Mega Man Zero 3 Review

       Mega Man Zero is a nice little series. It has some great hardcore Mega Man style platforming action featuring everybody's favorite red rampager and continues nicely on some of the cooler themes of the Mega Man X series. It also has some flaws of its own. Let's see where number 3 stacks up.

      Mega Man Zero 3 is a GBA game that I played on my DS as part of Mega Man Zero Collection. In it, Zero and his human companion Ciel face a new threat with the appearance of a scientist who has brought the giant, ultra-powerful reploid Omega back to earth. This guy was so powerful and dangerous that he was exiled from Earth to space. The scientist, Dr. Weil, claims to have him under control. It's obvious from the start that this guy is up to no good and is using Omega to complete his goal of using the Dark Elf for some evil purpose. Like all Mega Man X and Zero story lines, this one makes little sense and is mostly garbage. Ciel is as annoying as ever, as is everyone in the resistance base, and ignoring them as much as possible is a good idea. Actually, pretty much all the dialogue, including the mandatory conversations with boss enemies, is downright terrible. At least in this one, I didn't agree with what the bad guys were up to, which I did to a large degree in Zero 1 and 2. Having said that, Zero 3 does have some interesting themes and ideas. Most X and Zero games have this same dichotomy going on; the story is in general pretty bad, but with some cool themes. Zero 3's main interesting part is a giant truth bomb it drops on you near the end. There is some foreshadowing, but I was too dense to figure it out. I really liked this element, but after the big reveal, the game (story-wise) goes back to stupid mode and totally fails to capitalize on the bombshell it just dropped on you. It's a shame, but at least all the stupidity has a big bright spot in it, which is more than I can say for many games.

       Now onto what the gameplay is like. I felt like I could describe the story first since you probably know what a Mega Man game is like gameplay wise. In case you don't, you choose different stages that you must complete in any order. Each level is run by a boss, and if you get to the end, you must fight them. The 2d levels are pretty large and require traversal in all directions, but they all move from left to right in general. Enemies populate the levels. These typically take a few hits to kill. You have four weapons from the get-go this time around: the Z-Saber, a gun, the shield boomerang thing from the previous game or 2, and the new recoil rod. I used the Z-Saber and gun almost exclusively except for some specific situations. I equipped the saber to the b button and the gun to the R button as I found it easier to charge up a more powerful shot using a shoulder button as opposed to a face button. A is jump and L is dash. As usual you can cling to walls for a second before you start sliding down them, which means you can climb them by clinging to them and then continuously jumping higher and clinging again. You'll need to do this a lot to avoid enemy fire, traverse the level, and save yourself from falling down cliffs or into insta-kill spikes.

       Cyber Elves make a return in this game. These are basically one-time use abilities that are gone forever after you use them. You earn them by killing enemies and by finding hidden crates in levels. They do things like destroy enemies, damage bosses, or boost your score. As usual, this isn't a very well fleshed out system, as most of the elves aren't worth using. However, this time around there are satellite elves. These guys float around Zero when equipped, which is a cool visual touch reminiscent of a shmup power up. They grant him abilities as long as they are equipped, and they don't permanently die when used like other elves. I only found 3, and only one of them was really useful (the one that lets you slice bullets with your sword to block them), but that's better than nothing.

       The levels have a pretty nice feel to them. Dashing toward an enemy and slicing them just before they fire on you still feels amazing, as does jumping around at high-speed through tricky platforming sections. There are a few difficult jumping sections to complete, but overall they seemed less frustrating than previous games. Mini bosses pop up in a few of the levels, and they typically aren't very hard. My MO throughout the game was to use the sword throughout the levels and then switch to the gun to fight the bosses.

       Reaching the boss represents about 50% of the difficulty of each level as bosses are very hard. You must learn their attack patterns and be able to read when they are open for an attack. They can kill you very quickly if you are unfamiliar with them. This edition's set of bosses are pretty challenging. Usually in a Mega Man game there are a few pushovers, but in Zero 3, even the pushovers occasionally got a kill in on me. The design of the bosses is pretty good too. There is a really big guy with 3 life bars and also a tiny little boss that's really mobile, and everything in between. Most bosses have a weakness to one of the elements you can equip, but not all, and unlike some Mega Man games, you only do elemental damage with charged-up shots. Some of these bosses are in tight little rooms. Others are in less claustrophobic spaces that scroll a little bit. Some have you climbing the walls to avoid attacks, others have attacks that require you to hold still to avoid damage. Some have attacks that seem un-dodgeable until you notice the one little corner of space you can put yourself in and be safe. There is a great need to dash, jump, climb, and run in order to avoid certain death in all kinds of patterns and shapes.

       Once again, you have three lives to complete each level. That number is balanced pretty well. Unfortunately the very weird design flaw of not refilling your lives when you start a new level is in this game, as it is in many Mega Man titles. For example, if you beat a level on your last life, you will start the next level on your last life. Since there is no chance that you will beat a brand new level in one life, the best thing to do is purposely kill yourself so you can get a game over and then re-start the level with a full set of lives. This is terribly annoying. And if you save your game between levels when you are in this situation, you may have to repeat this process many times until you beat the level you are stuck on. You may even want to go into an older level, kill yourself, continue, and then exit the level and save again so that when you boot up you are at 3 lives. I had to do this once after I had to do the seppuku ritual many, many times while I was stuck on the last level.

         You may be aware that most Mega Man games end in a boss rush level where you must kill all of the bosses again and then face the final boss. This game is no exception. This time around it is especially brutal because, as stated earlier, the bosses seem a bit tougher this time and even the easier ones can get a kill in on you from time to time. I easily spent more time on the final level than the whole rest of the game; maybe even twice as much time. This is exacerbated by the fact that the last boss is super-hard too, and you can't recharge your health between the different segments of that multi-form fight. After many, many days of trying this level over and over, I decided to use some cyber elves to help me (I was abstaining on the one-time use elves up to this point because I thought I was too cool to need them). I used a couple that drained the last boss's health considerably, and was able to beat him that way. I felt a little dirty, but I was so ready for the game to be done, I didn't care. I usually pride myself on not using too many cyber elves in a MM0 game, but I think I did the right thing this time.

       Audio-visually, Zero 3 is ok. The sprites and animation are pretty smooth, but with some rough spots. Character design is pretty good. Two or three of the bosses are really cool looking. I especially like the little ice frog boss. Everything else is pretty standard though. Like most portable games, I played this one mostly on mute because I play in the break room at work while also having conversations. I don't feel like I missed out on too much though. The music is pretty good, although there aren't really any stand out tracks. Most of the sound effects are good, but there are a handful that are really annoying. For example, some of the bosses' voices that they use to scream before they do certain attacks are downright shriek-ey. There is also a satellite elf that when equipped will constantly fire bombs out. This seems really cool, but the sound effect of the bomb is really bad and you hear it non-stop as it continuously fires, so you pretty much have to un-equip it so you don't go insane.

       In both Zero1 and 2, I immediately played hard mode after beating the game. In 3, I was so ready to be done with it by the end, I definitely wasn't going to play on hard mode. It's not that it is a bad game; it is plenty of fun. I just didn't feel the need to challenge myself to a more difficult version. Maybe that speaks to the difficulty of Zero 3's normal mode, which I'm pretty sure surpasses 1's and 2's. I think it also speaks to the fact that Zero 1 and 2 where more engaging than this version. Zero 2 is the pinnacle of the series for me. It had an epic and inspiring last boss fight that is probably as hard as Zero 3's but much more engaging. It also had some great variations on the standard formula. The part where you fight 2 bosses at once especially stands out as one of the most epic Mega Man moments ever for me. 3 doesn't really have anything special like that.

       Looking over this review again, it sounds like I'm really trashing this game. Let it be known that it is a totally solid and fun entry in the series, just not a particularly stand out one. It's not as good as Zero 2, and I was disappointed that it didn't inspire me to high-level hard mode play, but it does have a nice set of challenging bosses. It's a mediocre game, tier 1.

Shinobi Arcade Review

       Last but not least in my recent set of reviews of games on Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection comes another arcade game that isn't actually on Genesis: Shinobi. I played a bunch of Shinobi 3 a few years back and had a blast, so I was interested to see what this was like.

       First off, it has worse graphics than Shinobi 3, which I wasn't quite expecting since some of these arcade games, like Fantasy Zone and Alien Syndrome, have quite good graphics. It looks pretty decent though. The sprites are huge and pretty detailed. A lot of the sprites have pretty great animation, but the player character looks a little stiff. He walks like he's trying to get to the bathroom asap, and his jumps aren't really that ninja-like.

       This is contrasted by the way the game's action feels; it really makes you feel like you are a ninja fighting other ninja and enemies. You go through the 2d levels from left to right although there is some up and done and right to left involved to. You must find a certain number of hostages (who, hilariously, are all the same red-headed little boy in pink pajamas) before you can leave. You move with the d-pad, X is jump. You attack with square. If you are far from an enemy, you throw a shuriken (which are unlimted, unlike Shinobi 3). If you are closer to an enemy, you will kick them or slash them with a sword instead. You can power-up your shuriken to a mini cannon type thing that is more powerful by rescuing certain little boys. You can jump between foreground and background or between levels on a stage by pressing up and jump or down and jump. Triangle activates your ninjitsu attack, which is kind of like a bomb in a shmup. Everything freezes and you unleash a cool attack, such as making a ton of copies of yourself bounce around everywhere or summoning some elemental power. This takes out all of the enemies on the screen, and really has the feel of a shmup bomb as you can use it offensively to take out a big group of enemies or defensively to save yourself from a hit at the last second. This can be used once per stage per life.

     The levels are typically crawling with 3 kinds of enemies. There are regular dudes with guns, who shoot continuously at you. When you see them, you need to duck immediately to get under their bullets, which fly across the screen pretty quickly (although pretty slowly compared to real life). One hit kills you in this game, so you need to be careful. You can often get the jump on these guys while they are reloading, which is really cool. Then there are ninjas. These guys appear out of nowhere and try to get you with their swords. They are pretty aggressive, and unlike the regular guys with guns, they too can jump into and out of the background, so they are hard to get away from. They also take two hits to kill. Dodging their aggressive jump attacks and charges is challenging but well choreographed, and is a big part of why the game is fun. It really feels like you are in a dance of death with other ninja when a few of them suddenly materialize in front of you and charge. The third type are the guards who are always near the hostages. These guys throw swords at you that you must either duck under or jump over. The swords boomerang back to the guards, so you must watch for them on the way back too. That is unless you kill the guard, in which case the sword will keep going instead of boomeranging. This leads to interesting combat situations in which you must remember if the sword is going to boomerang or not and what level it will be flying at in order to avoid it. These guys also have shields so you can't pick them off from a distance; you must approach them and give them the opportunity to attack you. These guys stay dead when you kill them, even if you die and start the level over.

       Between groups of levels there is a first-person bonus stage where you throw shuriken at ninjas who are approaching you. If you kill them all, you gain a life. It looks really impressive; the first-person view of hands throwing ninja stars is cool, and when a ninja kills you see a giant, awesome looking sprite of it, but the levels aren't that playable and I was never able to get a bonus life.

       The final level in each group of levels is a boss fight. These fights seem pretty difficult until you realize that your ninjitsu attack will drain most of a boss's hit points, although you'll still have to get a few hits in the hard way. Even so, the bosses are fun and varied. They each require different tactics to beat, and some require some figuring out with some pretty cool “aha!” moments. The last boss is a really fun challenge. 

       The game's music is pretty cool. It has a bit of traditional Asian flair to it that sets the mood pretty well.

Curiously, you can't continue when on the final set of levels. The game is set to free play on SUGC, but if you lose all your lives in the last world, it's game over. This means if you just want to see the end, you need to save scum your way through the last few levels. I used 15 “quarters” to get that far. The last few levels actually aren't that much harder than the rest of the game (read – they are all really hard). The last boss is super hard though, and trying to figure him out with very limited lives and no continues would be quite a process without the magic of save states. Beating the game on one “quarter” is doable, but I'm not going to do it. Like all these arcade games I played, that would be a matter of months to do, and it doesn't merit that kind of replay.

       Shinobi is a fun take on the action platformer. Like I said, it really does make you feel like a ninja, whether you are taking out an army of normal dudes with guns, nimbly fighting it out with a handful of your fellow ninja, or summoning ninja magic to duel a boss. Some of the animation could use some work, but the sprite-work in general is really cool. It's a fun little nostalgic game. Mediocre, Tier 1.

Alien Syndrome Review

        This review is for the arcade version of Alien Syndrome as included as a bonus on the PS3 disc Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. I found many of the games in this collection to be a bit lackluster, but I felt some kind of connection to Alien Syndrome the second I started playing it. It is fun and has a great look to it. It somewhat reminds me of the PSP sequel of the same name and license that came out a few years back, but it is instantly more likable (although the 2^nd half of the PSP version is quite fun).

       It is a top down shooter. You play as either a male or female soldier that control identically. You move with the d-pad or analog stick and fire with square. You shoot in the direction you are facing. That's it for the controls. Each level is a space station or installation. You must find ten humans and rescue them while fighting off hordes of aliens. Once you have rescued ten people, you can proceed to the exit and fight the level's boss. All the while a timer is ticking down, and if it gets to zero, the whole place explodes.

       You can find powerups in wall panels that replace the pea-shooter you start with. You can get a fireball launcher, a laser, and a few other weapons. You can also find robots that will follow along behind you and fire backward. Each level features a different layout. Some are mostly open but have a few seperate rooms. Others feature pits you can fall into. Later levels have a more complex layout for you to traverse. There are maps on some walls, and touching them will temporarily bring up a map of the level, including human locations. This isn't needed for the first few levels, but helps out in the last couple.

       Each level features a different alien species. The first level has these amazing pink bloated worm things that are stuningly animated (I think these are in the PSP game too, they seem really familiar). They mostly move in pre-set patterns, although there is a yellow variety that will hunt you down and even shoot a projectile at you. Then in the second level there are bipedal aliens that seem a bit smarter, shoot projectiles, and continuously spawn out of enemy generators. Things get weirder from there, with different appearances, behaviors, and strengths.

       Finally, each level features a boss. These are usually large, freakish beasts that aggressively attack you. The designers of this game obviously went to the Contra School of Freaky Creature Design, as there is more than one enemy that has a fetus head grafted onto it. Quite disturbing. Some bosses send minions after you. Others fire lots of projectiles. Others jump at you themselves, and there are a few other weird strategies they employ. One of this game's strengths is its diveresity in its levels, enemies, and bosses.

       Now after playing the game a bit, you run into some flaws. Mainly that you can only fire in the direction you are facing or moving, and you can only change your facing by taking a step in the direction you want to face. This leads to a lot of problems. If a game were designed around this as a feature, that might work, but in this instance it feels like a design flaw. There are a lot of frustrating times when you die because you couldn't aim where you wanted to while moving where you wanted to. This game looks like a twin stick shooter, but it isn't. That in itself isn't a flaw, but the issue of moving and shooting needs to be resolved. I think the solution would be to make it so you have a way to hold still and pivot in place, and possibly a way to lock yourself to one facing while still being able to move. Having it be a straight up twin stick shooter would change the feel too much, but implementing one or two of the above changes and then cranking the difficulty up a bit would probably make it more fun and less frustrating. Just to be clear, it's super-difficult as it is, but if you kept the difficulty the same and made these changes, that might make the game too easy. Know what I mean?

        As you might expect for an arcade shooter, Alien Syndrome is real hard. At the beginning of this version, you can change some of the settings (which, if I'm not mistaken, represents settings the owner of an arcade cabinent can change on the circuit board or a panel or something). Believe me when I say you need to set it to the easiest modes, and it's still going to be an extreme challenge. Is it possible to beat without using this version's ability to save at any time? Well, yes, I think so. But that statement is complicated by the fact that you can't continue by putting in another virtual quarter; the game goes straight to game over when you die. You start with 4 lives, and there is no way to earn another. That means you need to beat the entire game with only 3 mistakes allowed. Deaths come frequently and lurk around every corner in this game. It gets real hard at the end too. This feat is possible with a lot of practice. I didn't do it though. After playing for about 2 weeks or so without cheating, I got to the boss of level 4 out of 6. I started save-scumming and beat the game. It was still challenging and fun to figure out the levels and bosses, and I'm glad I did it, although I do feel a little dirty. I feel ok though since I played it a lot without cheating first, and really felt that hardcore arcade experience of being able to get further and further. It's just that at the point of frustration and lack of progress, I was able to leisurely play the rest of the game and enjoy it rather than just quitting. Several more weeks would be required for me to beat it legitamately, but I was ready to move on.

       Alien Syndrome is a fun game. It has amazing enemy design (if you're into the really weird Contra-style stuff), great animation, and a lot of variety in it's levels and encounters. The music, which is slow and brooding in the level, and then more frantic when you fight the boss) is pretty good too, as are the digitized screams and voice overs. It's extremely hard, but you should know that going in since it's an arcade game. You can see most of the game by playing it legitamately, but if you get stuck, it's still fun to play with cheat-saving as you still need to figure out how to navigate each level and how to attack each boss; you can't just force your way through. Its basic gameplay is a little flawed due to the above mentioned aiming and moving thing, but overall it holds up incredibly well for a game from '87 (I was 2 when this came out, and it's still totally playable!). It's a mediocre game, tier 1.

Space Harrier Review

       I've never been able to understand games where you are behind the back flying forward. Be it Star Fox or certain segments of Philosoma, I've never been able to dodge shots or aim properly in games that use that viewpoint.

       That certainly holds true for Space Harrier, an old arcade game from 1985 (making it exactly as old as me!) that I played on Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. Now the reason you want to play Space Harrier is that the title screen features a dude sitting on the shoulder of a robot with a huge gun waving crazily at you. Next to them is a wooly mammoth with one giant eye. The game is full of this kind of crazy character design, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

       You play as a guy running on the ground who can also fly freely through the air. He is constantly running forward “into” the screen. The backgrounds have a scrolling effect, and the enemy sprites have a great effect where they get larger and larger as you get closer to them. You shoot with square, X, or O, your choice (no triangle, obvs), and move around with the d-pad. You shoot enemies and dodge their incoming fire. At the end of the level, you face a giant, weird boss. That is it.

       Like I said before, I have a lot of trouble playing games with this view. It could just be me, but I think it's because it's a bad viewpoint, or at least on that is hard to do right. It's certainly not done right here. It's super hard to aim or dodge. You just get hit constantly and miss constantly. Unless of course I am just incompetant at this type of game, which is possible. Fortunately, on SUGC, the game is set to free-play mode, so you can continue as much as you want to blow through the whole game. It took me about 15 continues (that's $3.75 in quarters, not bad!).

       Blowing through with infinite continues is how I recommend playing this game. I started to get bored even doing that. As an artifact of '80's game and art design, it's a lot of fun to witness. As a game, there's just not enough there to warrant much play at all since the bad viewpoint/collision detection/whatever makes it really hard to improve yourself. If I saw it the arcade, I would definitely pop some quarters in for the experience, but it's not a game I'm going to keep playing. It's a Mediocre Game, tier 3.

Kid Chameleon Review

       I just realized it's going to be hard for me to give a proper score to Kid Chameleon. Back when it was made in '92, there were many such games that you had to play over and over again until you finally beat that last level, no saving involved. Not many games had over 100 super-hard levels like Kid Chameleon though. It's really hardcore.

       Kid Chameleon is a 2d platformer for the Sega Genesis. I played it on PS3 on Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. And I save-scummed like it was my job to beat the game. This game is extremely hard and has a seemingly unending torrent of levels. Even thinking of trying to beat it legitimately is nonsense. I understand that there are some warp-points like in Mario 3 that can let you jump forward many levels. Good luck discovering them though. Beating this game outright would take...probably years. In fact I was just reading an article by a guy who has the world's high score in the game, and if I was reading it right, it took him six years to initially beat the game. A few years ago I got into the game and played it a lot. I was trying to play it without saving, and I got to about level 10 or so. This time around, I just wanted to beat it and have some fun, and thankfully on SUGC, you can save at any time. So typically I would save at the beginning of each level and reload as needed, although several times, especially in the later levels where I was tempted to rage quit, I would even save mid-level.

       So, in Kid Chameleon, there is a virtual reality arcade game, kind of like a holodeck. It's final boss has started kidnapping kids (in real life). The player goes into the machine to save them. So each level is a level in the game within a game. That's so meta. You run around in these levels, which are often pretty big and feature multiple paths to multiple exits. You can jump on enemies heads to kill them. You often find power-ups that transform you into a new form, such as a samurai with a sword, a knight with lots of hit points, a tank that shoots skulls (?), or a axe-throwing Jason look alike. That's about half of the transformations, I won't ruin them all. Some of the later ones are amazing...

       X is jump, the d-pad controls your movement, and holding square makes you run. Circle activates your current form's special power. To use our previous examples, the samurai swings his sword, the knight can climb walls, the tank shoots, and the Jason guy throws axes. Some forms also have alternate moves or abilities. For example, the Samurai can stab downward if you press circle and down when in the air, the vanilla, un-transformed kid can grab onto blocks and flip himself up if you double-tap X, and the knight has more hit points and breaks any blocks he lands on with his feet.

       Speaking of blocks, they are everywhere. Blocks with a “p” on them contain power-ups and crystals and extra lives and such. You can also find clocks that increase the time you have to complete the level, as every level has a countdown timer in the corner, and if it reaches zero, you die. I found myself transforming a lot, as there are plentiful power ups and transforming re-fills your hit points. The crystals you find are used to activate special powers that each form has. You do this by holding square and pressing start. Typically these powers make crystals fly out and attack the enemy in a different pattern depending on what form you are in. There is usually a 20 crystal power and a 50 crystal power that is more potent, although one or two of the forms mess with this pattern. These abilities are quite powerful and can be a big help getting through tough spots, but unless you are really going after each and every crystal in a level, you'll only be using these powers once every 5 levels or so.

       The game has a bit of a Mario feel to it at first, but soon you realize that the levels have a much bigger verticality to them than classic Mario. You go up and down almost as much as you go left or right. That combined with the constant transforming really makes the game feel like it's own beast once you get a few levels in, and once you get really deep into the game, it feels nothing at all like Mario despite the fact that you jump on enemies' heads and punch blocks to make power-ups come out.

       Kid Chameleon has pretty great art and music. Each of the many forms have great sprites and animation, and the many enemy types are great as well. I especially love the humanoid killer whales that melt into skeletons when they die. The levels tend to have a blocky look to them, but when you beat the level, the holograms fade to reveal that you are still in the arcade machine, which is a very cool effect. The music is a bit less aggressive and in your face than most games in the genre from this time. It's less about melodies. Kid Chameleon's music fades more into the background. It's nice to have a different musical style in a platformer, which is a genre defined by its many tropes. The sound effects fit in well with the mix too. I especially love the enemies that yell “Die!” at you. That's amazing. If you enjoy seeing crazy stuff from the '90's, you'll love what you see and hear in this title.

       Kid Chameleon is a lot of fun, but it has two major flaws. First, it's really hard to control. You might not notice too much at first, but once the jumps start getting tricky, you will realize that the controls are insanely floaty. The kid controls like a blimp or something. When you jump, you can change direction in the air and your movement to such a degree that it makes it hard to land where you want to, even if you've been playing for hours. When you start getting into harder areas, this leads to frustration. Second, the game is insanely hard! Ok, first off, there's no saving because this is an old school game. I get that. But many, many of the game's levels require trial and error to figure out what to do. The areas that almost require you to sacrifice lives to figure out what to do outnumber the amount of lives you get probably four to one. Which means the designers want you to replay 20...30... 70... 80+ levels just to get back to the level you are on so you can blow through your remaining lives trying to figure out what to do. I would venture to say you would need to repeat that process hundreds of times to beat the game. If a designer asks you to do something repetitive, it must be compelling. Kid Chameleon is fun, but it is nowhere near compelling enough to merit that kind of intense play. In my opinion, that is bad game design (unless of course this was purely a hardware issue, i.e. there was no way to make the game save, in which case I apologize for the nasty stuff I'm about to say). I get that this game is famously super-hard, but what people have to realize is that (in this case) this means is your game isn't fun. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams is a good counterpoint to Kid Chameleon. It is probably the harder game in terms of the pure challenge the levels throw at you. But because it has saving between levels, it is engaging and fun to throw yourself at its challenges over and over until you finally break through and beat a level. It is designed to be extremely hard, yet fun and beatable. Kid Chameleon is just way too hardcore for me. I really enjoyed playing it and seeing it all through save-scumming though.

       Kid Chameleon is not beyond hard. Like I said, Giana Sisters is probably harder. Kid Chameleon is beyond punishing though, and requires a life-time commitment to beat legitimately. What that means for 99% of the people who play it is that they will have a few days of fun with it and then give it up having not seen 70% of its fun levels. Whether you are a kid in 1996 or a modern-day person trying to beat an old school platformer without saving, that doesn't help you, it just frustrates you. You can have some fun times playing as far as you can get legitimately, or you can have fun seeing all the levels using save-scumming, but beating the game outright is one of gaming's toughest challenges, and one few will ever accomplish. And that's due not only to the insanely punishing nature of the game, but also to its impossibly floaty physics. The two or so people who do complete the game legitimately will probably feel more pain than pleasure. Kid Chameleon is a Mediocre Game, Tier 2.

Fatal Labyrinth Review

      I was excited to hear that there was a rogue-like on Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection (although I think this game was only on Mega Drive. I'm playing a few of the games on the collection now, and I just beat Fatal Labyrinth.

       The only other rogue-like I've played for any length of time is Shiren the Wanderer, which is an incredible game. I would probably give it a perfect score were I to review it on this site. Fatal Labyrinth certainly follows many of the rogue-like tropes I'm familiar with from Shiren. The game is a turn-based dungeon crawler that takes place on a grid. Unlike Shiren, you can't move diagonally. If you've never played a game like this, the turn-based system is pretty cool. You move or take an action as if you are playing a real-time game, but after your action, every enemy on the screen takes an action too, and then it is your turn again. This all happens so fast that if you are just walking around, it looks and feels like a real-time game. You are faster than most enemies in the game, so you usually get to move a few times for each of their moves, although in combat they attack just as fast as you.

       On the PS3 port of this game, you move with the direction buttons, pick up items with square, and open the menu with X. You close the menu with circle. Square also causes you to skip a turn, which is extremely useful to help yourself get into position during fights. This game uses the “bump to attack” system that many rogue-likes use; in order to attack an enemy, you just press the direction button toward the enemy when you are standing by one.

       So you walk around the dungeon levels looking for the staircase that will take you up to the next level. Your goal is to get to the top of the castle and retrieve a mystical goblet or something. Along the way, you'll find tons of gear and loot. You can find and equip weapons and armor, and find potions, one-time-use magic staves, and one-time-use magic scrolls. Almost everything you find starts out unidentified. For example, you might find a potion called “pink potion,” and you won't know what it does until you drink it. There are a few items that hurt you, so it can be an adventure trying different items out. Once you use something once, if you find another like one, the description will be filled in since you know what it does. There are staffs that shoot magic at enemies, scrolls that confuse enemies, and a ton of other effects (almost all of which I was familiar with from playing Shiren).

       You'll also encounter a bunch of different enemy types, such as slow-moving and weak slimes, ninjas that throw suriken at you from far away, wizards that put various curses on you, and snails that hold you in place so you can't retreat. Again, almost every type of enemy is straight out of Shiren (and, I guess, straight out of Rogue or other rogue-likes). The have really cool sprites for the most part. The art in general is pretty cool. Different weapons and armor even appear on your character when you equip them.

       There are 30 randomly generated levels to get through, and unlike a traditional rogue-like, if you die, you can continue from every 5^th level. Usually rogue-likes have straight-up permadeath. Permadeath is a staple of rogue-likes, so it's a bit weird that it's absent here. But I must admit I loved being able to continue the few times I died on my run through. That's mostly because the game isn't really engaging enough to be playing it over and over from the beginning, but more on that later.

       For a rogue-like, Fatal Labyrinth is very easy. I think I only died 2-3 times, and I didn't have that many life-threatening situations come up. Most rogue-likes are pretty darn hard. This one is certainly beatable, even if it did have permadeath, which it doesn't.

       There are a few big cons to this game. The music is good, but it is on a loop, and that loop is about 15 seconds long, so it gets old fast, and it only changes every 10 floors or so. The game is also really clunky. Going into the menu is a pain as whenever you exit the menu, you exit all the way out. Since you often have more than one thing you need to do in the menu, this means you are frustrated and inconvenienced almost constantly. For example, if you find a ring, you have to go into the menu to equip it, and then go into the menu again to look at it's description to see what it does. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but you'll be in and out of the menu constantly, so the time wasted really adds up. The menu also has all your items split up into different categories, meaning you have to scroll through different icons just to look at your stuff. Shiren just had all your items in one sortable inventory, which works infinetely better than Labyrinth's system. There is also no way to turn in place, so in order to change direction, you must take a step in the direction you want to go. This really hampers your tactics and makes long-range weapons almost useless. By the time you take a step toward an enemy so that you are pointed at them, they have taken a step toward you too, and the rooms are so small you are probably now standing next to each other. Because melee weapons are more powerful, that means you should just use your melee weapon at that point.

       I would say that Fatal Labyrinth is a good beginner rogue-like because it is so easily beatable and it doesn't really have permadeath, but the truth is it's so clunky that it would probably frustrate people unfamiliar with the genre. Beginners would be much better off playing something with an infinetely better interface, like Shiren. Veterans should also look elsewhere, as there isn't much to the game beyond very basic rogue-like tropes and a terrible interface. That means that the game is really for no one. It was ok to quickly blast through it though. That's why it's a mediocre game, tier 3.

1000 Tiny Claws Review

   Arr, I be doin' this 'hole review in me best pirate speek!!! Just kidding. It is tempting though.  How do you pronounce this game's title? Is it “One-thousand” Tiny Claws? Or “A Thousand” Tiny Claws? Personally, I've been saying “A Thousand,” but that may just be my South Jersey accent.

     In this game, you play as a sky pirate named Rana. Each level is a small island floating in the sky. You have pulled a cursed sword out of a stone, unleashing a horde of giant insects, and now you must use the sword to defeat the bugs and save the rest of your crew from execution. In order to do that, you must knock 5 waves of bugs off the edge of each island level before they knock you off.

     From an isometric view, you must hit the bugs with your sword toward an edge to knock them off. If they attack you, you get bumped toward the edge. The more something gets hit, be it an enemy or yourself, the further they fly when hit (is this how Smash Brothers works? I've never understood that game). If you get hit just a bit off the edge, you will grab on and have to mash X to pull yourself back up.There are also some cool boss fights that use different mechanics, which I won't discuss too much since they are pretty cool and there are only a handful of them.

     You move with the d-pad, X is swing your sword. Holding down the direction button that corresponds with the way you are facing and mashing X makes you do a stationary combo that finishes with an attack that splashes out to a slightly bigger area than normal (protip- you are invincible during some parts of the animation of this attack). Double tapping a direction makes you run that way, and if you press X while running you will stop and perform a powerful rush attack. When you hit enemies, you build up a sword meter on the side of the screen. If it fills up, you can hold down square to charge up a big attack that kills everything in a 45 degree arc in front of you and a small circle around you. O is block. If you press a direction while blocking, you'll hop around quickly while continuing to block.

     You face many types of bugs, each with unique characteristics. Some are small and try to swarm you at an angle, others are big and shoot fireballs at you. There is one that spawns more basic enemies and one that goes beserk and runs at you when it sees you (and a bunch more unique types). Hitting big bugs a few times usually flips them on their back, where they will stay for a good while. When they are like this, you can hit them across the stage, taking out big swaths of other bugs if they are in the way. There are also crates that drop into the level at set intervals that do the same thing. This makes for cool moments where you can charge right into huge crowds of enemies because you know you are about to flip a big enemy and send it flying through the crowd.

     There are also a few different types of terrain you'll be fighting on. Some places have many obstacles that bugs will bounce off of when hit. Sometimes these obstacles are placed in sections where you would want to hit bugs off the stage, making bugs bounce right back at you rather than leaving. A lot of later levels also feature collapsing terrain that leave holes in the map as the level progresses. The levels get pretty challenging pretty quickly as the game is not afraid to throw very large crowds of bugs at you. You have to concentrate and not make too many mistakes to be successful. There are 25 story mode stages. Each takes just a few minutes to run through, although you will probably need to restart quite a few of them.

     A typical level usually throws a nice mix of enemy types at you. You might be fighting off a big horde of small enemies in one round, then a mix of big and small, then a horde with a few specialists harassing you. For most of the story mode I just used the basic attack, although the post game content will teach you how to use all the other moves efficiently.

     That post-game content includes a challenge mode and a survival mode. Challenge mode features some really cool challenge types, such as a mode where you must kill as many enemies as possible but you start out with very low defense, so you go flying very far if hit, a hyper boss mode, where you fight stronger versions of the game's bosses, and a mode where you must hit enemies through a soccer-like goal. Most of the other challenges are a bit too frustrating to be fun, and even the fun ones have the difficulty cranked up a little too high. I almost gave up several times before finally completing all the challenges. You will learn how to use all of the different attacks and techniques in this mode though as you need to experiment with different strategies to figure out what works best in each challenge. Playing story mode after completing challenge mode is a bit of an eye-opener, as the story mode levels are much easier once you learn more advanced strategies in challenge mode. Survival mode has you facing unlimited bugs until you die. It's fun to play around with for a few minutes, but once I got the in-game trophies related to it, I called it quits.

     Completing these different modes earns you in-game trophies and pages to the ship's log, which is written as a quite funny dialogue between the ship's captain and Rana as they comment on various things about the game. Acutally, about 99% of the game's writing in the short cutscenes, loading screens, and in these unlockable pages is really great and funny.

     Character and sprite design is likewise very well done. The many types of bugs look great, as do the huge bosses and the weird pirates. Like many minis, some of the menus are grainy when played on PS3, but fortunately the actualy levels look good. The music is mostly good. Some of it isn't that memorable. The title screen music is downright grating after the first few times you hear it. Other tracks sound like they are straight out of a Mega Man game which suits the game's action well. The pirate shanty lyrics during the credits are pretty cool too.

      There is something a little off about the game though. It's not quite engaging enough to merit the amount of dedication it takes to beat some of the harder stages. I think there needed to be a few extra moves for your character to do or character progression or some other element to really hold your interest. Instead a lot of levels feel the same as you just mash X to hit bugs. So much in the game is really well done, and my rat's off the developers. But the samey-ness of the levels and the amount of restarts neeeded in these samey levels really drags the experience down. That's why 1000 Tiny Claws is a Mediocre Game, Tier 1.

Child of Eden Review

            Awhile ago I was considering buying Playstation Move just so I'd have an excuse to play Stranger's Wrath again since it got patched to add Move support. I couldn't quite justify it for just that game though. Luckily, my cousin got me Child of Eden for my birthday, so with two games waiting for me to try Move out on, I went ahead and pulled the trigger. After resisting some too good to be true offers on Craigslist, I was able to get an Eye, motion controller, and nav controller for $25 bucks on e-bay.

            Child of Eden is a sort-of sequel to Rez, the PS2 on-rails shooter that featured trippy visuals and synesthetic music. Child of Eden is also an on rails shooter. It progresses you through themed levels, and you don't control your motion at all. You can control where you look with a greater degree of freedom than I expected although, except for a few segments, in general you need to keep your focus straight ahead.

            These levels are not your traditional videogame locales. They are more like meta-physical representations of their theme. I don't want to give too much away about what the levels are like, but, for example, one is called “Beauty” and takes place partially in a giant garden and features lots of flowers and butterflies all floating out on a giant ocean. There are five of these levels, and in general they last about 10 minutes. It's an intense 10 minutes though. Although the levels do a good job of representing their theme, there are also lots of enemies that look like microscopic organisms or creatures of some kind.

            It's hard to describe the game's look and feel; there are so many trippy environments, backgrounds, textures, lighting effects, and great use of live action. Live action used to be kind of looked down on in videogames (at least by me), but in the age of HD video, the actress in this game fits right in with the graphics.

            The actress plays Lumi, a girl who died a long time ago who you are trying to sort-of recreate using data stored about her in cyberspace. My interpretation of the game is that each level has you searching through an archive to find out about and free certain aspects of her. It's really breathtaking when she suddenly shows up in a level after many minutes of trippy visuals and wildly fluctuating shapes and colors and sounds. You really feel like you've found her and need to free her.

            I played the game primarily with Move controls. There is a brief and super-effective calibration you must perform, and then the motion controls work brilliantly. Navigating the game's menu with the Move controller is really fun; you never have to use a button, just hover the reticle over what you want for a second and you will jump to where you want to go. The placement of the icons is designed very well, so it's really entertaining and makes you feel like you're in Minority Report or something.

            During gameplay, you control a reticle with the move controller. If you pass over an enemy, you will automatically lock on. You can lock on to up to 8 enemies at once, or you can lock on eight shots at an enemy if it can take more than one hit. Once locked on, you can fire your homing lasers by flicking your wrist. It worked best for me to jerk the controller toward my body and then toward the screen. If you do this in time to the music when you have eight targets locked in, you will get a multiplier bonus. To me, this is really hard to do on purpose. From what I've read, it's essential to scoring high, as you loose your multiplier if you don't continuously hit on the beat. There's usually not a visual representation of the beat on screen, and it also just feels weird to me to not shoot as soon as you are locked on since you need to kill enemies fast so they don't return fire. Still, in certain segments, you can get in a groove and build your multiplier up. For me, these moments were fleeting; I never really got the hang of shooting to the beat. You can also hold the trigger down to fire a rapid-fire laser which you aim with the reticle, which is useful and also necessary against certain enemies. There is also an expendable Euphoria attack you activate by pressing the move button, which shoots out like-a-hundred lasers. This acts like a bomb from a more traditional shooter; it usually kills all on-screen normal enemies, damages bosses, and clears out any bullets that were headed your way. You start levels with 1 Euphoria attack, but can find more ammo as you go.

            If there are bullets coming at you, a wide ring appears around your reticle with grooves in it that show you what direction the bullets are coming from. Bullets are a lot rarer than you might think, but it is essential to shoot them down with the rapid-fire laser as you only have five HP. The ring is really effective at pointing the bullets out to you, and makes for tense battles where you shoot away until you see that ring and then have to quickly swing around to knock down the bullets.

            Once you get past the first few levels, the game starts to really play with the dichotomy between the lock-on laser and the rapid-fire laser. You start to run into more enemies and bosses that require you to use one or the other, or a combination of both. For example, one brilliant boss fight makes you shoot down colored lights. One color is only damaged by homing lasers, the other by rapid-fire lasers. It makes you try to frantically lock-on to all the one color while avoiding useless lock-ons with the other color. There are a few other great uses of this concept, but I'll leave them for you to discover.

            I only tried using a traditional controller once, and instantly thought that it wasn't worth messing with since I had already played the game for several hours with move and was really used to it. Basically, you hold X to make the lock-on laser acquire targets as you move the reticle around with the left-analog stick. You release it to fire. R2 fires the rapid-fire laser, and circle uses your Euphoria attack. I'm sure the controller works fine, I was just already really used to using Move, so I didn't bother with it much.

            I want to call out level 4 as an especially stand-out moment in the game. I don't want to ruin it, so I won't even mention it's theme, but the level really nails that theme. So much cool stuff happens in that level, and it wordlessly conveys a lot of ideas about the concept like few works in any medium manage to do. It's also one of the most fun levels, and it ends in a great boss fight.

            Unfortunately, the game's music is not as great as it could be. Don't get me wrong, it has its moments of brilliance, but I feel that a game that puts as much emphasis on music as this game does needs to have a nearly flawless soundtrack (like Bit.Trip Runner 2 and Retro/Grade), and to me, there's quite a few missteps on the musical front. I know it's a matter of taste, and I've heard others say this is one of the best soundtracks in gaming, but to me only about 60%-70% of the music is really good. Some if it is really similar to music and sounds from the brilliant Lumines (which was made by the same designer), but unfortunately those sounds haven't aged too well to my ears. This game tries to be synesthetic by matching visuals to music, but doesn't succeed quite as much as it should.

            The game is fun, but doesn't have much appeal for me to re-play. To me, it was very experiential; something you experience and enjoy rather than game through over and over like an addictive platformer or shooter. It's more like the WalkingDead games ; you experience it and then there's not much point in continuing on unless you just want to see it again. There are tons of really hard to get score-chasing trophies in this game as well as a hard mode and a super-challenging bonus level, but none of these hold much appeal to me. I'm happy to have seen the game's play ideas and thematic imagery and sound, but I'm not feeling re-playing each level 12 times, which is what you would need to do at the very least to get all the trophies.

             Child of Eden is a beautiful game with some cool gameplay ideas. It's fun to run through it and see each level's theme play out and the gameplay changes and differentiations that go along with it. But once you're done, the multitude of post-game content is not that appealing, as it all involves re-playing the same 5 levels endlessly until you are perfect at it, and would require that you master the wonky art of firing homing lasers to the beat. I have to mark the game down for its music too. If it had a really killer soundtrack, it would be a much better experience. Fortunately the soundtrack isn't bad, and there are a handful of awe-inspiring combinations of sight and sound. But you can tell that the whole game was supposed to echo those moments, and unfortunately the soundtrack fully can't keep up with that idea. Child of Eden is a Mediocre Game, Tier 3.

  

         

Grubbins On Ice (Costume Quest DLC) Review

     I was planning on downloading Grubbins On Ice and playing it during a snowstorm since it is set partially in a snowy environment. The snowstorm beat me to it though, as it wasn't on the hard drive before the storm hit! Luckily I was able to get out a day or so later and grab it, so I still got to play it with snow on the ground. Things that take place in snow are really fun to experience if there is actually snow outside. I read Mouseguard Winter 1152 with snow on the ground and watched The Thing under snowy circumstances, and they were both the more enjoyable for it. Appropriately, on the day I'm publishing this, the roads are covered in ice. I even got stuck in a valley in the road filled with ice. Makes me wish there was slippery ice in the game...

     Grubbins On Ice is a DLC pack for Costume Quest. It is an additional area with its own story that is basically a sequel to the game. It is 1/3 the length of the original game. It took me about 2.5 hours to beat. Please read my review ofCostume Quest for more detail on how it plays, as it's basically identical.

    It's got more of everything. 3 new costumes, 8 new battle stamps, and 18 new Creepy Treats cards (once again, a highlight for me, they are so cool!). The new area is the world of the monsters. There is a new race of monsters with several classes to fight. Lucy gets kidnapped and you have to save her. You play as Wren, Reynold, and Everett, who hook up with an underground monster rebellion (complete with Che Guevara style beards and berets).

   Once again, the writing is really witty and well done, with great nods and references and generally funny stuff. Once again, though, the battle system and basic gameplay is slightly boring after awhile. Because the mechanics started to get boring toward the end of the main game, I really think there should have been a few twists thrown into this DLC's main gameplay of trick-or-treating and fighting battles. I especially felt it when I had to fight several identical battles in a row. Getting experience isn't an issue, so I was thinking, “Does the game think the outcome of this battle will be different this time?”

   In general, the graphics seem to have a little more polish than the main game, although I ran into a few frame-rate problems. The river and water-fall of green goo that runs through the whole area is especially beautiful and impressive, as are the handful of cutscenes that seem to have a little more camera action than we got in the main game.

     Despite the lack of innovation, seeing the new costumes, new areas, new attacks, and new collectibles, as well as enjoying some more witty dialogue and visual gags, all make the game fun to run through. It just would have been a lot better with a few twists on the gameplay to make that more interesting as well. I'm going to give say it's a mediocre game, tier 1. The writing and visual design are of course somewhere up in the great game tiers, but the gameplay isn't.

Engimo Review

    Enigmo is the last game in the Beatshapers bundle I got on PSN that also contained Wizorb, BreakQuest, Canabalt, and Galcon Labs. Not a bad bundle for $7 or however much it was.

     Enigmo is a puzzle game of sorts where water drops from an inverted tank in one part of a 2d level and you must guide it into a receptacle at another part of the level by placing objects that manipulate the water droplets. Some pieces bounce or launch the droplets at high speed. Others let the liquid slide along or deflect it like a piece of steel. One piece acts like a sponge that soaks up the liquid until it drips out of the bottom. After a few stages, you start to have to manage lava and/or oil in addition to the water. The difference between these liquids is mostly cosmetic. All of the liquids (1, 2, or all of them can be in any given stage) must end up with 40 drops in their respective receptacles for the stage to end. The flows into these receptacles have to be continuous, as liquid quickly evaporates out of the receptacles if the flow doesn't continue. This stops you from using the same pieces to divert different liquids. You can't just put 40 drops of water in its spot and then use all those same pieces on the lava. You need to ration your limited parts.

     When a stage begins, you can survey the level by moving the analog stick around before pressing cross to start the stage. Once you start, the water starts flowing, and a bonus gauge in the corner starts counting backward from a high number. If you can beat the stage before that number runs out, you will get that score, plus a bonus for any parts you didn't use. This gives an incentive to move fast and be efficient, but there is no penalty for not doing so other than receiving a score of 0 for the stage. I also got some random score bonuses at some stages, not sure why. Along the left side of the stage is a bank of all the parts available to you for the level. There are eight different types, and you get a different mix in every level. Bizarrely, the game doesn't tell you how many of each part you get. You often have multiple copies of certain parts in a level, but you don't know that until you use a part and then see that it is still available in your bank.

     You cycle through the parts in the bank and parts that you have already placed on the level with the d-pad. This is a little frustrating as it seems to jump around randomly a bit from the objects in the level to the bank. Often you will want to place an object from the bank way over on the right side of the screen. To do so, you'll need to scroll all the way through all the objects you've already placed to your left to get to the bank. Then you must drag the object all the way back to the right side of the screen. There has to be a better way to do this. When you have selected the object you want to place or move, pressing cross puts you in edit mode (as opposed to view mode, where you can look around but aren't moving any objects). While in edit mode you move the object you have selected with the left analog stick. You can move it very slowly with the d-pad for fine adjustments. You rotate it left or right with L1 and R1, respectively. You can change how finely you rotate an item be holding triangle to make rotation slower and square to make it faster. I had to do this a few times to get things just the way I wanted them. By default, it is set to rotate at the fastest setting. Pressing cross again places the object and switches you back to view mode. Seeing how objects will work when placed is a snap since liquid dynamically interacts with objects as you move them around and place them. This is very slick.

     Solutions to these levels often involve placing bouncer parts that send streams of liquid flying around at high speeds. You typically need to set a few of these at the correct angles to get the liquid where it needs to go. There is also a cool part that shoots water droplets out like a cannon, although you must set the liquid up to fly into it at the right angle for it to work properly. In levels that include oil or lava, you always start with just the water dripping. You must make the water continuously hit switches to make the oil and lava start and keep dripping. There are also force fields in many levels that need to be deactivated by making a liquid go through a color coded hoop. There are also a few types of surfaces that make up the level itself that you need to work with. Some reflect liquid, letting it bounce or slide along the surface. One type absorbs it, making your stream disappear. All these elements mixed together in different ways make each level an interesting experience. They don't exactly feel unique though. Each one has you chart a convoluted path for each liquid you are dealing with until you finally have everything in place. There are 50 stages, and they all feel somewhat same-ish, with a few exceptions. In general, you use the same techniques and overcome the same obstacles in each. It would be great if a few more concepts were introduced throughout the game.              Even the difficulty doesn't go up all that much. Once you get about half-way through the game, each level is about the same difficulty: 1 to 5 minutes of mild brain teasing. None of the stages are very hard, and, disappointingly, the last stage is quite easy. Most of the stages aren't easy either, fortunately, but none of them will boggle your brain the way you might expect later levels in a game like this to. Super hard stages in puzzle games like this can be frustrating, but very rewarding. Both that frustration and that rewarding feeling are mostly missing from this game.

     The game does pull off the feeling that you are putting together a unique solution or even breaking the rules. And you probably are in many case. I believe there are multiple solutions to many of the puzzles, and because it is physics based, weird things can happen that aren't going to happen to everyone. It's often the sign of a great puzzle game when you feel like you're cheating to get things done, and I had that feeling a few times during Enigmo as the physics guided the liquid into strange paths and situations.

     The graphics are really great. They are simple shapes and blocks, but they are all rendered in 3d. They easily could have been 2d objects, but as the camera pans around, you can see they have depth. They even look great on an HD tv, with the exception of a few of the menus. Even the big background textures look good on an HD tv despite this being a Mini. It looks like you are inside of a giant silo or something. The lava is especially amazing looking. It's glowing so bright it looks like it's going to burn through your screen.

     Many stages in Enigmo are impressive looking when you complete them. You often have long streams of droplets of several liquids bouncing crazily around a large stage. There are hundreds of droplets on screen, all flying through the air and eventually landing where they need to go. It looks like a giant Rube Goldberg machine that you created. A few days after I beat the game, I came back and completed one of the larger stages just to see the spectacle again.
     It seems like there is a limit to how many drops the game can draw. If liquid starts pooling up somewhere so that too many droplets are onscreen, the game will sometimes compensate by stopping or slowing the dripping of one of the liquids. Also, if you shoot liquid super high into the air, it sometimes will evaporate instead of coming back down. But, the game never has slowdown even when there are a ton of rapidly moving droplets, so I guess it's a tradeoff. It's annoying though when the stream you are working with starts to dry up so you can't clearly see how you are manipulating it.

     There is a bit of a bug where sometimes liquid will not interact with any objects in certain situations. This is often when it is bouncing off of a stationary part of the level in a strange way. This forces you to change what you are doing, which is annoying. This only happened to me in about 4 levels though, so not too bad. The game also annoyingly auto-saves at the end of every level, which freezes the screen. It says press cross to go to the next level, but you have to wait on the frozen screen for a bit before you can actually press cross, which is annoying. While I'm complaining, I'll also mention that at the beginning of each level there is a quick fly-by of the whole level that is un-skippable and totally useless. Also, it's a missed opportunity to not have the camera fly around the level on the z-axis at some point, like when you beat the level. That would be really cool, and the levels are already rendered in 3d, so why not? Also if you go to the level select menu, you can't go back to the main menu; you have to pick a level. Also, you pointlessly unlock levels as you go. Why? One more thing; if you beat the last level, you still get a prompt to press cross for the next level. If you press it, it starts level 50 over again.

     While you play, there is some subtle ambient music in the background. It's really good; sounds like a Mum song. Each droplet that hits an object makes a ticking sound. Just like real water dripping, this can be annoying in some levels, and there's no sound options, so you can't turn it down. Just like real life, it can also sound cool in some stages if the beat is right.

     Enigmo took me about 3 hours to beat. It kind of dragged in the middle, but learning all the concepts at the beginning and doing all of the more challenging (but still not that hard) stages at the end was fun. It needed more concepts and ideas to really be great, but it was enjoyable. It's a mediocre game, tier 1.

Galcon Labs Review

     I've played around a bit with Galcon Labs before I finally sat down to play the whole thing, and the concept seemed really cool to me. Each level is a field of planets. You control a few of the planets, which will be in your color. The enemy also controls some planets, represented in their color. These planets (those controlled by a either you or the enemy) have a number on them indicating how many ships are stationed there. This number goes up as more ships are produced on the planet. The bigger the planet is, the faster it produces ships. There are also many neutral planets, which are gray. They have a number indicating how many ships you need to send there to conquer them. The object is to wipe out all traces of your enemy before they do the same to you.

     The controls are as follows: the d-pad acts as a cursor that jumps from planet to planet. You can hold down circle to make the cursor only jump between enemy planets or cross to make it only select your planets (I never really used this). To attack, you need to select a planet or planets you control. You can chooses them one at a time by pressing R1 while they are highlighted, or select all planets you control with L1. There is no way to un-highlight a planet once it is picked except to attack. You then pick a neutral or enemy planet to attack. You put the cursor over it and press square to send 50% of the ships from your planet(s) or triangle to send 100%. As soon as you press the button, ships launch from all of your planets and head to their target. Once there, each of your ships takes out one of the ships docked at the planet, and vice versa. So you need to send more ships than the number on the planet in order to conquer it. Once a planet hits 0, it changes to your color and the rest of your ships dock there, filling it up with the number that land. Keep in mind that the enemy is doing this same process at the same time, and all non neutral planets are constantly going up in number. These matches only take a minute or two.

     The visuals in the games are pretty sparse. The planets all have irregular surfaces, which look like cratering, like the surface of the moon. The backgrounds are basic space stills; they look ok. The ships themselves are literally just triangles. This is actually pretty cool. It doesn't sound like much, but it all works pretty well visually, and there isn't any slowdown even when things get crazy.

     The first thing to do is the campaign, which quickly runs you through the different types of stages. There are Classic stages, which are just like I described previously. In Crash stages, opposing fleets can crash into and destroy one another while in transit. This is cool, but doesn't seem to have much effect on the winner or loser. The casualties just happen in space instead of at a planet. In Assassin matches there are two enemies. You need to take out a specific one to win. Your target wins if it takes out the other enemy, and that enemy is gunning for you. In Billiards matches, the planets are in motion and bounce off of one another. The final type of match is Stealth, where enemy fleets become invisible shortly after launching so that you can't see where they are going. After a few stages of campaign mode, enemy planet numbers all become an X, forcing you to estimate their strength. And then you are done. Campaign mode only took me about an hour. Most of the stages are too easy, although a handful of them were quite challenging.

     Next up is Fusion mode, where you choose a game type from the five I listed above and a difficulty. There are 10 difficulty levels, which is really weird. You then are thrown onto a random map. As in the later campaign stages, enemy forces are represented by an X, so you have to guess how many ships are at any given planet. Win or lose, you can chooses to restart the map you played or go on to a new map. You can also request a new map while the game is paused if you want to restart with a new layout. If you win, you get awarded points based on how fast you were, what difficulty you chose, and how hard the type of match you choose to play is. When you earn enough points, you gain different ranks. This mode is fun for a bit. I played about 2 hours of it, mainly playing Billiards and Assassin on the mid to high level difficulties. I even had a few victories on the highest difficulty, “Don't Try.” Assassin and Billiards are the most engaging battle types to me. Billiards shows you just how important positioning is. Attacking nearby planets is key as you waste time if your fleet is traveling across the entire screen. This is important in other modes, but is highlighted when the planets are all moving around. Assassin is really fun. Depending on the difficulty you are playing you need to try and let the enemy that isn't your target take some of your planets so that your target doesn't win or try to survive the 2^nd enemy aggressively attacking you.

     The music is really good. There are six songs by my count, one for the campaign and one for each type of Fusion match. They are all cool space electronic music. Very nice.

     This game is fun and interesting, but something's not right. If you're doing the math, you'll notice that I only played it for about 3 hours. I had some fun, but lost interest after that. Different maps do make each game a little different, but my main strategy of making all my planets attack the weakest large neutral planets and then attacking the closest large enemy planets soon became routine. In Assassin matches, all I would do is press L1 to highlight all my planets and then send all my ships after the closest target enemy planet. Some interesting things would happen and sometimes the plan would go wrong and need to be altered, but in general I stuck to that plan once I got used to things. I feel like a big part of the reason I developed these strategies is that picking single planets to attack is so time consuming as to be not worth doing. If you were controlling the game with a mouse or touch controls (there is an iOS version, I hear), this would be much simpler, but as it is, you can't win matches by slowing moving the cursor to one planet and then over to another and back again. This might work if the cursor would snap back to your planet after an attack, but even that would be super clunky. It's often necessary to quickly move the cursor to the target planet while pressing L1 to select all of your planets. This is because of the control scheme, not necessarily because it is the best strategy. The controls shouldn't dictate the way you strategize in this manner.

     I also want to complain about the way you get a bunch of options at the end of the each level, but can't actually pick them until the game auto-saves. You just sit there, wondering if the game has frozen as you foolishly press the button over and over.

     I also wish there was multiplayer. I feel like it would be amazing and strategies would develop that this game's AI could never utilize. Assassin would be so cool in multiplayer.

     The game is interesting enough that I might look into some other games that play like this, such as Mushroom Wars and Planets Under Attack. This game has some fun times. Probably about half of my brief time with it was pretty engaging. That's not much time though. That's why it's a mediocre game, tier 3.

Alien Zombie Megadeath Review

    OG readers of Robotic Attack Squadron will remember that the first game I reviewed for the blog was Pom Pom's Alien Zombie Death, which was followed soon thereafter by a review of Jelly Pops, another Pom Pom game. Alien Zombie Death came close to receiving a perfect score. Jelly Pops was interesting and fun, but not nearly as good. Pom Pom's follow-up to AZD lies somewhere in the middle, or maybe dead even with, Jelly Pops despite the huge amount of new alien killing content it brings to the table.

     I really don't feel like re-hashing my gameplay description here since AZMD's gameplay is nearly identical to that of AZD, so I'll refer you to my AZD review for general information and focus on the difference between the two games in this write-up.

Point 1: The Graphics

    AZMD features 3D graphics on a 2D plane as opposed to AZD's 2D characters. A few of the enemies look better in 3D, such as the slime guys with an eyeball that shoot at you. Some look better in 2D. It's a bit of a toss up. The scary dogs that chase you around in AZD look waaaay better in 2D. The 3D versions are not scary at all. And they are called Buffalo for some reason despite the fact that they are clearly canine in the first game (they even bark in the first game, but not in this one). AZD had cool planetary backgrounds, but I probably have to give the advantage to AZMD's backgrounds. There is a different one for each of the game's 40 main stages, and some of them are really interesting. There's gasses, planets, structures, all kinds of cool stuff. Protip: quit out of a level and go to the title screen to see that level's background displayed in it's full glory on the title screen. I did this many times to get a better look at some of the cooler scenes.

Point 2: The Sound

     This is also close to a toss up between the two games as they have different sound effects that aren't really better or worse than each other, just different. I guess I'll give the advantage to AZD because it has that creepy dog whimpering bark when you fight dogs.

Point 3: Gameplay

     Gameplay is similar, although there are some differences. The big thing is that in AZMD your multiplier only goes up if you collect crystals that are dropped by dead enemies. These crystals disappear pretty quickly, so you need to constantly move toward where you have killed enemies. I think in general AZD was better without this, but it is fun to kill a million aliens and then run through collecting tons of crystals to quickly fill up the multiplier bar.

     There is a new power-up in AZMD. It slows down time for everything but your character. It's really great. It compliments the other 3 power-ups perfectly. The other three have more specific uses, but slowing down time almost always helps you out no matter what situation you are in. Speaking of power-ups, the missiles in AZMD don't seem as effective to me.

     There are also a handful of new enemies. There is a new version of the slime guys that shoot at you that have a shield on the front so that you have to shoot them from behind. There are these stationary guys that shoot lasers across the whole screen after telegraphing where they are aiming with a visible line. There are also new bosses that shoot at you, release minions, and chase you around as an invincible ball once you kill them until they regenerate. There are a few others too. All of the new enemies are great and fit in just fine with the old ones.

     The main types of levels in AZMD aren't endless; they have a set amount of enemies and then you beat them. This is strange considering that all the levels in AZD had you play until you died. To me these beatable levels were just filler as you need to beat them to unlock the survival levels. There are 40 of these beatable levels, so that's a lot of filler. Not that they aren't fun, I'm just questioning why they exist when the survival mode levels are the stars of the show. There are 32 survival levels by my count. That's a lot compared to AZD. There a bunch of new gimmicks in some of these levels, such as jet-pack levels that let you fly around really fast (kind of fun, but not as tight as the core gameplay), decoy pod levels that have stationary spots you can touch that create a decoy of you for a short period of time (also fun, but not as tight as they could be), bomb disposal levels, which have you carrying bombs to disposal units before they tick down and explode on you (these levels are pretty cool), levels that have tons of asteroids flying through them but no enemies (a fun diversion from shooting), and space baby rescue levels, where you must defend babies from the aliens as they bounce their way across the screen (a fun type of level, very hectic). It's sad when the babies die...but then it gets scary as their ghost comes after you... 

     Most of the levels are the traditional kind where you have nothing to do but dodge obstacles and navigate the stage layout while blasting aliens by the hundreds. There are many more levels in AZMD, but the layout variety and enemy themes keep things pretty fresh. I must confess, I did not get all the medals in all of levels. I got frustrated with a handful of the harder ones and have given up for now to move on. I'm not sure that I'll ever come back either; I think I may have had enough of this formula, even though I love it.

     AZMD has a bunch of space suits to choose from, and you can unlock suits that look like a bit like some of the aliens. You can mix and match parts to customize a suit too. It's fun to do that.

     And of course, it wouldn't be a Pom Pom game without a few glitches (just kidding, I honestly love this developer!). I experienced slowdown once when there was a truly crazy amount of enemies on screen at once (like, probably over 100). The other glitch I came across was repeatable and affected gameplay pretty badly in some cases. Shooting some bosses causes them to retreat. If they retreat off the edge of the screen without dying, they won't come back or re-spawn, meaning you are stuck in the level with nothing to do. This is real bad, as it means you sometimes have to lay off your fire when you have a boss on the ropes just to save the level from crashing. If this happens to you though, have some fun killing spaceships, which keep spawning. If you kill tons of them in a row, they start to be worth insane amounts of points.

    Alien Zombie Megadeath is not as sublime as its smaller progenitor. There's a lot more going on, but some of the magic is gone for me. A handful of additions, such as the new enemies and the new power-up, are really awesome. In general though, I prefer the original game in nearly every way, including its amount of content. AZMD has way more levels, but like I said, 40(!) of them are filler to me and some of the survival levels are not so great. I had fun with some of the other new elements, such as baby rescue and bomb disposal and some of the new level designs and enemy patterns, but I didn't really have too many of the great moments of narrow escapes and great triumphs that I felt in the original game. Maybe it's because the formula isn't so fresh in this game as it was the first time around. I'm giving AZMD a Mediocre Game, Tier 1 rating. There's a lot of fun to be had for AZD veterans looking for more content, but they'll have to wade through a lot of filler to get to those great moments. Conversely, if I hand someone AZD, I can almost guarantee they'll have an epic gameplay experience on their first game.