Donkey Kong Once you die 8 times in a level a pig shows up and asks you whether you want to skip the level. He mocks you by waving a little white flag. I’m happy to report that I beat the levels myself but saw the stupid pig a handful of times. I hate that they didn’t include a non-motion-controlled option because that would have saved me a lot of frustration. Other than that, this game is fantastic and unforgiving, even if you don’t try to collect all the hidden stuff.

Heavy Rain This is more like an interactive movie (with lots of different endings) than a traditional game. If you don’t replay chapters, you basically have one shot at completing each scene – if something ‘bad’ happens you just continue and the events get woven into the storyline. The story is pretty good, the atmosphere is haunting, and the action sequences are intense. There are a lot of mundane activities, like feeding and changing a baby – what happened to video games being an escape? Definitely worth a play-through though.

I haven’t played a game as engrossing as Batman: Arkham Asylum in a very long time. I stayed up until 3am Friday night playing it and finished it up starting at 830am this morning. It’s a phenomenal game, kind of Metroid-vania-ish in nature.

The game is really immersive. The graphics are phenomenal and the controls make it really easy to pull off lots of different maneuvers. You never panic when facing hoards of enemies because everything feels really natural. All of the locales are distinct and rich. The gadgets are really fun (and useful). The story is good enough to stand on its own. For once I actually feel motivated to collect bonuses because some of them are really interesting (like interviews with some of the villains).

Minor complaints: boss battles can be a bit easy/simplistic, and the game is a bit too helpful at times when giving hints. The sewer level is annoying (though most games have many more annoying parts than this one does). It’s also a bit on the easy side, but I didn’t mind since I was too busy exploring and being a badass superhero. Also I want to drive the Batmobile.

Before playing this, I was worried that I was outgrowing video games. I was also worried that I’d never really be impressed by the PS3. Batman changed all that.

A few days ago we bought Mega Man 9 from tne online Nintendo store. It’s a brand new Mega Man game done NES-style, and, though difficult, it’s amazing. I’ve forgotten how satisfying it is to replay a level over and over until you’ve perfected it. Cy and I have probably logged 4-5 hours and have beaten five of the bosses, and we savor each sweet victory (especially the ones that come with one remaining sliver of life).

I do think it’s kind of cheap that you can buy as many energy tanks as you want. I clearly remember there being four in all of Mega Man 2, and that I hoarded them until the very, very end. I’m willing to overlook this because the second I picked up the controller I was instantly transported back to my 10-year-old self.

Available for XBox360 and PS3 too. What are you waiting for?

I spent a few hours yesterday afternoon playing through the first world of Zack and Wiki. It’s definitely got a kiddy-feel to it, with colorful cartoony graphics and cutesy bunny pirates (the Sea Rabbits), but the point-and-click-style puzzles are solid and immensely satisfying. Everything you need to make progress is there, usually staring you straight in the face. Using items in the game usually involves motioning with the controller, and it really draws you into the game. You can die in a variety of gruesome ways, and it’s definitely something to be avoided because you’ll need to restart from the beginning of a stage or be charged a ticket to continue from the point at which you died. Definitely makes you think twice about trying stuff carelessly.

If you are a fan of old Sierra and LucasArts adventure games, Zack and Wiki is well worth checking out.

Over the past year, our Wii didn’t see nearly enough action to justify the 430am Black Friday trek that I made to acquire it. After beating Zelda there wasn’t a whole lot to get excited about. Fortunately, that’s changed over the past few months (Metroid, Guitar Hero) and there’s a lot to look forward to (Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart, Smash Bros.).

One game that’s pretty much guaranteed to be a huge sales failure is Zack and Wiki. Cursed with unrecognizable characters and cheesy cover art, the game has been well-received by reviewers, who are excited about its challenging puzzle-oriented gameplay and great use of the controller. I’ve decided to pick up a copy of the game in support of Capcom because it’s a shame that creativity is not generally rewarded by the gaming public. I’m looking forward to playing it over the next few months.

Way back in April, I received Super Paper Mario as a gift. A part of the Paper Mario series, it depicts the world and characters inside it using 2D paper cut-outs. Paper Mario and Paper Mario 2 were RPGs with some platforming elements; Super Paper Mario is a platformer with some RPG elements. Over the past few months I’ve been playing through it, one or two hours at a time, and I finally finished it last night. It has a lot of charm and some cute ideas, but the lack of challenge made it a lot less enjoyable and satisfying to me.

+ Good gameplay ideas. You can rotate the normal side-scrolling view to get a side view of certain objects, reveal new paths to explore, and dodge enemy attacks.
+ Play as Bowser. He’s the funniest character to join your party, and he also breathes fire.
- Weak use of the controls While I did like the fact that the Wii remote is held like an old-school NES controller, it’s obvious that this was a GameCube title ported over to the Wii.
- Too easy. I can’t recommend this game to anyone who is reasonably good at video games because it just wasn’t hard enough. For much of the game I felt like I was just going through the motions to finish it rather than taking satisfaction in playing it. There are also some parts of the game that just are really boring and pointless (World 6 in particular). I will say that World 8 is quite good in terms of challenge and using the 3rd dimension, but it doesn’t make the game worth playing through.

Overall, quite disappointing. I’d recommend Paper Mario 2 over it, and won’t be coming back to play through this one again. I’m a bit surprised by the high review scores that the game got.

After a long wait, Planet Puzzle League (Panel de Pon, Tetris Attack, Pokemon Puzzle) is finally out. I picked it up (two copies) about a week ago, and I love it so far. Feels a bit strange to be getting so much enjoyment out of a game I’ve played so many times before.

+ Touch screen control is awesome. No more frantically moving the cursor up and down with the D-pad. Just for kicks I tried playing it with the D-pad this evening and it felt really sluggish.

+ Online play. Would have liked Tetris DS-style rankings, but this is good enough. Will probably be playing with people I know for the most part. When playing against friends you have the option of turning voice chat on.

+ It’s the same core gameplay.There’s a great mixture of well-planned attacks, on-demand chaining, and frantically searching for a single match. I think that the best play mechanic is being able to continue to manipulate the game board as a chain propagates (unlike in Puzzle Fighter, Puyo Pop, Bust a Move, etc.). Powerful special items have been added to make the game a lot more interesting and unpredictable, giving you new ways to screw with your opponents.

Meteos-style skins and music. Very reminiscent of this other DS puzzler. Not sure if I like it since I always use red hearts, green squares, yellow stars, blue triangles, and purple diamonds.

- No avatars. I truly miss the Tetris Attack animals and the Pokemon from previous incarnations of this game, especially the sounds that thye made. I also kind of liked the 1P mode of battling different opponents.

- No easy way to refer to the game.“Tetris Attack” and “Pokemon Puzzle” were good names. “Planet Puzzle League” is not, and “PPL” is confusing to people.

When I saw Grant over the holidays, he lent me Excite Truck. This weekend I finally had a chance to sit down and play it. I fired it up while I was waiting for dinner to cook and ended up spending about 3 1/2 hours beating all of the challenges of the main game. My thumbs and fingers were sore from holding down the buttons; when turned on its side, the controller is not that ergonomic, especially on the left side.

+ There’s a good sense of speed. As you race through different areas, the scenery flies by. There’s a nice motion blur when you pick up a turbo boost. Ramming into other cars is satisfying. Getting enough air to jump over stuff is awesome.

+ It’s fun to move your arms wildly. Even though it wasn’t necessary, I found myself making exaggerated motions, especially when trying to turbo-jump off of hills. Tilting the controller back keeps in you the air for longer, so I found myself jerking the controller back upon leaping. I found this to be the most fun way to play.

The graphics aren’t great, and the music is annoying.. I didn’t go through the trouble of putting music on my SD card, so I was stuck listening to the blaring background music.

- Mid-air controls are inconsistent. If you manage to land your truck with all four of its wheels on the ground, you get a speed boost. In theory the orientation of the truck is determined by the orientation of the controller, but at times the truck didn’t seem to respond to my mid-air commands. This could have been better integrated into the “trick system,” which weighs in at a whopping 1 trick – you can spin your truck around while it’s in the air, but it’s done by a specific gesture, not by actually rotating the controller. Would have liked to see more freedom and better sensitivity here.

- No multiplayer. 2P Multiplayer is amusing, but not really compelling.

The game is an interesting and fun diversion. Definitely kept me amused for an evening, still deciding whether I want to go back to try to finish the rest of the game.

Oh man. It is real. And I’ve been waiting for it. If it has more than two-way multiplayer, it may replace Mario Kart. I can’t wait for this.

For those of you who won’t know, Tetris Attack/Panel de Pon/Pokemon Puzzle * is my favorite multiplayer puzzle game, despite the fact that my sister can usually beat me at it.

Yesterday I blogged about creating an Exhibit for a list of the 100 best-selling games of 2006. Exhibit is great for looking at how data items fall into categories, but it’s not as good for visualizing quantities. IBM’s own Many Eyes provides several very nice visualization tools (Swivel allows data upload and visualization as well, but I am not that familiar with it, and it looks like someone beat me to it).

I uploaded my text data and created a few quick visualizations.
Review score vs. sales. As people have already remarked, a well-reviewed game won’t necessarily sell that well. Alas.
Release month. This is a recreation of one of the charts that appeared in the original Next Generation article. Summer is always kind of quiet and things get more exciting towards the holidays.
Categorization treemap. This is one of my favorite data viewers. Each game is a rectangle. The area is the number of sales. You can drag the labels (next to “Treemap organization”) in order to redraw the treemap. Drag “publisher” all the way to the left to see why EA cranks out annual releases of their sports titles. Drag “genre” over to see the portion of sales that are sports titles or games based on licenses. Dragging “systems” over doesn’t give you a great view of the data because the original data wasn’t all that clean and Many Eyes doesn’t seem to handle multi-value properties. I’m not sure why it’s showing a quote about the game by default instead of the title.

My other favorite data viewer (that I was not able to use) is the Stacked Graph viewer, made popular by the Baby Name Voyager.

One last note: I wasn’t allowed to edit the visualizations after I created them, so keep that in mind as you think of titles and tags for them.