dominating newspapers across the country, I'd like to believe most people have a grasp of how the game works, but after having to explain it to several IGN staffers and watching their heads nearly cave in, I can see that isn't the case.

In Sudoku, a square is broken into nine smaller squares and each smaller square is broken into nine mini-squares. At the onset of a Sudoku game, numbers appear in some of these mini-squares. It's your job to fill in the rest of the numbers. The numbers one through nine must appear in each column and row of mini-squares without doubling up, and the numbers one through nine must appear in each of the original nine smaller squares without doubling up.

On a piece of paper, this process involves a lot of scribbling and erasing as you backtrack to find your mistakes, but on your PSP, it's pretty simple - use the D-pad to move and the X button to select the mini-square you want to write in, the cursor moves to a list of numbers and you can press X to choose a number. If there are still multiple options for the mini-square, you can press circle when selecting an integer and a small number gets jotted in the square. You can put all the possibilities into the square and continue to work hoping the process of elimination will solve the puzzling piece.
Aside from not having to use an eraser over and over, the electronic version also beats out the newsprint standby in terms of the big picture. Green row and column highlights focus your attention on the numbers that would affect your current choice, and a grid at the bottom of the screen lets you know how many times you've used each number.

Confused? Vorderman is here to help. Aside from the assists you can turn on and off in "Classic" mode, Vorderman pops up the moment you boot up your system to give you a brief introduction to the game - it was originally called Latin squares - and the peppy Brit can be called upon from the main menu for more tips and tricks.

However, she never answers the most important question - who the hell is she to be telling me how to play Sudoku?!

Turns out Vorderman - no relation to the guy who iced Harry Potter's folks - is kinda like the Bob Barker of the UK. She co-hosted Countdown, a game show that tested the intellect of contestants, for more than 20 years.

For a game that revolves around the same grid screen after screen, there's a lot to do in Carol Vorderman's Sudoku. If you're flying solo in your Sudoku adventure, you can choose the classic mode and choose puzzles that range from easy to "super-difficult;" try the arcade mode that can put you in a race against the clock or a battle to complete the puzzle perfectly; select to start your Latin squares career and complete close to 40 puzzles as you rise form a lowly white belt to a Sudoku black belt; or "Challenge Carol" and try to beat more than 20 puzzles in less time than it took Vorderman to do the same.

Got a psyched Sudoku fan over for dinner? Try the multiplayer mode to see who can solve the puzzles the fastest as you pass the PSP back and forth, go head-to-head if you both have systems and copies of the game, or open up "Sudoku Solver" and see who can come up with the craftiest challenge.

Closing Comments

Most folks are going to think I’m being too generous with my rating, but it’s important to recognize that I’m this is a Sudoku video game. Vorderman’s not trying to pump out a Zelda title or something with characters and a story – this game is all about furthering the addiction that is Latin squares. If you’re into number crunching for fun, this is the PSP title you’ve been waiting for.

Capcom Puzzle World

2008-08-12T06:52:00.000-07:00

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo makes this game worth the purchase alone" will likely become the popular mantra for diehard fans of the classic coin-op. After all, the star attraction of Capcom Puzzle World is certainly one of the most addictive non-Tetris brainteasers around. Even now, ten years after it first hit arcades, the CPS2 puzzler is still compelling (particularly when equipped with additional features that we didn't get the first time). But as good as Puzzle Fighter may be, the ultimate question still remains: "is it really good enough to pay thirty bucks for eons later?" All things considered, the answer is a definite "Not so much."

In truth, Capcom Puzzle World would have been better suited as a component in the company's solid "Classics Collection" instead of a stand alone game... especially since they run for the same price and you get a whole lot more for your money in the latter (five titles versus 20 is a no-brainer). Sure Super Puzzle Fighter II is brilliant -- it's an interesting take on the Tetris/ Columns formula that requires users to combine gems that can then only be broken with similarly-colored power jewels -- but the rest of this anthology isn't as interesting.

But before we get into the short end of the analog stick, let me just say that there aren't enough good things that can be said about Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. Using the gameplay methods described above, it allows players to use their favorite Darkstalkers and Street Fighter avatars to perform special moves as you succeed. More importantly, though, a strong performance actually triggers roadblock gems to appear on your opponent's screen, thereby making the action more hectic and more strategic than your typical block-based puzzler. Each fighter has their own unique gem-attack pattern too, and this means that character selection is actually important.

As an added bonus, the Puzzle World version of SPF2 also includes a couple of ways to play. X Mode (the method already mentioned), Y Mode (three or more gems clear a space while a "change gem" can be charged for chain attacks), and Z Mode (identical to X, only gems are fed from the bottom up) all offer unique ways to experience the game, and all of them are undeniably fun. Ad hoc multiplayer, secret characters, a personalized Gem Attack Edit feature, and the ability to take your own screenshots (for safe keeping on the memory stick) round the package out.

But if we're being realistic, Super Puzzle Fighter II would have made a great PS3-to-PSP downloadable game. When packaged with four other titles that don't offer the same kind of addiction, it's hard to stomach paying almost full price for. Take Block Block, for example. A blatant rip-off of Breakout and its one billion clones, the game's whole shtick is that your paddle is always shrinking and that you can experience it co-op. That description may make it sound worth of a try on paper, but in practice it's slow and boring and becomes monotonous extremely quickly.

The collection's three Buster Bros games (which were previously released as their own set for PlayStation One in 1997) don't fare so well either. The goal in all three is to use wires and guns to bust balloons that break into smaller balloons and so on and so forth, but their bad controls keep them from being entertaining almost immediately. Buster Bros, Super Buster Bros, and Buster Buddies seem to be included for nostalgia's sake and nothing more.

Closing Comments

The new and improved Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is good enough to save Capcom Puzzle Collection from falling too far down the numeric "buy it" scale because it's still laced with digital nicotine. But as I stated numerous times before, it's hard to justify buying an aged game at a higher price when there's only one title in the compilation worth playing. Plus, none of the other four entries warrant more than a few minutes of tryout time and some weird interface issues make it difficult to enjoy ad hoc in a seamless way. This one's for Super Puzzle Fighter freaks only.

Capcom Classics Collection Remixed

2008-08-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

Old-school compilation packs are perfect for handheld gaming. Not only are they easy to pick up and play, ideal for nostalgia, and a great source of variety, but they're also inexpensive lessons in history that show us what paved the way for the highly-complex games we play today. When done right, these sets can be surprising sources of entertainment (the GBA versions of the Pac-Man Collection, Activision Anthology, and Namco Museum have certainly proven that). But the real question for we, the PSP owners, is, "When are we going to get that kind of high-level fun for our mobile PlayStation?"

Thus far, we've only seen two attempts: Midway's Arcade Treasures (which paled in comparison to its previous counterparts) and the Namco Museum Battle Collection (which was actually rather good). Luckily, Japanese giant Capcom has also thrown its hat into the fray with Capcom Classics Collection Remixed, a handheld version of one of the better console compilation packs of 2005. This move to the portable realm is a pretty decent one too... even if its game selection isn't as strong as its console counterpart's.

Now to be fair, the PSP version of Capcom Classics Collection really shouldn't be classified as a "port." With the exception of only five games in the set (Final Fight, Section Z, Bionic Commando, Legendary Wings, and Forgotten Worlds), the remaining 15 titles found in Remixed weren't available for the PS2 or Xbox editions at all. In fact, some of the PSP inclusions are games that were sorely missed from the set-top version -- 1941, Magic Sword, Captain Commando, Black Tiger, Strider, and Side Arms are all must-have additions for any self-respecting arcade fan of the 1980s. It's good to see them pop up again here so that newer audiences can enjoy them.

I'm also happy to report that the emulation of every last piece of software in Capcom Classics Remixed has been handled very, very well. Once again translated by the team at Digital Eclipse (the same crew that did the console edition last year), the game's move from ROM to PSP is pretty seamless. There's almost no slowdown, audio problems, or video hitches to speak of whatsoever, and that's a big victory for a retro-pack fan like me who has seen countless compilations that botch my yesteryear favorites.

Another nice plus for Capcom fans is that Classics Remixed also benefits from several presentational advantages. Loading between games and menus only takes about 12-15 seconds, with no loading to worry about again until you switch to another title. Additionally there are plenty of bonus goodies available for every game -- the ability to learn about the history of each individual title, several pieces of unlockable art, and hidden gameplay tips among them. Users can even switch between various viewing modes with differing results in every title.

Some games, for instance, will offer an original viewing option or a friendlier "Stretch" mode, while shooters allow you to tilt the screen 90-degrees to take up the entire PSP viewing area. Some titles even have "Enhanced" viewing options that squeeze more information onto the screen at one time, and users can customize their controls to use only the analog stick and directional pad during vertical viewing mode if they like (expect some discomfort if you have big hands, though).

One of the most appealing aspects of Classics Remixed, however, would have to be its easy multiplayer interface. Not only does it have one of the quickest buddy locators I've seen on the PSP so far, it's easy to jump in and out of games with just the touch of a button. Hosting players can even choose to ignore unwanted opponents on a permanent basis if they feel so inclined, and high scores will be permanently logged and saved on your own system as well as your buddy's if you're playing together over the network.

Despite all these strong elements, Classics Collection does run into a number of hiccups that keep it from realizing its full potential. At the top of this list sadly, is the fact that, as easy and fun as multiplayer may be, there isn't an in-game sharing feature (which is fast becoming a standard in even the most complex handheld videogames). Not being able to hook up multiple systems to play on one UMD with a collection of titles this small and easy to load is pretty disappointing. Also disappointing is the lack of a "save state" option to keep your progress when jumping between games. With the setup as it is now, once you switch games and decide to play one title over another, you'll have to start all over again when you return. For a portable title that boasts such long-winded games as Strider and Magic Sword, that kind of functionality is sorely missed.

Above all else, though, the biggest hurdle that Capcom fans are going to run into is this set's inferior game selection. As fun as the seven titles I mentioned earlier may be, eight of the remaining new additions aren't anywhere near as compelling. In fact, the top-down brawler known as Avengers and the bizarre shooting duo of The Speed Rumbler and Last Duel skirt the border between awful and terrible. Moreover, the original Street Fighter, Quiz & Dragons, Mega Twins, Three Wonders, and Varth range between poor to okay at their very best. Sure, some of the stronger titles helps even things out a bit, but in terms of overall quality, I've definitely seen better selections out there.

Closing Comments

With excellent high-level production values, superb emulation, and an easy to use multiplayer interface, Capcom Classics Collection Remixed should definitely please most retro company fans. Having legendary fun traps like Strider, Forgotten Worlds, and Bionic Commando doesn't hurt either, and some of the remaining shooters like 1941 and Black Tiger are definitely worth checking out. I only wish that Capcom would have included Game Sharing and Save State features for better portability, and that some of the weaker titles would have been replaced by stronger ones (Mercs, Street Fighter II, or Pirate Ship Higemaru alone would have been better than having five or six of the stinkers available here). Still, for what you get this set isn't bad at all and could make that long plane trip or bus ride a fair bit more enjoyable.

Capcom Classics Collection Reloaded

2008-08-12T06:45:00.000-07:00

A solid compilation based on last year's PS2 anthology, Capcom's most recent PSP effort, Capcom Classics Collection Reloaded, is a downsized port with 19 games that revisits some of the company's best arcade titles from 1984-1992. For Portable owners this is particularly good news as Reloaded is certainly better than Capcom's last omnibus for the system, Classics Remixed.

Now it was widely accepted that the original PlayStation 2 version of this collection was a nod to renowned videogame designer, Yoshiki Okamoto (after all, he was involved with the creation or development of almost half the games in the assortment). Best known to recent players for his contributions to Devil May Cry, Resident Evil and Genji, Okamoto had an equally important role in titles such as Street Fighter, Final Fight, and 1942. Sure, his namesake in America isn't as recognizable as that of Kojima or Miyamoto's, but his games are... and that's pretty impressive.

But what about those games anyway? To Okamoto's credit, most of the ones he was involved with are also the best of this collection. 1942, 1943, and 1943 Kai are all considered legends in the arcade shooter market and the heavily-Japanese Pirate Ship Higemaru is an addictive homage to the SEGA puzzler Pengo. Let's also not forget that the world-renowned Street Fighter II series speaks for itself, and Ryu and Ken fans should be happy to note that both SFII Champion Edition and the always-killer Hyper Fighting join the original Street Fighter II for triple the Hadoken fun.

The rest of the collection is no pushover either. Ghosts 'N Goblins, Ghouls 'N Ghosts, and Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts are great, while Gun Smoke, Commando and Mercs kick all kinds of double-barreled ass. Oh, and whatever you do, don't overlook the surprise of the bunch in Exed Exes (you know it better as Attack of the Savage Bees) -- it's a terrific little Gaplus rip-off with better graphics and some neat variations on the typical wave shooter. Unfortunately, Volgus and Son Son are only moderately exciting additions to the anthology.

Another thing to take note of is that if you enjoyed the original PS2 version and want to pick this up to relive Final Fight, Forgotten Worlds, Bionic Commando, Trojan or Section Z, then you should look backwards -- four of those games were dropped since they appeared in "Remixed," while Trojan has disappeared entirely. Luckily there are three PSP-Exclusive games that take those missing titles' places: Knights of the Round, the King of Dragons, and Eco Fighters.

Of the three new additions, Knights of the Round still holds up best. Similar to King of Dragons in that it's a side-scrolling hack 'n slasher, Knights was one of the earliest arcade actioners we can remember that used experience points to upgrade your characters. It's definitely uncomplicated and somewhat cheesy compared to today's crop of sword-wielders, but for a quick fix "on the go" it does its job well.

Unexpectedly, Eco Fighters is still a lot of fun too. The result of a "Design your own game" contest in Japan from way back when, Eco Fighters is a horizontal shooter with a twist -- players take control of powered roller-ball circling their ship in addition to their traditional gunfire. It's mildly challenging and has a couple of neat enemies and stages that make it worth a look. Disappointingly, King of Dragons is essentially an earlier version of Knights of the Round with more character classes and an easier go of things... but it's a pretty mediocre experience (it just doesn't do anything special). There's also a little more bad news in that several high-profile titles we've been wanting to see have still been left behind. Saturday Night Slam Masters, Duck Tales, Gargoyle's Quest, Demon's Crest and a few others have all been omitted.

But regardless of which games were left in and which were left out, one of the most important things to consider in a compilation like this is how well the games have been translated. You could have 20 of the coolest games ever made, but if they were rushed onto disc with poor emulation, then that shows up in the final product. Fortunately, Capcom didn't hurry the production of the PS2 version when it was released last year, nor did it hurry the PSP port. However, the game does run into the same noticeable flicker and aliasing issues present in the PS2 disc (in all the shooters), while the transparency effects are hindered by some obvious interlacing troubles (thank you frame skip!). It's not the end of the world, but it's there (albeit it is less noticeable thanks to the smaller PSP screen).

On the presentation side, Capcom has made sure to include a lot of really cool supplements. As such, every title in the collection boasts an assortment of little goodies that players can unlock. In fact, there are almost 900 different collectibles that can be uncovered over the course of your play-through, and an interesting slot machine mechanic is used to find them (you're awarded tokens for playing through individual games which can then be gambled with to unlock secrets. Uncovered bonuses include everything from official artwork and remixed music to helpful cheats and other niceties.

As an added bonus for PSP users, several of the titles support game sharing for multiplayer hook-ups (1943, Ghosts 'N Goblins, King of Dragons, Mercs, Pirate Ship Higemaru, and Son Son), while several more boast straight-up WiFi competition (Knights of the Round included!). The development team has even thrown in a cool little stat tracker that tells you how many button presses you've performed, what your scores were, if you've beaten a game or not, and other little trivial info. It's just sad to see that the load times are so awful -- as it takes what seems like an eternity to access most of the software in the set.

Closing Comments

The reason Capcom Classics Collection Reloaded is so cool is because it does a number of things well that most compilation packs normally don't. Not only does it give you a lot of information and bonuses with every game in the set, it also (as one of my colleagues once said) forces you to play each game like a man because of their various "hardcore" settings. But what else can I say? Reloaded is a solid PSP anthology that's better than its predecessor and one I'd easily recommend for old-school gaming fans everywhere.

Call of Duty: Roads to Victory

2008-08-12T06:42:00.000-07:00

You win some and you lose some... and then you lose some more. That's Activision's Call of Duty: Roads to Victory in a nutshell. There's just no other way to describe it.

On some levels, Amaze has done a good job of capturing what makes COD one of the finest World War II franchises out there. Despite having a smaller screen and a different development crew, Roads to Victory "looks the part" by using the same dramatic situations and pacing that its console and PC cousins do. In addition, the game's audio effects are way too big for a handheld -- booming out of the PSP's miniature speakers like they were made for a surround sound system and not a portable device.

Activision has added a nice bit of value to the package too. Players can relive the 1940s as the United States, Canada, or Great Britain and throw themselves into 14 different missions that include bunker sieges, air battles, and full-scale invasions. None of these scenarios have been in used in other Calls of Duty either (they're all completely original), and each one boasts performance-based silver, bronze and gold medals with unlockable bonus content like vehicle profiles and PSP wallpaper.

Internet junkies may go AWOL over the lack of any kind of Infrastructure support (despite developers claiming such a thing in earlier interviews), but RTV does manage six-player ad hoc with a number of different modes. Capture the Flag, Deathmatch, King of the Hill, Hold the Flag, and "Team" versions of most of these play types ensure that users have plenty to mess around with; there's even a nice level of match customization to go along with them. Just don't be surprised when you can't find the game-sharing option, it's not in there.

A resume like that usually means that PSP users are in for a treat -- and in this case they almost were. But when you take an established franchise like Call of Duty and strip it of some of its more appealing elements while simultaneously ignoring much-needed handheld adjustments, you've got problems. And guess what? Problems we've got...

While it doesn't break the game, Roads to Victory's biggest issue still hurts it pretty badly -- and that's its control. Though similar to most PSP first-person shooters in layout, its modification options aren't very useful. Among the four preset configurations, only the first is really accommodating (the analog stick moves you and the face buttons aim), but it still doesn't supply nearly enough twitch to keep up with the action. Amazingly, there is no way to use the analog stick for aiming either, and given the reaction time of the button-controlled targeting, that's a shame.

The sluggish and somewhat delayed controls wouldn't be so bad if the gameplay accounted for it, but it doesn't. Instead, enemies run about the stage at full speed doing their own thing while you seem to be half a step behind at all times. Strangely, this doesn't create a problem of the game being too hard, but too easy -- as Amaze realized that players couldn't keep up and therefore made an auto-targeting adjustment that makes it close to impossible to miss. It's not unusual for your machine gun to be pointed to the right, while your bullets magically find their way to the guy flanking on the left. Plus, once you figure out that zooming towards a target in-between every shot almost completely guarantees a two-hit kill, you'll walk all over the Nazis like they did human rights.

Ah ha! "But what if you just turn the auto-targeting off?" you ask. Well then, if that's the case, then Call of Duty turns into exactly the sort of unresponsive FPS you'd expect it to be -- with your enemies moving at twice the speed you do, and your slow-mo guns trying their best to keep up.

Regardless of how you approach Roads to Victory, though, it still doesn't change some of the game's other fundamental problems. Enemy AI is the world heavyweight champion of dumb -- often running in place or getting caught in a standstill with its gun drawn at its own downed ally. Moreover, your fellow teammates will stop out of nowhere to create sudden impassible walls with their bodies at bottlenecks, and the stages themselves are the very definition of linear. Other than the US bombing raid, there isn't a single scenario that captures our imagination the way EA's Medal of Honor Heroes did.

Other disappointing things to consider: Unlike the previous Calls of Duty, this one doesn't offer any characters that matter; the storyline doesn't follow anyone in particular and everyone seems to have the exact same personality in no matter what your country or situation is. It's also rather annoying to see that some German soldiers can occasionally do some truly inhuman things (shooting through concrete sticks out in particular).

Here's what Call of Duty does right: Even though it has all the issues mentioned above, its sense of atmosphere can't be denied -- you definitely get the sense that this is World War II (albeit on a tiny little screen), and its faithfulness in recreating the console versions is admirable. Roads to Victory also has some of the best sniping mechanics I've seen on the PSP yet, and it's too bad that there aren't more chances to use them.

Closing Comments

As a big fan of previous Call of Duty titles, I found Roads to Victory to be the definite low point of the series. While diehard followers should enjoy the entertaining ad hoc multiplayer options and the second-best representation of World War II on PSP (Medal of Honor Heroes still has first), the game's major mechanical problems, technical hitches, and lack of true customization make it "just another shooter" instead of the standout blaster its console counterparts are.

Cabela's Dangerous Hunts: Ultimate Challenge

2008-08-12T06:41:00.000-07:00

Hunting fans can breathe easy. The Cabela franchise has finally made the jump from console to handheld with Cabela's Dangerous Hunts: Ultimate Challenge. If the title sounds familiar, it's because Cabela's Dangerous Hunts actually shipped in 2003 for consoles. This new version, Ultimate Challenge, takes the console version and adds a few mobile-friendly modes. But for the most part, the console and handheld titles share everything from specific animal types and gear to a near-identical hunting system.

That's good news for fans of the series. But for anyone looking for a revamped version of the console version then Ultimate Challenge definitely isn't it. It doesn't really change much or add anything in terms of PSP exclusives. Developers tweaked the control scheme to make it run, so that's good. Apart from that and a slightly modified 'quick action' mode, nothing here really appeals to owners of the console version. Having said that, if you want a portable hunting game, there's not much choice out there.

Also, Ultimate Challenge takes a far more action-oriented approach to hunting. More so than other games in the Cabela series, at any rate. True aficionados of virtual hunting will most likely find this to be a negative thing. And honestly, it just doesn't feel like your old-fashioned Cabela game. Hunting, more than anything, is about strategy and patience. And here, it's simply way too fast. The system isn't entirely broken, of course, but it serves to note that Ultimate Challenge doesn't play like earlier games in the series. Now, if you want a handheld first-person shooter with bears and wolves to shoot at, then this may be your type of game.
The whole thing splits between two modes. The first, Story Mode, weaves a standard tale of peril and rescue. You need to visit a bunch of different locations, blast the hell out of 20 or so different kinds of animals, and then ultimately rescue an old friend from the clutches of nature. It's a dull story, as far plot goes. But that's to be expected from a game were you spend most of the time pumping birds and bears full of buckshot. Still, it does lend the game some structure, and it's somewhat entertaining. Of course, it does have a few issues. Your AI partners, for instance, are the dumbest human beings on the face of the Earth. When presented with danger, they mostly just act as walking meals. They often refuse to shoot or fight. Not good.

The second mode, Quick Action, has more than a dozen missions you can play without having to deal with burdens of narrative. This mode is definitely one of the best parts of the game, as it lets you hunt in short bursts under a variety of terrain. You can try almost everything Ultimate Challenge has to offer by just playing through most of these modes. You can try everything from sniping inside a helicopter to blasting dingos with shotguns. You can also try vanquishing African elephants with handguns, though it doesn't work too well. It's still damn funny, though, and IGN strongly suggests that you try it.

Closing Comments

Ultimate Challenge doesn’t really offer anything different from the console version. Having said that, it does let hardcore fans of the series take their virtual hunting to go. But there’s a good chance that some of these fans won’t like the revamped, action-oriented pacing very much.

Cabela's African Safari

2008-08-12T06:31:00.000-07:00

Ditching the traditional tortoise-pacing of most hunting games, Cabela's African Safari gets straight to the point. You've saved up for the big African hunting trip so let's now waste the time! Of course, with smaller hunting areas than most games of this sort, the gameplay here is all about the action and provides plenty of it. Shoot some geese, bag a leopard, and be back in time for lunch because this drops you right in.

Unless you're a genre diehard, your typical hunting game is right up there with filling out tax forms, but the feeling here is more along the lines of Duck Hunt and it's fun. There are five countries to explore and they're all packed with animals sporting some tasty-looking pelts. As for the setup: the locals have been hired to drop you off in the middle of it as fast as you can and they don't mess around. One mission starts off with you sitting in the back of a truck as you drive up along a herd on the move. It's a solid wall of animal and you can't miss. Sure there's skill in getting the best ones, but just shoot already!

Hunting for geese here is one of the best thrills in the game. Run through the grasses and they start flying everywhere. Pull out the trusty boomstick and the flying trophies explode in a flurry of feathers. This has got to be one of the first hunting games where I've busted out laughing as I just went on a total killing spree. Each of the geese-hunting trips lasted only a minute or two, but nothing delivers the feeling of pure power like going on a shotgun rampage.

The bird hunting is so goofy and fun that there's even a wing-shooting tournament. You get a couple of minutes in each of the countries to see how many birds you can take down. This is as close to the action of a first-person shooter that I've ever seen in a hunting title, and with birds flapping everywhere and the sounds of shotguns going off, that's about as good as this game gets.

The rest of the hunting is done is a similarly light style. There's some tracking, but it's not too hard to pull off. A few missions even start out with a herd stampeding towards you or a leopard just a few yards away. Both the easy and normal difficulty levels include a radar system for the animals so it's just a matter of finding a green dot and shooting it. There's even a "hunting sense" that can be used to slow down time and fine tune the aim. The controls for targeting are the four face buttons so this is a necessary addition.

Sometimes the hunters get hunted and there are lots of animals in here that don't like being shot at (or walked near) and they'll gladly attack on a whim. For that there's the "adrenalin mode" which is a lot like the hunting sense. Time slows down and if you can point your hand cannon at the gaping maw of destiny, then you can get the kill instead and keep on going.

If there's a problem with African Safari it's that it's a little too easy. The AI for the animals is easy to predict and, all too often, it's a cinch to shoot an animal, run after it, and shoot it again. Plus, the fauna rarely run too far away before they sit right back down again and relax, making for easy pickings. Almost to compensate for this, the animals never slow down if they're shot. Even the mortally wounded ones can run away.

Closing Comments

Cabela's African Safari makes videogame hunting more fun by actually treating it like a videogame instead of a simulation. With each hunt lasting only a few minutes there's no need to stress out about blowing a long chase and having to do it all over again. For those with a short attention span and an urge to go hunting, this one's for you. It's not very serious, it's more than a little goofy, but it's fun.

Looking For Help

2008-07-08T08:56:00.000-07:00

PSP Haven is looking for people to assist in the updating of certain content that we love to provide. We are looking to fill the following positions:

Wallpaper Designers
Review Writers
Media Downloads
Layout Designers

If you are interested, please contact me at drakuldraequel@gmail.com

Bust-A-Move Deluxe

2008-07-08T08:10:00.000-07:00

Time marches on. Mountains rise and fall, the sea ebbs and flows, and the inevitable force of change is ever altering the universe. Yet, there is one constant on which we can all rely: that there will be a Bust-A-Move game released on every system ever released. Ever. Sometimes a new addition in the puzzle franchise is a welcome surprise (Bust-A-Move DS) and sometimes it is an aberration (Bust-A-Move Bash!). And so it is with great satisfaction that we report to you that Bust-A-Move Deluxe falls into the previous category.

The time-tested Bust-A-Move (BaM) formula stands among other long-running puzzle franchises such as Tetris. Players must clear multi-colored bubbles from the playing field by launching orbs from the bottom of the screen and matching at least three like colors. As play progresses, the mass of bubbles will slowly be forced down towards the "deadline," and if they cross the line it's game over. BaM Deluxe wisely allows fans to enjoy this proven formula and includes 300 new puzzles in a Classic Mode that doesn't mess with what makes BaM great. There are several new modes included, however, which provide a unique twist on this scheme.

In Ghost Mode, bubbles must bounce off a wall before it will stick to another orb. Until it hits a wall, a bubble will pass through any objects it encounters on its trajectory. This mode forces players to think a step ahead and plan their shots more than they might be used to. There is also a "heart meter" that increases your virtual heart rate each time you fail to clear a set of bubbles. With every shot that doesn't help clear the screen, the heart meter will increase by one notch. If it reaches five, your game ends. Each time you do clear a few bubbles, the meter will decrease by one. Drop enough of 'em and a ghost will appear on your opponent's screen and mask the colors of their bubbles for a short time. Both the heart meter and the ghost bubbles add additional layers of strategy to the BaM formula.

There are also eight Challenge Puzzle modes, with six rounds each, that all change the BaM gameplay in one new way. See Saw sends the screen tilting towards whichever side is more bubble-heavy. Players must keep the playing field balanced, lest the screen topple over and end the game. Blind Puzzle hides the colors of your orbs until you launch a bubble to their vicinity. In Count Puzzle, players (either human or computer) alternate turns on the same playing field and earn points for each bubble dropped. The player with the most points when all bubbles are cleared wins.

There are other modes that take even more liberties with BaM's gameplay with mostly successful results. The Running Launcher puzzles put the player's bubble shooter on a horizontal conveyor belt. Poppers will have to deal with a constantly moving launcher as they try to make their shots. In Mix 'Em Up mode, the bubbles are continuously changing colors, so you'll have to work even faster to make matches. The Shot puzzles can be cleared with just one shot. The new mode that may have you pulling your hair out is Time Warp. Here, the speed of your launcher and bubbles is constantly changing and you'll have to adapt on the fly.

While there is fun to be had in all of these modes, the aiming reticule seems to have been slowed down compared to previous Bust-A-Moves. At times it can feel excruciating moving the launcher from one extreme to the other. It's not a deal-breaker, but the primary control function of a game should feel buttery smooth.

Longtime busters will recognize their favorite characters: dinosaur siblings Bub and Bob (thankfully Majesco dropped the idea that Bub and Bob are human kids from the UK, as seen in the terrible Bubble Bobble Evolution), Monsta, and Dorank are all here. There are a few new faces, too: Banebow, a spring with boxing gloves; Goon, kind of a hairier Grimace; Chick'n, a cartoonish version of the popular barnyard fowl, minus the beak; and Propella, a pink marshmallow with a fan sprouting from its head. You can pick any of these characters and take them into any of the game's previously mentioned modes to level them up. Don't expect much out of this character building, though -- the game doesn't give you any stats for the characters and after increasing several levels we couldn't discern any improvement in anyone's abilities.

Bust-A-Move Deluxe features bright, colorful graphics that look great on the PSP's widescreen. Instead of taking up the entire screen, the action happens in the middle 50 percent while a border rests on either side. The developer made a strange choice with what border to go with, though: a graveyard. It would make sense if there were different themes as you progressed through the puzzles, but this is the only border in the game.

Notably missing is the classic Bust-A-Move music. The arcade original still gets a lot of play here in the IGN offices, and all employees have this theme burned into their minds, whether they appreciate it or not. The music in Bust-A-Move Deluxe is inoffensive, if forgettable.

Closing Comments

Nintendo DS owners have a pretty good version of Bust-A-Move, so it's only fair PSPers get one, too. Bust-A-Move Deluxe has a few shortcomings, but the core BaM magic is there, especially in multiplayer (too bad there's no game sharing). A little more care to the game's overall presentation would have put this one over the top into true greatness, but as it stands this is a title that puzzle fans should consider, and Bust-A-Move fans should probably pick up.

Burnout Legends

2008-07-08T08:07:00.000-07:00

Though Criterion and EA are launching the newest console version of the Burnout franchise this week as well in Burnout Revenge, the first PSP outing of the series isn't a port of Revenge but rather a "best of" of the series' past. Taking most of its gameplay elements from the excellent Burnout 3: Takedown and mixing in elements of the original Burnout and its sequel, Burnout 2: Point of Impact, Burnout Legends looks to offer a fresh experience for those who haven't played the series' previous titles while giving gamers a reason to pick up both Burnout Legends and Revenge.

Mix It Up
As mentioned, Burnout Legends relies heavily on the gameplay and driving style of Burnout 3: Takedown. The battling Takedown-based driving of BO3 makes up the core driving experience, Aftertouch and all, though the game features cars, tracks and even modes from the first two games in the series. For instance, Pursuit is back from Burnout 2 as are the cop cars that you'll unlock for beating them. Fans of the Cop Car from Burnout 2 will be pleased to know that there are not one but six black-and-white vehicles, including an F1-based cop car. Sirens never sounded as good as they do at 200 mph.

The mix of tracks, vehicles and modes from the original three games for the most part does well in putting a fresh coat of paint on what is largely Burnout 3: Takedown. We're fans of many of the tracks in Burnout 2, like Airport Terminal 1 & 2 and Big Surf Shores for example, so seeing those in Legends is great. These tracks work very well in adapting to Burnout 3's fast-as-lightning and violent-as-hell driving style as well, which is perfect. It's almost as if they were designed for Takedowns one game before that element was added to the series.

The Harbour Town course from the original Burnout doesn't fair so well, however. While the tracks from Burnout 2 and 3 were designed with the intent of flying around banks at high speeds without punishing you for keeping your foot on the gas at all times, Harbour Town is much less forgiving. We're not strictly complaining about the course's short and sharp 90-degree turns (what are brakes?), but rather a few other sections that seem to punish us for driving like the series has taught us to. For example, there's one straightaway that leads to the top of a hill, and if you're in the wrong place you'll literally go flying over a very short wall in the middle of the road and off the track. An even worse section is a railing that leads either into or out of a tunnel (depending upon which way you're racing). This railing looks to be smoothly curved, though racing along it to avoid traffic will actually cause you to crash.

Simply put, Harbour Town should not be in Burnout Legends. Sure, it's great that Criterion wanted to add a bit of the original Burnout into the mix, but there are two evident problems with this: Firstly, as mentioned, the racing style and track design is simply counter-intuitive to what we've come to expect from the series and essentially punishes you for racing as such. Secondly, the track doesn't look nearly as good as anything else in the game. Again, the track feels oddly out of place and probably should have either been left out altogether or at least tweaked.

Lost in Translation
As the Burnout series has always pushed consoles as much as Criterion could flex them, and with great results indeed, it was to be expected that Burnout Legends wouldn't be a 100% perfect rendition of its console brethren. Sure, the feel of the game is certainly there and it's a great title, but there were a few concessions taken to get the series portable.

For instance, races consist of only four Burners (including the player) rather than six, as on the consoles. While races still feel fairly intense, it makes races, and especially Eliminator races, that much easier to place in. Having to only finish a single Eliminator lap in order to place is more than a bit easy. In a race at least you need to put in three good laps to place, but even then you only need to beat one of the other races in order to advance. Granted, having only four racers is somewhat of a hardware limitation, though it's still a tad disappointing.

The game also suffers slightly from the PSP's lower resolution. With a game as fast as a Burnout title, and Legends can be just as fast as its console kin, being able to see everything off in the distance is of utmost importance. Criterion has made the smart decision to bloom the headlights and brake lights of other vehicles so they're easy to make out in the distance. The resolution problem actually comes into play with the tracks themselves. It can be hard to distinguish which direction a turn is heading until it's right up on you, so replaying the tracks a bunch of times to memorize their layout is important. Of course, if you've played the Burnout series through and through for hundreds of hours like any self-respecting gamer should have then this isn't a problem, though even for veterans such as ourselves the back section of Airport Terminal 1 & 2 can be a bitch on the PSP.

Aside from that, the series is largely intact. There are a few other minor things that don't detract from the fun at all, like the non-player cars in Crash not deforming (just a simple cracked window texture swap), but again none of it detracts from the overall gaming experience.

And as a whole Burnout Legends is as large a game as any of the console variants. It's maybe a tad shorter than some of the other games in the series, but it's a reasonably lengthy racing experience and certainly one playing through, even for longtime veterans of the series.

Burnout Legends comes replete with some good PSP vs. PSP multiplayer options. Sadly, there is no Infrastructure (read: Internet) play, but there's some good local WiFi gaming to be had. Party Crash, Eliminator, Race, Road Rage and more are all present with support for up to six players and essentially work exactly as the single-player versions do, or as expected in some cases. For example, multiplayer Pursuit consists of one player being pursued and another essentially acting as the cop.

A sweet aspect of the multiplayer setup is that you're able to set up a series of different events to compete in, each adding to an overall point total. For example, you could start with a 3 lap race, then bust out some Road Rage and end with a Pursuit sequence. It works pretty well and is a good way to carry a competition across multiple event types. Sadly you can't add Crash as an event as that must be set up separately, but it's still cool.

Collector cars also play a part in multiplayer. Playing through the singleplayer game will allow you to unlock one of five collector cars in each of the five car types (Coupe Collector 3, for example). The only way to unlock the other collector cars is by finding other PSP Burners with the cars you need and racing them for their pink slips. Well, not pink slips so much as you don't lose anything if you lose a race, but it certainly gives you reason to hunt around for more gamers with a PSP and a copy of Burnout Legends.

Finally with regards to multiplayer, you can utilize Game Sharing to upload a single race demo to your buddies. They can then play that race over and over and over again until their battery dies or until they switch off their system. And your broke-ass friends can actually use their AC adapter and leave their system on forever, giving them 2% of Burnout for 0% of the cost. They'll love you forever.

Not Quite Perfect
Through our time with the game we ran into a few non-showstopper bugs. Cars that fall into the Matrix after suffering a Takedown, that sort of thing. On one of the more extreme occasions one of our editors was bumper-to-bumper with a rival when his opponent passed through another vehicle that he crashed into. This is one of the much rarer and more impacting bugs that we encountered, though for the most part anything we ran into were slight "tweaks" here and there. Most of them didn't impact the game or its fun, but it's certainly something that we feel is worth mentioning. Don't let this keep you from buying the game, but don't say we didn't mention it.

Closing Comments

Burnout Legends is certainly a great portable version of the excellent console series. The mix of old and new alike provides a great Burnout experience for both new and old fans. While first-time Burnout gamers who are torn between picking up Burnout Legends for the PSP or Burnout Revenge for either Xbox or PS2 may want to go with the latter, Burnout Legends is the perfect remedy for those who want to do a little burning while on the road.

Burnout Dominator

2008-07-08T08:05:00.000-07:00

Criterion's Burnout franchise has dominated the arcade racing genre for the past few years, and for very good reason. The developer essentially perfected the series' control response and feeling, it's fast as hell, looks fantastic and features some insanely cool crashes. While Criterion is hard at work on Burnout 5 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, EA UK has given PlayStation fans a reason to rev up their engines in the interim.

Burnout Dominator is quite clearly a throwback to the old days of the series. Its focus has returned almost solely to racing, what with things like traffic checking that we saw in Burnout Revenge having been removed from the game. Burnouts are back, encouraging you to keep your finger on the boost at all times, and the track design is geared more for long and huge drifts rather than Takedowns.

In essence, Burnout Dominator feels a lot like an offshoot of the past few games rather than a revolutionary sequel, as Criterion has generally attempted to create in the past. EA UK made use of the Burnout Revenge engine for Dominator, and the (happy) result is that the game feels and looks almost identical to the last game, sans the major gameplay changes. But at its core, this is classic Burnout through and through.

The biggest change, or perhaps we should say throwback, to the series is the inclusion of Burnouts. When you fill your boost meter, the flame will turn blue and you can then begin using a supercharged boost. While you don't actually go any faster than using a normal boost, you're able to chain these together and earn multipliers. As you burn off your boost, if you manage to perform enough daring maneuvers while emptying the tank, be it by driving against traffic or drifting enough, your boost will then reset when you drain it and increase your Burnout multiplier by one. Not only does this mean that you can essentially boost infinitely around the track, this increases the score that you receive for your crazed driving, which is a major part of many events now.

Replacing Revenge's Traffic Attack challenge is the new Maniac mode. Like Traffic Attack, you start with a finite amount of time on the clock and your goal is to simply rack up points before your counter hits zero. But rather than smacking into cars, you'll want to narrowly pass right by them, drive into incoming traffic, slide wildly around corners and so on. Basically, you want to drive like a madman while chaining your Burnouts together and not smacking head-first into anything.

There are more specific offshoots to the Maniac mode as well, like Burnout, Near Miss and Drift Challenges. Each of these only gives you points for performing the challenge's namesake rather than everything.

What all of this means is that Burnouts become extremely important to your progression through the game. While it's possible to pass these challenges during the early parts of the game without amassing huge Burnout chains, you'll need to basically be perfect towards the end in order to win. While this has been somewhat true of every Burnout title in the past, this much emphasis hasn't been placed on one thing across many events. You simply can't let go of the boost button or you'll be back to square one. Some folks may like this design, though others may be a little annoyed that you can be so punished for not doing one simple thing.

As mentioned earlier, the track design in Burnout Dominator is more focused around racing rather than Takedowns, and many feel like throwbacks to the days of Burnout 2: Point of Revenge. Huge, sweeping turns are the name of the game here, allowing you to toss your car's tail end way out in front as you skid for hundreds or even thousands of feet at a time.

One really cool element of Dominator is that Signature Takedowns have been mixed a little better into the game and appear this time as Signature Shortcuts. Nabbing them is the same as the Signature Takedowns in that you need to slam an opponent car into a specific area of the course. But rather than simply gaining a mark on your progression list and a nice picture, you'll actually open up a new pathway in the course, allowing you to cut down your race times. Some courses have more than one Signature Shortcut, meaning that you can save a lot of time in later events by opening them up early as they become permanent sections of the track. This is good stuff.

While the track design is generally great and the game is pure Burnout goodness in most respects, it's also a rather bare-bones experience, at least compared to previous games in the series. Crash mode is curiously missing from the game, which is sure to anger longtime fans of the fantastic party mode. We're told that the reason for this is so that Criterion can reintroduce the mode in Burnout 5 in a big way after having it take a break in Dominator, but that doesn't make the lack of its inclusion any easier to take in.

One great return that some fans will love is a quick race mode, dubbed Record Breaker in the game. You can pick a car, mode and track to beat your existing high scores, or simply race for the hell of it. We received a number of complaints after the release of Burnout Revenge because it lacked this feature, so these folks will be quite happy with Dominator.

Burnout Dominator on the PSP includes a number of multiplayer-friendly options, including support for up to six players via Ad-Hoc. This is fairly standard stuff, and if you've played Legends this way you'll know what you're in for. New, however, is the ability to trade high-scores between systems. You can join together in a lobby with up to 16 other players and swap high-scores between each of your systems with a simple button press, allowing you to compare your times while on the road. There's luckily an option to remove them if you get too jealous...

On top of this, Burnout HQ gives you access to two online features, namely downloadable content and leaderboards. There isn't anything available for download yet, but it looks as if new tracks are in the works. As for the leaderboards, you're able to upload the records that you've set in the Record Breaker mode and see how you compare with others from around the world. Unfortunately, the scores are only taken from Record Breaker, so if you've managed to nail a few perfect laps on a course in the main career mode, you can't compare that time.

From a visual standpoint, Dominator on the PSP looks fantastic. The game runs at a blistering framerate and never slows down. Though the models and scenery detail are obviously not quite as sharp as what you'd find on the PS2, when running at full speed the two games look nearly identical. The one big difference is that cars don't feature nearly as much damage detail as the console games, with the only damage shown reflected on things like open doors and a popped hood.

Our only real complaint with the game is that the collision detection is rather forgiving. There are times where we were sure we should have slammed into a car, only to pass right through and keep on going. While this is certainly better than the opposite, crashing into nothing, it does take a bit of the edge off as you get away with a lot more than you really should.

Closing Comments

Burnout Dominator is best thought of as a "Greatest Hits, but Not All of Them" from the Burnout series. The racing is just as adrenaline pumping as it's ever been, and possibly even more so than what we saw in Burnout Revenge as you need to be afraid of traffic once again. However, the lack of standard features and modes like Crash are a rather big disappointment. It's more worthy of a pickup on the PSP than the PS2 however as its simply more impressive as a handheld game and the multiplayer features are much more robust.

Bubble Bobble Evolution

2008-07-08T08:02:00.000-07:00

The original Bubble Bobble, released in arcades in 1986 with a popular NES version ported in 1988, was a lighthearted, coop action game that proved especially popular with casual gamers. The gameplay was on the simpler side, but working with a friend to capture monsters in bubbles and send them popping (along with some great examples of Engrish: "Let's make a journey to the cave of monsters!") proved to be a charming experience. Apparently, the people at Codemasters hate this game, as they've gone a long way towards destroying what made Bubble Bobble enjoyable in the first place.

Bubble Bobble Evolution features two characters named Bub and Bob who blow bubbles -- but that's about where the similarities to Bubble Bobble end. Instead of dinosaurs, the friends have been replaced with boys in dinosaur costumes. And instead of depicting the duo's "journey to a cave of monsters," Evolution is set in 18th century London. Bub and Bob are outside playing when they find themselves suddenly transformed from normal little boys into little boys wearing dinosaur costumes. They are then separated and dropped into two towers where a mysterious voice tells them to enjoy the entertainment. From there the two will have to work their way up to the top of the towers and confront their captor.

Gone is the simplistic goal of the original Bubble Bobble: capture all the enemies in bubbles, pop them all, and proceed to the next screen. Evolution clumsily switches the focus to flipping switches and transporting items from room to room. Each floor of the tower is divided into three sections, and you'll have to solve little puzzles in each of the sections in order to open the elevator and advance to the next floor. As you move between rooms, the floor rotates in 3D which, admittedly, is a nice visual effect. But unlocking the elevator usually requires mundane tasks like flipping a switch in one room, proceeding to the next to find an item, then transporting the item in a bubble to the third room. There are three types of switches (metal, stone, and wood), and they all perform different functions. But telling the metal and stone switches apart is next to impossible and the game doesn't always notify you what the switch has altered in the environment. So you'll often find yourself flipping a switch, then wandering around aimlessly wondering what it was you just did and what you need to do next. On top of the often vague level objectives, the game also drops you into rooms that are blacked out and require you to search around in the dark for the light switch (all the while enemies are attacking and, probably, killing you).

Control is a simple matter of jumping (X button) and blowing bubbles (square button), with special bubbles you will rarely used mapped to the triangle and circle buttons. You can switch between your two characters with a tap of the L button, or all of these controls can be customized in the options menu. As Bub and Bob are in separate towers, you'll need to navigate them both to the top of their respective prisons. But where this could have provided for some inventive play mechanics requiring players to switch back and forth between the towers and play the two characters off of each other, one boy's progress is actually unrelated to the other.

After every few floors you'll encounter a boss which is impressive in size but only has one canned animation it repeats over and over. And defeating them rarely requires more than standing in place and blowing a stream of bubbles. Other enemies scattered around the game are returning characters from previous Bobbles, like Zenchan the robot and Baneboh the ghost. When defeated, they'll drop items that contribute to your score (which does nothing) or power-ups that increase things like your speed and bubble distance. The power-ups are cumulative, which is nice, so you at least feel like your skills are improving as you make your way up the tower.

As with so many PSP games, load times for Bubble Bobble Evolution are atrocious. Nothing will make you yearn for the instant gratification of the original game more than waiting a minute for your game to load, finding the game saved right before you entered an elevator, then waiting another minute for the next floor to load. On top of that, the game's built-in tips take time to load. So in the early stages, you'll flip a switch and the game will freeze for a few seconds -- finally, your tip will pop up, but then you'll have to wait a few seconds to get back into the game.

But here's where Codemasters really dropped the ball: Bubble Bobble Evolution does not feature any coop multiplayer. What was probably the strongest selling point of the original game has been ignored in this update. A competitive multiplayer mode for up to four players is included, but it is a shallow elimination game where you simply shoot "bubble bombs" at your opponents.

The music in the game is reminiscent of a carnival with a fun house version of the classic Bubble Bobble theme included. Each tune should have been a few phrases longer, though, as you'll find they quickly begin to sound repetitious and, ultimately, annoying. The graphics utilize 3D objects on a 2D plane, and the game starts out looking promising with bright colors and lively environments. As you progress up the towers, though, you'll make your way through darker areas that, while they add variety, don't really suit the lighthearted Bubble Bobble world.

Closing Comments

Ultimately, Bubble Bobble Evolution is a matter of trying to fix something that wasn't broken. This update could have capitalized on fans of the first game who spent countless hours popping bubbles with their friends on the NES. When you die in Evolution, the game over screen shows the tower master with his back to you saying, "You are not my son…" But you'll probably reply, "You are not my Bubble Bobble…"

Brothers in Arms D-Day

2008-07-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

For a while it seemed like the PSP would never get a library of first-person shooters. Coded Arms delivered a decent romp in virtual space, and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex had some good ideas, but neither games made good use of the PSP. After these two shipped, Sony's little system got Medal of Honor Heroes, a game that finally showed what a really good FPS would be like on the handheld.

Soon afterward, Ubisoft and Activision announced their own FPS titles, Brothers in Arms D-Day and Call of Duty: Roads to Victory. The former shipped a little bit ago, though it sadly fails to elevate the FPS genre on the PSP. At this point gamers don't even care to have a revolutionary shooter on the PSP - they just want one that works well. And that's the problem with D-Day. Even with an adequate representation of elements seen in the PC versions, D-Day simply needs more to succeed as a portable FPS. It has clunky controls and muddy visuals, and the AI could use some sharpening.

D-Day takes place during the Normandy invasion and chronicles the harrowing account of two soldiers, Sergeants Baker and Hartsock. Sergeant Baker starred in the first PC game, titled Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 while Sergeant Hartsock appeared in the sequel, Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood. D-Day doesn't just borrow characters from the first two games; it takes entire missions and scenarios. Players will essentially get a "best of" collection with D-Day, as opposed to a new game. Not a bad thing in itself, but anyone expecting some fresh content may want to look elsewhere. Also, there are the aforementioned problems to worry about, as well.
First, the squad-based action of the original games simply doesn't translate well to the PSP - or at least not in D-Day. This has less to do with thinking through a tactical situation and everything to do with how players control themselves and their squad. Since there's only one analog stick on the system, it's difficult to keep an eye on surroundings while engaging enemies in heated gunfights. The game does include the situational awareness view, which offers a birds-eye view of the action, but this only helps coordinate tactics. Surviving can get pretty difficult when actually running around the battlefield while struggling with squad commands and a funky control scheme. D-Day offers two different schemes, but neither works all that well.

As such, all but the most experience players will die constantly. But thanks to a handy-dandy checkpoint system, that's never really an issue. Brothers in Arms is a challenging series to master, both on PC and PSP. Fortunately, the save system lets a player beat sections of a stage without too heavy a penalty when death does occur. But the secret to not dying is understanding that D-Day is not Medal of Honor Heroes - running into the heat of battle will only result in premature death. That's where D-Day's cover mechanic comes into play. It actually makes for interesting firefights because the game makes it almost impossible for a player to take the Rambo route - it's necessary to think ahead.

In short, players need to use their squad to suppress enemies. This opens the door to various flanking maneuvers the player can then carry out while the enemy is confused and huddled under cover. It's easy to see when an enemy is suppressed thanks to a red circle floating above their heads - a nice touch given many of the game's environments get rather dark.

The only problem with this 'suppress and flank' dynamic is that it tends to get a little old after a while. Players can get through many of the game's encounters by doing the same thing in exactly the same way. Maybe this would be fine if the game in general progressed smoothly, but it doesn't. Where players could execute finely tuned strategies and engage in dynamic firefights in the PC original, the PSP version offers an experience far less refined. It still works on a fundamental level, but it's simply not as fun as it used to be. Players will struggle with the controls and camera every bit as much as with the Nazis they're trying to kill.

The game also has a few AI problems, too. Most of the enemies in D-Day seem content to get shot in the face and not do too much about it. It's strange to say a game with poor AI can actually be difficult, but that's the case here. But that's beside the point. It would have been nice to see enemies react appropriately to adverse situations like they did in the PC games, but that really doesn't happen all that often. And finally, the game's visuals are very mixed bag. The game can look downright pretty at times, and at others, muddy and unimpressive. There's a good amount of detail on the soldiers and in some of the environments, but overall, D-Day could have used a little more flair.

Closing Comments

Brothers in Arms D-Day could have been a rewarding stint on the battlefield. Unfortunately, sloppy controls and a few AI issues sabotage much of the fun. That aside, a little spit and polish would have gone a very long way. The multiplayer modes, while lending the package some longevity, still suffer from the same problems. Finally, it would have been nice to see more original content appear in the single-player campaign.

Brooktown High

2008-07-08T07:57:00.000-07:00

While large audiences around the world have lapped up some of Japan's biggest contributions to gaming, namely RPGs, some action titles and whatnot, some "experimental" content has crept its way out of the country and blessed US fans with the likes of Okami, Katamari Damacy and even the Brain Age series. But one genre that has so far stayed steadfastly in Japan is dating simulators.

Konami and Backbone Entertainment hoped to break the genre to US gamers with Brooktown High, a game where your entire goal is to pick up on the opposite sex while maintaining your grades (if you care to). It's certainly unique on this side of the world, but unfortunately we now have a clue as to why it hasn't caught on over here before.

The game starts with your character's creation. Your personality is determined by answering a few simple questions before you get to pick your name and how you'll look. Clothing is limited to start, but your allowance and possibly a job will net you enough cash to pick up some new threads as time goes on.

Each week is pretty simple. On Monday morning, you have 30 minutes (which is about a minute of actual gameplay time, give or take) to get to class, but before then you can chat it up with any of Brooktown's students. Once you go to one of the four classes, you're fast-forwarded to Friday where you'll automatically partake in any job or club you've signed up for. All of a sudden it's Saturday where you can spend your morning studying or practicing a mini-game, and then if you have one set up, you'll go out on a date. As soon as the date's over, it's Monday morning again.

The game seems rushed when you first start, but you'll come to realize that the pacing is pretty spot-on in that you have enough time to talk to a couple people and perhaps set up a date before class, and then the rest of the week flies by fast enough that you're not waiting for long. So the pacing and general idea works fine, but the actual execution is lacking in a number of areas.

For starters, you'll find yourself in the midst of the same conversations time and time again, and though they'll sometimes change on dates depending on where you are, when talking on the phone or at school you'll wind up hearing the same things over and over and over again. We had Elektra, the local goth chick, tell us her "new" haiku more than a couple times, which is as follows:

Empty plastic bag
Suffocation, strangulate
Gasp, gasp, gasp, gasp, gasp

There is voice work in the game, but it's of a limited nature. You may (or may not) hear someone say the first line of a conversation, but you're left to read the rest on your own. It's good that there are voices present in some form, but it's a little disappointing that there aren't full conversations here. Given the amount of dialog and music that have appeared in numerous other PSP titles, like the Grand Theft Auto series especially, we don't imagine the developers ran out of disc space (or if they did, they needed better compression).

But that isn't the only problem with the conversations. Many times you'll only find two answers, one positive and one negative, not allowing you to deviate the chit chat from its destined course. Some do, but certainly not all. Also, you don't always know what your options mean. To make things work a little more naturally, rather than have to read through each of your entire responses you'll find little phrases like "Compliment her", "Dis her" or "Let's go somewhere else". This is a nice idea, but when your two responses are "Too sexy" and "Too busy", it can be difficult to determine which one is positive and which is negative. It's not always clear, and having to guess at your dialog doesn't help when you need to guess at their response to you in the first place.

What all of this talking eventually leads to is some sort of make out session, though some of you may be disappointed to know that you don't actually ever see any sort of physical interaction between characters. These scenes of intimacy are instead replaced by real footage of things like flowers blooming, oil rigs pumping away and a guy jumping in the middle of the street. No, that last one doesn't make much sense even when you see it in the context of these videos. Even the dancing mini-game has each person standing off by themselves and jiving in their own ways.

While you won't ever actually see any of the juicy bits that go down, Brooktown High's mini-games are an interesting way to let you play some of them. The kissing mini-game has you control a pair of lips as you dodge some objects while collecting hearts and spraying back bad breath, but we only had to play this once during one school year even though we were constantly hooking up with a number of different girls. The dancing mini-game is only of use during the high school's three big dances, and we never actually came across the blackjack game in the course of normal play.

Perhaps most disappointing is that Brooktown High features a couple of presentation issues. For one thing, even though none of the load times are all that long, the game will need to load each and every section of the game. So if you change clothes, it loads. When you head out to school, it loads. When you talk to someone, they load. When you bring up your PDA to check your schedule or call someone, it has to load. And so on and so forth. As you can probably guess, this slows down the actual play experience quite a bit even though the actual pacing aside from this is quite good.

But perhaps the biggest problem for some people is that the game simply would not work with our 4GB Memory Stick. This is the same official Sony stick that we've been using for months with every other PSP game that's come into the office, and we've never had a problem before. The game told us that there wasn't enough free space for the save file, which is less than one megabyte, even though we had more than two gigs of free space available. So those of you who bought the basic pack without an included Memory Stick and then ponyed up for a 4GB stick, you'll have to run out and pick up a second, smaller card.

Closing Comments

Brooktown High is certainly a unique game outside of Japan, but it's also not a good one. Conversations are too repetitive, and given that they're the core element of the game it doesn't help to see the same thing over and over again. Some of the mini-games are interesting, but you rarely ever get to play them. And though it may sound perverted, a dating game where you never even see anyone hold hands is missing the boat entirely.

Brave Story: New Traveler

2008-07-08T07:54:00.000-07:00

There are hundreds of RPGs out there for you to pump your free time into, so it's important that developers establish a connection with gamers to keep the masses playing one title. The folks behind Brave Story: New Traveler must know how important this connection is because they did their best to cast someone you'd be familiar with as the main character -- i.e. you.

Now, I'm not talking about how they let you name the main character -- that's nothing new -- I mean that this kid is you. He plays handheld videogames, he ignores his friends when they try to talk to him while he's gaming, and he's a big enough God of War fan to name his dog Kratos.

It's like they put a camera in your shower, man.

Set to be released next week, Brave Story: New Traveler is the newest PSP release from XSEED Games and puts players into the shoes of a nameable main character -- I'll call him Lord Laffy Taffy for this review -- as he sets out on a world-spanning quest to save his friend, Miki.

The game takes place in the same universe at the Brave Story manga and features some familiar faces (Wataru, Meena, etc.), but you'll start the game playing videogames in a modern day park with your best friend Miki by your side. In typical chick fashion, Miki's yakking on and on about something or someone, and in typical gamer fashion, you're ignoring the hell out of her until your trusty pup Kratos comes back from a walk to bark his head off.

What is it, girl? Trouble at the old well?

Yes, Miki has fallen ill. She's taken to the hospital where the doctors can't figure out what's wrong with her but are nice enough to tell her parents she might never wake up. Lord Laffy Taffy runs to the rooftop to cry, a mysterious door appears and a disembodied voice tells him "Beyond the door, you can change your destiny."

And the adventure begins!

On the other side of the door, the story comes into focus. You're a traveler. You have the ability to go between our world and that of Vision -- a crazy world of lizard people, magic-like abilities and swordplay. If you find the Goddess of Fortune in Vision, she'll grant you one wish -- psst, you want to save Miki.

You won't have to go it alone in Brave Story. The battles you'll run into -- and there will be a lot as you crisscross forests and beaches -- are set up for the traditional turn-based, party battle. You'll have three slots to fill on your team, and as you get used to the game you'll get used to having Yuno (a half-kitten/half-girl hottie) and Sogreth (a beefy lizard) as your backup.

Although your sword, Yuno's bow and Sogreth's battleaxe will be the primary way you crack the skulls of the gimblewolves and seductresses you come across, Brave Story features three concepts -- friendship, courage and growth -- that will greatly affect the way you beat baddies.

The longer you toil away with the same set of combatants, the better friends your group gets to be. That sounds nice in the lovey-dovey way, but what it means is that the longer you're together the more ways you get to kick ass together. Unity moves open up as you go and involve everything from Lord Laffy Taffy and Yuno pulling a pick-pocket/stab routine to Meena and Lord Laffy Taffy running to one side of the screen and bombarding the enemies with craziness. These team-up moves will be critical to beating dungeon bosses, but need to be implemented with some forethought because they drain your BP meter.

What is a BP meter? Well, I'm glad you asked, friend. Brave Power is the light pink meter onscreen that governs what kind of special moves you can pull off -- it's also that courage thing I was talking about a few 'graphs ago. As you battle, the pink meter fills. When it's your turn to attack you can select one of those cool unity moves, or Bravura moves, which are similarly devastating attacks that you can do without another party member. Lord Laffy Taffy can shoot a ball of energy from his sword, Mitsuru -- one of the many guest party members you'll run into -- can engulf the bad guys in a fire pit, and Yuno can heal people via song … kind of like Avril Lavigne.

The final element of the battle system is growth. Sure, your characters are going to get bigger and better through experience points and new equipment, but for Lord Laffy Taffy to get an audience with the goddess, he's got to find these magical gemstones that fit into the faceplate of his sword. Each time he finds one, the sword changes forms and gets stronger.

With that, you've got the basics for what Brave Story is all about. Reflect. Nameable characters, world-spanning quests and upgrades -- doesn't sound that much different from most RPGs, eh? That's because it isn't. As much as I like Brave Story, it really is a vanilla RPG -- random battles, repeating music, silent characters, etc. It's still fun to play, but chances are you're not going to sit down and play this thing like a maniac. You're going to take a few daylong breaks.

The problem with Brave Story's pastel color scheme and blah menu system is that it makes me feel like I could be playing any RPG. Enter a dungeon, beat the randoms, beat the boss, upgrade your weapons and repeat. Where's the uniqueness? What puts this game above any of the other PSP RPGs out there?

Although the journey to save Miki is a unique seed for this story to sprout from, it never does. You're sent to this world by a vague voice and then just wail on enemies until it's over. So much more could have been done to make me care about these characters. As it stands, the kitten freak with a voracious appetite is the only character I come away knowing that much about.

Reflective of the game's general flow, the environments are extremely linear. The same shops are in each town, which is forgivable, but the few folks in the streets will say things that only pertain to your next story-driven mission. Basically, it feels like you could run around at random and get where you need to be. There are some side quests later on, but as you move through the story, you're path is pretty much predetermined -- as are the save points.

Closing Comments

There's nothing wrong with Brave Story. It's a solid RPG that's sure to appeal to fans who want a fun yet simple romp through the genre they love. However, Brave Story lacks the ingenuity to make it something I'd play for hours on end. After a set of the exact same events -- random battles, dungeon, random battles, boss -- I was rolling my eyes and ready to power down the PSP. Even the inclusion of being able to capture birds and make them fight didn't best the urge to take a break.

Bounty Hounds

2008-07-08T07:45:00.000-07:00

Games can frustrate for a number of reasons. Some of them get under your skin because of genuine challenge. That's the best possible scenario. Others irritate because of glaring design flaws or, along the same lines, sloppy code. Still others frustrate because they nail certain elements while almost completely failing in others. Bounty Hounds finds itself in this latter category. It excels in the areas of artistic design and technical prowess, but fails as a solid action tile due to a few gameplay issues.

In all honesty, most games suffer from lopsided quality to an extent, but it's especially bad in this case. Bounty Hounds looks and performs better than most any game on PSP. It crams multiple characters on screen almost every second of every mission, to start. Not only that, each of these enemy units looks and animates well; far better than in most third-person action titles. To top it off, the development team obviously took care to make enemy units appear unique. Everything from their armor and weapons to the way they move is undeniably impressive.

The same goes for the narrative art during many of the cutscenes in Bounty Hounds. Its characters wouldn't seem out of place in a sci-fi graphic novel, and you see everything through a filtered, documentary-style lens. The story itself is told well enough. Characters spew dialogue bubbles, like the ones seen in your average role-playing game. As for the actual plot, it does the job without getting too deep. Many of the game's subplots and twists come from older sci-fi material. Still, it's better than in most action games, and as mentioned above, it certainly has a lot of style.
But for those who don't know, here's a little recap: The story takes place far in the future. The Human race finds itself in an intergalactic relay against a variety of alien species to colonize as many planets in the galaxy as possible. Deciding they need a helping hand, the Human race hires a mercenary group known as the Bounty Hounds to eradicate alien life on planets the Humans want to colonize. They're interplanetary conquistadors, in other words, and they're tasked with slaughtering indigenous beings all over the cosmos. Now before you start thinking this sounds ethically shady, or in case you already do, just know these aliens suck anyway. They're vicious, power hungry, and deserve to die.

You start the game onboard a massive spaceship. You, as the protagonist Maximillian, live aboard the vessel along with dozens of other bounty hounds. The ship receives missions through a military contract and rockets through the cosmos delivering the bounty hounds to their objectives. Before heading down to the planet, there's lots of stuff to do and see aboard the ship. Here's where Bounty Hounds does several things absolutely right. To start, you can simply walk around the massive interior of the ship and talk to whomever you want. Fellow Bounty Hounds offer informative tidbits on the story and the ship's many functions, too.

You can then enter a pair of vendors and go shopping. You can also assign skill sets and define character progress through experience points. First, you can enter the weapons retailer. You can purchase (or find) some 500 weapons in the game, so you'll spend plenty of time here. In addition to buying weapons, which come in melee and long-rage varieties, the weapons shop also lets you modify existing hardware.

This goes for all weapons and armor. You can equip multiple weapons per arm, as well as individual pieces of armor for your head, arms, waist and legs. Taking things even deeper, you can upgrade every piece of hardware with modules you find on the field. These modules raise your defenses to the elements or lower the defenses of your foes. There's so much to find and tinker with that it's frankly a little overwhelming at first. But it's better to be overwhelmed with content than be shocked by the lack of things to do.

At the Medical Center, you can take earned experience points and assign them to specific skill sets. They split into three categories including Field, Passive and Enhancing. The field option, arguably the game's main unique feature, lets you emit a shield over your character or project one in front of you. Depending on what skills you master, this shield can increase your defenses, lower the defenses of your enemies, increase your own attack power and so on. Under the passive and enhancing skill sets, you can do everything from unlock special attacks to improve your map. The interface for all of this, including skill improvement and weapon shopping, is easy to read and navigate. As much information as Bounty Hounds presents, it's all nicely laid out.
After buying your gear and receiving your mission, you head down to various planets (four in all) and do what you do best: kill aliens by the hundreds. Here's where Bounty Hounds falls apart. For all its high points, it suffers from a handle of very poor design choices. The first, and biggest, deals with the camera. In a game as complex as this, where you fight multiple enemies constantly, you need full control of the camera. Or at least have the game do an excellent job of handling it for you. Bounty Hounds gives you neither option. It only lets you center the camera behind your character by tapping the left shoulder button. This simply doesn't work. In fact, it's a downright terrible idea.

As you run through the game's various battlefields, you constantly tap the left shoulder button trying to get the best view of the action. It rarely works. On the contrary, unseen foes shoot you constantly as you spin around wildly trying to locate them. The radar helps to a degree, as it actually paints enemy locations with colored dots. But even if you turn toward an enemy's general direction and the camera fails to achieve a lock, you'll aim square at something and still miss entirely. If this happened occasionally that'd be fine, but it happens a lot. And since you face clusters of aliens all the time, you sustain a ton of unnecessary damage solely because the game fails to offer you the means to deal with scores of adversaries.

Even something as simple as navigating the myriad caves and barren wastelands of the four alien worlds feels like a major chore. It looks and performs beautifully, but getting your bearings, if nothing else, should be like second nature. And again, that's just not the case in Bounty Hounds. Even after you plow through hordes of bloodthirsty aliens and work your way through the landscape, you still have to deal with the boss fights.

These annoy far more than ordinary enemies do since they move around so much. That may sound stupid and obvious, but when a game doesn't let you track semi-stationary targets, actually tracking something mobile is a royal pain in the ass. Plus, they deal a serious damage, so it doesn't take many bad camera adjustments (which you do often) to send you to your grave.

In addition, combat itself tends to get a little repetitive. It's fun for a while, but most enemies simply move toward you slowly and wait for you to kill them. Bosses put up a good fight, of course, but most other enemies simply get in your way instead of pose a serious threat to your health. At this point Bounty Hounds may sound like a total loss, but that's not the case. The wireless option helps keep things fresh for a while, even if some of the problems from the main game plague multiplayer as well. It's a very basic deathmatch setup, where one other player (with a copy of the UMD) fights another one-on-one on in variety of locales. It's fun yet ultimately a little shallow.

Closing Comments

Bounty Hounds is a classic example of shoddy execution derailing a slew of great ideas. With a better camera and improved controls, it could have been a real contender. Still, as frustrating as the game can get, it’s enjoyable in short bursts and presents a wealth of good ideas. Beyond that, the game looks great and runs extremely well for the amount of action that transpires at any given time. Multiplayer adds a bit of appeal, but it could benefit from a few more modes in addition to the included one-on-one deathmatch.

Bomberman Land

2008-07-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

You might not think of "bombs" when trying to come up with family-friendly activities, but we can assure you that Bomberman is quite family-friendly. This little hero has been blowing things up in the name of fun for years now, and he's trotting over to the PSP in Bomberman Land, a mini-game compilation filled with a wide variety of activities and a healthy chunk of classic Bomberman entertainment.

Bomberman Land is, generally speaking, an enjoyable game to play but has a number of problems that we should discuss. Before we truly begin though, let's cover the basics. Bomberman Land places you in control of White (you can rename him), the quintessential Bomberman ready for adventure. White -- and a number of his Bomberman friends -- receive word that Bomberman Land (a massive amusement park) is in trouble. Being the noble and lively Bombermen that they are, White and co. travel to the fun-filled island hoping to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Not all goes according to plan and their plane crashes into the island. What's worse: all the residents of Bomberman Land have lost their memory and the entire park has been broken up into pieces and needs restoring. The story is silly but satisfactory for a simple title, so your adventure promptly begins.

This is a title made up primarily of mini-games and dialogue. White is accompanied by Mini Bomber, the smart-talking, self-proclaimed star of Bomberman Land. You progress through the game by hopping from point-to-point on a board game-style map, where each marker activates either a mini-game or a dialogue sequence. The entire single-player campaign is structured in this fashion. You move to each spot, play a game or talk to people to get a Zone Piece (small numbered blocks) and then you use those Zone Pieces to open up more areas. The game flow is very straightforward.

Unfortunately, one of the main problems with the game arises when analyzing this overarching structure. First and foremost: although you'll be clear as to "where to go" the majority of the time, there will be points when nothing seems to open up the next area. These stagnant moments result in mindlessly running from one place to another looking for a random Zone Piece you may have missed, and such repetitive checking can get really aggravating.

And although some of the dialogue scenes are amusing, it seems like you spend an awful lot of time not playing mini-games, which seems odd for a mini-game collection. Fortunately, Mini Bomber will often deliver some genuinely funny lines that range dramatically from completely self-absorbed to awkwardly uncertain. The pacing issues may coax you into rushing through the dialogue to get to the next mini-game, but if you take the time to read it you may be pleased.

Otherwise, most of the mini-games (called Attractions in the game) are fun and offer a wide assortment of things to do. One of your first tasks is to race a small remote-controlled car around a track, while others include launching Bomberman off a cliff and flapping his arms/wings to stay afloat. Some of the games are even more complex than typical mini-game fare, like a side-scrolling ninja game with multiple platforms and a host of enemies to dispatch. Besides a few poorly controlling entries, most of the content is entertaining.

Perhaps the real beauty of this title is the inclusion of Battle mode, which is a traditional Bomberman game with a surprising number of options. You can pick from over 40 levels (many of them are just alterations of each other, but it's still an impressive collection), numerous skins and extremely detailed game type customizations. Battle mode plays like any classic Bomberman should, just with upgraded sprites to make the experience easier on the eyes. We had a great time with this mode and it will absolutely please fans of the classic gameplay mechanic.

Bomberman Land also has a fair number of multiplayer options to enjoy. You can play Battle mode with up to three other people, even if they don't have the UMD. You can also send over unlocked Attractions through game sharing, though these are only for single-player usage. Ultimately, these are great options to have, but we would have also liked to see infrastructure play available.

Unfortunately, Bomberman Land as a whole isn't quite as strong as its base components. As we mentioned before, the pacing of the game definitely feels slow, which is unusual considering its status as not only a casual game but a portable game at that. The music isn't exactly ideal either, with repetitive, overly happy loops that grow old fast. And while the graphics are somewhat above average for a portable title, Bomberman Land isn't pushing the system in any new directions.

And let's not forget to mention the pacing one last time. It really hurts the experience.

Closing Comments

If you're a fan of traditional Bomberman and you want a shinier, portable version of the experience, this is a pretty solid game to pick up. However, if you're more interested in the single-player mini-game collection, be wary: the pacing and lack of real innovation keep this from being a stellar title.