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GOTTA GO

Too Many Games On the Horizon

There are times where gaming is a very, very expensive hobby. These next few months are that kind of time. Within the span of 48 days, there are five games coming out that I want to play at a cost of approximately $210 in total:

Professor Layton 10/17
Kirby's Return to Dream Land 10/24
Super Mario 3D Land 11/13
Zelda: Skyward Sword 11/20
Mario Kart 7 12/4

Now, I could go crazy and try and get all of them at once. That's just what the developers would like me to do. However, in order to get them, I'd have to start getting rid of other games, and I don't really want to do that.

This is the downside of gaming. It's the eternal struggle between what we want to play, how much time we have, and how much money we have to spend. It's a very odd, materialistic culture that grows. If you don't have the new game, what's wrong with you? Why haven't you played this new game?

If you decide to wait and pick up the game in a year, you're old news! You don't have an opportunity to join in the discussion, because you're late to the party and no one will discuss it with you. It's kind of a weird culture and one that I'm not entirely comfortable with.

So what I'm doing in these next couple of months is just picking out which games I want to play, and picking out which ones can wait. The only two that are must-have first-day purchases will be Kirby's Return to Dream Land and Super Mario 3D Land. As intrigued as I am by the London Life RPG in Professor Layton, that can wait. As much as the new Zelda makes me excited, I can wait. And Mario Kart 7 can sit for a bit.

This means, though, that my Games of the Year for 2011 will be incomplete. I can live with this. I've never pretended to be an exhaustive cataloger of all games that exist, just the ones that personally interest me. I'm sure I'm forgetting about games that are coming out, but that's OK. If I don't remember them, they won't exist for now.

Steve Jobs Dead

I was never a huge Apple fan, but you can't deny the influence Steve Jobs has had on technology. Best wishes to his friends and family, and here's hoping that Apple can keep making him proud.

Review: Kirby Mass Attack

Developer: HAL Laboratory
Publisher: Nintendo

Kirby fans got a great surprise at E3 this year. All of a sudden, Nintendo drops the bomb that they have not one, but two Kirby games in development, and ohbytheway, they're both dropping this year. One is coming up for the Wii, and the other, Kirby Mass Attack just launched for the DS.

I'm an absolute whore for Kirby games. Any Kirby game, anytime, anywhere and I am there. There are only a few of them that I wasn't completely in love with: Kirby's Dream Land 3, which I still played through to completion, and Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, which was just a weird game all around. I also wasn't crazy about Canvas Curse at first but I got over it and harbor some love for it.

So you would expect me to be jumping up and down about having Mass Attack to play, right? You wouldn't expect anything approaching ambivalence, but rather insane delight at my good fortune. And yet, there's something about Mass Attack that holds me back from a ringing endorsement. It's good, but with some slight issues.

First of all, the story with Mass Attack is simple: Kirby has been split into ten pieces, and you have to use all your Kirbies to defeat enemies and put yourself back together. It's a cute setup, and it enabled the designers to make a few twists to the Kirby formula.

The first twist? Kirby does not take any powers from any of the enemies. Frankly, I didn't even notice this was gone until I wrote this review, so take that as you will.

The next twist is that Kirby Mass Attack plays like a platformer/real-time-strategy game, if you can believe that. You don't have direct control over your army of Kirbies, but instead you direct them using the stylus. You can either have them walk/run to where you need them to be or fling them with the against enemies, breakable blocks or switches.

Attacks also aren't done by Kirby's typical inhale/exhale methodology, but with a hilarious swarming method. By tapping an enemy, you'll get all of your Kirbies to pile on and start pounding on it. It reminds me of nature videos where helpless animals get swarmed by ants, and it's almost always funny.

There are also no "lives", per se. The amount of lives you have is equal to the amount of Kirbies you have on screen. If you have seven Kirbies and two die, you're down to five Kirbies. You get extra Kirbies by eating fruit, and once you hit 100 pieces eaten you get another Kirby, with a maximum of ten Kirbies. If a Kirby gets hit, it'll turn blue. If the Kirby gets hit while it's blue, then it starts floating away like an angel unless you're able to rescue it by flinging another Kirby at your fallen friend to grab it and pull it back to Earth.

In other words, they've changed quite a bit about Kirby games with Mass Attack. That's good and bad. On the one hand, you can't accuse Nintendo of treading water. On the other hand, if you're going to change the game so drastically, why keep the Kirby name? Why not just create a new character to do this kind of game? It seems counterproductive. Either way, the mechanics are fairly solid, the levels are diverse and there's lots of fun to be had. So why is that I feel a little flat about Kirby: Mass Attack?

I think what's bugging me is the lack of control you have over your characters. You can direct your group to huddle up in a ball, but when walking or moving, they'll usually spread out over a fairly large area. This can create problems when you're trying to avoid obstacles or enemy attacks, since you have to keep telling your guys to bunch up in to groups.

It's also hard to select an individual Kirby to fling. I found myself, more often than not, just sticking my stylus in the middle of the group and hoping against hope that I would pick one out to fling. This leads to you sometimes trying over and over to fling someone and getting one of your characters accidentally hurt.

The first levels are also pretty easy, but in the later going you can find yourself losing everything far too quickly. For example, in one level, I was cruising along until I got to an area where there were falling blocks reminiscent of Thwomps in the the Mario series. My Kirbies ended up accidentally underneath one of them when it fell, and the enemy managed to crush ALL of them.

It was a fluky shot, but I lost every Kirby in one second with no chance of getting them back. Then, once I lost all of my Kirbies, that was it for the level. My game was over and I had to restart the level from the beginning. That meant that ten minutes of my progress was erased.

Another example: There's a late level with a tower that rocks back and forth depending on where your Kirbies are standing. There are enemies that try and push you off by blowing air at your group, and if they blow off one of your Kirbies, the Kirby flies off the tower to its death, with no chance of getting it back.

OK, so I sound kind of whiny. When I was younger, I used to play games all the time in which I would lose considerable progress after a death and it never bothered me. But the problem is this: This is Kirby. Kirby games are generally pretty easy. Most of Mass Attack is pretty simple as well, and to be blindsided in later levels by higher difficulty is a little disconcerting.

Still, there is a lot to recommend. The control issues don't entirely kill your fun, and you're constantly being handed a new task to attempt, whether it's some switches you have to hit in order, a new enemy that attacks you in a way you weren't expecting, or a puzzle that pleasantly surprises you.

There are also a ton of unlockables, including a faux-RPG of sorts, a shoot-em-up, a pinball game and more. It even has an achievement system of sorts, a sure sign that Nintendo is getting the idea that people like achievements. Here's hoping that they integrate that into future systems like the Wii U.

So Kirby Mass Attack is pretty good, with a few caveats. If you can look past its flaws, you'll see it's a solid title that shows that Nintendo is still full of ideas for the little pink puffball, even after after all these years.

Final Grade: B

Let's Make A Game Episode 22: Blow'd Up

Where we left off last time, we wanted to make the game end somehow. As it is, once you lose all your health, the score resets. That's all. There's not even an indicator that you lost, no "A LOSER IS YOU" words on the screen or anything.
One of the ways we can resolve this is by having a visual indicator. I would like there to be multiple explosions over your character to let you know that you just got BLOWED UP GOOD. The most simple method would be a simple for/next loop:

For (1,3)
{
    AddExplosion(Player.Position);
}

Except this method sucks. Since the game loop is so fast, the three explosions sound like one. There's no delay. If we trim it back to one explosion, once again, it happens so fast that the player may not even realize that they lost.

Another option would be to create the explosion and then toss in an Initialize() call to restart everything, but that doesn't seem to work very well either. Once again, the loop is so fast that you can't even tell that the explosion happened. There has to be a better way.

Criminally Overlooked Games: Lords of the Realm 2

The long path of gaming is littered with games that were once considered monumental testaments to the craft and have since been forgotten. A lot of things can diminish these games in people's eyes: Outdated graphics, lackluster sequels, or the ravages of time itself.

Lords of the Realm II has a lot of these issues. First of all, the graphics pale in comparison to even Command & Conquer Red Alert, released exactly the same day. While Red Alert has great animation and detail in the units, LotR2's units look fake and weird in comparison. Most items only have about four frames of animation. For God's sake, when you start up the game in any mode other than 640 by 480, you get a warning about your screen resolution.

Next up, the Lords of the Realm name means nothing to gamers anymore. If the Lords of the Realm name still meant something to gamers, then Lords of the Realm II would still remain a well-remembered high watermark, much like Civilization II still conjures up fond memories. However, since the third game in the series was so poor, no one remembers the series name with a great fondness anymore.

On top of that, many, many strategy games have come and gone since Lords of the Realm II graced our screens. Fourteen years is a long time in gaming terms, and our memories are short. It's been a long time since Lords of the Realm II was installed on the majority of hard drives, let alone on store shelves. In fact, when I bought it in early 1998, it was already $10. It's been a budget game for longer than Starcraft has been released.

Lords of the Realm II deserves better. Here's the story: The king died without an heir, and five rivals have stepped up to claim the throne: The noble Baron, the calculating Countess, the headstrong Knight, the duplicitous Bishop, and you. You have to subjugate your enemies through a variety of battle and good management on the way to claiming the throne for your own.

Years before the Total War series was a glimmer in Creative Assembly's eye, Lords of the Realm II combined turn-based and real-time strategy exceptionally well. All county management is handled in turn-based mode. Battles are handled in real-time, including castle sieges. In order to truly succeed, you have to master all facets of the game to win.

What made Lords of the Realm II stand out, though, were the characters. Each character fights you in a specific way, and it's awesome. For example, the Bishop is a back-stabber of the highest order. If you form an alliance with him, he'll still wander into your lands with a large army and siege your castles. His claim is that he's seizing your lands on behalf of the church. He'll get mad if you tried to attack back or defend yourself. If he did gain control of a county, he'd put the largest castle possible in it, making him exceedingly dangerous.

The Baron, on the other hand, excelled in field combat and infrastructure, was incredibly loyal, and also had crappy castles littered around his counties. He was a great ally to have, because he'd always have your back. However, at some point you have to wipe him out in order to claim the throne, which was made easier due to his penchant for the aforementioned crappy castles.

You'll notice I'm describing these characters as if they're real people. They're all so clearly defined in-game that I can explain how each of them will behave in a certain situation. If you'll allow me a "get off my lawn" moment, this is something a lot of games are missing nowadays. We have better technology than we've ever had, and yet all the technology in the world can't make great characters. That comes down to writing, and writing in most games is woefully insufficient.

Getting down from my soapbox, the only major flaw in Lords of the Realm II is the multiplayer code. It appears that the network code was made by partially trained wolves who programmed by urinating on the keyboard. The only time I ever got it to work online was using dialup, and any attempt at running it on anything fast would cause it to crap out after a minute. But when we got it to work online, it was GLORIOUS.

Look, I don't know what else to tell you. If you like strategy games at all, Lords of the Realm II is a phenomenal game that deserves a shot. I hope some day someone gets the license and remakes it the way that it deserves. In the meantime, you can pick it up cheap from GOG.com.

Looking for more Criminally Overlooked Games? Click here!

Some Ambassador Games Rated?

So it appears that the ESRB rated two GBA Ambassador games this past week: WarioWare and Mario Kart. Are we close to getting them? Let's hope.