NES Replay: Arkista's Ring

Have you ever played a game where it feels like everything should fit together, but never quite does? As you're playing it, you say, "I should like this. Everything about it is objectively OK, but I don't like it at all and can't exactly put my finger on why."

That's how I felt while playing Arkista's Ring. The controls in Arkista's Ring are solid. The music is passable, and the graphics are clean. So why does it leave me so cold?

Arkista's Ring is an overhead action-puzzle game in the same vein of Legend of Zelda. You play as a warrior woman who wields a bow and arrow. You must fight against hordes of monsters and make your way to pick up the titular ring of Arkista that you can use to save the world or something. Along the way you pick up different tools that can improve your armor and health and help you lay waste to your enemies.

Unlike Legend of Zelda, there is no overworld in Arkista's Ring. Instead, it's divided into a bunch of discrete levels. Each level is similar: Navigate a simple labyrinth while killing enemies. Once you reach a certain amount of enemies that you've killed, a key will appear. Pick up the key and find the door to get you to the next level.

There are two things that Arkista's Ring tries to do: Action and puzzles. Neither of them are very good. Let's look at the action first of all.

When you kill an enemy, there's a good chance that it'll drop a goodie bag. Inside those bags, you can find various consumable magic wands and health restoring potions. Some of these wands are almost game-breaking. For example, one of the wands kills all the enemies on the screen. That's fine if you get these wands every once in a great while, but they're constantly throwing these at the player. At one point in the early going, my inventory was full of magic wands that I had no use for.

Once the game gets harder, you start needing to lean on the wands, but that makes everything almost too easy. For example, why bother fighting the scary vampire in the middle of the room? Why not instead use a fireball-shooting wand and pelt him to death from across the level?

OK, so what what about the puzzles?

Here's a real example of a puzzle: You fight a couple of baddies at the bottom of the screen. You see more enemies on the top of the screen, but you're separated from them by a row of trees. One of the trees looks a little different than the others. You walk up and touch the tree and it disappears, giving you access to the top of the level.

That's the puzzle, folks.

So many of the "puzzles" are so brain-dead that they won't even slow you down. Compare that to The Legend of Zelda, where some of the puzzles actually make you think about what you're doing. What a concept!

One other major gripe: There's no level flow whatsoever. For example, the first part of the game starts out in a bombed-out village, then moves to a cave. After that, the levels change constantly: You're in a cave, then you're outdoors, then in a fortress, then outdoors, then in a cave, then a castle. There's no rhyme or reason to it. The levels don't feel like part of a whole, but rather distinct areas with no relation between them. It makes Arkista's Ring feel less like an epic quest and more like a series of places that you just sort of go to.

That's a big problem for a game of this type. An action game needs to have some sort of stakes involved, like, "If you don't win, this really bad thing will happen." Think of all the great action games of the NES era: If you don't get to the end of Super Mario Bros., the princess stays with Bowser. If you don't finish Zelda, Ganon wins and destroys Hyrule. If you don't finish Mega Man, Dr. Wily destroys the world with his robots.

This is accomplished almost entirely by level flow. While the instruction manual might tell you the motivation, the levels are what propel you through the game proper. Everything in the game is supposed to move you toward a final confrontation, so when you finally reach that point, all that you have learned and experienced prepares you for that moment.

I'm sure there's a plot behind Arkista's Ring, but you would be hard-pressed to find it in the game itself. Within the game, you instead feel like an aggressor who's killing a bunch of creatures at random and hoping to move on. Some of them aren't even trying to attack you, just standing there and minding their own business when you brutally murder them.

With better level flow, this feeling could have been avoided. The first levels could sttill have taken place in a bombed-out village, but then it could have diverged from there. You could have moved through the village and reached the elder's house. Inside the elder's house, you could have fought a vampire. Then, in the house, you find a cave. Go through the cave, reach a mountain. Climb the mountain, reach the clouds. Navigate the clouds, find a tunnel. Take the tunnel, go into a volcano. Meet the boss. Boom.

That's level flow. Instead of having that flow, Arkista's Ring feels like, "A bunch of stuff happened, and now the game is over. Congratulations! Or something."

I will say that Arkista's Ring excels in one area: In stark contrast to the stingy games of the time, Arkista's Ring gives the player three lives and ten continues. That's pretty cool. Everything else needs work.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Asterix

Review: Starseed Pilgrim

Remember seeing a magic trick when you were a kid? The first time you saw a magician saw a lady in half, you were shocked. Then, when he put her back together, you were stunned. You wondered in amazement, “How did he do that?”

Then, someone showed you how the trick worked. They showed you that there are two boxes, and the lady bunches herself up in one box while another woman sticks her legs out of the other box to give the illusion of a woman sawed in half. There was probably a moment of excitement when you finally realized what had been happening the whole time. However, you no longer cared to see the trick afterwards. It no longer held your attention in the same way because you knew exactly what was happening.

Starseed Pilgrim reminded me of that. Starseed Pilgrim is a 2D platformer game with emergent gameplay, where you're expected to make your way around the world and explore for exploration's sake. The early instructions in the game are the equivalent of, "Here is how to move. Press the Space Bar to plant a seed. Go." You're dumped into an all-white world and that's it.
At first, you're confused and lost. You spend time wondering why you're playing this game in the first place. Then, you slowly start understanding what the game is all about. You figure out what the point of it is, and how it all works together.

Then there's a moment of realization where everything sets in. "Oh, this does this and this does this! I go here and do this, then I grab that, then open this!" That's when the pleasure center of your brain lights up, pats you on the head and tells you what a good boy (or girl) you've been.

Afterwards, you wander around and ask yourself, "OK, now what?"

That's where the designers of the game hope that the game really starts for you. If Starseed Pilgrim really has its hooks into you, you'll start poking around, getting more snippets of poetry (yes, poetry) to read, and going further and further through the world.

However, the problem is that there's no definitive goal to shoot for. I'm not saying that there needed to be little guideposts sprinkled throughout the world or a giant floating head telling you what to do next, or immersion-breaking achievements of any kind. Just a goal.

In other emergent games like Minecraft or Terraria, you're building something. You're affecting the world, like putting up a building or revitalizing a formerly dead area. When you're done, you can say, "I did that. I made that." When you open up a new area of Starseed Pilgrim, it looks pretty much like the last area you opened up. There are slightly different rules in the new areas, and you're going further, but for what? What is the ultimate goal?

This could have been solved easily. The stated goal at the beginning of game is to "bring back the sky." So how about when you plant a seed, the blank white blocks around it turn to a sky-blue color? Eventually, clouds start forming in the blue blocks and weather returns to the world. Now you have a goal to play towards. Your emergent gameplay has an endpoint, not just playing just to play.

You may read this review and think I didn't like Starseed Pilgrim, but that's not true. I thought it was an exceptional experience and I'd love to wipe my brain and start over from scratch, relearning the world and how it works. The sound design is really cool, like the sound of encroaching darkness that sounds just as ominous as it looks. Starseed Pilgrim also has a totally unique aesthetic that looks unlike any other game out there right now.

I'm only disappointed because Starseed Pilgrim came oh-so-close to being a knockout of a game. Instead, it ended up as a really neat one with some interesting and mysterious mechanics, which is a lot closer to perfection than a lot of other developers can get.

Final Rating: B

DLC Quest Giveaway Winner!

We've selected a winner in our DLC Quest Giveaway! It's Bernard H. with this response:

I'd like to see the consoles and hand helds give independent developers the ability to run and distribute their code without a gatekeeper.

Here are a couple other responses:

I would like to see the video game industry make games more cross platform. PC gamers would love to play the newer Halo games on PC for example, but are unwilling to buy an Xbox just for that. - Alex R.

Only thing i want to see from developers is that they change how they make their games and get suggestions from testers, consumers, etc. - M. Noku

Interesting ideas, folks. Thanks for responding, and thanks for playing!

NES Replay: Arkanoid

Developer: Taito
Publisher: Taito
Released: 1987
Who Came Up With These Game Names:
Arkanoid? Amagon? Astyanax? Did they
just pick out of a bag of Scrabble letters?

The "Breakout clone" is one of the oldest game genres still in existence. Breakout was originally made in 1976, and it's basically single-player Pong. You control a paddle, and you bounce a ball off that paddle against a bunch of bricks. When the ball touches a brick, the brick disappears. The object is to get rid of all of the bricks in the level.

Since it's such an easy game to clone, other game companies rushed to copy it almost immediately after it launched. The most successful of these clones is Arkanoid, made by Taito. Arkanoid became so successful that it's almost eclipsed Breakout in popularity and notoriety.

Fun fact: The original arcade came used a trackball to control the paddle, which allowed for really great fine-grained control. It meant that if you were caught out of position, you could quickly scramble back to the right place if you needed to. I could never get the hang of the trackball myself, but my dad was awesome at it.

To Taito's credit, they didn't just copy-and-paste Breakout wholesale. In Arkanoid, breaking blocks can sometimes produce powerups, like making the paddle longer, slowing down the ball, shoot multiple balls, shoot lasers, or causing the ball stick to the paddle. There are also penalties that can be picked up, like making the paddle shorter or speeding up the ball. A good player will have to identify the powerups quickly in order to avoid getting the bad ones. Eventually, there's even a final boss, which was rare in the arcades at the time.

Like every arcade game at the time, it got a port to the NES. While the port of Arkanoid fares better than most arcade ports of the age, it's not quite perfect. For example, the fine-grained control that the trackball provided is obviously missing in Taito's NES port of Arkanoid. There was an optional controller you could buy that would try to duplicate the arcade controls, but it was very rare. While the directional pad was normally great for every other type of game, for Arkanoid, it was inexact. The ball also races around the levels at crazy speeds, which means that you'll frequently find that you've moved yourself just a little too far to the left or right and completely miss the ball.

In order to succeed, you have to force yourself not to follow the ball with your paddle but instead look at the angle of return. However, your angles can get messed up because almost immediately in the first level, you're not only breaking through blocks but also fighting off alien ships that pour through the top of the screen. No sooner that you've destroyed the ones coming in, another three or four come streaming through. Therefore, you can't just focus on the blocks at the top of the screen, but also the aliens coming after you, which frequently changes the angle that your ball returns at and catches you completely out of position.

The playable area is also very narrow, as almost 1/4 of the screen is taken up by the score, the level, and extra information that doesn't really need that much room. You have very little time to plan ahead and figure out where the ball is going to go, and since your natural inclination is to follow the ball with your paddle, and the ball moves faster than the paddle does, it can take all of two minutes to lose your lives. It really makes Arkanoid much more frantic than Breakout, as you always feel you're on the precipice of failure.

For those reasons, I wish that the first couple of levels were a little more forgiving, as it takes time to get used to the speed of Arkanoid. However, since Arkanoid came from the arcades, they had no interest in helping players along, just crushing them and taking their quarters.

Still, that frantic feeling of impending failure is actually pretty entertaining on the NES when you're not pumping quarters into a machine. Once you get the angles down and force yourself to think ahead, Arkanoid turns into a delightfully harried game that will force you to try just one more time. It certainly helps that the underlying game of Breakout invented is still fun over 40 years later. Just think of Arkanoid as Breakout in Hard Mode, and you'll have a good time.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Arkista's Ring

Review: Gunman Clive

Developer: Horberg Productions
Publisher: Horberg Productions

Gunman Clive is the best hand-drawn platformer featuring a cowboy who goes to space and fights robots that I've ever played on the 3DS.

All facetiousness aside, Gunman Clive is pretty great. It's a platform/shooter game where you play as the titular Clive and rescue a damsel in distress. Or, if you prefer, play as the damsel in distress and rescue Clive.

The first thing you'll notice when you start up Gunman Clive is the unique graphical style. Everything looks like a "Wanted" poster in the Old West, which gives it a look that's instantly distinguishable from any other game on the eShop. It uses a limited color palette of yellows and oranges that you would think it would get boring to look at, but it doesn't.

Clive does almost everything right for an action /platformer. The controls are really tight. I never ran into a situation where I missed a jump or got myself killed because of the controls. The levels are varied and interesting, with tons of little surprises along the way.

I only have two complaints. One, the music is a little bland in parts, but it's not awful. I played the whole game with the sound on and I didn't regret it. Two, Clive is awfully short. I finished the whole game in an hour. However, it's only $1.99, so you can't get too angry about the length.

I didn't know what to expect from Gunman Clive, but I'm glad I played it, and you'll like it too.

Final Grade: A-

NES Replay: Archon

Developer: Bulletproof Software
Publisher: Activision
Released: 1989
Yes: I'm really that bad at chess

I am legendarily bad at chess. It's not that I don't know the rules. I know the rules about as good as anyone else. It's not that I don't know that you're supposed to plan ahead, either. I read about chess and look up information about the best strategies, and yet, for some reason I just can't play chess no matter what I do.

Quick story: A friend of mind wanted to play chess against me. I warned him that I was really bad at chess, and his response was, "That's OK, I'm bad at it too." As the game dragged on, it got so bad that he actually said, with some annoyance, "Do you even know how to play this game?" I explained that, yes, I've been playing chess since fifth grade, and no, I have not improved in the intervening twenty years. He quit in disgust.

So that makes me uniquely unqualified to review Archon, a chess variant that was published by Electronic Arts for the PC in 1983 and then ported over the NES. It's clear that Archon was supposed to combine the best of chess and the best of video games into one package. Did it succeed?

Crap, don't revive that piece! It took me
forever to kill it!

In Archon, you're given several units that are laid out on the chessboard just like normal chess pieces. In the front row are your pawns, and in the back row are units with more special abilities, like the ability to call forth a fire elemental or teleport. However, here's the quirk: When a piece moves onto an opponents piece, a minigame begins where the two opposing pieces duke it out with magic and weapons. Whomever wins gets the square, and the other piece is dead.

It's an interesting combination of chess and video games, but Archon isn't perfect. For example, the interface in Archon is very clunky. Every time you need to select a piece to play, none of the pieces themselves are highlighted. Instead, the selector icon begins way off the board, and you have to move the selector over several spaces before you can even select a piece. That's kind of inexcusable, since there doesn't appear to be any specific reason that the selector needs to be off the board, at least from what I can tell.

Archon isn't very intuitive, either. It absolutely demands that you have the manual nearby, since it's really hard to figure out what each piece does, what its weaknesses and strengths are, and all of those details that are really important to a game like this. I suppose I can't judge Archon too harshly for that, since that was the way these games typically played back in the day.

A pitched battle between two water
elementals. I'm the one who's dying.

Also, playing against the computer is ridiculous. It's not that the computer makes really good moves. It doesn't. The problems start once combat begins. The microsecond that the computer player has you in its line of sight, it's like Liam Neeson in Taken: It will find you, and it will kill you. The computer immediately knows when it can take a shot at you, and frequently fires before you have a chance to move out of the way.

However, Archon is still a pretty good idea. It reminds me of the sport of chess boxing: Whomever wins by knockout or checkmate wins first. For someone as strategy-stunted like myself, it's nice that good strategy alone doesn't guarantee a win, and good action-game skills don't guarantee a win either.

If I was playing this game against a human opponent, I could see getting over Archon's quirks and having a lot of fun. There's a lot of depth to it, and it's the kind of game that would lend itself well to obsessive fans. It's actually the kind of game that would be perfect for a revival, but that's par for the course with a lot of these sort of games.

It takes guts to take a game as storied and steeped in tradition as chess, then ask, "How can we make it better?" I want to make it clear: Archon is not better than chess, and it has numerous flaws. However, it at least tries to meld two different types of game into one in a unique and exciting way. That at least counts for something.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Arkanoid

Read This: Football's Worst Nightmare

Here's an article about the last professional football player to die on the field. Sobering stuff.

NES Replay: Arch Rivals

Developer: Midway
Publisher: Acclaim
Released: 1990
Detroit Melee Joke: On its way

Remember our discussion on sports games that accompanied All-Pro Basketball? If not, here's a recap: In the NES years, you had two choices when making a sports game: You could either try and make an exact replica of the sport (which usually wouldn't work because of the NES' limitations) or make something that felt like the sport but wasn't quite the same thing (which also didn't always work).

All-Pro Basketball tried to make an exact replica of basketball and didn't turn out very well. Arch Rivals tried to just have fun with the concept of basketball, and it was all right. Not perfect, but all right.

Arch Rivals is a two-on-two basketball game where you can steal the ball easily, knock down other players and shatter the backboard with thunderous dunks. If that idea sounds familiar, it's because Arch Rivals was made by Midway, who eventually turned out NBA Jam. Yes, Arch Rivals was NBA Jam before NBA Jam was NBA Jam.

However, there's a little bit more going on than that. The joke in Arch Rivals is that the referee is near-blind and really short, so he has no control over the game. Because of that, the players have resorted to violence and throw punches at each other. It's pretty hilarious to run across the court toward an opponent with your fist cocked and knock them out cold right before they take a shot. It's like a continual Detroit Melee, except without Ron Artest climbing into the stands. It's almost the best idea anyone has had for a basketball video game ever, but Arch Rivals doesn't quite do it right.
For example, punching out your opponents is a great idea but in the game it doesn't have much of an effect. Knocking out an opponent in Arch Rivals merely makes them lose the ball for a bit and have them lay on the floor for a split second while they get back up. It doesn't really matter how many punches you throw, you're not going to make your opponent play any worse or injure them in any meaningful way, so that's a little disappointing.

This is how chaotic everything usually is.
Fun!

There are also only two music tracks that play throughout Arch Rivals. The main music track acts as the title screen music, the character selection music, and the in-game music. The only other music is played during the breaks between quarters. Also, get this: Every time either team scores, that main track starts over from the beginning.

Don't get me wrong, the main music is good, but there's only so much you can hear the first 10 seconds of it before you start getting annoyed. Why didn't they just let the track keep running instead of constantly restarting it, or, better yet, come up with a new track just to mix it up a bit? Just throwing that out there.

You also don't get to choose your team, but instead have about eight different players that you can choose from. Each player has their NBA equivalents from the 80's. One looks like Dennis Rodman, one looks like Larry Bird, one looks like Horace Grant, and so on. I'm sure that somehow they have their differences, but I've never been able to tell. For that reason, I just pick "Tyrone," who's the Michael Jordan equivalent. It's like, if there's a player who plays like Michael Jordan, why would you pick anyone else?

Finally, Arch Rivals is a game that's designed to play multiplayer, and it shows. The computer opponents can be pushovers if you pay a little bit of attention. They really only have about five different plays that they run, so if you anticipate their moves, it doesn't take much to rack up high scores against them.

Arch Rivals had so much potential, and it's the kind of game that's ripe for a revival. Imagine a two-on-two basketball game where your punches matter, you can knock the star player out of the game, run out of bounds, grab the referee and use him as a shield, dump Gatorade on the court, and run into the stands after loose balls. I can see that being a huge hit as a downloadable game, and I would play that so hard.

As it is, Arch Rivals is a neat precursor to NBA Jam, but it's not much else. It's fun to play, but is much more notable for having a great idea than being able to pull it off.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Archon

Review: Dungeon Hearts

Developer: Cube Roots
Publisher: Devolver Digital


Dungeon Hearts has a really cool idea at its core: What if battles in RPGs took place entirely via a fast-paced match-three puzzle interface instead of the old menu-based way? It's an exceptional idea, but Dungeon Hearts can't quite pull it off.

In Dungeon Hearts, you play through a series of battles, one right after the other. At the bottom of the screen, there's a constantly-scrolling stream of tiles called the FateStream. The tiles have different colors which correspond to the colors of your four units, and mixed in to the FateStream are tiles that can damage your units or cause various status effects to affect them. When a tile gets to the end of the FateStream, it's gone, so in order to defeat your enemies, you have to quickly match tiles.

Your enemies also get tiles that appear at random in the FateStream, and if the tiles reach your characters, then they apply that effect, whether it's a straight attack, freezing, weakening, or some other debuff. Each unit has its own allotment of hit points, and when they run out, your game ends.

After each battle is complete, you're given another pile of gems to sort through, except that matching the gems in this area enables your characters to gain levels. Gaining levels strengthens your characters and unlocks special skills which can be used during combat.

Got all that? Good. The system itself is great and fairly easy to master, but the way the system is implemented is problematic.

First, the way your characters gain levels isn't very well-executed. If you mess up during the gem-matching portion after the battles are concluded, you may have gimped your characters for good. That's a problem, since levelling the characters unlocks skills, and some of those skills are as basic as a healing spell. If you've made a mistake and somehow not unlocked it, too bad!

There's also a tile that the enemies can use against you that's wildly overpowered: Life Drain. It continually damages the unit it hits while giving that life to your opponent. Now, these sort of spells and effects are in a lot of other games, but usually they have a set duration, like five or ten seconds. However, in Dungeon Hearts, Life Drain just keeps running until your unit dies, making it the most deadly tile in the game. Whenever you see one, you have to drop everything and desperately try and obliterate it or it's all over.

So if you do get hit with Life Drain, how do you stop it from killing you? Well, one of your characters has a skill that heals and clears debuffs. What if you didn't level up enough to get that skill? Too bad! More than likely, though, what will happen is that you used the skill and now have to wait for it to recharge. And what if that happens? Too bad!

How do you recharge your skills? By attacking with the appropriate character. What if no gems show up for that character? Too bad! What if the character who has the healing skill dies? Too bad! He also gets a resurrection skill, and if he dies, too bad! No resurrecting for you!

I don't like whining about fairness in games, but I have to say this: If you tie the strategy of your game into something that's completely random, that's not fair. That changes your carefully-constructed game into something like poker: You can think that you're a great poker player, but if you end up with the wrong cards in your hand, it doesn't matter how good you are. You will lose. That's how Dungeon Hearts feels sometimes.

So how could the situation have been improved? First, what about item drops that you can equip onto your characters, like shields that create immunities or absorb damage? What about a more generalized way of levelling your characters? Say, you match the gems, and then can pick who you want to upgrade and what you want to upgrade on them? That seems fair to me.

When Dungeon Hearts works, it's incredible. It's fun to play, the gem-matching is a ton of fun, and it's an idea that really hasn't been tried before. I would love to see this idea expanded upon and given a narrative so that it's closer to a real RPG. However, as it currently stands Dungeon Hearts feels like 75% of a great idea. The matching mechanics are just fine, but there needs to be more player agency and strategy. Since it's only 75% of a great idea, it gets a score that averages out to... 75%.

Final Rating: C

Giveaway Time! Free Copy of DLC Quest!

Hey everybody, I'm giving away a free Steam key to the pretty decent satire/platformer DLC Quest! Here's how to enter:
How Do I Enter? In order to enter, send an email to lee (at) downwardscompatible (dot) com with the subject line of "Giveaway". In the email, write ONE THING that you would like to see the video game industry change.

How Will The Winner Get Picked? The winner will be picked at random. I'll take all the email addresses, put them in a spreadsheet and select a random number from random.org. Whoever gets picked gets the code!

Any Restrictions? One entry per person. Duplicate entries will be removed. The contest will run from 4/2/13 until midnight on 4/21/13. Any entries afterwards will be discarded. I will be announcing the winner's first name and last initial (or pseudonym) so bear that in mind when making your entries.

Special thanks to Ben Kane from Going Loud Studios!

NES Replay: Anticipation

Developer: Rare
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 1988
That Title Screen: What is going ON

When Nintendo gets an idea, they stick with it.

A lot of recent Nintendo products have come from previous devices that had good ideas but poor execution. Nintendo sat on some of those ideas in hopes that some day the technology would get better and they could do them the right way. For example, the Game & Watch games turned into the DS. The Power Glove turned into the Wii Remote. The Power Pad turned into Wii Fit. The Game Boy Advance/Gamecube link turned into the Wii U.

One of Nintendo's early ideas was that gaming shouldn't be the sole province of children. Everyone should be able to find something to like in gaming, and they felt that the best way to do that is by making a game for adults with no cartoon characters or goofy mascots. Maybe if they just made a game that wouldn't make your mom or dad embarrassed to play it, they could open up a whole new market.

We all know that it turned out pretty well for them with games like Brain Age and Wii Sports, but where did the idea really come from?
Anticipation was Nintendo's first attempt with that idea. It was a video game board game that revolves around figuring out what items the computer is drawing. When you've figured out what the computer is drawing, you can stop the computer and try and guess the name of the shape.

It's like watching someone play
"connect the dots."

In Anticipation, there are no shoe-horned reference to other Nintendo characters, no indication whatsoever that this game is anything other than Serious Business For Grownups. Even Anticipation's box art eschewed the normal hand-drawn style that other box art used, instead taking great pains to show nothing but adults, having good, clean fun in the 80's.

Is Anticipation good? I really don't know. I mean, I played it, but I played it by myself. Anticipation is supposed to be more of a party game, and playing a party game by yourself makes you feel really sad. From what I was able to play all on my lonesome, though, I can at least say a few things.

The presentation of Anticipation is absolutely horrid. In their attempt to make this game appeal to adults, they used black backgrounds and a minimum of color. By comparison, if you look at more adult-oriented board games of the 80's, like Trivial Pursuit, there's always color. It's understated and tries to look classy, but it's there. I understand that Nintendo and Rare were trying to make something for grownups and so were trying to avoid the happy, cartoon-y worlds of Mario, but at that didn't mean they had to avoid jazzing things up a bit.

The rules of the game are also unnecessarily complex. You have to land on four different colors and solve those puzzles, then move to a new board once you have all four colors filled in, and you have to get through three boards to win, then place a doily on your head and dance the cha-cha, then slaughter a goat under the full moon with your second cousin (twice removed) present. It's like they were trying to think of things they could do in a board game that didn't require an actual physical board and just got carried away.

Still, Anticipation is an admirable first attempt at making a party game, and also a good first attempt for making a game that would appeal to adults. Nintendo would return to the party-game well for the Mario Party series, which was far more successful and they would also make games for adults with the Wii Sports and Wii Fit series of games, which both proved that you could make a game for adults while still using bright colors and cartoon characters.

Here's the big question, though: Since Nintendo never lets go of ideas, the question is: What idea will they come back to down the line? My best guess is the Vitality Sensor. You heard it here first.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Arch Rivals