Extra Life 2012: Play Games. Heal Kids.

I've never had much interest in the whole "charity" thing. I don't particularly enjoy helping people I know, much less complete and total strangers. However, one thing that does interest me is finding new ways to validate the unreasonable amount of time I spend playing video games. Also, as a father of two, I have managed to develop some level of fondness for children. I realize how fortunate I have been that my son and daughter are growing up strong and healthy, but I also realize that many families are not always so lucky.

That's why I've decided this year to participate in Extra Life, an annual event where participants engage in a 24-hour video gaming marathon for charity. The donations raised support the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals, which treat thousands of sick and injured children each year. Last year, Extra Life raised more than $1.2 million dollars to help children with life-threatening conditions like cancer and cystic fibrosis, and this year they're aiming to raise even more.

On Saturday, October 20th, 2012, I'll start playing video games at 8:00 AM, and won't stop for 24 hours. In exchange for me doing... well, basically the same thing I did during every spring break in college, I'm asking people to donate to help me reach my goal of raising $1,000 for the Boston Children's Hospital. Your donation is tax-deductible and all proceeds go directly to the hospital.

Here's the link to my donation page: http://www.extra-life.org/participant/appliedgaming.

Of course, the big question is what game(s) should I play during a single 24-hour sitting? Maybe a big, open-world fantasy like Skyrim, or something punishingly difficult like Dark Souls? Perhaps I should play something recently released, like the new XCOM or Dishonored? Or, maybe I could play a different game each hour for 24 hours? Should I go retro? NES? SNES? Maybe I should try a speed run? (Final Fantasy VII in 24 hours?) Maybe I should just try to play the most terrible games I can find, like this one.

The point is, I'm open to suggestions. Regardless of what game or games I choose, be sure to check back with the site on Saturday, October 20th, where I'll be live-blogging during the full 24 hours I'll be parked in front of my Xbox. Thank you in advance for your donation!

What game or games do you think I should play? Let me know in the comments!

Boston Festival of Indie Games Wrap-Up

Saturday was a gorgeous day, the kind of bright and sunny, yet breezy and temperate weather that makes me love autumn in New England. However, rather than spend outdoors one of the few perfect September days we get here in Boston, I chose to lurk in dark auditoriums and elbow my way through crowded (and by the afternoon, fairly pungent) exhibit halls. Why? Because Saturday, September 22 was Massachusetts Independent Game Development Day, which I spent attending the first ever Boston Festival of Indie Games (Boston FIG).

Co-presented by the MIT Game Lab and the Boston Indies community, the inaugural Boston FIG was a free(!) event showcasing the vibrant indie video and tabletop gaming scene in the New England region. In addition to several lectures, a game jam, an art show, and movie screenings, the exhibition halls boasted more than 30 game demos, primarily from New England indie developers.

After attending a keynote by game journalist and Gamasutra editor-at-large Leigh Alexander, I decided to brave the exhibit halls (and by "exhibit halls" I mean "crowded MIT classrooms") to check out some of the local talent. Here are a few of the games that caught my eye.

Lost Marbles

After the keynote, I plunged headlong into the exhibition throng and gravitated to the first game that caught my eye. Lost Marbles is an homage to the classic SNES action-puzzle game Lost Vikings, reimagined by developer Binary Takeover as a 3D Marble Madness style game (hence the name "Lost Marbles").

I think the reason the marbles were lost was because I kept accidentally steering them into the abyss.

I enjoyed the clean, bright cel-shaded graphics (which I thought really worked for this kind of puzzle game), but I honestly had trouble telling if Lost Marbles was actually fun or not. I found the controls to be pretty twitchy, and I spent most of my time driving my marbles off the narrow paths they were supposed to be traversing. After a few dozen restarts, I scraped together what was left of my dignity and went off to look for something that demanded a little less in the fine-motor-skills department.

Girls Like Robots

Hoping to purge myself of the stink of failure, I looked around for a game that might play more to my strengths. Enter Popcannibal's iOS title Girls Like Robots, a self-proclaimed "romance, adventure, puzzle game about seating arrangements". (Apparently this game was at PAX East this spring, but I must have missed it there.) Reminiscent of the classical "ménage problem" in combinatorial mathematics, Girls Like Robots asks you to arrange various people in a space, each according to their particular preferences. For example, you might surmise from the title that the girls like to sit next to the robots.

Girls like robots, but hate nerds. Who do those bitches think built all the robots?

Girls Like Robots seemed like the kind of fun, stylish, tightly-designed puzzle game that is perfect for mobile platforms. It has a light-hearted sensibility that plays well with its eccentric art style, and I'm sure it will be well worth the dollar or two purchase price via iTunes when it releases.

Prime's Quest

Next, I stopped by to visit my friends at the Intrepid booth, to talk to them about their upcoming game Prime's Quest, debuting soon on iOS platforms. Prime's Quest builds on the traditional "sobokan" (warehouse keeper) style of puzzle game, wherein the player has to shift a bunch of blocks or crates around a crowded room to make it to the exit. I've been playing the beta, and so far it's got some great new mechanics that make this classic puzzle style seem fresh. I'm looking forward to playing the finished product.

Rite

One of the great things about the game expo environment is that you get to see products before they are finished. Some of them, like Rite are still in the prototype stages, allowing you a unique opportunity to engage the developer early in the design process. Developed by Father Octopus (which is also the name of the founder's band), Rite is a puzzle-platformer where you guide some sort of futuristic priest through a maze of deadly traps. The primary puzzle element I saw was a "dimension-splitting" mechanic, wherein you divided the player character into two copies of himself, which you had to control simultaneously.

The web page for Rite describes the protagonist as "trapped in a horrible room filled with programmer art".

Given that puzzle-platformers have become a somewhat trite and overutilized genre as of late—they're basically like the dubstep of indie games— Rite may have a hard time standing out from the crowd. However, even in its infancy, I could tell the game captured a certain distinctive ambience, one that could really shine with right graphics and audio direction.

Snapshot

Of course, after disparaging the whole genre of puzzle-platformers, the next game I played was Snapshot, a puzzle-platformer by Retro Affect available now on Steam. I first played this game at PAX East this spring and really enjoyed it.

In Snapshot, you play as an adorable robot who uses his camera to capture items from the world, which he can then use to solve puzzles. Captured items maintain physical qualities such as their momentum, giving many of the puzzles a physics-based bent. One nice thing about Snapshot is that unlike most modern indie platformers, the grisly character deaths are kept pretty much to a minimum, meaning that I can play this game with my three-year-old without worrying that he'll be waking me up in the middle of the night because he thinks Meat Boy is trying to kill him.

Candlelight

One of the last games that really grabbed my attention was Candlelight by Idle Action Studios, a game that I'm not going to call a "puzzle-platformer" only because I'm sick of typing those words. In Candlelight, you to control two characters simultaneously with independent controls (e.g. with the WASD and OKL; keys on a keyboard, or eventually with dual joysticks, one would presume). The silhoutte-based graphics divide the environment into light and dark, positive and negative spaces over which the pair of characters can exert certain powers. For example, the one character's lantern might cause hidden platforms to appear, or remove certain obstacles from view allowing the other character to pass.

I'm pretty sure if this were my wife and I, she wouldn't let me wander off with the lantern while she crawled through the spike-and-rock tunnel by herself.

The game still has a long way to go, but the version I played at Boston FIG already had some really smart design choices. For example, when the characters became separated, the view gently separated into a split-screen arrangement, which gradually shifted to corners of the screen as the characters became even farther apart. The effect gave me a subtle sense of where my characters were in the world, and was a much more elegant solution than more traditional approaches such as zooming way out, or plotting my location on some sort of mini-map.

All in all, Boston FIG was a great event. Although I played plenty of other promising games, I hope the handful I talked about give you a sense of just how exciting the indie game scene is here in Boston. Speaking with one of the festival organizers late in the day, he shared that in his estimation, there were about 2-4 times the number of attendees than they expected—about 2,000 or so total. Hopefully the success of the event was such that Boston Festival of Indie Games will continue to be an annual tradition for years to come.

Review: Mark of the Ninja

Mark of the Ninja not only perfects the stealth genre, it transcends it, such that even non-stealth-game fans are likely to enjoy its rewarding gameplay and captivating atmosphere.

"Fun" and "rules" are two concepts frequently placed at odds with one another, and yet one of the basic truths of video games is that they are fun because they have rules. Video games are simulations of various realities, built on sophisticated systems. Understanding the parameters and limitations of these simulations—what actions are and are not allowed, and what responses we should and should not expect—is often an essential part of successful and enjoyable gameplay.

A genre where rules are exceedingly important is the so-called "stealth game". In a typical stealth game, the player controls a vulnerable (though often quite powerful) character whose primary charge is to ambush, hide from, and/or otherwise circumvent adversaries using methods besides direct confrontation. For this type of gameplay to be effective, there has to be a well-understood set of rules. How can I tell if I am adequately hidden? What actions will cause an enemy to sense my presence? If I am detected, what are the consequences? When these rule sets are skillfully designed and well communicated to the player, stealth games become a challenging organic puzzle that tests the player's capacity for deceit and subterfuge. When they are not, stealth games become a vehicle for limitless frustration that test the player's capacity for anger management.

Mark of the Ninja is a 2D action game that implements the essential design elements of the stealth genre impeccably. Developed by Klei Entertainment (makers of the Shank franchise) and available via the Xbox LIVE Marketplace, Mark of the Ninja follows the Champion of the Hisomu ninja clan in his quest to destroy a powerful private military corporation that has assaulted his ancestral home. To fulfill his duty, the Champion must disable scores of heavily-armed guards, evade deadly and devious traps, and circumvent high-tech security measures.

Enemies can be distracted in a variety of ways. Investigation of mysteriously damaged floodlights and unexpectedly sounded gongs is a leading cause of guard-related death in this game.

Though his mission is daunting, the Champion is well equipped for the task at hand. A gifted ninja with superhuman abilities derived from his mystical tattoos (called "marks"), the Champion can effortlessly scale ceilings and walls, fling bamboo darts with unerring accuracy, and execute an unsuspecting enemy in complete silence. Despite this impressive list of powers, he's hardly invincible; if a misstep or botched kill raises the alarm, a burst or two from a mercenary's assault rifle kills him as dead as anyone else.

It is in its understanding and expression of the player character's advantages and limitations that Mark of the Ninja truly excels. When performing noisy actions such as sprinting or using your grappling hook, blue circles indicate the radius within which these sounds will alert a guard. When standing in light or darkness, the Champion's visibility to a foe is clearly apparent. In other words, whenever you end up dead on the ground with more holes in your face than nature intended, it's pretty much always because of a careless step or a flawed strategy, and you'll know exactly what went wrong.

Attacking an unsuspecting enemy results in a stylish instant kill animation. Attacking a suspecting enemy usually results in getting your head blown off and reloading at a checkpoint.

In addition to the expertly implemented systems for player feedback, Mark of the Ninja has a pretty generous checkpoint system, which typically responds to your untimely demise by restoring you to the point just before everything went all sideways. Together, the feedback and checkpoints encourage a satisfying level of experimentation and choice. If I let that guard catch a glimpse of me, can I return to the shadows quickly enough to sneak past him when he comes over to snoop around? If I hang this guard's corpse from that lamppost, will it terrify those other two guards enough that they'll accidentally shoot each other? I often found myself repeating a section multiple times not because I couldn't complete it, but rather out of a desire to complete it as elegantly as possible. (Yes, I realize I just used "elegant" to describe the act of hanging corpses from streetlights.)

The artfully refined mechanics of Mark of the Ninja would add up to a pretty fantastic experience irrespective of graphics and story; however, the game manages to deliver on these other fronts as well. The characters are masterfully illustrated in Klei Entertainment's trademark comic-book style, and the richly layered environments possess a sense of purpose that embraces the visual extremes of light and dark. While for some games, the graphics are the point of the game, for Mark of the Ninja, the graphics communicate the point of the game, by taking the practical requirements of the world and restating them in a visually compelling way.

The story of Mark of the Ninja is also impressive for such a mechanical game, though it shines somewhat less spectacularly than the graphics. The characters are as well acted and are developed about as deeply as one can expect from a handful of cut-scenes and some limited instructional and expository dialogue, most of which involves a stereotypically taciturn ninja clan. The plot is similarly pragmatic, although it contains a few twists that, while fairly predictible, are thoroughly appreciated in a game that could have just as easily have ignored narrative altogether.

The environments of Mark of the Ninja are a triumph of utilitarian design: beautifully rendered, yet wholly committed to the game's essential purpose.

To summarize: Mark of the Ninja refines the stealth game to its functional zenith, and like all great feats of design, achieves in its complexity a certain simplicity. I believe that the elegance of its mechanics, along with its diverse opportunities for player experimentation and appealing aesthetic trappings, allow it to appeal to a wide audience. If you think you might enjoy pretending to be a bad-ass master ninja—which I'd like to think is pretty much everyone—then Mark of the Ninja is a game for you.

Review: Dust: An Elysian Tail

Whether you view it as a visually evocative action-adventure or as a testament to its creator's talent and persistence, Dust: An Elysian Tail is a game worth experiencing.

Whether video games are "art" is a question that has largely been settled, at least by anyone whose opinion I value. These days, someone arguing that "video games shouldn't be considered art" sounds like my grandfather arguing that rock and roll shouldn't be considered music.

Fortunately, moving past the "games as art" debate allows us to address the sorts of interesting questions people have been asking about other art forms for years. For example, when judging the quality and worth of a work of art, how much do the circumstances of its creation matter? Should the value I ascribe to a work of art be affected by knowing who made it, or how they made it, or why they made it?

Of course, I don't know the answers to these questions, but I certainly thought about them a lot while playing Dust: An Elysian Tail, a downloadable title available on Xbox LIVE Marketplace. Dust is an 2D side-scrolling action/adventure/RPG game, a genre more tritely known by the portmanteau "Metroidvania". You play as the eponymous protagonist Dust, an anthropomorphic animal (or "furry", to use a more socially loaded term) suffering from a conventional case of narrative-induced amnesia. Joined by a talking magical sword and some sort of flying squirrel-bat, Dust fights to uncover the truth behind his mysterious past, while helping the denizens of the world of Falana fight back against the forces of an invading army led by a genocidal commander.

Amidst the game's enchanting sylvan environments teeming with stunningly animated fauna, you might think you're actually watching Bambi... up until Dust starts murdering everything, that is.

From this synopsis, you might think that Dust is derivative, uninspired, and full of clichés, and were circumstances different, I might be inclined to agree with you. However, when I was at PAX East earlier this year, I got a chance to play an early demo of the game and speak briefly with its creator, Dean Dodrill. I learned that Dean (or "Noogy", as he seems to be known on the Internet) created Dust almost entirely by himself, and that he was not an experienced game developer or computer programmer, but an artist. In 2009 he won Microsoft's Dream-Build-Play competition, and since then he has toiled with single-minded devotion toward making his game a reality.

For some reason this interaction profoundly altered my perception of Dust. Instead of thinking about it as a product, I started thinking about what it meant to Dean, why he made it, and what it had taken for him to accomplish this task. My personal assessment was that Dust had been a true labor of love, a stunningly beautiful interactive experience created by a gifted animator to honor a group of characters and a fantastical world that he truly cared about. After only playing Dust for a few minutes, I had decided that I loved it, too.

When I first met Fidget (Dust's "nimbat" familiar) I wanted to stuff him in a bag full of rocks and toss him into the sea, but godsdammit if he didn't start to grow on me by the end of the game.

Mind you, I don't want to give the impression that Dust isn't a great game in its own right. After playing it in its entirety, I can say that beyond its breathtaking visuals, Dust does a lot of other things right, such as its well-balanced and highly engaging combat system. The main character fights in a variety of ways: with melee combos, by having Fidget (his sidekick) shoot projectiles, or by spinning his sword and/or himself into a whirlwind called the "Dust Storm". However, ideal combat arises from the skillful interplay of these three elements. For instance, Fidget's projectiles are greatly enhanced in scope and power when used in concert with the Dust Storm, but continuing this action for too long damages your character, requiring the intermittent use of sword attacks. Also, certain enemies have strong defenses that can only be lowered by parrying their attacks directly with a melee strike, but such enemies are usually accompanied by large groups of weaker foes that must be crowd-controlled with the Dust Storm.

Once you get the hang of the combat system, it feels completely fluid and highly satisfying... except on those occassions when some monster get in a lucky shot that stops your 1,000-hit combo at hit number 999.

In other ways, though, Dust runs somewhat counter to my tastes. Its story is rooted in a certain kind of traditional "good-versus-evil" high fantasy that's never appealed much to me, especially when compared to the grittier, morally ambiguous (and admittedly trendier) settings of something like Dragon Age or Skyrim. However, like a Disney movie, the characters exhibit such an earnestness that even a stone-cold asshole like me can't help but find them endearing. In particular, the interactions between Dust and Fidget, delivered via some highly respectable voice acting, are often engaging and charmingly funny.

On paper, I typically would consider Dust to be above average, but not truly spectacular— a "check-plus", if you will. If it had been made by a larger studio with a sizable budget, I'd probably be giving it four stars. However, I can't separate what I know about the game and its creation from my experience while playing it, no more than I can watch Braveheart while pretending Mel Gibson isn't a deranged racist. Even though I don't know Dean Dodrill personally, I can tell that that he deeply cares about the world he created and the characters in it, and a sense of that devotion stuck with me the entire time I played his game. Ultimately, the enjoyment of experiencing something that matters so much to someone else is probably the biggest reason why I loved playing Dust: An Elysian Tail. I hope that other people love it, too.

My Fall Preorder Lineup

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Preorder

I've gradually grown to love "preordering" upcoming titles before they're released. Originally I viewed the practice as a way for desperate Gamestop employees to harass you at the register, by running through all the additional games they'd like you to buy beyond the one you were actually holding. As I started buying most of my games online, I became more willing to drop a bit of pre-release coin in exchange for various discounts and bonuses.

Today, I'm a straight-up preorder addict. I buy upcoming titles on Amazon as soon as I know I want them, without regard to whatever preorder bonuses may or may not materialize. (More than once, I've ordered games so far in advance that they've been delivered to a previous address several months after I moved.) Every release date is like a little mini-Christmas, and the UPS guy is my own personal Santa in brown short-pants. Here's a quick run-down of the titles I'm expecting to show up on my doorstep between now and the end of 2012.

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Game:	Borderlands 2
Platform:	Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC
Release Date:	September 18, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Cautiously Optimistic

Released in 2009, the original Borderlands received a fair amount of acclaim for its distinctive visual style and its skillful integration of RPG elements into solid first-person shooter gameplay. Also, from what I heard, when experienced at its finest, the four-player co-op bordered on transcendental. Unfortunately, this was never my experience, as the difficulty scaling was so aggressive that to play with anyone a few levels above or below you was either prohibitively challenging or pointlessly easy. Furthermore, the bare-bones plot and repetitive mission structure left me pretty unsatisfied with the single-player experience. Still, there was a whole lot about Borderlands that reeked of promise, and if its sequel can fix some of these missteps while building on the potential of the original, it could turn out to be one of the best games of the year.

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Game:	XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Platform:	Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC
Release Date:	October 9, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Sporting a Raging Nostalgia Hard-On

If you've ever spent any time talking to a PC gamer, chances are they've mentioned XCOM at some point. Originally released in 1994, XCOM was a turn-based tactical strategy game that revolutionized the genre, while simultaneously keeping my friends and I up playing into the wee hours, terrified that at any moment a Cryssalid would burst out of the monitor of my Tandy desktop and impregnate us with its zombifying alien toxins. This upcoming remake of the original has been lovingly developed by the capable hands at Sid Meier's Firaxis Games, the folks behind the Civilization series. All signs point to this game being a slam dunk, and for the developers' sake I sure hope so... should it disappoint, an army of XCOM fanboys stand at the ready to unleash a flood of impotent Internet rage.

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Game:	Dishonored
Platform:	Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC
Release Date:	October 9, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Skeptical, But Intrigued

Dishonored is a first-person stealth/action-adventure game developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. I hadn't heard about this game at all until this year's E3, and I'm still a bit skeptical. If there's two things that first-person games tend not to excel at, it's stealth and melee combat. (Fans of the Thief games would probably disagree with me here.) Still, the impressive screenshots and industrial-era setting—along with the fact that it's one of the few new games this year that's not a sequel—piqued my interest enough to go with Dishonored as my impulse buy for the fall.

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Game:	Assassin's Creed III
Platform:	Xbox 360 / PS3 / PC / Wii U
Release Date:	October 30, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Brimming With Revolutionary Bloodlust

Being a New Englander, any game where you run around revolutionary-era Boston murdering Redcoats is going to get four out of five stars from me just for showing up. Sure, the Assassin's Creed series started to get a little stale after Ubisoft released a second follow-up to Assassin's Creed II, but it's still a rock-solid franchise, and everything I've been hearing about this game indicates that the developers have taken nothing for granted. For now, I'm going to allow myself to revel in unchecked enthusiasm for this game, fully confident that it's going to turn out to be phenomenal.

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Game:	Halo 4
Platform:	Xbox 360
Release Date:	November 6, 2012
How I Feel About It:	Glad It's Not Call of Duty

I never thought of myself as a huge Halo fan, usually preferring to scratch any competitive multiplayer itches with the Gears of War games. However, my friends and I have recently gone back to playing Halo 3 during our weekly online play-date, and I was quickly reminded of what an amazing game it is. As someone who is thoroughly bored of the whole Call of Duty thing, I'm picking Halo 4 over Call of Duty: Black Ops II as my preferred multiplayer shooter for the holiday season. (If my friends are reading this... you now know what to tell your wives you want for Christmas.)

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As you can see, I've got my work cut out for me for the rest of 2012. (I'm actually glad Bioshock Infinite got pushed off to February.) Looking at this lineup, it makes me wonder what kind of space is left in the marketplace for the Nintendo's new console (the "Wii U"), which they just announced will be available November 18. Regardless, there will probably be no U for me... my dance card is full.

What I've Been Playing

After a July full of PC gaming, I returned last month to the comfortable embrace of my Xbox and Nintendo 3DS. Let's look at some of the titles I checked out during August.

Dark Souls (Xbox 360)

With no new titles immediately demanding my attention, I began last month's gaming by returning to an older title, one that I lovingly refer to as "my Waterloo". As I imagine is true for a lot of folks who've played it, Dark Souls is a perpetually ongoing and highly ambitious undertaking, like that novel you've been writing on since college or that growth you keep meaning to ask a doctor about. However, despite receiving pretty much universal critical acclaim and garnering a zealously devoted fan base, I'm still surprised how many casual gamers haven't yet heard of Dark Souls.

Yeah, you're going to see this screen a lot.

If you're not familiar with the game, I'll try to describe briefly what makes it such a big deal. At first glance, Dark Souls appears to be a drably gothic third-person action RPG with a middling combat system and an uninspiring plot. Once you start playing it, though, you quickly realize its appeal: it's brutally difficult, but in a rigorously fair-handed way. In each new area, you will die repeatedly at first, and it will probably depress you. However, by gaining equipment and levels, by learning your way around the environment and its many fiendish traps, and by becoming attuned to the patterns and weaknesses of your adversaries, eventually you will progress (albeit to the next crushingly difficult area of the game). It's the kind of difficult that is much less characterized by controller-throwing frustration, and much more about terrified, crippling paranoia interspersed with occasional bouts of cautious jubilation.

One of the most engaging aspects of the game (other than its innovative twist on multiplayer, which I won't get into here) is the checkpoint system. Whenever you die, you are revived at the last "bonfire" you camped at, but without all of your souls (which serve as both experience points and currency) and humanity (another important commodity in the game). Moreover, resting at a bonfire refills your health, spells, and stock of healing potions, but also revives any non-boss enemies you have slain in the area. This system works in concert with the game's merciless difficulty to present some difficult choices to the player. If I'm forging a path through an unknown new dungeon, but I'm running low on health and have accumulated a hefty cache of souls, should I try to make my way back to a previous bonfire, or try to tough it out to the next one... knowing that if I fail, all my efforts will have been for nothing? (For an added dose of sweaty-palmed intensity, note that it is possible to reclaim your lost souls and humanity after you die, but only if you make it back to the location of your demise without dying again.)

Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance (Nintendo 3DS)

I recall playing the original Kingdom Hearts on the Playstation 2 as being quite a magical experience. Thrust into a bizarre world where Disney cartoons, Final Fantasy characters, and Haley Joel Osment somehow coexisted, I raced through the game in about a week, desperately anxious to find what treasured memories from my youth I would uncover in each new world. And even though Kingdom Hearts was covered in a layer of nostalgia so thick that it bordered on exploitation, underneath was a solid action-RPG with a rich story, engaging environments, and genuinely fun gameplay.

Nearly 10 years and several confusingly named sequels later (most of which I didn't play), I decided it was time to revisit this idiosyncratic franchise with Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance for the Nintendo 3DS. Unfortunately, while this newest Kingdom Hearts has a mountain of new and complex battle systems big enough to get an A for effort, it manages to capture very little of the magic of the original. The worlds and characters are limited primarily to Disney's more obscure and/or disregarded properties, and the Final Fantasy influence is practically nonexistent. After about 20 hours I have yet to beat it, but at this point I'm almost ready to put it to bed anyway and pick up Tales of the Abyss for the 3DS instead.

10000000 (iOS)

Finally, a compelling reason to match
three arbitrary pictures of things.

Ever since I bought a Nintendo 3DS, I've largely ignored my iPhone as a game platform, except during particularly boring technical seminars or at unusually long traffic stops. However, after hearing about 10000000 (i.e. "ten million") on the Gamers With Jobs podcast last month (which featured a great interview with the creator), I decided to give the game a shot. After about five minutes I was hooked, to the extent that for a few bizarre days last month, my iPhone was my go-to gaming platform.

10000000 is a typical match-three game (like Columns or Bejeweled), except that matching items affects the progression of your avatar as he crawls through a linear dungeon at the top of the screen. For example, matching swords performs a melee attack, matching shields bolsters your defense, and matching keys opens locks on chests and doors. During each run you collect gold, experience, and resources, which can later be used to upgrade your character in various ways. The uninspired name "10000000"—and wow, it really is an awful, awful name—refers to the high score you must reach in a single run to beat the game.

10000000 is rendered in a pixel art style accompanied by chiptune audio tracks, and its tutorials and menu interfaces suggest a lack of polish that one might expect from a homebrewed title like this. However, don't let these rough edges fool you; the gameplay itself is actually quite refined. The sliding controls are smooth and responsive, and the block animations, combo notifications, and sound effects are fluid and well-timed. Take it from someone who isn't a die-hard puzzle game fan: 10000000 is well worth $1.99 and 6-8 hours of your time.

Darksiders II (Xbox 360)

Most of what I needed to say about this game I said in my recent review. However, looking back over what I wrote, I realize that I may have understated how disappointed I was with this game. For me, the first Darksiders was one of those rare games I really fell in love with, the kind of game that you start over again from the beginning the moment you beat it, or that you lend to your friends so that you can talk to them about how awesome you think it is. Darksiders II isn't a bad game by any metric, but it certainly hasn't inspired me the way its predecessor did, causing me to proselytize to my friends until they started blocking my phone calls. If the franchise continues, I'll be interested to see if Darksiders really was lightning in a bottle, or if somehow Vigil Games manages to recapture the magic of the original.

Dust: An Elysian Tail (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

After putting Darksiders II to rest in peace (see what I did there?), I moved on to my other most-anticipated game of the summer: Dust: An Elysian Tail. I first heard about Dust at PAX East this spring, when I got a chance to speak with the game's developer, Dean Dodrill. (Note the singular noun "developer", as in one single dude.)

Dust shows me that even in today's 3D-dominated world, there's still plenty of room to be amazed in two dimensions.

With its beautifully animated graphics, rich environments, and engaging gameplay, Dust turned out to be everything I hoped it would be. Even its characters were well-acted and charming enough for me to look past their excessively cutesy appearance an occasionally cloying dialogue. I'll save the rest of my analysis for my review, but for now you can know that Dust gets my seal of approval.

So that about wraps up my recent gaming experiences, as well as another New England summer. Soon it will be time for fall jackets, changing leaves, pumpkin-spice lattes, and most excitingly, Borderlands 2.

Review: Darksiders II

Like its predecessor, Darksiders II combines familiar game elements in ambitious new ways. While it can be a bit rough around the edges, fans of the original should be satisfied, and newcomers to the franchise should give it a look.

Darksiders II is the sequel to the 2010 post-apocalyptic adventure game Darksiders, developed by Vigil Games and published by THQ. In the first game, War (by which I mean the famed horseman of the biblical apocalypse, and not the 1970s funk band known for "Low Rider") was unjustly blamed for prematurely initiating the final conflict between Heaven and Hell, one which ultimately led to the destruction of humankind before its time. The story of Darksiders II takes place concurrently with that of its predecessor, this time following Death as he searches for a means to restore the Kingdom of Man and clear the name of his brother War. It's an ironically noble undertaking for the one they call "Kinslayer", considering that once you meet Death, you quickly realize he a ruthlessly violent and highly sarcastic dickhole.

Like the first game, the gameplay in Darksiders II is constructed with a "remix mentality", pulling mechanics from other well-known franchises like a hip-hop artist samples classic rock riffs. The original Darksiders was essentially the hack-n-slash action of God of War combined with the dungeon-delving puzzle solving of Legend of Zelda, with nods to a few other games mixed in. Its sequel includes these elements while also casting a slightly wider net, incorporating Prince-of-Persia-style acrobatics, a Diablo-esque random loot system, and even some third-person shooter mechanics. While the variety of these elements are a big part of what gives the Darksiders franchise its charm, at times the game suffers from a "jack-of-all-trades" syndrome, wherein no particular gameplay approach ends up feeling particularly polished (except for the combat system, which I thought came off fairly well). I was especially disappointed with the loot system, as I found the randomness of the equipment drops detracted from my enjoyment of exploring the game world. More than once I took a break from the main story quest to poke around the game's numerous side-dungeons, only to find chests containing loot no more interesting or special than what I could have bought from a merchant or found on any random enemy.

Death is more or less the Slayer thrash-metal version of Kratos from God of War.

Some influence of the remix mentality is evident in the plot of Darksiders II, as well. The Pale Rider's journey is set against the well-worn backdrop of biblical mythology, with many a familiar angel and demon encountered (and in most cases, subsequently eviscerated) along the way. I didn't find the story itself all that engaging; like the plot of so many games, it seemed to consist mainly of a string of "broken bridges", quests whose purpose was only tangentially related to the overall story arc. However, what Darksiders II lacks by way of a compelling plot, it makes up for in terms of characterization and dialogue. Nearly every ally and enemy I encountered throughout the game turned out to be a rich and multidimensional character, beautifully realized through solid writing and excellent voice acting.

Visually speaking, the characters and worlds of Darksiders II are rendered in a slightly cartoonish style, one which I found truly refreshing given the surfeit of visual realism in big-studio games. This visual style also helps to take some of the edge off the inevitably absurd nature of some of Death's weapons and powers. A grittier, less tongue-in-cheek version of Death scrambling through the same highly contrived, Zelda-inspired dungeons would simply have looked ridiculous.

Either Death is about two feet tall, or that's the largest dwarf I've ever seen.

Unfortunately, on the Xbox 360, some the game's graphical chops are undercut by assorted technical issues. The in-game menu screens are sluggish and unresponsive, and during the action frame rates are erratic with screen tearing occurring fairly frequently. These issues are prevalent enough that even a non-videophile like myself found it hampering my enjoyment of the game. Moreover, the technical hiccups aren't limited to graphics alone; I had the game freeze (to the point of requiring a hard reset of my Xbox) more than once.

The game's frequent technical issues are especially disappointing when considering how carefully refined certain other elements of the Darksiders II are. There are a lot of subtle bits of mastery in the game, ultimately leading me to believe that any rough edges are a function of limited time and resources, and not for lack of thoughtful technical or game design.

If the grassy hills and dales of the Forge Lands aren't your preferred post-apocalyptic vacation spot, don't worry; Death's journey will take him to plenty of other, less idyllic realms.

In the end, perhaps the best word to describe Darksiders II is "ambitious"... perhaps even overly so. The game universe is expansive, but at times can feel unfinished and sparse. The game dynamics and systems are interesting and varied, but often come across as rough and not fully realized. The characters are well-acted and their mythology is deep and full of potential, but it is largely left unrealized by the game's weak plot. When it comes down to it though, I would much rather play a game that has tried to do great things and come up a bit short, than one that takes no risks at all.