Masem’s Gaming Blog

LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures is another LEGO-based game from Traveler’s Tales, who have previously done both LEGO Star Wars games.  While there are several elements that are reused, and much of the general gameplay hasn’t changed much, they have refocused the general approach on the adventure genre and solving puzzles to progress in the game, making it feel pretty fresh and showing that the series has more legs with other popular franchises.  The game is generally on the easy side and is a bit short, but it is entertaining throughout.

Review Helpfulness: (3 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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Sam and Max Season Two is a continuation of the episodic series from Telltale Games with assistance from GameTap, bringing the misadventures of the detective canine and his hyperkinetic rabbity-thing partner as they work their way through five new cases.  While the series continues to deliver the humor and intelligent puzzle solving that Season One had, there’s not the same feel of overall connectiveness that was in the first game, and the three-act approach to each episode does start to get a bit tedious.

Review Helpfulness: (1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a mix of a puzzle and adventure game from Level-5 and published by Nintendo for the DS.  The game is basically 120 brain teasers of various difficulty, wrapped in a well-presented story that helps to encourage progression through the game. Though there are a few small problems with the game and it lacks some replay value, it is definitely a nice title that can appeal to a wide range of gamers.

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Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is the fourth game in the laywering adventure game series by Capcom, and the first game in the series specifically developed for the Nintendo DS, such that it incorporates DS-unique features in part of the investigation and trial phases that were introduced in the DS remake of the first game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. The game definitely is a step up from the previous entries; the DS graphics are much more vivid, the added investigation methods work well, and the cases are much tighter and make more sense, though to some extent, this makes the game somewhat easier. However, it is still a good play and requires only minimal familiarity with the previous works to appreciate.

Review helpfulness: (1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law is High Voltage Software’s and Capcom’s take at taking the natural extension of the Ace Attorney games into the popular Adult Swim cartoon as to make a humorous adventure-type video game. Unfortunately, the game may capture the same game mechanics as the Ace Attorney series, but the integration of the animation against the typical adventure gameplay makes for an extremely awkward and extremely short title.

I will note I played this on the PSP, but I expect that there’s little difference in the PS2 and Wii versions from what I’ve read.

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While Naughty Dog’s more recent Jak and Daxter series was generally met with good reviews, the last few games in Naughty Dog’s series have been rather lackluster. While certainly I’d love to see PS3 version of the franchise, it is understood that, just like Insomniac Games before them, Naughty Dog has attempted to bring new IP to the PS3 in the form of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Naughty Dog did not miss with this one: the game is a strong contender for being one of the top PS3 games, doing an excellent job of mixing strong gameplay elements among plot development to give one of the more entertaining titles I’ve played this year.

Review Helpfulness: (3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure, developed by Capcom, is hopefully what is the first of many more adventure/puzzle games for the Wii console. The game combines situational puzzles with the use of the Wii Remote nicely, albeit that it is possible to run into a situation where you have to restart a puzzle completely from the start and can be a major source of annoyance in the game. Regardless, the rest of the gameplay is pretty well done and provides a nice framework for followup games to work from.

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Consider this as Squenix’s first venture in the Pokemon-type RPG.  Basically, you go around, collecting monsters to fight together monsters in order to get them into your party.  While there’s less about competing against other “scouts” (aka trainers), and much more in terms of visible random encounters that you see.   Where it is better than Pokemon is that it is much easier to work on convincing a monster to join you: you “scout” it and then let your monster party do one round of attacks to accumulate a percent of a chance to turn the monster to your side.  A weak part will only gain a few percent while a powerful one can get close to 100%.  No more carefully waiting until you’ve poked the monster enough to weaken it to capture.  The other aspect I’ve yet to get to is that one can then synthesize monsters together to make stronger ones — my monsters are too low level to do this, but it seems to have standard aspect of the DQ games that make them interesting to experiment with.

Unfortunately, the game is done in 3D mimicking DQ8 in art style and approach.  While it may look ok, the 3d movement is just too klunky to really work well - I’d much rather have seen them go all 2D sprites like in Rocket Slime, or a fixed top-down 3D angle like Pokemon Diamond/Pearl.

For purposes of last season, I will hold off on a full review until the entire season is released; particularly since most of the general presentation elements are the same and will carry over.

So far, the second “season” of Sam and Max is looking pretty good. “Ice Station Santa” continues where the first season left off (and while its not required to have played through Season 1, you will miss a lot of the characters and setup if you don’t), this time having the duo facing against an evil-turned Santa. The game still has the same usual gameplay structure: in this case, an intro, two “acts” (a singular puzzle that requires solving several other puzzles before continuing), and an ending puzzle, but it works for the material. The puzzles themselves are not too hard, but nothing too sinister either, though some of the puzzles require multiple traversing of the the game’s sets to collect all the items as needed. The gaming introduces a hint system option that you can adjust, from having absolutely no hints to being close to hand-held through the game, which can be a nice option if you’re more interested in the clever writing and situations than the puzzles themselves. Characters include all the favorites from the last series and a few new ones that are bound to make reappearances in future episodes.

Probably the only other most notable change to date is the addition of widescreen support which is really nice.

Zack and Wiki feels like a mix of point-and-click adventures with the minigame concept of WarioWare using the Wii remote, and so far seems pretty good.  Generally, you point where Zack, a pirate wannabe, goes or investigates on the level, picking up objects or other actions.  If a monster appears, you can cause Zack’s partner Wiki (a strange flying monkey-like thing) to transform into a bell to cause the monster to transfer into a usable object.  With this objects or other pieces around, you then need to figure out how to avoid traps or cross chasms or the like; using this objects requires to mimic the action , sawing a tree is done by holding the remote horizontally and moving in and out of the screen repeatedly.  Each stage is rather short (so far) but can be repeated to improve you score on it…  what this does, I don’t know yet.

It looks pretty good, even if it mimics some of the Zelda animations (such as when Zack pulls an item from a chest).  However, I’ve only gotten a chance to play a few levels so far to get a better sense for how big this game is.