Hysteria Project Review

       Hysteria Project truly is a mini. There is about ½ hour of content, and that is it. The game costs $3, so that ½ hour would have to be really, really great to justify buying it. Unfortunately, despite some cool ideas, there's not enough there.

       The game is pretty basic. You see a short video segment (and I mean real video with actors) and then you must make a decision about what the character you are controlling will do. You have two choices. If you choose the wrong one, you die. If you choose the right one, you may need to follow some onscreen prompts to press buttons as they flash on the screen. If you press the wrong button or don't press the buttons fast enough, you die. Dying sets you back to the last checkpoint.

       You wake up in a room and have to try to escape and then make your way through the woods while being pursued by a relentless axe-wielding figure. That's the gist of the story. There are a few interesting wrinkles to it. There are about 3 pretty interesting developments that happen while you are playing.

       The video quality is really bad. I imagine it looks a little better on the smaller screen of the PSP, but I was playing on my PS3, and it was pretty grainy. However, in a horror game like this, that's not the worst thing. It looks a bit like a found-footage movie, which isn't a bad look. Although if it was a few shades sharper and in HD, it would still look like found footage and be a little more palatable.

The presentation does have some good qualities to it. It is shot from a first-person perspective, and it pulls that off very well. You often see “your” arms touching branches while going through the woods and the perspective looks great when you are performing tasks. There is also a neat effect where you blink from time to time that works really well. On the other had, the action is frequently broken up by checkpoints, which save your game on a seperate screen, and the decision screens, which take you to a separate screen away from the images of the video. Both of these elements break up the flow and should have been super-imposed on the screen while the video was still rolling. It's strange that they aren't since the quick-time events are super-imposed on the moving video, so the developers obviously know how to do it. Then again, if the video rolled straight through without the screens popping up to break up the action, the game would only be 20 minutes long...
       I also think the game would be better with some gore, since it supposed to be a horror game and you die a lot. Not every horror game needs gore, but this guy pops out and chops you with an axe from time to time and the screen just turns red and you die. Some low-budget gore would be really cool and appropriate, methinks.

       The music is pretty good. It's quite dark and dread-inspiring.

       This game was obviously made by a few people in the woods on a very small budget. In order to be a better game, it would need more content, more mechanics, better video quality, and a presentation tune-up. A few of its narrative ideas are interesting. The “epilogue” of sorts that you can access after the game ends is dumb and threatens to ruin the mood of the game. A few days after playing it, I realized I barely remembered it existed, which is a bad sign. I wanted to like the game a lot, but it's a Bad Game, Tier 1.

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.

Sneezies Review (PSMinis)

            When I watched a video of Sneezies, I thought it looked really interesting; extremely simple and cute, yet with a cool chain reaction mechanic. Although I typically go for much crunchier gameplay, I wanted to give it a try. It's my belief that very simple games with good graphical design can be a lot of fun despite the hate they sometimes get. Unfortunately Sneezies is much less of a game than I thought it would be.

            In the game, a bunch of Sneezies (cute, colorful, round creatures) float around in bubbles on the screen. They are constantly in motion. You move a cursor around and can drop one blast of sneezing powder by pressing X. Any Sneezies the blast touches will sneeze, which pops their bubble and lets out another blast of sneezing powder, hopefully causing a chain reaction. They then parachute to safety. Some levels feature just a few Sneezies and some feature close to 100. Unfortunately there isn't too much strategy to Sneezies. You can try to optimize your drops, but it all seems to work out pretty randomly. I try to drop between two Sneezies as they are moving apart so that the chain reaction spreads throughout the screen. I tried a few other strategies too. But it seems that you get a pretty similar result if you just press X randomly. Your goal is to get a certain number of Sneezies to pop their bubbles and fall off the screen. Usually you need to get almost all of them.

            Watching the Sneezies sneeze and cause big chain reactions is amusing, but the game wears out its welcome with its length. A full game of Classic mode is close to 50 levels and seems to take forever. The game might have had some potential for high score chasing with friends if you could play it in five minutes, but it's hard to imagine ever playing it again after sitting through over an hour of sneezing.

            There are four game modes. Classic has you go through progressively harder and bigger levels. Easy mode is like Classic mode but you get a second drop of sneezing powder if you don't beat the level on your first. Score Ex mode gives you an increasing amount of points for each Sneezy you get in a level, as opposed to Classic mode, which gives you 1 point per Sneezy. Challenge mode is slightly different than the other modes. In it, you get 5 drops of sneezing powder and try to reach a goal number of Sneezies. After each drop, more Sneezies are added to the screen. If you drop 75% or more in a single drop, you earn another drop. Unfortunately this mode is really easy, and you can meet most of the goals by mashing the X button. After completing Classic mode, I quit Challenge mode after about ten levels as I was really bored. I was starting to miss drops on purpose to hurry things along when I met the goal, and I did that thing where you start to fall asleep and almost drop what you're holding; in this case, the controller.

            The animation and sound of the Sneezies themselves is quite good, and it's cool to see a huge chain reaction go off, or to watch a hundred sets of blinking eyes watching you, waiting for the powder to drop. The sneezing sounds are pretty amusing, which is good since you will hear them a lot. Unfortunately the backgrounds are pretty bad looking. The music is passable; a gentle guitar and some other subtle stuff. After awhile it's annoying though.

            Sneezies would be cool as a mini-game or a mechanic within another game, or if there were more interaction to it. As it stands, an animal could literally be trained to press X and could beat the game and beat your high score. A game like that could still be silly fun, especially if you had a high-score rivalry, but no one is going to play this game for an hour to try and beat your high score. I'm sad to say it's a bad game, tier 1. 

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.

BreakQuest Review (Minis)

     I just finished BreakQuest tonight, and I am ready to play its sequel, BreakQuest Extra Evolution, immediately. After playing Wizorb, I thought I was done with the breakout/ arkanoid genre (in case you don't know, these are those games where you bounce a ball off bricks at the top of the screen and then as the ball comes down, you bounce it back up to the bricks with a paddle. You want to break all the bricks without the ball getting past the paddle at the bottom of the screen). Wizorb was fun, but quite frustrating too. I now think that I may have been frustrated with Wizorb because it was trying to bring order and meaning to breakout mechanics, which are by nature random and uncontrollable. BreakQuest takes the total opposite approach by embracing and enhancing the breakout genre's inherent chaos.

     BreakQuest is a breakout style game with 100 levels. Each level is totally different. When you beat a level and move on to the next one, you never know what it's going to load up. Some levels have standard bricks arranged in patterns. Others have weird shapes that take many hits to break and bounce all over the screen when hit. Some of objects that need to be hit in order. Some have blocks that change colors and won't disappear until you match all of the blocks in a row. Some levels resemble other games, like Space Invaders,  complete with aliens that shoot at you, causing your ship to freeze up if they hit you. In my opinion, seeing what the next level is going to be is the main draw of this game. Just like I mentioned in my El Shaddai review, it's an amazing thing for a game to be so full of surprises that you never know what you're going to see and do in the next level.

     There are also a bunch of quirks and tweaks to the standard breakout gameplay. First off, you can press L1 to activate a strong gravitational pull on the ball. This is limited by a meter that refills for each new ball. This allows you to try to steer the ball into things below it. It's pretty ingenious as it gives you some control over the ball's flight path, but it is very inexact. I would use it every few stages to try and hit obstacles when the opportunity arose. It's hard, and succeeding feels like an accomplishment. This technique is so difficult and situations where you can use it come up so infrequently that it really adds to the chaos of the situation rather than make it more controllable (this is a compliment). It's not like you can steer the ball; that would be a design mistake. It's more like a semi-useful power-up that is always ready to go.

     Speaking of power-ups, there are a ton of them. Looking through the instruction book, I count 60. You read that right. Many of these are good. Many of these are bad. Some of them aren't really an advantage or a disadvantage, they just change things. There are good things, like barriers that catch the ball if you miss it and a power-up that launches 3 extra balls at once (and yes, this does stack if you get more than 1!). There are bad ones, like ones that make the ball's pattern erratic or mess with the controls of your ship. There are many types weapons that let your ship directly fire on the bricks and objects in the level, such as homing missiles and a spread gun. There are power-ups that change the shape of the ball and the bumper on your ship, or change the size of the bumper. And there are many, many others. The combination of 100 unique stages and 60 power-ups really made me feel like I ended up in some unique situations that no one else probably experienced, especially out of control scenarios with many, many balls on screen, some with their own orbiting ball enhancements! The addition of negative power-ups that need to be avoided is a great choice. Often you have to make the agonizing decision to fly through a bad power-up in order to save the ball. This hurts, and goes against your instincts, but losing a ball is a big deal, so you end up having to deal with these negative effects. Power-ups often end up interacting with objects in the level and getting knocked around by the ball, so that great item you're waiting for might keep getting juggled just out of reach, or a bad item might come flying at you as it gets knocked around.

     The d-pad or left analog stick lets you move your ship left and right. Holding square makes you go faster. Cross fires any weapon you might have equipped, and also re-launches the ball when you die and re-spawn. Triangle let's you launch your second ball (each life has two balls). Launching the reserve ball is typically too chaotic to control since juggling multiple balls is really hard (just like in real life), but is great for finishing off a final piece in a level, as you can try to line up your launch. The game also smartly spawns free weapon power-ups toward the end of levels to help you finish up the last few bricks or objects on the screen.

     The music is really cool. It's done by Maniacs of Noise, a group that works on sound effects and music for games and movies and stuff. The game's tunes are all a little different than typical video game music, but in a weird, good sort of way. Unfortunately there is a weird glitch (design choice?) that slowly turns the music down as you play until it disappears completely. Since you can't access the options screen to turn it back up during gameplay, I made many trips back to the main menu to turn it back up since it is really enjoyable. It's a very weird thing. I really want to know if it's a glitch or if they did it on purpose. Either way, it was really annoying to have to keep doing that when I was getting into a rhythm.

     Another little flaw (in my opinion) is the way the ball can sometimes slide down along your bumper and get past you even though you hit it. I feel like if you hit it, it should not get past you. This may be a design choice or a bit of a glitch, hard to tell. This happened to me quite a bit, although not enough to be a major issue.

     The graphics are really cool. Like many minis, there's a different look to it than your typical 2d HD game. And that's a very good thing. There are some really visually stunning effects, such as pieces that explode into confetti or bright colors when hit. Even when you smash many blocks at once and the screen fills with beautiful particles, there's no slow down (well, maybe I saw a hint of it once...)

     There's actually a little story to this game if you read through the digital instruction booklet (accessed on the XMB while you are playing the game). You are piloting a ship to try and shut down all tv signals because they are detrimental to humanity. Something like that. It's accompanied by several weird drawings, and I found it very amusing. Definetly some truth to the idea that tv is ruining humanity (a message given to you, ironically, through your tv). Even a few words and drawings like that can add a sense of purpose and coherency to an arcade style game like this as your imagination fills in the gaps of what you are experiencing.

     Once you beat all 100 levels, there is hard mode to try (actually you can pick easy, normal, or hard from the beginning), as well as arcade mode, which let's you pick from a list of game settings and play random levels. I never tried hard mode, as normal mode is pretty hard (I only ever got to 4th place on the high score table in normal mode), and playing the same levels over in order wouldn't have the magic of having something you've never seen before pop up in each new stage. I played with arcade mode for a few minutes after I beat the game. There are a few easier settings, and a few harder settings in this mode. There is Armageddon Mode, and Master Mode, which are both super hard in different ways. There is Fast! mode, my personal favorite, where the ball is super fast. You either beat the stage or die in an amazingly short time. I like the idea of having multiple modes that are hard in different ways. I'd like to see some other games in different genres have modes like that. Imagine an FPS or action game with difficulty modes like "Bad guys all have great guns but are slow," or "bad guys are super fast, but have normal guns." It's fun to see what random stage you get in arcade mode, but I what I really wanted was more new stages. That's why I'm going to play the sequel. I feel like I could play it right now, but I'll probably wait a bit.

     Despite how much I like Wizorb, my frustration with it made me think I would avoid breakout games from now on. After playing BreakQuest, my interest in the genre has been resurrected. I talked about it's limitations in my Wizorb review, but BreakQuest has show me that by embracing the chaos and randomness inherent in the genre, there is still a lot of fun and innovation to be had. I am now planning on playing BreakQuest Extra Evolution and Magic Ball. And if Wizorb 2 comes out, I'd be willing to give that a go too. I just hope its developers have learned a bit from playing BreakQuest. It's a great game, tier 2.

Canabalt Review (PS3, PSP, PSVita)

      I would probably give Canabalt a higher score if I wasn't playing Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien (review pending) at the moment. Canabalt is really cool and fun, but I feel like Runner 2 is better in most ways, with a few exceptions.

     Canabalt is an infinite runner. I think it is one of the first. You play as a guy in a business suit running on rooftops. You jump from rooftop to rooftop as you automatically run faster and faster. The only control you have is when you jump and how high/long you jump. Holding the button down makes the leap longer and higher, while tapping it quickly produces a quick hop.

     You're running because the city is under attack. There are giant robots in the background running amok, and sci-fi aircraft are flying by at high speed as well. As you are propelled forward, you must time your jumps to make it to the next rooftop (or crane, or billboard). Missing means instant death. You go until you die, the goal being to make it a longer distance. The game measure how far you get in each run in meters. It keeps track of how long your best run ever was and how long your most recent run was. When you die, the game very specifically tells you what happened ("You ran 329 meters before somehow hitting the edge of a crane"). Basically, there is a message for any and all of the strange ways you will die in the game. A very nice touch. 

     There are a lot of interesting obstacles that pop up as you go. There are buildings that collapse as you run across them. There are tall buildings that require you to jump through a window and run through a floor of the building and jump out of the other side (I find this especially difficult). There are bombs that drop out of the sky and land in front of you that you need to jump over. There are also giant objects that sheer buildings right in half right before you go to jump on them. I can't figure out if they are giant missiles or giant robot arms or what. It happens really fast and you either die or run away from it and it is far behind you. There are also boxes, chairs, and other small obstacles that you can run through but slow you down if you do. I've found that hitting them to slow down on purpose if you get going really fast is a necessity.

     That's the whole game. It's sublimely simple and very addictive. Once you start playing, you want to give it “one more go...” over and over until you've played a lot longer than you thought you would. Breaking your record is thrilling, as is the many times you will just barely make it through an obstacle or over a tight jump. You'll run along a long building as it collapses and just barely jump up to the next one as it sinks below the bottom of the screen, or slow yourself down too much by hitting boxes and then barely be able to make that next long jump, or go on a long run only to have a building ripped out from under you by a falling obstacle...but then you miraculously make it and keep going! You will also die a million times, but that just spurs you on to keep going. Quitting can be difficult. I had to use caution when writing this review that I didn't just play and play without writing.

     The graphics are really great pixel art done in just a few shades of grey. The animation is really great. Your character parachute rolls really smoothly after long falls and flails his limbs wildly during long jumps. The whole screen shakes as huge ships fly by just overhead at high speeds. The way bombs drop in and then explode if touched is really great looking, and when buildings collapse or are suddenly chopped up by falling stuff, it looks and feels really awesome.

     A big part of that feel comes from the sound design. Despite the pixelated graphics, the sounds (shattering glass, rapid footsteps, bombs falling from the sky, buildings being torn apart, grunts of exertion) are designed to sound realistic. This is an interesting choice that adds a lot to the game.

     So do the backgrounds and various graphical touches. There always something crazy to look at in the background, be it a giant robot, a million varieties of smashed buildings and structures, or... what is that floating in the sky? Birds sometimes fly off of rooftops as you run by and debris falls off buildings as they collapse. And what made those massive claw marks in that billboard? Great attention to detail.

     There are three music tracks you can pick from the main screen before starting your run. They are all appropriately epic and/or fast paced and/or exciting, or at least they start slow and build up to epic. All three are worth listening too. I would rotate them as I played.

     The main problem with this game, if you want to say it is a problem, is that there isn't really a reason to keep playing it for any period of time. Once I played for a few days, I didn't feel the need to fire it up again. I can tell that I will probably play it randomly from time to time over the years when I see it there on my hard drive, but I won't be seeking it out on any regular basis. And that's fine, really. There should be some games like that. This game is simple and fun, but not super deep. I can't really knock it for that. But comparing it to Bit.Trip Runner 2, which I invariably must, it comes up a little short, as Runner 2 has so much that you want to do and unlock, not to mention how beautiful it sounds and how great and varied it's gameplay is, but more on that in its own review in the future. Runner 2 also throws you back into the action almost instantly when you mess up, while Canabalt has you sit through an auto-save screen that's a few seconds longer than it should be (and shouldn't trigger if you don't beat a record, as there are no other stats being tracked). There is also some slowdown when playing on PSP, usually at the start of a level where it won't mess you up.

     One thing Canabalt has that Runner 2 doesn't that I really like is procedurally generated levels. Every time you play, things will be different, and you will run into new situations that surprise and challenge you even after you've played for several hours. Runner 2 features stellar pre-made levels, but it would be really cool if it had some randomly generated content or a random mode t0o, as the emergent situations that pop up in Canabalt are really awesome and I can tell that awesome situations would come up in Runner 2 as well.

     I feel like it's hard to rate Canabalt on my scale as for me it's a game you play every once in a great while for a few obsessive sessions. I guess it's a Great Game, tier 3. I want to say that it should have more content or trophies or something, but its lack of all that in favor of pure, focused gameplay is an asset as well. It's a different type of game in that way.  Oh, and in case you are wonder or want to compare yourself to me, my longest run (so far) is 12,177 Meters. Beat that! Actually, I have no idea if that would be considered good or not.

Closure vs. Where is My Heart?

      I want to write a brief comparison of the gameplay in Closure to that of Where is My Heart? If you don't know about the games' mechanics, this post will make no sense. Go read my reviews, or better yet, just go play them first! I think they are both excellent games, and although their story themes are quite different, the way they play is similar and complimentary. Both heavily involve perspective and reality.

     In Where is My Heart?, the level layout exists. You perceive it through the panels given to you in any given level. The arrangement of the panels does not affect the layout. You perception does not affect reality. You are kind of battling your own mind just to understand the layout of the levels.

     In Closure, the level has a layout, but it is manipulated by your perception. Only what you can see is reality. The layout of the level bends to your perception of it. Reality changes to match what you are seeing.

If Where is My Heart? Followed Closure's rules, you could rearrange the panels to change the layout of the level. If Closure followed Where is My Heart's? rules, you could walk around in the dark and run into objects you couldn't see, and the light would just be manipulated to help you see the level. Both would be totally different games if they switched rules like this. It would be very interesting to see. I'd would love it if the creators of both of these games got together and messed with the rules of each others' games, or made a new game (or games) exploring these ideas even further.

     I was going to throw in comparisons to Quantum Conundrum and The Unfinished Swan too, but I think keeping it to just these two favorites of mine makes it a more streamlined and interesting post. I just thought it was really neat how these two games both deal with perception and reality in regards to their gameplay. I played them relatively close together, and when I realized that they were almost opposites gameplay-wise it made me appreciate both of these great games even more.  

Where is My Heart? Review

     It seems to me like I've been playing a lot of games in the puzzle platformer genre lately, or at least plenty of games in the “get from point A to point B” school of puzzling thought. I reviewed Quantum Conundrum last week, and the Unfinished Swan and Closure are coming up next. This week is Where is My Heart? You already know what I gave Quantum Conundrum (great game tier 3). While all of these games are great, two of the three others are going to get perfect or near perfect scores. Obviously, you'll know by process of elimination by the end of this review, but do you care to take a guess before you get to the end?

     Where is My Heart is a Playstation Mini, playable on PSP, PS3, and PSVita. It's a 2d puzzle platformer done in a wonderfully serene and beautiful 8-bit style. I think it's the color palette that really makes it stand out. There are lot of purples and yellows that are not quite pastel and a lot of browns and grays that almost are. You play as three monsters, a family consisting of mom, dad, and their young child. They are searching for a special tree that has flown away, and seem to be getting lost as they go. Each of the three are really beautiful sprites with great animation.

     In each level, you control all three monsters, and you must get them all to the exit in order to move on. You move with the d-pad, switch which monster you are controlling with triangle or circle, and jump with cross. Puzzles often involve stacking the monsters on each others' heads to reach certain areas, basic platforming, and getting to certain blocks that you can activate to have hearts fly out and fill in silhouetted blocks or clear out blocked off areas, allowing you to proceed. There are also some advanced things you'll be doing, which I'll talk about in a sec, but first we need to talk about what really sets this game apart.

     The game's gimmick (and I use that word without any negative connotation) is that each level is chopped into frames, and frames that are adjacent to one another do not necessarily depict areas that are adjacent or even near each other in reality. Adjacent frames are not necessarily even at the same zoom level. The frames themselves are often times not the same size. Some are large, some are tiny. It's as if the real level is in there somewhere, and there are several cameras on it. Some are at different zoom levels, and some are displayed on smaller or larger monitors. And the monitors are scrambled. It's hard to describe. An example would be a level that is just a straight walk from the entrance to the exit. There are four frames. When you walk forward, you will go through frame 1, then appear in frame 3, then 2, then 4. In other levels, these frames might be on top of each other, or across the screen from each other, and the level might have a lot of verticality (even though you might pop out in a frame at the bottom of the screen after you jump up a bunch of platforms). Once you understand the idea, it's quite an ingenious thing. You might think it's something that you'll be able to play right through, like your gamer brain can unscramble the images and allow you to play normally. You'll quickly see that isn't true, it's going to confound and surprise you the whole way through.

     This amazing concept is executed brilliantly throughout the game in many ways. There are frames that show the same thing, but in different sizes. You might walk out of a frame and into one that shows your character at a bigger size (you can really see the pixelated details of the sprites in these shots). Frames might also show the same thing in the same size. So if you move too quickly, that platform you think you need to jump to in the next frame might actually be the platform you are already on. You might jump forward only to land in a frame behind where you started. Some parts of the level seem to not appear in any frame. Some levels feature teleporting blocks or big leaps that take you to seemingly distant areas, until you discover that you are really right next to where you were and that there is a barrier between the two areas that is only seen in some tiny frame in the corner of the screen. Each level has the frames laid out in different ways and shapes as well. As a way of making you feel lost (as your characters are) this is ingenious. As a gameplay mechanic, this is also ingenious. You may think you understand how it works, but you need to experience it firsthand to understand what it feels like to play this game. And since there are so many implementations and variations of this idea in the game's levels, it's never going to wear out its welcome. It only gets more compelling as you go on.

     Each character can transform to an alternate form by finding certain blocks and standing all the monsters on the blocks on each others' heads in a certain order, which is dictated by colored silhouettes that appear over the blocks. Two of the monsters gain some cool abilities that could be featured in a normal platformer. I'll let you see for yourself what they are. Those abilities are great, but the one that interacts with the whole frame concept is the orange monster's alternate form, the Rainbow Spirit. While controlling the Rainbow Spirit, you can press L or R to rotate the frames. This, of course, does not change the layout of the reality of the level, only your perspective on the level. Simply rotating the screen may reveal frames that were partially offscreen, but is generally just a viewpoint change. The real magic is pressing L or R while jumping. This makes the Rainbow Spirit stay in place on the screen as the frames rotate around her. Meaning when you stop rotating, she will land in whatever frame is under her (unless she lands inside a solid object or outside of all the frames, which will kill her).

     This ability is a whole nother brain bending idea built on top of the first. To get somewhere in this form, you have to go to a place in the areas you can go to that will line up with the spot you want to get to in another frame when it comes around. I'll just stop explaining it now, because once again, even a video wouldn't do this concept justice, you have to actually experience it yourself. And once again, it is brilliantly executed.

     The levels are all very short, but have just the right amount of difficulty. Just like I said in the Quantum Conundrum review, you're never stuck for long enough to get frustrated, but you never get unstuck early enough that you are bored or just blazing through. The pacing is pretty much perfect.

     There is the additional gameplay element of scoring. Each level has a certain amount of hearts in it that you can collect. This is totally optional, as you only need to get to the exit to continue. Getting a heart increases your score for the level by 1. If you die (by falling off a cliff, or hitting spikes), the character you were playing respawns at the beginning of the level, but first their skeleton sprite produces a dark heart, which lowers your level score by 1. At the end of the level, the level score (rounded up to 0 if you were in the negative) gets added to your total, which is tracked on the pause menu. A lot of these hearts are in out of the way spots, and collecting all of them without dying is a challenge. Once I beat the game, I immediately played it again in the quest to get a perfect score. I had a blast going to every corner of every stage to collect hearts and forcing myself to start each level over if I had any deaths, and I highly recommend trying for a perfect score. The game is quite short (which I'm not saying is bad. In this case, the length is perfect), so playing again is totally feasible and just as much fun as the first time. Did I succeed in getting a perfect score though? That's where my one and only complaint about this game comes in. It is glitched so that you can only get a score of 171 out of 172 hearts. The designer, @bushghost, confirmed to me on twitter that one of the hearts is unreachable due to a design flaw or glitch (apparently it's off screen too, as I never even saw it). This may seem like a superficial flaw, but I was surprised at how much it affected my sense of satisfaction and completeness at the end of my perfect run. Not getting to see my long sought after 172 of 172 was very disappointing.

     But like I said, that is literally this game's only flaw. The game's subtle music and ambient nature sounds lend themselves perfectly to the pace of the puzzling and exploring. The games theme of being lost, emotional distress and depression, family, and nature are subtly shown to the player in the short screens that tell you the name of the level when you get to a new one. One of the characters is on this screen each time along with a quote from them. It's less about what is happening in a story (although there are a few events in the story, and those are great) and more about a mood that you get from these on-screen quotes, the graphical style, and the sounds of the game. It's hard to put into words what this mood is, but it's something we've all felt and everyone whose paying attention will recognize.

     To me, that one flaw in the scoring system is kind of a big deal. That's my personal feeling. If that doesn't bother you, then this is a close-to-perfect game. I would give it a perfect score if the scoring system was patched or if a new version comes out with this problem fixed. As is, I have to dock it ever so slightly and give it a score of great game, tier 2. It's really a tier 1 game though if a tiny fix was implemented, which means, in my opinion, it is approaching gaming perfection.

Dracula - Undead Awakening Review (PSP/PS3)

     I saw some videos of Dracula - Undead Awakening and I thought it looked interesting, and with Playstation Minis, that's about all you need to know to give one a try since they are so cheap. It's fun for awhile, and before I started playing Minis, it's what I would have expected a good Mini to be. Of course I now know that Minis (like Alien Zombie Death and Velocity) can be stellar games.

     Dracula is a twin-stick shooter, although the PSP doesn't have two sticks, so you'll be shooting by holding down the face buttons in the direction you want to shoot: triangle for up, circle for right, square for left, and cross for down. Diagonals are achieved by mashing two buttons at the same time. For example, to shoot diagonally north-west, you hold down triangle and square at the same time. This sounds a little awkward, but it works well with the exception of when you try to shoot in circles quickly with the machine gun or flamethrower, which can be a little rough on the wrists. The PS3 doesn't let you use two sticks either, you'll still be mashing face buttons when playing on the big screen. You switch weapons by pressing the shoulder buttons to scroll along your collected weapons which are displayed at the bottom of the screen. You'll use these simple controls to run and gun the entire time you're playing since you can (and have to) move while you are shooting.

     And what are you shooting, you might ask? This is a gothic, Victorian time period game (I think), so you play as this guy wearing a cool hat blasting tons and tons of monsters that are under the control of Dracula himself. Giant wolf/rat creatures and mummies are the main baddies that are lining up to get blasted by the thousands (literally), but there are a few others as well, like creepy worms and these bipedal amphibious guys. There are also palette swapped angry versions of most monster types that are faster than their normal counterparts. All of these monsters rush you in huge mobs and attack you if they get close enough, draining your health bar.

     There are three levels and four game modes, which you can mix and match as you please. There's a graveyard, a castle, and a frozen outdoor area. The level determines what enemies you'll face, but not much else. Survival mode (the main mode, in my opinion) has you blasting away at endless and increasingly numerous and angry hordes while periodically giving you a choice of a random bunch of powers. Each time you earn one of these perks, you can press select to pause the game and choose one. Each time you get to pick one out of a list of four that are pulled randomly from all the possible perks. They are pretty cool. There are a lot of them, and picking out the best one for your current situation is fun. There are some that increase your damage or armor in certain situations, some that add to your score, and some that improve weapons, plus many more. My personal favorites include the telekinesis power that makes power-ups, ammo, and weapons slowly creep toward you, and any of the handful that increase your running speed in some way. Getting the right perks will help you go the distance, as you start out facing a lot of enemies and it only gets worse. You'll soon be facing close to 50 on the screen at once with armies more rushing in as each one dies. Despite the high number of on-screen enemies, the game runs without any hiccups and without load times once you get to the title screen.

     Enemies also drop health potions, weapons, ammo, and the occasional random power-up, such as one that freezes time for a bit and one that increases your rate of fire for a few precious seconds. There are a bunch of weapons (I want to say 8+) that range from a pistol to a rifle all the way up to a flamethrower and a rocket launcher. Each one handles differently, and they are all pretty fun to use. .

     After awhile, Dracula will show up and shoot lightning bolts at you. Killing him gets you an omen. A running tally of how many of these items you have picked up is shown on the high score screen, and collecting enough of them will change your portrait and title on said screen. Getting new portraits was my motivation to keep playing for awhile, as I liked the art style of the pictures, especially the grizzled old man one. Dracula can appear multiple times in a round if you are able to survive long enough, so you can potentially pick up multiple omens.

     Super survival mode is... I don't know. I can't tell the difference between this and survival. Maybe it's slightly harder or there are less weapons? Nothing too noticeable though.

     Wave attack mode has you facing set waves of enemies and collecting the gold they drop. When a wave is over, a little shop appears where you can buy weapons, ammo, and health before moving on to the next wave. You also can choose upgrades to your health, damage, reload time, or gold drop amounts in lieu of picking perks. I don't think Dracula appears in this mode, although I didn't play it enough to really confirm that since I was mainly into survival mode.

     Rush mode is really cool. When it starts, you get to pick either a machine gun, flamethrower, or a giant buzz saw as your starting weapon. You then immediately get attacked by a huge horde of monsters as if you were really deep into a survival mode run. These rounds are usually over really fast, but you take out a ridiculous amount of monsters. I just tried it out again to refresh my memory, and I killed about 200 hundred mummies before they killed me... in a 51 second game. Unless I'm mistaken, this mode is the only way to get your hands on that buzz saw, and it's cathartic after a long survival mode run to jump into rush mode with the buzz saw and shred hundreds of enemies in seconds.

     I stuck to survival mode for most of my time with this game so that I could try and see as many portraits as possible. I wish you could earn omens in the other modes some how (maybe you can in wave attack, not sure), as I only really felt an incentive to play survival mode in order to earn more omens. I would have probably played the other modes more if you could earn omens in them too.

     The graphics are pretty cool. The enemies seem to be 2d images with a few frames of animation. I liked the design of most of the monsters and the way the graphics are done gives them a unique look. Dracula himself looks a little weird, like his head is really small or something. The player character also looks a little awkward when he pivots the top half of his body around but keeps walking in the same direction. He can actually pivot 360 degrees at the waist, which is a little scary. The backgrounds look nice, but there's nothing really special about them.

     There are two music tracks in the game. The title screen theme is ok. The song that plays during gameplay is better. It's fast-paced and has a synthesized electric guitar and a death metal voice part that both chime in from time to time. I thought the vocal part (which I can't understand at all) really adds to the atmosphere for some reason, even though it's only 2 seconds long. It would be cool if there was a different song for each stage or mode, but what's there is good.

      I had fun with this game, but I also didn't play it very long. I was motivated to get the first few portraits, but the gameplay didn't compel me to keep going after that and I lost interest after awhile. It's a thrill for a few days, but I was ready to move on after killing Dracula 21 times (along with thousands of his minions). It's a tier 2 mediocre game since what's there is good, but it would need a lot more content or something additional to motivate the player if it were going to be a great game.

Wizorb Review PS3/PSP

     Wizorb is an Arkanoid/Breakout type game that adds in a fantasy twist. It has a fantasy story seen through some cool retro cutscenes shown at the beginning and end, and a bunch of interesting twists on the block breaking formula. 

     In each of the 5 levels you play as a wizard who turns himself into a ball and then hits himself around to destroy blocks and enemies. You control his magic wand at the bottom of the screen, hitting the ball up the screen as it bounces back off obstacles and enemies and preventing it from slipping by you. If it does get by you, that costs you a life. The game is old school in a lot of ways, from its graphics and music to this life counting mechanic. You get 3 lives to start with, and 3 continues per world, and if you use them all up, you have to start that world over again. The auto-save is very strict in enforcing this, and it's hard to even cheat the auto-save to get around it (more on that later).

     You need to break all of the blocks in a level to advance, as well as take out any enemies that may be wandering around. Enemies typically don't attack you (except for bosses). You just need to hit them a few times to kill them (I feel guilty killing werewolves, their sprite is so cute!). You have a few spells at your command as well. Pressing cross will shoot a fireball out of the wand. Pressing cross while the ball is touching the wand will make it into a magma ball for a few seconds, allowing it to smash through blocks and keep going instead of bouncing off of them after one hit. Square will cause a wind to blow the ball towards the paddle, and pressing square while the ball is touching the wand will slow the ball down and allow you to control it for a few seconds. You can also teleport the ball to anywhere on the screen instead of re-launching it after losing a life.

     All of these spells cost mana, which is one of the things this game does very well. Mana is somewhat scarce. It can fall out of blocks as potions that you can grab with the wand, or you can get it in bonus levels, or buy it in the shops you sometimes find by hitting the ball through doors in the levels, or you can get it by having the ball not hit anything for 8 or so bounces. That's it. It doesn't refill between levels or worlds, and managing it is important. All of the spells are very useful, but the scarce mana stops you from spamming them. It forces you to choose wisely what spells you need to use for the level you are on and how much you want to save up for the next level.

     The spells are kind of hard to use, but in a good way, so pulling off a spell in an effective manner after collecting enough mana is very satisfying. The fireball lets you take out a specific target quickly. The molten ball helps you cut a swath through levels that are very block heavy (such as the cool levels with tons of blocks that form a mosaic picture). The wind spell is great for blowing the ball into hard to reach places. The ball control spell is the go-to spell to slow the ball down when it gets really fast to avoid losing control and has the added bonus of allowing you to guide it into some hard to reach block or enemy. The teleport spell lets you drop the ball into contained areas where it will bounce around for awhile. I used all 5 spells throughout my time with Wizorb instead of defaulting to favorites like you do in so many other games; the repertoire is very useful yet challenging to use.

     There are also a few power-ups, such as added ball damage and a bigger paddle, but after finding that most of these disappeared after you lost a life (which I would do constantly) and seeing that they weren't that useful anyway, I started to ignore them. You have to buy the power-ups in shops. I barely bought any, preferring to save my cash to spend on lives and re-building stuff in the village. A few curses can also pop out of blocks instead of cash or mana. These fall down the screen and if your wand hits them, they affect you for a bit. Some make you slow or shrink your wand. The coolest one is instant death, which destroys the wand in a really cool sort-of burning animation so that next time the ball comes down there is nothing to hit it.

     The 5 worlds each contain 12 levels and a boss fight. Bosses are a really fun highlight. They are big monsters with hit points in levels with no blocks, so you just need to take them out. Their sprites and animations are all great and they directly attack you. I could have gone for more of theses battles.

     In between worlds you can explore a tiny rpg style town and donate the money you earn from each level to re-build buildings that were destroyed there. You can talk to the residents too. This is amusing, but there isn't much to it.

     The basic ball bouncing gameplay is just what you remember from playing other games like this. You can make your wand move faster by holding circle. I found myself holding it a majority of the time. You can also adjust the speed of the wand in the settings (I recommend speed 2). You can aim a bit by hitting the ball off the side of the wand, but it can be quite hard (and frustrating) to try and line up a specific shot. There is a lot of crazy randomness to hitting the ball around.

     My main complaint involves the basic ball hitting mechanics, and the level design. Lining up shots to hit specific blocks in tight spaces is not really that fun or engaging. Using a spell to help you out is fun, but mana is so scarce, you are going to have to hit a lot of hard-to-hit blocks the old fashioned way. This wasn't much of a problem for the first four levels, since I beat them all without running out of continues and was able to move on. I only had to experience the handful of levels that I found annoying once and they were done (there were plenty of fun levels in there too, don't worry). But then I got to the last world.

     World 5, which is visually the most interesting (it has these pillars with blinking eyeballs: awesome!) is the most frustrating. It has tons of really hard shots. And then it has a really hard boss at the end. I used all my continues up the first time around, and then I realized that I would have to do the whole world again. After my second try and death at the last boss, I almost gave up. Playing through the second time was painful. It was both frustrating and boring. Don't get me wrong, the last boss is actually really fun and challenging in a good way, and probably the best part of the game. I just didn't like having to re-play the most upsetting part of the game to get another shot at him. So then I made a scum save by copying my save data onto my PSP at the last boss. But then I beat him without using it! I felt very accomplished in beating the game since the last world was so challenging, but replaying it was not fun.

     I don't know what you could really do to improve it either. It has to be challenging, it's the last level. I think it just goes with the territory of this type of block busting game. It's a simple thing, and it can get boring to try and bust the same blocks up in hard to reach spots. And making the save system more forgiving would just mean that there's no consequences to dying. It would be more fun that way, but also almost without any challenge or tension. I think the game just ran into the limitations of the block busting mechanic of its predecessors. That last boss is worth it though, it was really fun and really hard. It makes me think that maybe the game should have been all about fighting enemies that attack you with the blocks totally removed. I don't know if that would really work though...

     After that, there are a few little secret things to do if you haven't already done them, such as rescuing some elemental children in a side quest (trust me, this is worth doing, the reward you get is awesome!). You can also replay levels to try and get a high enough score to earn a star, which is actually kind of fun in the lower levels. I got the first 3, and I'm tempted to go back and try for the last two. I don't know if I'll ever get around to it though.

     Overall, I had a lot of fun with Wizorb, but it caused me a lot of grief too. There were a few hours spent replaying that last world that were not enjoyable. It's got a lot of stuff going for it, but I have to dock it quite a bit for the pain I felt there. I'm going to say it's a tier 1 mediocre game. The good outweighs the bad, but it would need a little more of a push to be a great game. I recommend it for the boss fights, the cool sprite graphics, and the magic mechanics, but just know that you might get bored with the brick breaking, especially if you have to replay any levels. But hey, maybe you'll beat all the levels in your first try and have a great experience.

Velocity Review (PSP/PS3)

      Not too many games do teleportation that I can think of. I rented a Genesis X-Men game when I was a kid where you could bamf through walls as Nightcrawler. I hear that Dishonored does it well. And Portal, of course (I still haven't played this, shame on me). Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner has a really great teleport mechanic where you press the button and then the direction you want to go and you suddenly appear quite far in that direction, even behind enemies. But Velocity does teleportation in a very basic and satisfying way that works so perfectly, it makes you wonder why no one ever did it before. More than any other game I've played or heard of, it really makes you feel like you are legitimately teleporting.

     Velocity is a vertically scrolling 2d space ship shooter released as a Playstation Mini. As the screen scrolls by, you move through the level, but even in this basic idea in Velocity is different than most shmups I have played. You are moving through an actual level with structures all around you instead of just flying on top of a scrolling background. You don't take damage from touching structures, but if the bottom of the screen pushes you against an object, that will kill you. The object of the game is to find survivors who are floating around the levels in little survival pods. So you have to navigate through the structures to get at the pods and pick them up. Sometimes the pods are behind walls or inside the frame of the space station, meaning they would be impossible to get to in a traditional 2d game. That's where the teleportation mechanic comes in. When you hold down square, a cursor appears. You control the cursor instead of your ship's movement as long as you hold square down. When you release square, your ship nearly instantly appears wherever you left the cursor. This elegant, unlimited use ability is the backbone of the gameplay of Velocity, and because you've probably never played anything like it and it is executed so well, you're going to have a blast with it.

     The other controls include: cross to shoot, circle to launch bombs, R to fly faster, triangle to drop a telepod (more on this later), and L to bring up a map.

     The story is that a black hole is about to destroy a space station and the government has decided to send the prototype Quarp Jet into action immediately to rescue the people there. You are its test pilot, so in you go. An electromagnetic pulse from the black hole has knocked out a lot of power to stuff, so that's why they can't just save themselves. Also, some of your enemies are taking advantage of the power outages to attack and steal stuff, so they show up. The story is halfway decent. It's told from time to time in the game in the form of short blurbs of text and cool pieces of still art. You also get some of it from reports you can read from the menu that unlock as you go.

     There are three different qualities that a level can have, and a level can have more than one quality. Search and Rescue missions focus on finding survivors. Hostile Forces missions have more of a combat tilt, but still involve rescuing. Critical Urgency missions have strict time requirements and are often adrenaline-pumping petal to the floor races to the end of the level.

     You fail a mission if you get the end of the level and haven't rescued a minimum amount of survivors, or if time runs out (or, of course if you die). You get three lives per mission, and you can take a couple of shots or collisions with enemies before losing a life, although getting crushed by the edge of the screen will instantly kill you. Loosing a life sends you back to a checkpoint that is usually pretty close behind you.

     I wouldn't really call this game a shoot-em-up, as it is really squarely focused on rescuing survivors. There isn't much shooting, and when there is, it isn't that intense or great. It's ok, but the game is totally focused on getting as many survivors in as little time as possible. There are a few weapon power-ups to make things interesting, but teleporting around and grabbing those poor helpless people is where you'll be spending most of your time.

     So, in a typical level, you'll be teleporting through walls and into little cubby holes and such to grab every survivor pod you can find as you scroll toward the exit. You may also need to shoot some numbered switches in order to deactivate forcefields that block your path. You can launch bombs in the four cardinal directions based on which direction you are flying. This mechanic is used to hit switches off to the sides or behind you in many clever ways in conjunction with the teleportation mechanic and leads to some cool moments as you jerk your ship around to get bombs to fly in the right direction. It's hard to explain how much fun all of this is, but it is. You just have to try out the teleportation mechanic for yourself to see what I mean.

     There are 50 main missions to play through, and many of the latter-half involve the use of the previously alluded to telepods. This is a second form of teleportation in the game. You have a certain number of telepods you can drop in these levels. Once you drop one, you can bring up the map with L and then select that pod to teleport back to it. This allows you to access areas that you have already scrolled by. This is also a really great and really fun mechanic. It allows for some mind-bending puzzles that have you quickly jumping all over the level to hit switches in order and return to newly opened areas once you have your network of telepods dropped where you want them. The game prompts you to drop the pods at key locations, and it is usually right, but there were a few spots where I dropped them differently than suggested, especially when trying to get perfect speed runs.

     The game rates you on each level in three categories: number of survivors rescued, time taken, and points (which you get from blowing stuff up and collecting pickups and survivors). There are three target values for each of these categories, and getting the best at all three in one run will give you a satisfying “perfect” stamped on that level. Getting these perfect ratings is quite challenging, but it was so fun, I got all 50. Mastering the teleportation and telepod techniques is required to get these perfect scores, but I really recommend doing it as the mechanics are so fun and different from other games that you stay motivated to keep trying. It's very satisfying to blaze your way through a complicated level that took you forever your first time around, or to finally speed through a critical urgency level without missing a single survivor.

     As you go through the story mode, you unlock tons of extra content, including: concept art, bonus missions, in-game trophies, a calculator (?), artwork, story text, and mini-games (including fun clones of Minesweeper, memory, Bomberman, Coconut Dodge (which was also made by this game's developer, Futurlab), Snake, Space Invaders, and some game that plays kind of like pixeljunk shooter or asteroids or something). Actually, I find the Space Invaders mini-game to be very not fun. The others are a blast though. That's a lot of mini-games, and that so many of them are fun is a really amazing. I never knew Minesweeper was so cool!

     The bonus missions you can unlock are like really short regular missions but you can't touch the structure at all or you instantly fail the mission and you are on a very strict timer! They are challenging and very fun, and really push your ability to teleport super-fast and super-accurately to the limit. The bonus missions are where the one big glaring flaw in this gem of a game is, however. One of the missions (bonus mission 14) is unfortunately glitched so that it is not possible to complete. When you complete it, it says you missed some survivors, even if you didn't. The developer has confirmed this. I played this mission for a few hours before I learned about the glitch, so that was annoying. But the game is so good, I really didn't even care and moved on.

     This game is also crawling with little secrets and Easter eggs all over the place that I won't spoil for you. The trophies help point the way to a lot of them. Others you'll find on your own. And still others involve codes and stuff you can find on the internet. The game is also filled to the brim with references to science, scientists, and science fiction. Keep a look out and you'll see little references to Alien, Ender's Game, The Big Bang Theory, and many more.

     The multitude of in-game trophies do a great job of cheering you on to complete every aspect of the game, including the bonus missions and grabbing those perfect scores, along with a bunch of other little goals. Unfortunately you can't get the trophy for getting every trophy, since you can't beat that one bonus mission. I got all the other trophies though, with the exception of the Space Invaders trophy, which I gave up on after many tries since I wasn't having fun with it. This makes me sad.

     The graphics are really great sprites with some cool effects thrown in. Especially impressive is the trail that follows the quarp jet around, and jumps drastically when you teleport. This can be especially hypnotizing when you unlock the ability to change how the trail looks. The music is also worth mentioning. I don't really know how to describe it, but it's really good. A few of the tracks are fast-paced and urgent, and one or two are slow and mysterious. They all fit the action really well. I heard that they are going to release a re-mix album of these tracks, and if they do, they are good enough that I might pick it up.

      There are a few other minor little problems with the game. Quitting a level often involves going back to the main menu, not the level-select screen, which is a little cumbersome when you are trying to switch levels. There's also no way to check what your time and survivor quota is without going back to the level-select screen that I could find.

     But beyond the one bonus level glitch, the space-invaders clone mini-game not being fun (I'm just bitter that I couldn't get the trophy for beating it!), and the minor menu interface issues, this game is extremely fun, challenging without being overly frustrating, innovative and well-executed, and bursting with secrets, references, and in-game trophies to collect. It's a great game, tier 2.