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February 29, 2008

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

As I stated before, I recently picked up Professor Layton and the Curious Village (WARNING: Link contains spoilers!) for my DS. Anyone who knows me, knows I am a puzzle fanatic. I play puzzle games all of the time and enjoy them. So of course, when I first heard of this game, I knew I was going to have to get it. I'd have to say that overall I liked it. Here is The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of it.

The Good
First let's start with the story. In Professor Layton you are trying to discover the location of the Golden Apple - a treasure of the late Baron Reinhold. To do so you must talk with the puzzle obsessed people of the town of Mystere. The story is actually pretty good, if somewhat predictable. I knew very early on what the people of Mystere really were because of some subtle clues along the way. This lead me to an incorrect assumption about Inspector Chelmy, though (Note: I'm being circumspect here because I don't want to ruin it for anyone who wants to play the game).

The interesting thing about this story is it's approach to using puzzles as part of a game. Usually, games try to pretend the puzzles are some intricate part of the game. You are supposed to believe that the puzzle is tied into some device seamlessly or some other such nonsense. In Mystere, the people are obsessed with puzzles and pose them to you as you progress in the game. Sometimes, characters will pose them as a trade such as "If you help me solve this puzzle, I'll give you information." There are a few places where the puzzles are presented as the means for opening a lock or triggering a device, and there are places where puzzles "just appear" or are "hidden". But most of the time, it is a direct QA session between characters.

The second thing about the game that is real appealing is the artwork and animation. The artwork is very clean and well done. The animation is really nice and would fit well as a cartoon on TV. There was only one spotty bit of performance in the playing of the animation (the main characters are running and the movement is just barely choppy) but otherwise it is superb.

The Bad
The only bad thing I can say about the game is actually about the puzzles themselves. Most of the puzzles are classic puzzles or variations on them. For instance, one puzzle is the classic about a farmer with a raft that must ferry across a river a wolf, a sheep and a piece of cabbage. This is an extremely old logic problem and easily solved. Only a few of the puzzles gave me any trouble at all. A couple of them were because of my own weaknesses in puzzles. In fact, as I write this I only have one final bonus puzzle to complete: 135 - Royal Escape. It is a perfect example of the type of puzzle I have the most trouble with.

The Ugly
There really is no truly negative thing to say about this game. I really enjoyed it even if most of the puzzles were easily solved. I look forward to the promised sequel.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give this game an 8.0.

Posted by Kaishaku at 08:27 AM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2008

Happy Birthday to Me!

Monday was my birthday. To celebrate, I tried to keep my schedule clear. I still had one job to do that day, but I was able to do it early in the morning so I had the rest of the day to myself.

I decided to get myself a game for either my DS or my Wii, so I stopped into EB games. In the end I got 2 games: Dewey's Adventure for the Wii and Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the DS. Mostly I just goofed off and played those for the rest of the day.

So, it was just a lazy day.

Posted by Kaishaku at 04:14 PM | Comments (1)

February 05, 2008

Missing Things in RPGs

This weekend I was reminded by something that bugs me from time to time. There is always something missing with RPGs. For instance, I am running a Star Wars Saga Edition game on alternate Sundays and I discovered that there isn't an official vehicle record sheet for the new system yet. We were on our 5th session and I knew the characters could potentially get into a space battle, so I felt it was time to write up the spaceship. But there wasn't a vehicle record sheet to be found for the new system.

This bugs me because we haven't been playing the new system very long and we discovered this to be missing. How is it that WOTC didn't notice this in their play-testing? Considering how often space battles happen in Star Wars, you would think they would have noticed. In fact, they just put out a supplement book which is all about spaceships and there wasn't one in there either. Seems like quite the oversight.

So I had to do what I normally do, make one of my own. It's functional, it's crude and it's here. I could have done more with it but I didn't want to spend too much time on it. As it was, I spent about 2.5 hours doing this in Scribus, which isn't bad considering I don't use Scribus too often.

I think when I make my RPG, I'm going to describe in general terms the stats for characters and not bother making a character sheet. ;)

Posted by Kaishaku at 11:00 AM | Comments (1)