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.

Tomb Raider Review (PS3)

 I used to be a big Tomb Raider fan back in its PSOne heyday, but hadn't played any of the games since The Last Revelation. I wasn't very interested when I first heard about this reboot, but I heard so many good things about it that I decided to play it. I was also interested because I heard that they were trying to take Lara's “sex symbol” status out of the picture to some degree with a more human and relatable character. Don't worry, I won't talk about that anymore lest we enter a rage filled discussion about such things.

     This entry in the Tomb Raider series is way different than the Tomb Raiders I played back in the day. It's basically half cover-based shooter, half exploration game. You go through different locations on the island you are trapped on. When you encounter enemies, you often have a chance to take them out silently with your bow, melee attacks, or silenced firearms. If the enemies spot you, the battle is on and plays out like many a cover-based shooter, although with a few little tweaks that make it a bit different (which I'll go into a bit in the controls section of the review). After the battle, you're off to your next destination, which you can see as a waypoint in the distance. You have to run, jump, climb, zip line, and work through physics based puzzles to get where you are going.

     The left stick controls movement, the right stick controls where you are looking or aiming if you have a weapon drawn. The directional buttons select your weapon (each button is mapped to one of the four weapons, so to draw your shotgun, for example, you simply press left on the d-pad). Square is manual reload. Lara doesn't automatically reload her gun when it is empty, she only reloads when she tries to fire and finds that the gun is empty. At first I found this annoying, but I liked it in the end as it adds to the tension when you go to blast a guy who is right next to you only to find you are empty and have to scramble to reload. Square is also used to activate switches and interact with stuff. Often you need to tap square rapidly to pry open a door with your climbing axe or turn a crank. It's also used to pick up stuff, because as is Tomb Raider tradition, you don't just pick up stuff by running over it, you need to pick it up! Cross is jump and climb up, circle is dodge. While dodging, bullets and arrows are less likely to hit you, and melee attacks will almost never hit you. You can also tap circle while dodging to go into a roll to get yourself away from danger quickly (such as when a stick of dynamite lands right next to you!). Circle also causes you to let go while holding onto a ledge. Triangle triggers your melee attack, which starts out as just a shove and moves on to swinging your climbing axe. Triangle is also used to do stealth attacks (along with tapping square to choke someone out) and to do finishing moves. You can do finishing moves on enemies that have been incapacitated. If you don't do it quickly enough, they will get back up and start fighting again. The finisher you start with is bashing enemies in the head with a rock you pick up off the ground, but you can get skills that let you do firearms based finishers that give you experience bonuses. You can also just shoot incapacitated enemies. Pressing L2 triggers your “survival instincts,” which basically highlights anything you can interact with. It also makes everything else less detailed, and is a bit straining on the eyes.

     Holding L1 aims your weapon. R1 fires it. If you are using the bow, you can hold R1 before releasing to draw it out to a full strength shot before releasing to fire. You can't hold it fully taught forever though, so if you can't draw a bead on your target, you have to let go of L1 to stop your self from automatically firing when you run out of strength. This makes stealth situations interesting, as you don't want your shots to go wild. L3 swaps which shoulder the camera is looking over, which allows you to aim around obstacles more easily. R3 zooms in on your aiming reticule a bit, allowing for more precision shooting with any weapon.              You'll notice I didn't mention any buttons to snap you into or out of cover. That's because if Lara is around enemies and approaches cover, she just automatically ducks behind it. This pretty elegantly eliminates a lot of the bizarre animations and control mistakes that often come up in cover-based games that make you manually lock yourself in behind cover. Lara is never locked into her cover, she can always just walk away from it. It's just that if you are near cover, she ducks behind it. It's simple and works surprisingly well. Once in cover, aiming will pop you out, and letting go of the aim button drops you back in.

     Encounters with enemies are usually pretty short and involve just a few skirmishers. A few encounters are bigger and involve lots of enemies in larger environments. The smaller encounters often give you a chance at stealth before the enemies notice you. You can often dispatch them by shooting an arrow near them to make one enemy go investigate. You can then take them out while they are split up. If you mess that up, you get into a fire fight. Some enemies throw dynamite or molotovs to drive you out of cover or set your cover on fire, which temporarily makes it useless.

     The bigger battles often have waves of attackers. Some may snipe at you with arrows or guns from a distance while other get closer and fire and melee attackers run or zipline in. These are really fun as you need to do a lot of different things during the battle. You do melee counters (where you dodge a melee attack and then shove an arrow into an enemy's knee), run to higher ground, zipline through active battlefields, dodge enemy attacks and then immediately shotgun blast them, snipe at faraway targets, shoot explosive items to damage enemies, shoot enemies as they are throwing dynamite to make them drop it on themselves, pull people off their high perches with rope arrows, and a few other little tactics. Enemies are great at flushing you out of cover, especially in hard mode. This really adds a lot of depth to what you have to do as you usually can't just sit there and shoot everyone. However, even on hard mode, the combat isn't too tough. Even if I died once or twice during an encounter, I often felt like I was dominating the battlefield, confidently striding up firing lanes until things got too hot and I was forced to take some cover or other actions. Ironically, the game was harder for me on normal mode as I was still learning how the combat worked. Once learned however, even hard mode becomes pretty easy. It could definitely use an even harder difficulty. I even purposefully didn't get a lot of skills or weapon upgrades on my hard run through for fear of making the game even easier, which I shouldn't have to do. I shouldn't have to hold back for fear of breaking the game.

     Getting from point A to point B (what you'll be doing between fights) is interesting. It's fun to jump and climb your way through levels. It's pretty smooth transitioning from climbing, to jumping, to rock climbing, to ziplining. I wish the areas were bigger though. Really, I wish this were an open world game with a really huge environment. As it was, I felt a little boxed in. I feel like the combat would benefit from this as well, as you could have emergent encounters were you run across enemy patrols and such. There are some interesting things that happen in combat, but they are all written in as events. It would be cool if those things weren't scripted, but just waiting out there in the world for you to stumble upon..

     Almost everything you do earns you experience. You can use this to buy skills. You also find salvage everywhere which allows you to modify your weapons. Both of these improvement systems are somewhat interesting.

     If you want that old-timey Tomb Raider feel of being alone in an area for a long time, all you have to do is try to find the tons of hidden collectibles. There are tons of things to find, and looking for them is actually enjoyable. It's also pretty doable, as you can find treasure maps that show you where to look for stuff. Challenges on the other hand, are a little tougher, as they make you find stuff that you can't find on a treasure map. I was able to find most of the challenge items without a guide, but needed one for the last couple of tough challenges. Finding this stuff is where you will want to use your survival instincts, although it de-saturates the colors, which makes everything look like terrible, so that's not cool. Stopping to find collectibles is a fun change of pace to the rapid-fire objective race that is the main story. Wandering leisurely through an area that you blazed through before is enjoyable.

     The graphics are pretty good. No major complaints. There is some cool design work to the look of the levels too, especially the shipwrecks and shoddily built makeshift structures and towns.

     One thing the game does really well is going into short little cutscenes right out of gameplay. You walk right into some of them and don't even notice that you aren't in control anymore. And then just as smoothly you are playing again. Very cinematic and executed nearly perfectly.

     Now let's get into the bad stuff. Notice how I haven't mentioned the story yet? That's because the story is pretty bad. It's a cool idea; you're stranded on an island that has seen many, many shipwrecks. The inhabitants are all from these shipwrecks, but are now cultists of some kind. There are also ancient ruins and tombs on the island, and old World War II Japanese military installations. Unfortunately it's messily written and poorly done. And the game is heavily story focused. So it's focused on one of its weakest parts. There are a handful of cool moments to the story, but by and large it's pretty bad. Voice acting is pretty good though.

     The themes are not very well done either. A handful of narration by Lara, including what should be some important parts, are so bad I was asking myself, “What is she talking about?” The theme of survival works ok, as Lara gets beaten up really badly by tons of falls and many injuries, which stay on her character model for the whole game. The combat, however, seems like a desperate fight for survival too, until you remember that you've killed dozens and dozens of enemies like you're the Master Chief, so there's a little disconnect there. This is relieved a little bit later in the game when you can overhear enemies talking fearfully about Lara. At least they realize she is a killing machine. Lara seems to realize it too, as she starts to yell threats at enemies during fights, which is pretty cool. But overall, it doesn't make sense. The game also has some really over-the-top set pieces. About half of them work and are really cool, and about half of them are so over-the-top that they take you out of the game a bit. Like, why is that exploding? I have no idea why that wooden thing just exploded. Most of them are fun to play though. They usually involve running around a structure that is collapsing or sliding down a steep cliff. There are a handful of physics based puzzles in the game, most of which are optional side quests. These are interesting, but make no sense thematically. You would never try the things you do to solve these puzzles in real life. You just do them because you see that the game will let you. Nevertheless, these puzzles are fun to figure out. Just don't press L2, or your survival instincts will show you what to do, totally ruining the fun. The game also tells you to press L2 during these sequences which is really annoying as it's basically saying, “Let me show you what to do so you won't have fun solving this puzzle. I don't want you to figure it out.”

     I also thought the game would be a little more realistic, but it is very videogamey. As soon as you walk into an area, you almost immediately know what to do. You can use rope arrows to pull on objects that are wrapped in rope. That makes no sense. Surfaces you can run up and climb all have the same look to them, no matter where they are or what they are made of. This is functional and all, but made me feel like I was playing a more cartoony game than something that is trying to look realistic. It also bothered me a lot that switching weapons makes them magically appear and disappear on the character model. A few moments are also so unbelievable that they really take you out of the game. Like, beyond Indian Jones-style unbelievable. There's this one zipline that would so obviously kill you if you used it. I really hesitated to go on it. It's at such an extreme angle you would basically just free fall if you used it. Then there's a few parts where Lara drops from one zipline to another, using her axe to slide along them. Think about free-falling and grabbing a zipline with your axe. You'd have to put your hand under the zipline to grab the axe on the other side. It's so near-impossible that it's distracting, but the game portrays it as an easy, normal thing to do. It would be ok if it was a one time thing that you barely pull off.

     There's something off with some of the cut-scene editing, as you don't get to see some things that I think you need to see. There's a part where Lara gets herself free from hanging, but then you see her in a cutscene already halfway through her fall. You don't actually see her start to fall. Why not? This is a visual medium, I want to see what is happening. I've noticed this kind of editing in a few movies and games, and it really bothers me. I can't tell if it's a mistake or a style, but I don't like it either way.

     The game is also buggy. Lara gets caught on level geometry from time to time. Sometimes animations get screwed up and go off wrong, especially the finishing moves. Many times I did a finishing move on the air as the enemy somehow got out of my grip (this still kills them though, lul). I also ran into a bug that made Lara invisible and unable to move, so I had to reload. During some optional conversations, people's lips don't move, and their gestures don't match what they are saying. That's not really a bug, I guess.

     The sound and music is generally good, nothing remarkable. But it seems to be poorly mastered, as sometimes dialogue would be muffled by sound effects. There was no way to adjust this in the options either, as dialogue and sound effects can only be adjusted together.

     Now it's time for me to give this game a low score. I know wrote about a lot of stuff I liked, but think about what I said was bad... the story, writing, and themes. Only gameplay heavy games can get away with these being bad or absent, and this is a very heavily story based game. Add on to that the handful of bugs and flaws, and it's not looking good. I had plenty of fun in some of the game's battles and exploration segments, but there's a lot of bad here. In fact, it's about fifty-fifty. That's why Tomb Raider is a Mediocre Game, Tier 2.

Spec Ops: The Line Spoiler Post! DO NOT READ THIS!

I was only planning on doing spoiler posts for games I give a perfect score to, like Closure, but I wanted to talk about a few things in this game with those who have played it. So maybe I'll do spoiler posts for games with really great stories, even if they aren't nearly perfect. And I don't know what I'll do if I give a game with no story a perfect score. Maybe a strategy post? Anyway....

SPOILER ALERT!! DO NOT READ THIS IF POST IF YOU HAVE NOT PLAYED SPEC OPS: THE LINE YET AS IT CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS ABOUT A GAME YOU NEED TO GO INTO AS BLIND AS POSSIBLE FOR FULL ENJOYMENT! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK (COMMENTS SECTION WILL PROBABLY CONTAIN SPOILERS TOO)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So there are 7 endings by my count. I want to list them all as some are not as obvious as the others.

1. Shoot yourself (note that you shoot at the mirror, the reflection shoots himself. But then you see that the real you has died.)

2. Let Konrad shoot you (which is actually also you shooting yourself, and leads to the same ending as #1. Note that when Konrad fires, your reflection shoots himself, and you really die)

3. Shoot Konrad. When the extraction team comes to pick you up, lay down your weapon.

4.Shoot Konrad. When the extraction team comes to pick you up, do nothing until the solider takes your weapon (basically the same as 3, except you didn't act by pressing a button)

5. Shoot Konrad. When the extraction team comes to pick you up, attack them, and get killed by them (I believe this is the ending where it gives you a quote about crossing the titular “line”)

6. Shoot Konrad. When the extraction team comes to pick you up, attack them and kill them all (My personal favorite ending. After purposelessly slaying the soldiers sent to help him, Walker grabs one of their radios and announces, “Welcome to Dubai, gentlemen.” He's totally lost it, but you can also see that what he's doing is hurting him. Also note that in all of the extraction team scenes, Walker is wearing Konrad's uniform and has patched up a lot of his wounds. 

7. Quit the game before the ending because you don't want to do this anymore. I've heard that the developer (or someone else.... don't quote me) said that this is a legitimate way to end the game's story. In this case the loading screen with the skull and the skyscrapers that look like gravestones that takes you back to the main menu  is kind of your ending.

     Some of these are subtle variations where you see the ending unfold onscreen the same way but your actions are different. I love how interactive these endings are. Someone watching wouldn't see a difference between endings #3 and #4, but you as the player feel the difference. Great way to end a game. My first time through, I shot Konrad just as he counted to 5, then waited until the soldier took my weapon from me, ending # 4. My favorites are number 1, 5, and 6. 6 is my favorite, as I think it shows that walker has totally lost it and is killing just on momentum...kind of like you do in videogames. In this ending you attack and kill the soldiers just because you can, which is a very videogame thing to do.

I also want to list the references to videogames and videogame violence in the game that I saw. If you saw any others, let me know!

1. When you get in the helicopter and catch up to the prologue from the beginning of the game, Walker seems to notice, saying, “We've done this before!” or something to that effect.

2. There is a scene where you curse at the radioman and he replies something like, “Woh, this is a family show, rated E... for everyone's thirsty!”

3. When you clear out the roof of the radio tower before going inside, the radioman says something like, “What's causing so much violence? Is it the videogames? It's the videogames, isn't it.”

4. The loading screen that says, “Killing for yourself is murder. Killing for your country is heroic. Killing for entertainment is harmless.” 

These references are great!...at making you feel guilty for playing violent games. Definitely food for thought.

One more thing... there is one choice that you can make that is not pointed out to you by getting a trophy depending on your choice. In one of the early levels, when the guy is getting interrogated, but he takes the interrogator's gun and kills him, you then hold him up and yell at him to drop his weapon. You can either shoot him or let him go. There's no trophy, but you do get different dialogue depending on what you do. There may be other instances of this kind of thing, let me know if you know of any.

Also, here are the choices I made on my first playthough:

I saved the two civilians rather than the CIA agent. I shot the ropes of the two hanging men to save them, but they died in the firefight (or rather, they were already dead and just a hallucination, I guess). I mercy killed Riggs. I melee attacked a guy in the crowd that hangs Lugo, but didn't kill him. I shot Konrad. I let the soldier at the end take my weapon. Feel free to let me know the path you took your first time through, or your favorite path in the comments section or as a DM on twitter (@roboticattack).

Spec Ops: The Line Review

    I heard someone say that games like Spec Ops: The Line and Hotline Miami should be called “worst-person shooters.” That's a clever and apt description. They both have “line” in the title too, make of that what you will. Despite the rhyming description, Spec Ops is not a first-person shooter, it's a third-person cover based shooter a la Gears of War. At least that's what I'm going to compare it too as it's the only other cover based shooter I've played.

     The control scheme is fairly standard for a game of this sub-genre: I pretty much knew how it operated just from the few times I've played Gears. The left analog stick controls movement and the right controls where you look, like an fps. L3 toggles crouching on and off. Cross snaps you behind cover. It is also used to make you start running. You can hold it down when running to slide into cover. L1 switches you to aiming mode: If you are in cover you pop halfway out and now have an aiming reticule. If you aren't in cover, you can walk slowly in this mode. R1 fires your weapon. Holding R2 shows you a grenade's trajectory and releasing it throws the grenade. Tapping square will make you reload your weapon. Holding square down while standing by a weapon will switch your current weapon for the one you are standing next to. Triangle switches you between the two weapons you are allowed to carry. Pressing circle while in cover vaults you over to the other side. Circle is also your melee button and used to trigger an execution move on downed but not out enemies. Pressing up on the directional pad toggles alternate firing modes on your weapons. R2 is used to issue commands to your squad. You can hold it down and release when your reticule is on an enemy to have your squad target a specific enemy. If one of your squadmates is injured, you can tap R2 to have the other heal him. If you get pinned down by a lot of fire, you can tap R2 to have your squadmates throw flash grenades to hopefully give you a reprieve. All of these contextual control functions are shown to you with onscreen prompts that give you the info you need without getting in your way, so nice job on that.

     Spec Ops tells the story of a team of three Delta Force operatives sent into Dubai to rescue a lost army unit. But this is not the Dubai we know in the real world. It's a destroyed city that has been cut off from the outside world by massive sandstorms. Many of its skyscrapers have been buried under mountains of sand. Others have been half destroyed by the violent storms. Some are in pretty good condition, including an alternate version of the iconic Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, which is often hovering impossibly high on the distant skyline looking like it shouldn't be able to climb to such heights (just like real life). The unique setting is comparable to Bioshock's underwater city of Rapture. It's has that same unique feeling. You can be inside buildings only to realize that you are actually under the sand. There is so much luxury inside the posh apartments and high-end stores you'll visit, but much like Bioshock's Rapture it's all been ruined. The storms have ravaged everything, as have the people left in the city.

     The city has been declared a no man's land (which means no one is supposed to go there), and the sandstorms make it near impossible for anyone to get in or out. But Delta Force is sent in when a distress signal is received from the famous General John Konrad, who led his army unit, the 33^rd, into Dubai against orders to try and provide relief aid and organize an evacuation. Delta's mission is to find and rescue Konrad and the rest of the 33^rd, along with anyone else they might find. The three operatives are Walker, the captain and player character, Lugo, the sniper and translator, and Adams, the heavy weapons specialist.

      I won't go into any specifics about where the story goes from there. Even who you end up fighting and why is better left to be discovered by the player. The game is heavily story oriented. It's partially based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the Vietnam era movie Apocalypse Now, which is itself based on Heart of Darkness. It starts out like a somewhat standard videogame story, although with particularly good writing and voice acting. But it ends up as anything but a standard story, in a really good way. It's a challenging story that goes places a lot of other games don't care or dare to go. In a world of shooters with throwaway stories and gung-ho cookie-cutter protagonists, Spec Ops stands out as a story with a totally different direction and theme than most games. Not to be too down on shooters as I know some of them do have good storylines.

     What happens in the game and how the game interacts with the player is pretty unique. I can only really compare it to some of the stuff a Metal Gear game might throw at you. Hopefully I haven't said too much. Bottom line is you should play this game as blind as possible as far as the story is concerned. Just have faith like you would with any story that you know will be good and avoid spoilers at all costs!

     What I can talk about is the gameplay. It took a little getting used to for me, but I eventually started to really enjoy it, especially as I replayed the game on harder difficulties. You pretty much get shredded if you aren't in cover. Moving from cover to cover and picking your targets before popping out and taking some shots at them becomes second nature after awhile. You can aim using a large reticule while in cover so that your cross-hairs will be nearly lined up when you pop out of cover. Your squadmates constantly chatter during battles, which is cool for flavor reasons (I loved this in the 2d shooter Philosoma), but in this case it serves a very useful purpose too. They tell you what they see, and it's useful information that you don't get visually. The first time they yelled out “Sniper on the balcony!” and I looked over to the balcony and there was a sniper there, it was a revelation. I started really listening to them after that; they are a real resource. They often tell you when dangerous soldiers appear and where they. And when you give them orders, the voice acting is impressively detailed. I was really surprised when I ordered the squad to target a soldier and Walker yelled out “Take out the gunner by the piano!”

     On harder difficulties, you are often forced to abandon your safe spots and your current tactics in order to adapt to what the enemy throws at you. I mean this literally, as they throw lots of grenades at you to flush you out of cover. You will also grow quite good at using grenades to drive people out of cover and to blind them by detonating grenades on sand, which causes a big cloud of sand to erupt out of the ground. On harder difficulties, you will often be forced to abandon safety to try and rescue your squadmates when they get in trouble. If they become wounded, they bleed out until you patch them up, and if you wait too long they will die, causing a game over.

     I loved it when the hardest mode forced me to use positions of attack I would never have thought of and forced me to switch between laying low and being aggressive if my squadmates needed my help. Having to redo a level over and over can be frustrating, but in this game, many times I enjoyed learning enemy tactics as I got a little further in the battle each time I played until I finally got the best of the enemy in some unique way.

     The great weapon set also requires you to use different tactics as you will be constantly switching between different types of weapons as you run out of ammo and try to scavenge for the optimal load out for your situation. Assault rifles are great for general fire fighting. One has a silencer for stealth kills that don't alert other soldiers to your presence, the other has three-round burst mode for precision shooting and ammo conservation. Sub machine guns are great for situations where you'll have to fire while moving as their reticule is available even while moving at normal speed. Shotguns are great for close range fighting. And the mighty automatic shotgun you can find in a few spots is so much fun. There's an RPG launcher, a heavy machine gun, an assault rifle with a grenade launcher attached, and a few other weapons rounding out the arsenal. You can also use stationary turrets, although typically you have to liberate them from the enemy first, which can be difficult due to the shield guarding the operator. Sniper rifles and the few other weapons with long-range scopes seemed a little difficult to use for me. I found it easier in some instances to just shoot at long-range enemies with a normal weapon. The scope only gave an advantage in my opinion against enemies at extreme distances and in situations where you can camp without much expectation of return fire.

     Between skirmishes, the story is revealed as your squad talks as you walk around and also through cutscenes. The voice acting is top-notch for most of the major players. I didn't care for the voice-work of one or two characters you hear for a few levels, but the main three Delta Operatives are all really, really stand out. The good voices combined with the well-written dialogue and the interesting story add up to a very compelling experience. The background of the story is also revealed through intel items you can find lying around during the game's quieter moments. A handful of these are quite interesting, although I didn't get much out of the majority of them.

     The game is short, but I found it highly re-playable as the higher difficulties add a lot of fun twists to the gameplay and the multiple story-based choices you get to make through-out the game along with the multiple endings keep the story element of the game fresh as well. The trophies are pretty well done. I played through three times plus a few extra levels to get the platinum. The only one that is a little tricky is the one where you have to drop sand on someone. I swear I did this a few times and it didn't pop. It definitely works in level 10 though. I enjoyed my three playthroughs, but it's a shame you have to unlock the hardest mode by playing the next-to-hardest mode. I usually play games on normal first and then skip to the hardest mode, so I didn't like being forced to play through an extra time just to unlock the hardest mode. 

     The graphics are really great. My only complaint is a pet peeve of mine. The texture pop-in is crazy in this game. Almost every time you come in from a loading screen, everything will be low-res and then texture will add in slowly. They'll pop like 5+ layers in before they're complete and you're seeing the good graphics. This can be ignored in most situations, but it can't be ignored when the first thing you see in a few of the cutscenes is a close up of someone's face. Before the textures pop, they literally look like a PSOne person. It's a crazy thing. The load screen really needs to be a few seconds longer so we don't have to see that. There is even pop-in on the title screen and difficulty select screen.

     Checkpoint placement is a little wonky: in certain places the checkpoints really needed to be after a cutscene so I don't have to skip it 20 times as I die over and over on hard mode.

     The music in the game is pretty great. A few awesome licensed tracks make it in, and they fit in perfectly. They are piped in through the radio add quite a bit to the experience, kind of like Bioshock's soundtrack. I don't want to spoil them, but two of the licensed tracks are especially great. The game's original music works well too.

     Apparently this game has multiplayer, although you might not notice. From what I hear, the studio that made the single player game was not involved in this part of the game and did not approve of it. I haven't had the opportunity to try it out.

     I want to call out how awesome some of the graffiti and artwork that you see on the walls is in the game. It's crazy good. There is one area with some amazing underwater fantasy scenes on the wall, and they are stunning, especially the turtle, so keep an eye out for that.

     Overall, the game is a great game, tier 2. The story is amazing. The gameplay is fun. The graphics and music are really good. There are a few hiccups in all of these elements, but the good outweighs the bad in a big way. Even if the gameplay was mediocre or even bad, this game would be worth playing to see its story and themes play out. The fact that it's also fun to play makes it a really great experience.

Bit.Trip Presents...Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien Review + a blurb about the Good Friends DLC! (PS3)

     Gaijin Games loves you! That's what it says on one of the loading screens for Bit.Trip Presents... Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien. That idea plays out in the design and attitude of the game in several ways.

     First and foremost in my mind is how the game handles failure. In each level, your character is propelled along the 2d field, automatically running forward at a fixed pace. All you have to worry about is dodging obstacles and navigating the course. One hit will stop you cold. You must complete each stage without hitting any obstacle. But here's where the genius of the design comes in. If you get hit or fall down a pit, your character is physically pulled back past all the obstacles you've passed to the beginning of the level or the half-way checkpoint (provided you haven't purposefully jumped over the checkpoint for bonus points). You then immediately start again. It's an ingenious way to make the game demand perfection yet stay amazingly accessible and un-frustrating. It's remarkable how this system turns play sessions that would be very frustrating in other games (such as restarting a level a baker's dozen times) into a blissfully fun romp as you are nearly instantly thrown back into the gameplay. It makes me realize how much waiting for a load time to restart a level in other games is the real frustration, not re-doing the gameplay itself.

     Another reason you won't mind re-starting over and over is the brilliant music that will be tickling your ear drums as you play. Runner 2 is something of a rhythm game, only instead of playing notes by pressing buttons when an abstracted note comes along like in Frequency or Guitar Hero, you are playing an endless runner-type of platformer and the enemies and obstacles are the notes. Jumping over an enemy, sliding under a wall, kicking through an obstacle, or holding up your shield to block a projectile all produce sounds that fit perfectly with the timing of the music. Brilliantly, the sounds you produce through platforming are augmented by the music itself. You may play a few notes as you jump over enemies, and then the music may play a few notes. Or there may be a more rapid back and forth between notes you are creating and the notes that the level is playing. It very often feels like a duet. There are a huge amount of magical moments in this game where you are in the zone, playing a beautiful duet with the game as you traverse through a level.

     There are a huge amount of magical moments partially because there are many levels. 100 to be exact. It's a lot of content, and takes a good while to get through. There are five different worlds, and levels in those worlds all share a musical and graphical theme.

     Speaking of the graphics and art design.... The game has a very lightheartedly wacky sensibility to it. The game seems to take place in some sort of “un-fused reality,” possibly all inside the main character's head. There is always something crazy in the background. Some levels feature some crazy animated happenings in the background, such as a bigfoot running around. Or a really freaky spider guy. You saw him too, right? Or ghosts. Or UFO's. These shenanigans can be so distracting that they cause you to die, which is awesome. Every level has at least something going on in the background. It usually involves things with eyes that should not have eyes, like mountains, clouds, barrels, the moon, etc, as wells as trees, shrubs, and other stuff bouncing to the beat. I hate to say it, as I hope there weren't any drugs involved in the design, but it reminds me of drug related grafiti type designs. Everything looks like it's high or out of it. These aren't the smiling things with eyes from Loco Roco or anything like that. This type of design can sometimes be off putting, but something about it works in this game. Perhaps it is because the game keeps things upbeat and positive with its character designs.

     The main character, Commander Video, is basically a man-sized black tube with legs and arms and a white slot for eyes. His animation comes off as athletic and smooth. Other playable characters are not so smooth. Like Unkle Dill, a clueless pickle man who stumbles his way through the levels. Then there's alternate versions of Commander Video, like a female version and a futuristic Tron-like version. And don't forget Whetfahrt Cheeseborger. I can only describe him as a disco cheeseburger who never stops dancing and has each layer of his cheeseburger head fully designed and animated. You have to see it to believe how cool he is. Each character has a unique set of the many animations used in the game. It gives each one a unique feel despite the fact that they all play the same. Each one also has several outfits that you can find in the levels. Outfits can change up a character's look significantly. Commander Video may find himself wearing a robot suit. Commandgirl Video has a crazy inverted color scheme and a punk-rock outfit. Unkle Dill gets a toothpick through the head so that he looks like an hors d'oeuvre. There are 40 outfits in all, which gives you a huge amount of variety. The only character I wasn't fond of is Reverse Merman. He has a fish head and man legs, which is really cool. He also has gigantic testicles that bounce around, which grosses me out (note that he is wearing shorts, you can just.. see the shape).

     The cutscenes you see at the beginning of each level are rhythmically and alliteratively spoken by the smooth voice of Charles Martinet, the guy who plays Mario. In the games, not in the movie. These are quite entertaining, especially the intro, which is making stuff up as it goes and is filled with bombastic verbiage. He also narrates these hilariously-gross Ren and Stimpy or Tim and Eric style ads that accompany each start-up of the game.

     So what are these levels I've been talking about so much like? Well the level itself has obstacles, such as stairs, platforms, and railways you slide along or hang from. Then there are enemies. Mostly these are round little robot guys whose eyes follow you around. They hold still and you have to jump over them or slide under them. There are also these stop sign guys you kick through. There are a bunch of other things too, such as springboards that launch you in the air and loop-de-loops you trace with the analog stick to earn extra points as you run through them. I'll leave some of them for you to discover. Combine these obstacles with the enemies and level designs and you get levels that range from basic in the beginning of the game to quite difficult in the end. Most levels would take you about 2 minutes to run straight through with no mistakes, although you will make mistakes and play through them over and over until you beat them. My longest level took 24 minutes to beat since I kept messing up and being pulled back to a restart point.

Each level has a set amount of gold bars that you strive to grab as you are running. There are also 4 power-ups in each level. The first 3 add to the music. It crescendos when you get the 4^th pick up, which takes things down a few levels so that you finish with a more mellow sound. Getting all the gold and power-ups earns you a perfect ranking. If you get all the gold and power-ups in a level, then your character jumps into a cannon at the end. You shoot yourself out at a target to get bonus points, which are important if you are competing with your friends on the leaderboard shown to you as part of the intro to each level. Getting a bull's eye scores you a perfect plus ranking.

     There is also a boss fight at the end of each level. I've heard these criticized, but I think they are awesome and fun. You use the same controls, but the obstacles being thrown at you all come from a big boss enemy. I won't spoil any of them. They break up the normal game play brilliantly as each one is a unique, fun experience.

      The 25 retro levels also break things up. You access them by finding game cartridges in a level. These feature pixel graphics and chiptune sounds and totally different background and enemy design (swapping spiders and scorpions for the normal robotic enemies), but are otherwise very similar to normal levels. They are typically more difficult than normal mode levels and are more unforgiving since you only get three tries to complete them before having to exit and start completely over.

     And what does this music I've been mentioning sound like? Well, the sound of picking up the gold and some of the other sound effects are always the same, but the music itself differs in each of the five worlds. It is mostly very well produced electronic music. The ocean themed level has a bit of a sea shanty thing going on, while the forest level has a jazzy organ sound to it. It all sounds great.

     There are three difficulty modes. Normal is pretty balanced, starting easy and getting quite challenging near the end. Hard mode is the same, except it ratchets up even higher, but does not get excessively difficult. Or maybe it just feel less difficult due to the forgiving nature of the way the game handles your mistakes. I was super pleased that by the end of my trophy run (I got 100%!), I was one-shotting some of the most difficult levels that had given me trouble in the past. I found it strange that there are trophies that want you to play easy mode. I would prefer difficult trophies that make you skip checkpoints or something like that, but I went along with the easy mode trophies anyway because I was having so much fun. Still, in general, I disapprove of easy mode trophies.

     I also ran into 2 glitches. There is slowdown in this one section of the last world (although I believe a recent patch has fixed this, cannot confirm). There is also this weird thing where one of Unkle Dill's outfits makes black lines shoot out of his eyes and stretch out behind you as you run. I don't think it's part of the design as it is a professor outfit, so it's kind of weird.

     I downloaded the Good Friends character pack DLC, which includes five new characters and a new version of Commander Video. The characters are all from other games: Josef from Machinarium, the guy from Spelunky, Dr. Fetus from Super Meat Boy, Raz from Psychonauts, and Quote from Cave Story. I haven't played any of these games (although I want to play them all), but I still enjoyed getting some extra variety out of the already robust character and outfit selection. The Invisible Commander Video you get in this pack is also super cool. And it only costs $3. I thought it was going to be like $10, which would have made me mad.

     Bit.Trip Runner 2 is a great game, tier 2. It was a blast to play thanks to it's demanding gameplay coupled with the quick and painless way it throws you right back into the action if you mess up, its fun characters and visual design, and the fond memories of its wonderful soundtrack I will have for years to come.

Rainbow Moon Review (PS3)

     When I played Front Mission on DS a few years back, I had a lot of fun, but my big complaint about that game is its lack of difficulty. Mission after mission, I steamrolled and dominated my opponents. I felt like I could have handled double the opponents or take on a whole squad with just one or two of my guys. That's why when I started up Rainbow Moon, another game with a turn-based tactical battle system, I opted for hard mode right off the bat. Even though Rainbow Moon is a tactical game, it's so different from Front Mission, it felt like a totally different genre. I might need to replay Front Mission sometime on a harder difficulty... This review is covering hard mode, as that's what I played, so your mileage may vary if you opt for normal mode.

     Rainbow Moon is different than a lot of tactical games in that it is also a full-fledged dungeon crawling RPG. It behaves very much like a classic JRPG in that you go to towns, get quests from NPC's then head into the wild and down into dungeons to complete them and move the game forward. It's just that when you get into a battle, instead of a classic turn-based system, you have a tactical battle where you can move around a grid to position yourself.

     Your main character is Baldren, a warrior who has an annual duel with his rival, Namoris. This year, they plan to fight it out in an area known for its unstable portals. Namoris surprise attacks Baldren and forces him through a portal. Several thousand monsters mysteriously appear and go through with him. He wakes up on another world, the titular Rainbow Moon. Unfortunately, there's no known way back, and the army of monsters he saw have spread far and wide. To make matters worse, the people of the world blame him for the army of monsters now running amok on their land since they came through the portal together. It's an interesting set up, but I hope you're not playing this game for the story. It's quite weak. It's just barely there to get you to go through myriad dungeons and fight thousands of monsters. The game would be much better if it had a great story to go along with it. It's a shame too, as there is a lot you could do with this concept. I do have to say that the side quest called “Love and Hate” is very compelling and well written. It's basically the only bright spot in the whole story though.

     Since the story is so weak, this game would really suffer if its gameplay had any major flaws. Luckily, it doesn't. As you make your way through the colorful world, you'll always have an objective for your main quest, as well as multiple sidequests you can complete for optional rewards. Quests usually involve going somewhere, like a wilderness area or a dungeon, and finding or killing something. There are two types of battles you can get yourself into. Random battles pop up in the corner of your screen. An information bar tells you exactly what would be in the battle if you choose to join it. These are totally optional; you only engage in them if you press cross while the information bar is displayed. I should note that you can also instantly escape from any battle as long as it is one of your characters' turns, so unwanted battles are minimized quite nicely. There are also enemies visible onscreen that walk around or guard certain areas, and touching them will automatically engage you in battle with them.

     On the battle screen, you and your enemies are on a grid. You take turns moving and taking actions, such as moving a square, attacking, or using an item. You can perform a number of actions based on how many sub-turns your character has. You start with one, and I got up to six by the time I finished the game. You can have up to three of your six main party members fighting in any given battle. In hard mode, the defend command (which I find useless in many other games) is absolutely essential, as many of the enemies you encounter can kill you on their turn if you aren't guarding. Once you get a few sub-turns to play around with, this idea really works in the game's favor as you try to position yourself in a way that lets you use all your sub-turns to attack and leaves you safe from enemy attacks without guarding. This is often risky though, because your character might get smashed if you didn't calculate correctly. The safe bet is to guard up at the end of every turn. At the top of the screen is a lineup of whose turn is coming up. Paying attention to this is important as you don't have to guard if you know your character is about to have two turns in a row. Or maybe it's time to heal up if the boss is about to take two turns before you get a turn again. I wish this lineup was longer, as it only shows you so many turns ahead, and in a battle with many enemies you might not be able to see when your next turn will be. You also can't tell which enemy is which if there are many of the same type, as they all have the same icon on the lineup.

     Most of the time you will be attacking with your character's skills, which are special attacks that use up MP. Each skill has its own attack pattern, so you need to line up your characters properly to get the most out of each turn. Many skills let you attack multiple enemies if you can reach them. Some skills let you attack enemies that are far away. Others need you to close in on the enemy or keep certain spots open on the grid. Some skills let you move when you use them or move your enemies around. The main strategies you will develop will have a lot to do with which characters you choose to use and where those characters need to be positioned in order to use their skills. For example, my favorite character, Gorodo, has a skill that lets him attack at a long distance, but its range is limited if the enemy is directly in front of him. He also has skills that let him move into crowds of enemies and attack them all at close range. So sometimes I would position him off to the side of enemies I really wanted dead so that he could hit them with his long range attack, and other times he would spend his turns moving deep into hordes of enemies to do maximum damage on the greatest number of enemies. Another example would be the main character Baldren, who gets one powerful skill that lets him attack multiple enemies that are directly in front of him, and another skill that lets him attack multiple enemies that are diagonal from him. Each of the six playable characters has a nice set of unique skills with attack patterns that help dictate what strategy is most effective for them to employ.

     You'll often face large amounts of enemies. An average battle might have five to ten enemies, but you'll see a few battles with 30+ enemies. It's pretty cool to see the screen filled with these bad guys. In most fights, weaker enemies can be taken out with just a few hits. Higher level enemies and bosses can sometimes take many, many hits, however. Boss fights often involve an epic exchange of blows between your party and the boss, with its many minions being taken out by collateral damage from your skills. Other bosses come with high-level monsters in their retinue, meaning you have to make a choice about whether to concentrate fire on the deadly boss or try and take out the minions first.

     Normal battles often only take a minute or two. That may make it sound like its easy, but like I said, if you're not careful about your guarding, you can end up dead real quick. If your party gets wiped out, you end up right where you were with your party leader alive and at 1 hp. So the only punishment is that you have to use resources to revive and heal your party members (and you also lose whatever items you used in the battle). Money for the healer can be hard to come by on hard mode, so I would often save before battles I wasn't 100% confident about. Saving before these tough battles also allows you to go all out without worrying about losing all your expensive or rare items, like potions to heal yourself and crystals that give you temporary stat boosts.

     The controls for these battles are a little different, but work well. To move, you select move on the menu and then press the direction you want to go rather than selecting a square on the grid like many of these types of games have you do. Movement is final, you can't take your move back once you press the direction button. You also only move one square per sub-turn, unlike many games that give you a set amount of movement when you use the move command. This may sound limiting, but battle areas are small and once you have a few sub-turns for your characters you can move pretty far in one turn. To execute a normal attack, you select attack from the menu and then press the direction you want to attack in if there is an enemy next to you. If you choose skill, you then get an overlay showing the attack pattern of the skill you want to use. You line it up and press cross to execute. You can go back and pick another skill if you can't line your attack up or you decide something else would be better. Cross is execute, circle is cancel, and triangle centers the camera so you can see the whole battlefield. You can't rotate the camera like many tactical games allow, but centering the camera with triangle works really great. I screwed up a few times using the directional buttons to attack and move, but really no more than I would have using a cursor based system like the one in Front Mission and the like. Using the directional buttons to move has a smooth feeling to it that keeps the battles moving along quite nicely.

     Leveling up works slightly different than the traditional RPG system. Each character that participated in a battle earns the same amount of experience points based on the enemies faced. As long as a character was alive when the enemy was killed, they get the points. Earning enough experience points gains you a level, which increases your max hp and mp, and also gives you skill points (used to equip passive abilities) and additional sub-turns at set levels. Your other stats are improved through rainbow pearls, which are earned by the character who deals the killing blow. You trade these pearls in to an NPC called a Savant to increase your defense, attack, speed, and luck (which governs how often you get a critical hit). You can also increase your hp and mp at the Savant, although it costs a lot of rainbow pearls. There is a limit to how much you can increase each stat, but that limit jumps up every time you level up.

     You can equip passive skills to your characters to give them abilities, such as resistance to status effects, buffs to stats, and even an extra sub-turn. These abilities can be quite expensive, so picking them up can be slow going. Attack skills are also very expensive, but your characters can permanently equip them for free once they are bought.

     Weapons and armor are another big part of character growth in Rainbow Moon. Probably the most dramatic, as a new set of gear can really push the power level of your character up drastically. Weapons and armor are expensive (everything is expensive), but you often end up using them for awhile because weapons and armor are also highly upgradeable. I would often upgrade my weapons and armor so much that I could skip the next level of equipment when it became available and wait for the next generation to purchase new stuff. You upgrade armor by adding materials to it at a blacksmith. Each piece of equipment has a certain number of slots for materials. Materials are dropped by enemies. They add stat boosts to your equipment. Rarer materials can also add positive status effects. Adding enough materials to a piece of equipment adds tremendously to its power. It often makes the decision of when to buy new stuff painful as new weapons and armor usually have higher attack and defense, respectively, but don't have the added stat boosts added on to your upgraded equipment. For example, if you have a sword that you've upgraded a lot, it might give a massive boost to your speed stat. The boost might be so valuable that its better to keep your old sword than to buy a new one with higher attack power but no speed boost. This is exactly why I would often skip a generation of equipment, saving up my money to fully kit out my characters when the next set comes out. I love games that offer you equipment choices between items that are different, not necessarily better, and this game has you making hard decisions like that quite often due to this excellent customization system. Shops update with new equipment periodically after story events. To top it all off, weapons and armor are visible on your character, which is awesome.

     As you've probably gathered, in hard mode you are often short on cash with lots of stuff you could possibly by. That's why by about mid-way through the game I decided to just use three out of my six characters. There is a rock, paper, scissors, Spock, lizard system that makes some enemies weak against attacks by certain characters, and I tried to let that govern what characters I was using for awhile, but that spreads your resources thin. I soon learned that with just a few extra levels, a character that is weak against certain enemy types does just fine, or even better, than a character that is strong against it. So I completed the rest of the game with Baldren, Gorodo, and Dozeru.

     There are other systems in Rainbow Moon, including a food system that makes you eat from time to time or lose hp, a time system that give you bonuses based on what day of the week it is, and a network of wells around the world that have different effects when you use them. There's also a bunch of other stuff, but I think I'm hitting on the main ingredients. The 37 (!) tutorials that pop up when you encounter new stuff will tell you about the rest of it.

     The game is extremely colorful and vibrant. The characters aren't sprites, but they kind of look like 3d high definition versions of classic jrpg characters, or like high def versions of the deformed characters from Final Fantasy 7. It's a very cool effect. The character portraits in the menus are these demented looking drawings... very interesting. At least it looks different than other games.

    Everywhere you go, the environment is constantly moving. Plants blow in the wind, insects fly around, mechanical baubles spin, and pennants flap. Monsters and NOC's walk around or bob in place. Talking to them produces a short voice clip of a greeting. The cheery and bright aesthetic is really cool, and really beautiful, and the many different environment types keep things fresh. Animation is a little stiff and limited, but works good enough.

     The music is pretty good, and includes a lot of upbeat tunes for exploring, gloomy tracks for those dank dungeons, and fast paced music for battles. There's a lot of variety, from chimes and strings to chopping piano, to mysterious woodwinds. It all sounds pretty good and some of the standout tracks will stick in your head.

     I'm writing the first draft of this review after beating the main quest on hard mode. It took me 74 hours. That's a lot of game. Maybe the lengthiest main quest I've ever played. But I had fun almost the whole time. By the end, I was ready for it to be over, but ended up having to grind for a few hours to beat the last boss. But by and large grinding was kept to a minimum. Whenever I got stuck, I would go do side quests until I leveled up a bit, then return to the main quest, so it usually didn't feel like grinding. I've heard that the game takes a lot less time on normal mode, but I can't confirm that. There is an insane amount of postgame content, including leveling up to absurd levels, new quests and enemies that pop up, ultimate equipment to get and upgrade, and optional bosses. After taking a month long break to play Bit.Trip Runner 2, I hopped back in to see if I could get into the post game content. Ten minutes later, I decided I needed more of a break. 

     I also realized after this break that the game was pretty forgettable. I hope I've conveyed that I has a lot of fun playing it, but looking back, I can't really remember much in the way of standout moments like I can with other great games, and it's shocking that I spent 74 hours on it.
     So, close to a year later, I am back, and I have earned the platinum trophy! It took me exactly 100 hours. That's 26 hours of play after the main campaign to get the platinum. And guess what; there is still a lot of stuff I could do in the game if I was so inclined. Right now, I'm happy to take another break that will last at least a year and possibly forever; we'll have to play it by ear.

     I can say that the post game journey to the platinum is mostly pretty fun. At least it is if you follow this post-game guide. In my opinion, a few of the items in this guide are a bit out of order, but it's a great outline to follow to help you go through the post-game quests, as there is a little less in-game direction as to what to do than in the main game. Watching your characters quickly soar to insanely high stats and levels that make the main game look like child's play is quite fun, as is beating on the challenging post-game monsters, some of which you get a little glimpse of from time to time in the main campaign.

     Everything in the post game is a hyperbolic version of the main game: weapons and armor become insanely powerful, monsters are blisteringly fast and hit incredibly hard, and your characters quickly become epicly powerful (at least, until they meet the next set of monsters that kick their butts). It was a long post-game experience, but I had a lot of fun getting the platinum. I'm very happy that I ended my run by beating one of the really tough post-game bosses in an epic slug fest. I definitely needed the year-long break from the main game though.

     I toyed with the idea of raising the game's score because I enjoyed the post-game so much, and indeed it is remarkable how much content the game packs in. Unfortunately I ultimately felt that almost everything I said about the main game also applies to the post-game. It's fun and interesting, but probably pretty forgetful in the long run. A few design flaws start to stick out as well. Namely, using rainbow pearls becomes a chore as you get so many you can max out almost all of your bonuses. This means there is no meaningful choice. You just have to walk to a savant and mash cross. It would be nice if you could set this to automatic. Also, at least on hard mode, the characters you aren't using really fall behind in power, and it would be a huge chore to catch them up. It's a shame, because I would like to play around with the characters I usually don't use, but I don't have the interest in spending time just to make them usable. I wish they gained some experience and pearls just for doing nothing if you don't play as them so that you could use them all. Will I ever pick it up again and try to kill the final 2 post-game uber-bosses? …......possibly.  

     Rating the game on hard mode, I'd put Rainbow Moon in the Great Game, tier 3 category. It's plenty of fun, but a good story, or at least a decent story would have gone a long way in giving the proceedings meaning. Still, I admire the gameplay first approach, and the battles are satisfying, as is customizing your characters. If you're looking for a game like Front Mission, where you fight like 20 big battles, keep in mind that this is nothing like that. I fought exactly 900 battles during the main game according to the stats menu, and most of them were very short. It's a different take on the strategy rpg, and I enjoyed it a lot.

I hope this review is helpful as I'm a little daunted as to how to accurately give my impression of a game this big and time consuming. If it makes no sense or is inaccurate in any way, forgive me.

Piyotama Review (PSP)

     I'm dreading writing this review. I might have to put this game in the bad category, which would be upsetting, the first game I've done that with. We'll see. Keep in mind that this review is for the PSP version of the game. The PS3 version may have more features that would affect the score.

     Piyotama is a puzzle game. I was even in the mood for a puzzle game when I played it. Even so, after about 7 rounds of play, I'm done with it. The first was confusing. The 2^nd through 5^th round were entertaining. The last two were boring.

     I like some puzzle games a lot too. I love Lumines. I had a bitter high score rivalry with my brother in the original. I ultimately lost, but I'm convinced I could beat his high score if I wanted to put in the effort. I had a brief flirtation with Hexic HD that I enjoyed. And I played a huge amount of the truly remarkable Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, one of my favorite PSP games ever.

     So let me describe Piyotama to you briefly. It's set up kinda like Tetris. There are a bunch of eggs all in stacks. More drop in from the top from time to time. You control a cursor that highlights a row of eggs. You can press left or right to move out three eggs from the left-most or right-most section of the rows. Those three eggs stay with your cursor, so you can move them to other rows by pressing up and down and then left or right to put them back in while taking three others out from the other side. Matching up four or more in a row of the same color highlights them, meaning they will hatch. Hatching occurs at set points, or you can speed it up by pressing R or L, although this gives you less points. You can also switch around the order of the three eggs that are outside of the rows with your cursor by pressing cross or circle. One cool feature is that once an egg is highlighted to be hatched, it stays highlighted, even if you move it out of its group of four. This means you can go and grab every egg of one color and plug them all into the same spot on top of three other eggs in turn, and they will all hatch even though they end up all over the board. There are special rare eggs that hatch all eggs of the same color, eggs that lock rows so you can't move them, and eggs that are worth extra points. Also, I should point out that the columns are diagonal only, eggs are staggered, not directly on top of each other. There is a mode that gives you 300 seconds of play, and a mode that stops when the eggs reach the top of the screen like Tetris.

     Does that make sense? I hope so. If this was a better game I would try to explain it a little more clearly. I didn't like it because it's really random. You will get tons of matches accidentally as you move eggs around. I thought that might be cool at first, but it turns out it's not. It makes you feel like you don't know what you're doing; kind of the opposite of what I want to feel while playing a puzzle game. Or any game, really; it makes the game feel like it is playing itself without your input. There also just isn't any depth or hook that I could find. It's a bit different, but also basic. While I like the mechanic of keeping eggs highlighted so that they will hatch even if you move them out of their grouping, nothing else was doing anything for me.

     The art style is decent; cutesy chickens, I guess you could say. There are a few skins you can download for free that change the background and dress up the mama chicken. They are beach and holiday themes. It's cool how when the eggs hatch, cute little chickens fly out and hang around on the side of the screen.

     The music is about half cute, half grating.

     I've seen positive reviews of this game praising its price. I guess it costs like $2. Totally irrelevant since it isn't fun after a few sessions. Games should only get praised for being cheap if they are good. I got this for free; what good does that do me if I'm not going to play it anymore?

     I don't regret the few play sessions I had with Piyotama, I'm just not going to play it anymore. I need to show that it is quite a few steps worse than some of the games I've put in the mediocre tier. I'm going to give it a Bad Game, Tier 1 rating. I feel mean, but it wouldn't be fair to sugar coat my honest opinion. I'm sure people worked hard on this, and I respect that. It just wasn't very fun to me.