Review by Bobby Foster

If I could take only one videogame with me to a desert island, it might be this one. There is so much depth and challenge here that even if I spent a lifetime in solitary confinement playing it, I might still never be able to say I’d mastered it.

Unfortunately, away from the desert island, my patience was too short.

The longer I played, the more stupid and ordinary I felt. My tiny mind failed to remember which ship I was supposed to click on first to build a certain kind of unit, and then I kept losing my bearings in a sea of identically sized, abstract icons. It took me nearly an hour just to play through the “basic” tutorial, and afterwards I felt exhausted.

Now I find myself worrying that I’ve gone soft and/or stupid after playing too many primitive games- the kind that can be boiled down to nothing much cleverer than “press X now to be awesome!!!” It seems plenty of others have been able to get their heads around the game and enjoy it, and it wasn’t so long ago that I was exactly the kind of guy who’d throw himself into a deep and sophisticated strategy game. Have my game-playing abilities in fact regressed despite the 20-30 hours I spend each week playing the damned things?

Maybe. You probably don’t care: it’s more my problem than yours. I guess the point here is that if you too have played a lot of “press X now to be awesome!!!” games, you might struggle with AI War.

There is of course an honesty and fairness thing too. I hold my hands up: I definitely haven’t spent as long with the game as would be needed to review it “properly”. I felt worn down and gave up, because it was starting to feel more stressful and undermining than my day job. Four hours is my current total play time according to Steam, and even if this were the most basic of Real-Time-Strategy games, I’d have scarcely scratched the surface.

AI War is categorically not the most basic of real-time-strategy games. And if the consensus usually is that it’s a good idea to thoroughly understand a thing before you criticise it, shouldn’t you be asking why this says “review” at the top of the page and not “lazy, irresponsible, scratch of surface”?

Go ahead. Ask. You could well be onto something. Maybe Lewie will change what it says if enough people ask for it.

Yet with disappointing sales taking developer Arcen Games to the brink of bankruptcy, it seems downright bizarre that so much of their (hugely admirable) post-release support has been directed toward satisfying people who already love the game, rather than working on how to make it more approachable for new players. Wouldn’t it have far greater reach – and thus potential profitability – if it could realistically be marketed beyond players who found Starcraft too easy?

[Editors note: Chris from Arcen popped along to the comments to add a clarification on a few points regarding the sales, and other things. Cheers Chris]

I wonder whether Arcen have even grasped that this is a fundamental problem with their game. From the first dialog box of the first tutorial – where the RTS concept is introduced in terms of chess – alarm bells start ringing. Why use a slightly confusing analogy with a turn-based board game purely to make a redundant point about how the player isn’t represented by a piece in the game? How is that important? And are people with no prior RTS experience seriously expected to make AI War their first? Wow.

The first RTS I played was the original Command & Conquer. Players rarely gave up on that one, because it knew how to introduce itself. Sure, it was a much simpler game than AI War, with far fewer mechanics to learn, but nonetheless, it knew that if it showed us everything it had to offer right from the start it would have freaked out our simple mid-90s gaming brains. So instead you had a first mission that was really just about getting used to using the mouse to drag and select units, pointing and clicking to move and shoot, and right-clicking to de-select. This point, which could quite easily be (and just has been) made in one sentence, Command & Conquer used an entire mission to demonstrate. When the player completed their objective, big red capital letters saying MISSION ACCOMPLISHED appeared in the centre of screen, and while those words were probably just there to deliver some sense of satisfaction to the player, they could equally describe the developer’s success at entertainingly communicating the knowledge needed to play the game.

AI War’s approach couldn’t be more different. It uses lengthy tutorials instead of short missions to introduce concepts. In those tutorials a paragraph or two of text is thrown at the player that details the elaborate mechanics and keyboard shortcuts the game uses. You’re then told how important it is that you don’t forget the information being told to you, before the game quickly rushes on to the next equally important demonstration.

Wait, hang on, what did it just say I wasn’t supposed to forget?

It’s telling that within AI War’s tutorial menu there’s also a link to the developer’s Wiki, in which you’ll find a further six chapters to help out beginners to the game. Under the “How Do I Know What Difficulty Level To Play On?” heading, they recommend that “If you have never touched an RTS game before, and you struggled with the tutorials, you should probably start with difficulty 1 or 2, which will be extremely easy and will give you more time to get used to the game.”

Wait- what’s that? It seems Arcen Games are indeed aware – but aren’t concerned – that some people will sit for hours playing through the lengthy tutorials and still be struggling. That attitude seems foolish- if not a little irresponsible to me. Don’t they realise that it won’t just be lazy reviewers, but also cherished paying customers who give up on the game before they get to the good bit?

I realise that it would likely take a lot of hard work and creativity to break the components of the game down in such a way that they could be gradually introduced organically one-by-one instead of all at once, but you know what? If you want to make an elaborate and sophisticated game that involves running a galaxy-spanning empire, then you can’t afford not to think about this stuff. It’s simply unfair to expect your less-able players to take it on trust that the game they’re struggling through will eventually be worth the effort.

Then again, what do I know? Not enough, admittedly. But I can be certain that I won’t be the only one generating the sort of word-of-mouth that says, “I had a quick go and it looked kinda interesting but I got bored long before I could really get into it”.

AI War: Fleet Command, PC – £5.32

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Review by Bobby Foster

Seriously? You want to read about Super Mario Galaxy 2 instead of play Super Mario Galaxy 2? You are, quite simply, wasting precious moments of your life that could otherwise be spent enjoying the greatest videogame ever made. Really. Honestly. I promise I’m not just saying that to catch your attention.

The history here is well-worn but important. Shigeru Miyamoto gave us Donkey Kong a little under thirty years ago. You got to jump over barrels and occasionally smash the barrels up with a hammer, as you set about trying to save the kidnapped Pauline from the giant ape at the top of the screen.

Despite that the technology driving Miyamoto’s Mario games has gotten ever more powerful, none of these essential details have changed much in the past thirty years. Pauline might have been edged out in favour of Daisy or Peach or Rosalind (or whatever the bland token female might be called next), but the damsel in distress motif endures. The slightly too cuddly Donkey Kong was quickly replaced by a meaner, spikier and ever-growing Bowser, but his role was the same: irrational and unyielding tyrant. Even now that the action has evolved from taking place across a single screen to multiple planets, the game can still be boiled down to one core principle: “time jump well to get girl”.

It’s no coincidence that the biggest misstep Mario ever made was when Nintendo forgot these crucial tenets. The generously reviewed but massively disappointing Super Mario Sunshine changed the formula to “hose graffiti down to clean town”. It didn’t have the same ring to it and the game bored away all but the most devout of Mario fans before it had a chance to get interesting. Even Mario 64, in spite of the assuredness with which it first put Mario into three dimensions, suffered from a similar problem. It wasn’t a game that boiled down to just jumping. You had to explore. Retrace your steps. Play the same level six times over. Most notably, it was happy to throw you into situations where you didn’t know exactly what you were supposed to do next.

Okay it was a great game, but it wasn’t a proper Mario game.

Real Mario games are about obstacles courses- usually the most beautifully designed obstacle courses it’s possible for their host hardware to generate. They’re about getting from point A to point B without coming to harm. In Donkey Kong, it was obvious that “point B” was up there where the barrels were coming from. And in the original Super Mario Brothers, the screen was only capable of moving from left to right, so it was pretty clear which way you had to go. But in three dimensions? Who knew which way was forward? Even with the greatest level design in the world (and at the time it pretty much was), Mario 64 couldn’t communicate so effectively or consistently which way to go next.

The real triumph of the first Super Mario Galaxy was solving the conundrum of how to do a proper Mario game in 3D. By basing the action on small planets and firing the player between them in quick succession, it reinjected the pace of the 2D games, and was much better at compelling you to keep moving in the right direction. It also featured some of the greatest architecture ever featured in a game. (Yes, I’m calling the level design “architecture”- because I simply don’t believe it’s possible to be pretentious when you’re talking about something so exquisitely fit for purpose.) Unsurprisingly, nearly everybody loved it and – unlike Super Mario Sunshine – it truly deserved the universal acclaim.

What was left for the sequel to do? “More of the same” would have satisfied all of us who spent large amounts of time since the first game’s release wanting to rip out the tongue and tear off the fingers of anyone regurgitating that lazy unthinking nonsense that “the Wii doesn’t have any games for proper hardcore gamers”. And in some ways that’s what we’ve got: riotously inventive levels, a huge variety of challenges, and a generosity of ideas that most developers would spread across ten games and try to sell for £40 a pop.

Yet this isn’t just more of the same: it is by a long stretch a superior game to the original. The levels – in particular those that mess around with gravity and perspective – are braver and more ambitious, and ultimately more rewarding to play. Across the board it’s bigger and tougher, and whilst getting the 70 stars required to defeat Bowser should be within almost any player’s reach, collecting the additional 172 that lie beyond that point will be a severe test for even the most dexterous and patient. Happily, the unnecessarily convoluted hub system from the first game has been stripped back so there’s less pointless wandering about. The new power-ups open up entirely new ways of thinking about levels. Yoshi has been implemented superbly. The hairs on Mario’s moustache flap in the wind more convincingly than ever before…

Yep, it’s the greatest videogame ever made. Sure, you might want to deduct points because it wastes time at the start telling you nonsense like “ shimmering stardust falls on the Mushroom Kingdom only once a century”. Or you might think that the “daredevil” comet challenges (where you have to replay a level without taking a single hit) are just a little too frequent and unforgiving. You might even be disappointed that the camera, although pretty much perfect 99.9% of the time, isn’t quite as capable of psychically predicting where you want it to be as it would be in your geekiest dreams.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that in Super Mario Galaxy 2 we have a game that compels you to keep playing without the need for a cheap cliffhanger story. It doesn’t have to bother with the illusion of character development and a tedious slow-drip of upgrades, because in its unashamedly old skool way, it asks that the player, rather than the avatar, improves their skill level in order to progress. It’s got the confidence to frustrate you with challenging objectives, because it has enough faith in the sheer joyousness of what it’s presenting to you that it knows you’ll keep trying at it.

But really. Words words words… you’re still wasting time. This is simply the best a videogame has ever been. Go play it.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 – £29.74 delivered

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Review by Bobby Foster

Routine is important. I get that. Like most people, I learnt young that failing to brush your teeth every morning has disastrous consequences both hygienically and socially. And although I’ve always kinda felt that the alarm clock is the cruellest machine mankind ever made, I’ve come to accept that you have to use one to be successful in the modern world.

Yet it’s still true that the darkest and most powerful depression that ever took hold of any of us stemmed from the realisation that we’re dancing to the beat of someone else’s drum. With worrying ease, routine has the power to take us prisoner, and its capacity to rob us of our freedom and creativity is the reason every blues song you ever heard was about the same thing. We all want control of our own destiny.

As it is in life, so it is in videogames. The most pointless and facile titles are those that one person plays in exactly the same way as the next. A game with a linear plot and one-solution puzzles never lets me feel like I’m playing. I want to experiment, take risks and work out my own way of doing things. In fact, my ability to do that within the safe context of videogames is one of the key reasons I continue to tolerate the humdrumity of the rest of my existence.

So if I say Japanese Role Playing Games aren’t usually for me, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. They mostly seem like an attempt to tell the most long-winded story possible in the most roundabout way imaginable. Despite their elaborate battle systems they’re often pathetically formulaic, and thanks to their needless complexity they end up rewarding conservative play over experimentation. Remembering to equip all my party members with fire-based weapons when I enter a dungeon made of ice won’t ever make me feel creative or resourceful. In fact, I’d probably feel more fulfilled stepping away from the game and flossing between my teeth.

Persona 3 is a roleplaying game that was developed in Japan. Most of the male characters have stupid-looking spiky hair while your female party members are the usual collection of highly sexualised teenagers. It asks you to spend a lot of time comparing stats and collecting items. And the battle system involves everyone taking it in turns to hit each other. It goes without saying that it’s just as boring, creepy and pointless as the rest of its Far-Eastern genre-mates, right?

Wrong. This is among the most inventive, unpredictable, funny, engaging, well written and charmingly constructed games it’s possible to play on the PS2. Really. It’s blown my usual “modern JRPGs are all the same” shtick completely out of the water.

It probably helps that it’s not set in the kind of fantasy-cum-futuristic universe that’s become so over-familiar since Final Fantasy VII first popularised it. Here we’re based in the present (a setting still bizarrely underused in the genre), and the game starts with you arriving at a new school for the start of an academic year. Half of the game is based around the routine of school life: attending lessons, hanging out with your classmates, and deciding what extra-curricular activities you want to take part in. The other half, which follows from the early discovery that you’re no ordinary school boy, is about battling through Cerberus, the demonic tower that appears on the school grounds each day at midnight.

I don’t want to waste too much time on the details of the story, as the game’s anime sequences do a more impressive and stylish job of explaining the supernatural aspects of the plot than I ever could. What’s important is the way the paranormal and mundane elements of the story blend together. To be as powerful as possible when you go out dungeon-crawling, you need to have developed your relationships with your class mates and other people living in town, because as acquaintances become close friends, your ability to channel stronger magic increases. This allows these two very distinct parts of the game to provide variety without ever feeling pointless.

One interesting consequence of this “chat-up to level-up” mechanic is the possibility it raises that your character is a total sociopath. You might for instance ask yourself: am I befriending the boorish fat kid with no mates because I have an interest in him and his well-being, or because I need to get him to like me in order to max out the abilities I want? You’re certainly not likely to waste any time with him once you know he’s unlocked all the power that he has to give, because by far the most effective strategy is to keep moving from one emotionally needy person to the next to increase your powers as quickly as possible.

Happily it’s an issue that’s never fully resolved, giving the game a shade-of-grey moral atmosphere that’s almost unheard of in Japanese RPGs.

Yet more important than the ambiguous motivation of the leading man is the amount of control you have over how to play the game. Although the main story arc is about as linear as they come, you have plenty of freedom to choose which characters you engage with and therefore which powers you develop. It’s down to you who you speak to or ignore, and what order you deal with people. Crucially, there isn’t time to develop all the available friendships to their fullest, which adds weight to your decisions. Regardless of how efficiently your try to play the game, you will be left with loose ends by the time the school year ends, so you’re forced to prioritise.

Of course, none of this would have much significance if the game’s dozens of supporting characters were underdeveloped or uninteresting, but thankfully they’re among the most memorable you’re likely to encounter in a game. Some are charming, others funny, and a couple out-right twisted- and the writers and translators should be congratulated on the job they’ve done in making all of them worth caring about. Admittedly some of the romantic elements can feel pretty hackneyed, and you’re not going to gain any great insight into the nature of human relationships, but you could say the same about a TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You’ll still likely come away heavily invested in a well put-together ensemble of characters.

The dungeon-crawling is where there’s probably the biggest cause for complaint. Aside from the turn-based combat (which some will surely find an immediate turn-off) the layout of the tower is randomly generated, with very little variety in the types of rooms and corridors you’re walking through. In what is otherwise a very good-looking game, it’s disappointing that the sections you spend so much time exploring are really very repetitive and unattractively designed.

That said, it’s sufficiently redeemed by the fact you’re never allowed to switch onto autopilot. Almost every battle requires at least a little thought about which attacks you use, and the game demands that you’re willing and able to adjust your set up on the fly. Most fights work out so that if you get it right, and you can wipe out your enemies while scarcely taking a hit, but if you get it a bit wrong, the situation can turn precarious very quickly. It’s the proverbial glass cannon approach, and it’s very effective at keeping the player on their toes and preventing complacency.

What’s less successful is the decision to only give the player direct control over the lead character. Your team-mates can be given vague tactical instructions each turn, but you can’t specify exactly what action they take. In principle it’s an idea that could work, but it relies on having AI companions who are capable of consistently making smart –or at least rational- decisions. Unfortunately here your party members act foolishly a little too frequently, and when that happens in the crucial phase of a boss battle it’s hard not to feel like you’ve been stitched up.

Yet despite these occasional moments of frustration, Persona 3 still stands head and shoulders above other Japanese RPGs. There’s an element of genuine craft involved when fashioning a character that works for you, both through choosing which relationships your pursue, and in the constant evolution of your abilities. You often have to sacrifice powers you’d previously relied on to create the new and more powerful “Persona” that grant you your power, and this keeps the game feeling fresh and interesting from beginning to end. Or at least, I never felt like an idle spectator at a 100-hundred hour long CGI fireworks display, in the way some games might have made me feel in the past.

That’s the irony here. A game that’s based around the rigid timetable of school life, uses a very limited range of locations, and involves returning to the same dungeon again and again is in fact more inventive and varied than hundreds of others that try to create vast worlds for you to explore. I’ve barely scratched the surface of all the things Persona 3 has to offer – in particular the 30 hours of epilogue content that comes with FES Edition – but I don’t think I need to. It’s a game best explored for yourself, full of opportunities to develop your own tactics, and packed full of wonderful little surprises. I’m trying to think on an RPG on the PS2 that I’ve enjoyed more, and am coming up empty. Really. Go get it.

Persona 3 FES – £14.95 delivered

Review by Bobby Foster

The first thing you’ll notice about Mass Effect 2 is the quality of the Brylcreem all the characters use. Every haircut in this universe stays perfectly shaped at all times, even when the hair is really long. It’s a truly exciting vision of what the future of hair care holds.

That’s a lie. It’s probably more likely the 112th thing you’ll notice. (At the start of the game nearly everyone is wearing a space helmet, so you don’t get to experience the amazing static hair thing until later.) Yet this game has the power to brainwash. You’ll find that when you do pick up on the slightly weird looking hair, your mind will have become so used to thinking “wow this is great!” that it won’t be able to accept that the game you’re playing could have any flaws.

“There’s no way the programmers could have run out of memory for proper hair physics. It’s just part of the fiction. In this universe they’ve mastered faster-than-light travel so they probably have pretty awesome hair gel. Makes sense. Probably referenced in the books somewhere.”

In fact, Mass Effect 2 is such a tremendous game that you’ll still be thinking “wow this is great!” when you’ve accidentally popped out from cover in the middle of a gunfight for the fifth time and have been left staring at the reload screen. (In other titles they call it the “game over” screen, but here you’re always so eager to carry on playing that it would be a totally inappropriate thing to name it.)

The part of you that hasn’t utterly succumbed to Mass Effect 2’s engaging story, believable characters, and enjoyable dialogue (and which is probably the same part of you that exists to make sure you don’t forget other important things in your life such as sleeping and eating) might nag at you that there’s no way the game should have interpreted your controller inputs as a command to spring out from cover. It might even ask the perfectly valid question, “if that doesn’t happen to me in Gears of War, why does it have to happen here?”

Mass Effect 2 doesn’t allow such questions to linger for long. The combat is so vastly improved over its predecessor that it guilt-trips you for nitpicking. While the cover system is certainly still not perfect, it’s a helluva lot more responsive and dynamic than it used to be, and at least a match for how it’s been done in games like Grand Theft Auto 4. Weapons now feel like they’ve actually got some weight and clout, and firing them feels satisfying in a way that the previous game never really managed. There’s also a greater variety of weapons to choose from, even for those playing a class that isn’t a weapons specialist, while they’ve gotten rid of all the faffing around in clumsy menus that plagued the first title.

Of course, beyond just shooting at people, your team also has various ‘biotic’ and ‘tech’ powers (which are basically the futuristic equivalent of magic). These too have been improved from the first game, so that you can now satisfyingly curl shots around or over cover. Additionally, the decision to put all these powers on the same recharge timer (i.e. each character can only use one at a time) makes deciding how to use them a lot more tactical than before. In the first Mass Effect, the majority of players will have spammed all their powers as soon as there were several enemies in the room. Now you’re forced to give a little more thought to how to use them and in what order.

It’s probably important to point out that this game isn’t just about trying to kill enemies though. There’s a lot of talking. And although in most videogames the bits where the characters talk to each other are rubbish, in Mass Effect 2 they’re really good. This is a videogame script that successfully combines suspense, intrigue and comedy, and that’s a pretty rare thing. The voice-acting, although occasionally a little too earnest from the supporting cast, is for the most part utterly convincing- especially if your Commander Shepard is female and voiced by Jennifer Hale instead of Mark Meer. There were times when I laughed out loud, not because of wooden delivery or dodgy lines, but because the game had tried to be funny and succeeded. That really doesn’t happen very often in videogames.

Yet what you, I and the world are probably going to remember as Mass Effect 2’s crowning achievement is the way it continues the story from the first game. In the first Mass Effect you had a lot of decisions to make, some in seemingly inconsequential conversations with bit-part characters, to other life-or-death dilemmas about the fate of an entire alien species. These all carry over when you import your saved game, and it gives the player a sense of ownership over the story in a way that no other game has managed. Perhaps more significantly, it also adds extra weight to all the new decisions you make, as Mass Effect 3 is guaranteed to make you feel the repercussions of choices made in both Mass Effect 2 and the first game.

The videogame press has always been pretty eager to throw hyperbole around, but this truly does feel like a landmark in interactive story telling. The pacing, which was quite severely misjudged in the first title, is now spot on, and special mention should probably go to an opening section that exhilarates instead of testing the player’s patience. Although some might object to the transparently formulaic way you go about recruiting your team and making them loyal to you, they’re all interesting enough characters with sufficiently varied back-stories that you’re never left feeling like you’re going through the motions.

So probably the worst thing about Mass Effect 2 is that you have to play the first Mass Effect to get the most out of it. Which is a bit like saying that the worst thing about going out to a restaurant for dinner is that the starter’s not as satisfying as the main meal. What’s for certain is that your mouth will be watering at the prospect of dessert.

Review by Bobby Foster

Games in the early 90s mostly didn’t bother with narrative. The titles that sold best recreated the kind of experiences people were having in arcades, and you’d probably only catch a glimpse of a “plot” in the opening couple of screens. Even there, the aim was mostly to explain what the player needed to do and what was meant to be represented by the crude in-game graphics. Games that aimed to build a meaningful relationship between player and avatar were almost non-existent.

This made the original Secret of Monkey Island stand out: it not only had a story, but it was funny. The protagonist, Guybrush Threepwood, had enough personality that you could even call him lovable. Helped by the fact that the game looked stunning for its time, players the world over were charmed, and it set a precedent for the long line of LucusArts SCUMM games that would eventually peak with the masterful Full Throttle.

Almost twenty years have passed since that first Monkey Island game, during which time the scale, ambition and scope of videogames have all grown exponentially. In the years between 1991 and 2009 we moved from playing the simplistic Catacomb 3D to the bombastic Modern Warfare 2, and progressed from managing the lives of insects in Sim Ant to letting narratives emerge in the Sims 3. This sense of progress and improvement is a major part of what keeps us all coming back to these clever electronic toys, and so I can’t help feeling a little disappointed that Tales of Monkey Island has turned its back on twenty years of progress and improvement.

Aside from the graphical overhaul, there’s nothing here that pushes the envelope any further than it got pushed a couple of decades ago. Developers Telltale, understandably worried about meeting the expectations of long-time fans of the series, have played it safe; and the result is a game that feels beholden to the past and never manages to carve out a strong identity of its own.

The titular Tales mostly involve visiting all the locations available to you and making sure you’ve picked up or interacted with every object you can. This becomes super-jaw-gratingly frustrating when you discover that, for no sensible narrative or logical reason, some events and objects can only be triggered after you’ve done an unrelated ‘something else’ first. Even twenty years ago this kind of design separated the crap point-n-click games from the great, and circuiting through a number of locations trying to discover the arbitrary order the developer wants you to do things is just as horribly unsatisfying now as it was back then.

What of the dialogue though? A few good laughs can go a long way to redeeming an otherwise mediocre game, and this is perhaps where Tales of Monkey Island is strongest. The voice-acting is credible and some of the gags, if not laugh-out-loud funny, at least have the power to bring a smile to your face.

Yet it’s all done with so little flair. Nine out of ten conversations involve nothing more than patiently trotting through all the available dialogue options until you hit the right one. Worse still, people’s responses flip between the angry, the light-hearted and the sad so quickly that it regularly feels disjointed and contrived, lacking the weight and drama needed to keep your interest through what often end up being quite long discussions.

I can believe that people with fonder memories of the early Monkey Island games than me might get more out of these games than I did. The feel of the originals has been captured very successfully, and some of the puzzles are quite ingeniously crafted. New characters like Morgan Le Flay compare well to the old guard, and you always just about care enough about the ensemble to keep you playing (although the particularly tedious second chapter, The Siege of Spinner Cay, might test that to the very limit).

Yet aren’t we entitled to more? Is it really okay for Telltale to rely on fans’ nostalgia to compensate for their own lack of ambition?

For me at least, telling a sort-of-funny story is no longer enough. Working through Tales of Monkey Island (and it did sometimes feel like work) only ever made me want to play other smarter, faster and funnier games. Something like Dreamfall: the Longest Journey, which in fact contains more genuine hilarity than Tales of Monkey Island despite being a much darker and more serious game. (It also has much greater variety to it and a superior system for handling dialogue, but I should probably try to remember which game it is I’m supposed to be reviewing here.)

Three words sum up all five episodes of Tales of Monkey Island: competent fan service. Should you demand more?

I know I’ll be taking a pass on Series Two.

Seizuredome is about shooting things before they collide into you. In that sense, it’s a direct descendant of the 30 year-old Asteroids. What Seizuredome adds to the mix is sumo wrestling, nudity and amazing music. I think I’ve fallen in love.

Where Asteroids was tense, minimalist and eerie, Seizuredome is bright, lunatic and breezy. In many ways it’s a much easier game, because there are usually fewer obstacles on screen at any given moment, and you’re always kitted up with a machine gun, rocket launcher or laser beam. Not only that, because of the keyboard and mouse controls (WASD for movement, point-and-click to shoot) you can react and aim much quicker and easier.

Then again, the obstacles you’re shooting are naked women, babies and sumo wrestlers, and so move a lot less predictably than floating bits of rock in space. They also take several more hits than an asteroid before they explode, which is a little odd when you consider that they’re nearly all completely naked, and certainly not concealing any armour.

But why am I boring you with game mechanics? Yeah, there’s a neat little combo system, but it’s Seizuredome’s surrealism and style that impresses, and even puts the Warioware series a little to shame. Those games might seem like gritty documentaries on drug addiction and self-harm after your fifth or sixth round of this. Although indie games (and those who write about them) often get mocked for taking themselves too seriously, Seizuredome stays too busy screaming “YOU’LL NEVER FORGET ME!” to ever trouble itself with artistic pretensions. It’s not big, it’s not clever, it’s just a simple game with silly sprites that wants you to enjoy yourself from the second you start playing.

Technically, there’s not a lot to it, which should come as no surprise when you realise that it was made in just two days. Yet  I don’t want to give the impression that I’m going easy because it’s free to download, or because it got made quickly, or because I cling to some misguided belief that indie games somehow benefit from receiving overgenerous reviews. No, what makes Seizuredome stand out is that unlike so many of Jonathan Söderström’s other games, it feels unrushed and complete. It is, like most things that are a little bit special, a collection of simple parts that come together perfectly to make a greater whole. The colour, the sound and the play: they all gel.

There doesn’t seem much point in me going on and on at you about giving this a go. The download is less than 6mb, meaning you could probably have downloaded it and be playing it in less time than it’s already taken to read this review. And I feel confident enough to say that playing Seizuredome is more fun than reading about Seizuredome. So yeah, I’m done here, ready to go back for just one more quick go. Go look at it for yourselves already.

Review by Bobby Foster

I’ve become a willing participant in the rape and murder of seven young women. I say “young women”, but five of them you’d definitely call girls. What worries me is that I’m not sure I even regret it.

It needn’t have worked out like this. I’d happily have taken each of them safely to Grandma’s house and let them live there happily ever after. To begin with that’s what I did, and young sweet Robin looked so peaceful cuddled up next to Grandma. But the game wasn’t about that. It told me I hadn’t found any of the secret rooms, picked up any of the collectibles, nor met “the wolf”. I had failed. It was clear that next time, I would have to walk off the path.

Things then started to get strange. I headed off into those woods determined to keep sight of where I’d come from, but along the way I must have let myself get turned around. Pretty quickly I’d lost all my bearings and couldn’t find my way back even though I’d wanted to. Knowing I’d gone off course and uncertain of how to proceed, I had no choice but to wander aimlessly for a while. Then in the distance I caught a glimpse of another young girl, dressed in white, running between the trees. Was she a ghost? I didn’t know. But by now I had no idea where I was and felt the only thing I could do was run after her.

She led me to an abandoned theatre. We got up on the stage and danced and played together, and then she lent in to give me a hug. Before I had any chance of finding out who she might be, she ran off.

Lost and alone again, I kept walking. I came across an abandoned wheel chair, and sat on it.

“Wolves are just dogs. But werewolves are like people.”

What did that mean? I couldn’t be sure. But it certainly seemed I was getting closer to encountering the wolf. I knew now that it was only the wolf that could lead me to “Success”.

…

This is the Path. Incredibly bold in its choice of subject matter and for its narrative ambiguity, but sufficiently flawed that I have to break out of telling you the story of my game to explain some of the stuff that’s likely to test your patience.

For starters, the pacing. Everything is designed to make you take your time. If you run for too long, your view pans down, and collectable items and interactive objects fade out of view. There are some moments when you can only move in a straight line, crawling forward at a painfully slow pace with no interaction required aside from holding down the forward key. At others, you’ll be forced to move along a fixed path regardless of what key you press, taking in the scenes like you’re riding a demented Tunnel-o-Love. You often end up with the sense that you’re bumbling (slowly) through what the game wants to show you, rather than being in control of what’s happening.

It gets repetitive too. Despite sublime sound design, the woods themselves are flat and often uninteresting. Aside from the collection of slightly-interactive objects through which the abstract narrative unfolds, you spend most of your time collecting the 144 flowers there are in the game. What’s the point of collecting these flowers? I don’t know. I finished with 142 of them, and it was never made clear to me what benefit they were giving me or what I might gain from painstakingly trying to find the last couple.

And while the game isn’t very long, it would surely benefit from being even shorter. I love the subversive way the player is given an instruction that they need to wilfully disobey (“GO TO GRANDMA’S HOUSE AND STAY ON THE PATH”), but after the fifth or sixth time it loses all of its power. Similarly, during the first hour or two of playing it makes sense that you’re encouraged to play slowly, as you need a bit of time and space to think and work out what’s going on. But by the fifth or sixth hour you feel like you’ve seen enough, and the game’s slow and uncooperative controls become frustrating instead of perhaps, err, “making a provocative statement about about mankind’s desire to manipulate other people”.

Yet I want to give Tale of Tales the benefit of the doubt. It’s hugely refreshing to play something that isn’t just about goodies fighting baddies, where the imagery is full of symbolic ambiguities, and the story is implied rather than made explicit. It’s still pretty rare that game-makers trust players enough to fill in any narrative blanks for themselves, and the Path gives me hope that it will one day be possible for me to play a game and feel like an adult instead of an over-grown child.

So much of modern game design has become an exercise in bombarding the player with fun, and providing an unrelenting stream of stuff intended to stop the player getting bored or from making them want to take a break. The Path becomes boring, as well as genuinely horrific at times. I played it in forty minute chunks across the space of a week, and would be amazed if anyone could stand much longer sittings with it. Yet every day I found myself wanting to go back to it, because so much of my time not playing it I’d spent thinking about it.

The Path is atmospheric. It’s thought-provoking. And I took away as much from playing it as I have from any art gallery I’ve been to. Does that make it a good game? I hope so.

Review by Bobby Foster

Single-player, fantasy-based roleplaying videogames are often a lonely, tedious experience. You spend hundreds of hours developing your character, trudging through predictable environments, and repeating the same attacks over and over again. Japanese developers in particular have a track record of making games where the core mechanic consists of battling against wave after wave of easily defeatable enemy, who exist solely to dispense the Experience Points you need to beat the more challenging and interesting boss encounters. Any time spent in combat with enemies who never realistically pose a threat is no fun, because a fight without some sense of peril is inevitably dull. Yet it’s become so commonplace in modern RPGs that fans of the genre have learnt to accept it and even name it: ‘grind’.

Secret of Mana is one of too few Japanese RPGs that avoid grind completely. This is partly as battles occur in real time rather than the oh-so-polite turn-based line-dance system favoured in the majority of other JRPGs, but also because easy fights are few and far between. Sure, the boss battles remain a good chunk harder than fighting against regular enemies, but it’s also quite possible for your entire team to get slaughtered just wandering the game world if you let your concentration slip and fail to look out for each other.

This “looking out for each other” is key. The game is hugely flawed as a single player experience, as your computer controlled companions have an annoying habit of getting stuck behind scenery and behaving suicidally in battle. Although you’re given some control over their tactics through a matrix of battle stances (containing “Guard”, “Stay Away”, “Attack” and “Approach”), putting them on anything much above the most defensive setting is usually only going to guarantee their premature death.

There are other problems. Having told your AI buddies to “guard” and “stay away” in an attempt to keep them alive long enough to reach the boss of the dungeon you’re in, you may find yourself fighting monsters whose attacks knock you to the ground. Infuriatingly, the time it takes to get to your feet is exactly the same amount of time it takes them to make another attack, and you’re left defenceless as you get hit again and again while great chunks are taken out of your Hit Points. The friendly AI can only be counted on to stand by and nervously twitch from side-to-side as they watch you die.

“How horribly broken!” you might cry, but what made (and still makes) Secret of Mana revolutionary is that three people can play at once, with each player controlling one of the three main characters. Suddenly the frustration of being stuck on the floor defenceless while you get hit repeatedly floats away, as you can hold out at least some hope that one of your human companions might come to rescue you. Valve’s Left4Dead has more recently demonstrated that putting players in a position where they are helpless to defend themselves is a great way to encourage teamwork, and Secret of Mana did the same thing over a decade earlier. The only difference here is that it’s not quite so obviously an intentional design choice, and the quality of the AI is nowhere near high enough to make it work when you’re playing the game by yourself (an area which even Left4Dead fifteen years later still couldn’t quite get perfect).

Yet assuming you can persuade one or two of your real-life friends to play with you, then you’re ready to enjoy what remains one of the best roleplaying games ever made. I returned to Secret of Mana with a sense of trepidation: I’d fallen in love with the game as a teenager and had concerns that years of nostalgia and changes in my tastes might make it an “Event Horizon” moment in my life. In other words, it would prove to be one of those beloved cultural artifacts from my youth that fell apart under older, more mature scrutiny.

In fact, it’s aged marvellously. The world looks vibrant and distinct. The combination of timing, sensible strategy and flexibility of approach required to succeed in combat makes it a game you easily end up playing compulsively. And oh, shall we talk about the sound track?

Secret of Mana continues to feature in those “Best Game Music Ever!!!!” lists for a very good reason: Hiroki Kikuta does amazing things within the constraints of the SNES’s sound module. The opening theme alone outshines pretty much every recent release I can think of, and really helps to convince you that you’re about to play something special. For the rest of the game, the musical landscape shifts between the kitsch and the profound, from the playful to the sinister and the sombre, with a quite uncommon confidence. In fact, the greatest testament I can make to the quality and variety of the in-game music is that hearing it again has left me in despair at the pathetic way modern games are satisfied with (and even aspire to) simply imitating Hollywood movie scores.

This is a game with its own identity, where the visuals and sound aren’t showy distractions but an integral part of the charm and sophistication of what you’re playing. It’s a 16-bit cartridge that embarrasses modern JRPGs for their lack of ambition, both artistically and technically.

Why don’t more narrative-driven epics like this let you play with friends? Probably because it’s a damn hard thing to do well, and Secret of Mana has cast an intimidatingly long shadow. But now we find ourselves in 2009, and few developers are even trying to match it, yet alone go one better. Borderlands and Star Wars: The Old Republic offer some hope for a bolder and braver future, but why has Japan given the West so long to catch up? Perhaps more importantly, how could there be more innovation in a 16 year-old download from the Virtual Console than all of Square Enix’s output from the past five years?

I’m baffled. But what I do know is that if you decide to buy Secret of Mana, you’ll also be getting a ton of troubling questions about the creative decline of Japanese RPGs for FREE.

Secret of Mana – 800 Wii points