With Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, Nintendo hit on a near perfect formula for making Mario RPGs. Using the A button for Mario and B for Luigi in both the platforming and in the timing based battle system was brilliant. The inventive gameplay would have been enough to carry things, but that game also featured a charming story that made the most of the Mario Universe. The first game received accolades for its story, especially the new villain Fawful, who spouts inspired gibberish as he hassles the Mario brothers throughout the Beanbean Kingdom.

The seeds of the series’ downfall lie in that lauded story. Future games, no longer hampered by the relatively small cartridge space of the GBA, expanded on that charming dialogue, much to the games detriment. The first sequel, Partners in Time, was widely dismissed as an overly talky slog. Bowser’s Inside Story seemed to regain the series luster, but even that game was all kinds of too chatty. It was easier to accept, since much of that chattiness was from the highly amusing Bowser and the returning Fawful. The 3DS entry in the series, Dream Team, is even chattier than the others. It makes playing an outright chore. It is not that the dialogue is bad or that the story isn’t amusing, it is just that there is so much of it. The entire game slows to a crawl anytime you have to talk to anybody.

Also, the characters just don’t have the charm of the first and third games. Bowser is still great, but he doesn’t play that big a role in this game. There is no Fawful and the villainous replacements lack anything like his charm. The new allies similarly fall flat. There are quite a few humorous moments, but a lot of it is just dull. The worst part is, all the excess dialogue is completely unneeded. The biggest part of the humor comes from the excellent animation. Mario and Luigi more with charming grace and since neither of them talk, they do all of their conversing with delightful pantomime. Seeing Luigi tap his head as he tries to think never stops being amusing. Everything else looks similarly great.

Also, the gameplay is largely excellent. Much of it is the same thing that the series has been peddling since the first game. There is still plenty of rudimentary platforming where you have to control both brothers in tandem. It is still fun. The battles are all about timing and using the right attacks; how enjoyable it is largely dependent on how good the player is at avoiding enemy attacks. Then there are the dream segments. Luigi falls asleep and Mario jumps into his head and into the dream world. There, the dream version of Luigi is able to merge with things in the background and through the touch screen affect the world. The game gets to stretch its legs and largely puts the touch screen to good use. There are some uses of 3DS functionality that just don’t work, though, mostly involving using the tilt functions. Tilting the screen around while you play seems like a good idea, but it rarely works out. Dream Team has a lot more hits than misses, making for what should be a fun experience.

It all comes back to the fact that any enjoyment there is to be had in the game is almost completely destroyed by the incessant, pace breaking jabbering. It never lets up and it is never interesting. So many times the game has a cutscene where the characters joke and meander through a plot point for way too long only to stop the player immediately after it ends to recap it all one more time. It is tiresome. It you can get past that, or are able to appreciate the charm through the excess there is a lot to like about this game. I could not.

I love Mario games. Not every game in the expansive series is great, especially if you include the wide variety of sport and party games that bear the portly plumbers name, but the main series is nearly uniformly excellent. Even Mario platformers come in an array of flavors, though. There are the 2D New Super Mario games, games that might not be doing a lot to push the genre forward but are all tightly designed. The 3D Mario games, like Galaxy or 3D World provide another experience, ones that are frequently groundbreaking. Getting a little further afield there are Donkey Kong games, like the recent excellent Donkey Kong Country games from Retro Studios which an experience quite different from that of Mario. Mario’s devious doppelganger Wario also has a series of platformers that tend to be experimental and inventive. Lastly are the Yoshi’s Island games.

There are four or five games in the Yoshi Island family, depending on how you count them, spread across five systems. I’ve played bits of most them I am finally ready to admit that I just don’t like these games. They are a slower brand of Mario game, slower paced with an emphasis on puzzles and exploration. Those are things I generally enjoy, but in Yoshi’s Island I find is tedious. I thought the problem might just be with the GBA port of the original Yoshi’s Island after I gave up two worlds in. Having cleared New Yoshi’s Island on the 3DS it is now clear that I just don’t like this series.

There is nothing really wrong with Yoshi’s New Island; it is a fine game. The graphics look bad in stills, but they look pretty good in motion. The level design is rarely spectacular but it is mostly very good. The mechanics, except for some ill-considered tilt based minigames, a solid as well. I just didn’t enjoy playing it at all. Feeling compelled to snatch every coin because it could be a Red Coin was annoying. Dealing with both aiming eggs and keeping the annoying baby Mario on Yoshi’s back was just not fun for me. Both of those seemed to take away from the hopping and bopping that is central to the genre. Still, Yoshi controls well and the bosses, while easy, are impressive and usually fun.

It is just kind of odd to get to the end of a game like that and know that you had almost no fun with it. It isn’t a good game in genre I don’t like, like an FPS. I know there are plenty of good games in that genre but I have no desire to play them. When I do, I don’t really expect to have much fun. (which is why I play them very rarely) The Yoshi’s Island games, though, are pretty much exactly the sort of games that I enjoy. Everything about them is right up my alley but still they are just not for me. They are also not bad games. I’ve disliked plenty of bad platformers (though trying to think of a recent one is proving more difficult than I expected) and this is not one of them. It is simply a matter of a game just not clicking with me.

Luckily, I didn’t spend any money on it. It was the reward I chose for my final Club Nintendo Platinum Reward. I’m not sad I took it, though I still wish someone would have bought a DKC Tropical Freeze code off of me and I could have gotten Hyrule Warriors, but it just didn’t work out. Now I’m left wondering if I want to risk buying Yoshi’s Woolly World. It seems to pull in most of these Yoshi’s Island mechanics, minus the crying baby, but it also pairs it with that outstanding knitted look. I want it, unless it turns out like Yoshi’s New Island, in which case I don’t want it.

I beat a lot of games in April; most of them download titles on my 3DS. Many of those titles were free games I got from Club Nintendo. For some reason, I thought it necessary to try and beat all the unbeaten download games I had. I got pretty close. I have cut it down to just 6 titles, two of which are retail games that I got for free. I also played a lot of Mass Effect. Next month will probably see fewer games on the list, since I am about out of 3DS games.

Beaten

Mass Effect 2 – wrote about it here.

Boxboy –

Hal Laboratories took a very simple idea and explored it in delicious depth. It plays out a lot like an indie title, and does it with more skill than just about any of those indie creators. You play as a box that can make more boxes. The game forces the player to do all sorts of things with that simple idea. Just play it, it is great.

Affordable Space Adventures – wrote about it here.

Attack of the Friday Monsters – wrote about it here.

3D Classics Kirby’s Adventure – I’ve played this a ton, on the NES and on Virtual Console. Kirby’s Adventure is one of the greatest NES games. This 3D version is still really great. It’s Kirby’s Adventure; I don’t know what else to say about it.

3D Classics Kid Icarus – This is an NES game that I haven’t really spent much time with. I have played it enough to know that the small tweaks in this version turn something downright cruel into something actually fun and playable. Kid Icarus has a great look and world, but it frontloads the difficulty horribly. It is harder to get through the first two stages than to beat the rest of them combined. Once you get past that initial hump, though, it is a lot of fun. It does make me years for a Super Kid Icarus that never happened.

Mighty Gunvolt – this was a fun little freebie. It is a combination of Comcept upcoming Mighty #9 and IntiCreates Azure Striker Gunvolt. As a backer of MN9, I got it for free. It is neat, a handful of NES like stages and with a trio of playable characters. Unfortunately, MN9’s Beck is easily the least fun to play as. This isn’t anything substantive, but it was fun.

Wizards and Warriors – While trying to figure out how to get streaming going, I ended playing through all of this game. It is good. Not great, but good. The jumps are floaty, the enemies can be unfair and some of the power ups are worse than useless. Still, it is plenty fun and infinite continues makes it one of the easier NES games to beat.

Siesta Fiesta –

This is a side-scrolling Breakout game. It is a very interesting idea, bouncing the ball as the level moves along. It ends up playing something like a puzzle platformer, balancing how to hit the ball with which power ups and special blocks to hit. It is addictive, though I am terrible at it.

HarmoKnight – The makers of Pokemon got to try something new here. Their opportunities outside of their landmark series have mostly been very good. Drill Dozer was one of the best original games on the GBA. HarmoKnight is not quite as good as that, but it is still a charming game. It is a rhythm platformer, a combination that works very well. At least, it does in except for the boss battles. Those are not fun, especially because the timing doesn’t feel quite right. It also doesn’t get quite as much use out of its side characters as it could, since they have somewhat interesting differences from protagonist Tempo’s playstyle. Still, it is a solid game.

Broken Age – More than a year after the first half, the concluding Act of Double Fine’s Kickstarted Adventure finally hit. I have some minor quibbles with it. The story doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the first half. It felt like maybe there was something profound coming, but there isn’t. Still, the story is quite enjoyable. Some of the puzzles are a little unfair, forcing the player to have knowledge from the other half that the character would not. Still, I greatly enjoyed it. It is filled to the brim with wit and charm. It is one of the few times I’ve played an adventure game that never made me feel like I was doing something wrong. The puzzles could still be difficult even though the reasoning behind them is perfectly clear. Really, it is everything I wanted out of it.

Ongoing

Zombie Panic in Wonderland – It was on sale. I didn’t realize that this was mostly the same game as I got for my Wii years ago. It is still a fun little time waster. Harder than is necessary, to sure, but it is some good old fashioned arcade shooting. There is plenty to unlock, but I think I’m about done with it.

Pokemon Shuffle – Nintendo trying out free to play junk. I got to about stage 80 and decided I’d had enough. I had some fun with it and didn’t spend any money, so I can’t complain, but I don’t feel the need to spend any more time with it.

Stealth Inc 2 – I had forgotten I’d purchased this. I was about halfway through when I put it down and after beating Affordable Space Adventures decided to give it another go. I’d call it good, not great, but I’ve enjoyed my time with it. Hopefully I finish it up before too long. The hubworld metroidvania stuff isn’t as tight as I’d hoped it would be, but the levels are pretty great pieces of puzzle platforming.

Super Mario 64 –

It only cost me $2 to upgrade this for my WiiU and I couldn’t help but try it out. Mario 64 is still a thoroughly excellent game. I’m not sure I’ll stick it out until the end, but it is a blast to play even after nearly 20 years.

Fluidity Spin Cycle – This started out so great, a puzzle platformer with the player controlling a puddle of water. Soon, though, each stage started to feel like a slog. Controlling a puddle of water by tilting your 3DS can get very frustrating. I will likely push myself through it, but I went from loving the game in the first world to being barley able to stand it by the end of the second. Maybe it will rebound before the end.

Mass Effect 3 – I’ve started, but I am not blazing through it like I did with ME2. My biggest early complaint is that missions are much longer. ME2’s missions were generally pretty brief. The game kept moving and kept things interesting. ME3’s missions have all felt really long so far. Also, the DLC for this game is ridiculous. If I just want storyline DLC, it would cost me about $50, half again as much as I paid for the while trilogy of games. It is ridiculous.

Etrian Mystery Dungeon – This is a surprisingly effective combination of two very different kinds of dungeon crawlers. It is set up like an Etrian Odyssey, with the player building a party of different classes, but the dungeons play out like the Mystery Dungeon series. One is based on permanence, the other on impermanence, but they manage to combine quite well. I hope to have a full write up ready soon, just after I finish the game.

Smash Bros – I got sidetracked from this faster than I expected, likely thanks to a spotty internet connection of wearing myself out with the 3DS version. Still, the addition of Mewtwo to the roster of fighters was all the incentive I needed to get back to it. I like Mewtwo as much as I did in Melee, which is very little, but still I am glad to have him back. More fighters are always welcome. This game is still great, as well. I am eager to see who else makes the DLC cut.

Mario Kart 8 – More DLC came out. I might complain about DLC is certain games, like ME3, but Nintendo has done it right, so far. The DLC for Mario Kart 8 has added half again as much game as it started with and it wasn’t exactly lacking in content to begin with. 8 new tracks, as well as a trio of new racers and a handful of karts and parts is pretty big haul for about 8 dollars. The Animal Crossing stuff fits right in with the Mario game, which was not as true for Link, as welcome as his addition was. I wouldn’t mind seeing Mario Kart becoming full Smash Kart, though I would hate to lose some of the lesser Mario gang.

Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball – This is another of Nintendo’s free to play experiments. I have to say I quite like it. It is certainly a very Nintendo game. It is a collection of baseball themed mini-games all tied around a down on his luck ex-player and his run down shop. You can get demos of most of his games, but in order to get the whole thing you have to buy them from him, using real money. The point of the game is haggling the price down as low as possible, by offering him items you find playing the games to help solve his personal problems, using coupons and simple wearing him down. I only bought two of the games and I liked them, but I don’t really want to spend much more money on this. Still, it is very interesting and a decent chunk of game that should only cost the player about $15. I can’t tell if the real life haggling is brilliant or diabolical.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate – still plugging away.

Upcoming

Paper Mario – New to WiiU virtual console, this time I play to actually finish this game. I’ve started it several times, but never made it more than halfway. I like it a lot, but somehow I get distracted.

Knights of the Old Republic – I think this will be June’s Bioware game, though it could still change. I will finish ME3 before too long and want to get right on to the next game.

Yoshi’s New Island – My Club Nintendo Platinum reward, since I couldn’t get anyone to buy a code for the truly excellent Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze. I don’t think I’m as big a fan of Yoshi’s Island as most people, but it still looks to be pretty good.

Attack of the Friday Monsters is a game about what it is like to be a kid. Specifically, it is about being a kid in Japan in the 70’s, but while the some of the context is strictly Japanese, the underlying feel rings true for anyone who remembers being 10 years old. It is a sadly unique experience. It is a narrative driven game that is completely free of violence, at least in regards to the player. Attack of the Friday Monsters shows the intermingling of reality and fantasy that happens in the imaginative mind of a child. It is the closest a game has come to replicating watching a Studio Ghibli movie.

It is a simple game. The player mostly just walks around town, talking to people and picking up glowing rocks. Occasionally, you play a rock/paper/scissors card game with other kids. There really isn’t more to it than that. IT might seem lacking, but the context and the adventure is absolutely worth the three hour adventure. It is a tiny slice of life game and it does all it needs to.

I don’t want to give it all away, because everyone should really play this game, but you play a Sohta, the new kid in town. The town he just moved to also happens to be where they film a TV show about giant monsters. The line between the truth and Sohta’s fantasies about monsters and aliens are constantly blurred. At the start of the game, Sota is given a fairly simple task. His parents run the cleaners and he is tasked with delivering some clean uniforms to the bakery. Like a small child, he is quickly distracted. He runs into some other local kids, who induct him into their gang; he meets the director of monster TV and a mystery man named Frank, who may or may not be real and may or may not be an alien.

That is how the game goes, with 26 episodes to complete. Sohta talks to people, learning more about their problems and his unique interpretation of the world. While the completely accepting Sohta, and his friends, fully believe in the monsters that come out every Friday, the adults of the town tend to indulge them in this fantasy. They warn kids to come home early, before the monsters come out. It is just the sort of lie that parents tell young kids, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

There is just something perfect about Attack of the Friday Monsters. It feels authentic, filled with the mischievousness and wonder of youth; always sweet but never saccharine. For a game that last less than 3 hours, it manages to have more weight than the vast majority of supposedly important games. It also does it all with no violence, that most overused crutch of video games. It is a charming and heartwarming examination of childhood. I actually first beat it right after it came out, but this is the kind of game I can see myself beating once every year or so. While the details are nothing like what I my childhood was actually like, it so perfectly captures the feelings of running around with my brothers on summer afternoons as a child. There is sadly nothing else quite like Attack of the Friday Monsters.

The jump in quality from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 is something remarkable. The original Mass Effect, while ambitious and largely satisfying, never played right. It looked like a shooter, but the mechanics underneath were still very much RPG. That was compounded by how poorly a lot of the encounters were designed. The story and world were all great, but the game they were in was largely a tedious bore. Mass Effect 2 fixes pretty much all the problems with the first game. ME1 was an RPG dressed like a shooter, ME2 is a shooter with a few RPG trappings. It also builds rather terrifically off the world building of the first game, thought its main plot is easily the simplest of the Bioware game’s I’ve played so far. That is forgivable thanks to the games unique and compelling structure. Mass Effect 2 is the Dirty Dozen in space. This time Shepard is tasked with assembling a team of talented mercenaries, criminals and oddballs to complete a dangerous mission. It is just a terrific structure to build a game around and Mass Effect 2 takes full advantage of it.

I am not that much of a shooter fan. I just tend not to enjoy them. Mass Effect 2 didn’t do a whole lot to change my mind about the genre, but it is still clear how tightly designed it is. Some of it gets repetitive, always using the same skills to deal with certain enemies, but for the most part is tense and inventive. While the shooting is just better, the biggest improvement comes from how missions work. The story missions in ME1 were fine, but there were only a handful of them. There are something more like 25 in ME2, though not all of them are required. Each one is quite a bit shorter, though. That shortness means that the missions don’t give the same sense of place that those did, where each gave the player a city or planet to explore. However, the events in them are more varied. In one you are breaking a character out of a prison space station, in the next you fight through a plague infested slum and after that you end up fighting a war with three different mercenary groups. Sticking with the game’s overall movie reminiscent theme, they all stick pretty solidly to genre movie subjects. It works really well.

The story is very simple. Shepard is apparently killed by an attack from an unknown ship, but she is revived by Cerberus, the group responsible for some reprehensible crap you found out if you wasted your time with the sidequests from the first game. They want her to help them deal with an alien race called the Collectors, who have been kidnapping entire human colonies. First she must prove that the Collectors are behind these disappearances, and then she has to follow them through the Omega 4 relay, a special relay that no ship has ever returned from, and stop them. This is not really spoiler stuff; it is all outlined within the first couple of hours of the game. Along the way she has to build a team capable of taking out the Collectors. That is where the game gets good. Each of Shepard’s 11 possible allies, making for the dozen when you add in here, have two missions associated with them. First is the recruitment mission, where Shepard has to do whatever possible to convince her target to join up. Later there is a second quest that earns the character’s loyalty. The player doesn’t have to recruit everybody and doesn’t have to any of the loyalty missions, but doing so changes the outcome of the final mission.

That means more than two thirds of the game is devoted to missions specific to individual members of Shepard’s crew. It really lets the player get to know the crew. Collectively, the characters who join up in Mass Effect 2 are some of the best I’ve encountered in a game. Sure, not all of them are likely to strike the player as interesting, but they cover such a wide variety of personalities that it is hard to imagine not finding at least a couple to the players liking. The two Cerberus operatives that join up to start are as close to vanilla as they get. Jacob can be bland, but Miranda has a very intriguing backstory and complicated loyalties. Tali and Garrus, two of the best characters from the first the game, return in this one. I loved Mordin, the scientist whose expertise and dubious history belies his oddly moral nature. He works in a field that requires him to make terrible choices, but he tries to minimize harm in making them. Also, he sings. The rest have their moments, except Jack, I really didn’t have a use for her.

You build this team as you get closer to the Collectors, and whether or not you recruit who you need and whether or not you build their loyalty changes how that final suicide mission plays out. There is no penalty for just doing all the possible missions, as long as they are done before the one that triggers the end game, so building that team is largely up to how much work the player wants to put into it. It all comes together for that supposed suicide mission, in which you must choose characters for various roles. Who to put where is largely obvious, but it can still be tricky. It is also a perfect culmination of the rest of the game. It has all of the player’s choices coming together for the big ending. Unlike many games that fall apart in the less tested back act, Mass Effect 2 finishes strong.

As far as gameplay goes, Mass Effect 2 seems like a pretty big shift from Bioware’s usual game. It follows an evolution from Knights of the Old Republic to Mass Effect to this, but it still seems odd to play a Bioware game that is not primarily an RPG. On the story telling side of things, it is firmly in Bioware’s style, though the loyalty thing is new. It is also really effective. Mass Effect was an interesting rough draft; Mass Effect 2 is a masterpiece built off of that structure. Despite still having some technical flaws (really, I would have spent more time with the crew if the game didn’t have 30 second loading times to move between decks) Mass Effect 2 is one of the best games I’ve played on my PS3.

The WiiU is a great system. I’m not trying to convince myself of some sort of turn around for sales or its long term viability, but merely stating a fact. It has nearly a dozen must play exclusive games. Most of them are from Nintendo themselves, but it still has a fat stack of great games. More than you can say about the PS4 or Xbox1 at this point. The tablet controller is simultaneously an albatross around Nintendo’s neck and the systems biggest selling point. Most games go the easy route with it, merely using it for off screen play or to display an inventory. Off screen play is amazing. It is the reason that Assassin’s Creed 3 is the only game in that series that I’ve completed. It makes it so easy to play without monopolizing the TV. Still, it is not an exciting use for that second screen. No one other than Nintendo has really leveraged that screen into something vital, and even they haven’t done that great a job of it. The recently released Affordable Space Adventures is the best use of tablet yet, a game that could only be possible on the WiiU.

Affordable Space Adventures is not an especially complex game. You play as a tiny space ship, deployed from a shady space tourism company to explore a supposedly safe alien world. Of course, the drop ship crashes and the player must fly their ship to one of the SOS pods set up around the world. It plays out in linear, puzzled based levels. As you go along, more of the ship’s damaged systems come back online and they must be used effectively to avoid being noticed by the hazards on the planet, usually leftover drones from a crashed alien ship.

The ship actually has a nice array of abilities. It has a powerful, but loud gas engine, a quieter electric one, a scanner and searchlight, and several types of landing gear. It is great to deploy them in interesting ways to get through the levels. Sometimes you have to get up to speed, kill the motor and drop the sled shaped landing gear to slide by unnoticed. What is great is that the first half of the game slowly builds up the players powers and then the second half slowly takes them away again. The ship doesn’t make it through the obstacles unscathed, and it systems start to malfunction. It makes for a really great puzzle platformer, all couched in the increasingly disturbing ads for UExplore, the shady company that sent you out there. The ending might be one of the darkest things I’ve encountered is such a charming game.

Affordable Space Adventures gets the most out of the WiiU’s tablet controller. While the sticks control the light and ship, but managing the various motors and the like is all done on the touch screen. Playing the game single player means you have to control all three parts simultaneously, making it a delicate juggling act of balancing everything. It uses the entirety of the tablet to keep the ship moving and out of trouble. Flicking switches on the small screen while darting the ship in and out of trouble is just so satisfying. It does a terrific job of making the player really feel like they are piloting a small spacecraft. The multiplayer is equally great. Up to three players can play at the same time, each controlling one part of the ship. One will be the pilot, moving the ship around, another the engineer, managing the engines and the last the science officer, manning the scanner and searchlight. It is frustrating, of course, but it is also a wonderful experience in forced teamwork.

No game has made the tablet more central to the experience than Affordable Space Adventures. It is all about doing things on the bottom screen while watching the top screen. It is also just a really well made game. It shows how great an experience is possible with the WiiU tablet, even if few are willing to try to find ways to make it work. Really, off screen play is enough to justify the tablet controller in my mind, but games like this are as beautiful as they are rare.

I spent a lot of time with only a few games this month. I beat some small titles, Mario vs Dk, Tengami and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, but most of my time was spent plugging away at Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate and Mass Effect, with some leftover time spent with Tales of Graces f. In all, it was a good month, though I didn’t end up liking those latter two as much as I had hoped to.

Ongoing

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate – wrote about it here. Yeah, I am still playing this. I haven’t put anything else in my 3DS for more than a month. I am really close to finishing up the single player quest and I am about halfway through the multiplayer High Rank ones. I’ll get sidetracked by Etrian Mystery Dungeon, but I’m going to keep plugging away at this. It is so great.

Tales of Graces f – wrote about it here. I am still picking away at this. I’m not sure I am going to finish it, but I haven’t yet given up on it.

Yakuza 4 – I made some progress in this. I want to savor it, but I think I am taking it a little too slow. I should have it finished before too much longer, and hopefully I can find something to say about it, other than saying it is great.

Persona 2: Eternal Punishment – Still keeping up my glacial pace through this game. I like it, but it just keeps getting put aside for things that are a little more immediate.

Beaten

Mario vs Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars –

This is a pretty great little game from Nintendo. It uses the pretty standard MvDK formula here, which once you get past the disappointment that the series is not going to be a continuation of DK94 is pretty swell, but with an added focus on creating and sharing stages. I think some of it is a dry run for Mario Maker later in the year, with Nintendo testing the waters of created contend. I want to really get into creating stages with this, but I’m not very good at it. I will make some time for the foreseeable future to keeping toying around with this. Also, it is Nintendo testing the waters with cross buy, though I have yet to claim my 3DS copy because that would mean turning off Monster Hunter.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis – I don’t think I’ll ever really like point and click adventure games, but I get just enough enjoyment out of them that I keep going back to the well. This game certainly deserves its reputation as one of the greats of the genre; it does a better job of getting what makes Indy work than any other game I’ve played with him in it. It really is a fine example of the genre; I just don’t seem able to fully enjoy them.

Mass Effect – wrote about it here. I never really grew to like playing this game, though I did like tooling around in the MAKO and goofing off. Also, the story is actually pretty good. The flow of the fights was just off throughout, though.

Tengami – This is another kind of point and click adventure, for the most part. It has a nice pop-up book art style and some generally pretty good puzzles. I liked it, but I don’t have much to say about it. It is good.

Upcoming

Mass Effect 2 – This or Dragon Age Origins or Knights of the Old Republic. I wasn’t really intending to play through the whole Bioware catalogue this year, but I’ve sort of stumbled into doing it so I am going to keep doing it.

Etrian Mystery Dungeon – I was on the fence about this, because I am not a particularly big fan of Mystery Dungeon games, but the more I saw of it, the more it looks like it took the things I don’t like about roguelikes and replaced them with stuff from the Etrian Odyssey style dungeon crawlers.

Pillars of Eternity – My computer can’t quite run this, but I might be able to borrow one to try to give it a go. I was really looking forward to this, so I can work something out. It is sure to be another time sink that I am more than happy to sink my time into.

 

 

I thought that in my haphazard play through of the majority of Bioware’s catalogue of games, the next game up would be Knights of the Old Republic. I’ve started it before, but my computer died and I got distracted by other games pretty quick. However, with my tax return, instead of using to make a big payment on my student loans, I purchased the Mass Effect Trilogy for my PS3. While I was still finishing the game I was playing on my laptop (Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis) and waited for my brother to get me his copy of Dragon Age Origins, I popped the first Mass Effect in my PS3 and gave it a whirl.

All of the Bioware games I’ve played so far, whatever ever warts they may have, are good games. The first Baldur’s Gate doesn’t look so good in its original form these days; the simple bump in resolution from that game to the first was a big change. There are some flaws with both of those games born from adapting D&D to video game form. Dragon Age 2 is a neat concept trapped in a much too small world. Still, those three games, as well as Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights, are still good RPGs. They are both mechanically and narratively interesting. Mass Effect, despite doing a lot of great work on the world building and story side, is kind of a terrible game. Or at the very least a game that has aged very poorly over the last 8 or so years.

It looks like a shooter, but is still an RPG. However, it is one that I cannot understand how it works. I’ve tried several strategies and classes, but found nothing to be more effective than anything else. I am sure I do just not understand it, but I am no fool. I’ve played a lot of video games in my life, but I am finding it hard to grasp the mechanics of combat. Not that the game provides much in the way of feedback as to how you are doing.

Well, that is not entirely true; Mass Effect does provide a little feedback. You die, sometimes immediately. I died multiple times in the prologue area. As the game was supposedly teaching me the mechanics, it instead tossed me repeatedly into the meat grinder. It doesn’t help that the deaths have a way of sneaking up on the player. I ran through the majority of quest, rescuing Liara, without sustaining any damage. I finally felt that I was learning how the game worked. I had just rushed a hill with snipers and took them down. Then I hit a little cutscene that lead to an ambush. Before I could so much as duck for cover I was dead, only to find out that the most recent auto-save was at the start of the mission. That wouldn’t bother me too much normally; I died a lot Baldur’s Gate, as well. But in Baldur’s Gate, saving took the press of a button and two seconds. While not onerous, it does take more effort in Mass Effect. It does have an auto save, it pauses the game to do so and does it so rarely that it is all but useless. Still, it should take at most one death to learn that the game relies heavily on “surprise, you’re dead” moments and save more frequently.

That runs up against the game’s other major failing: the loading times. They are frequent. They are long. They are numbing. The constant, lengthy loading times kill any moment the game builds. Adding loading times to the frequent sudden deaths create a game that is full of stops and starts and lots of waiting. It is simply not fun. It is either an RPG where the mechanics are perfectly obscured or a fairly terrible shooter. Neither one is particularly enjoyable.

The thing is, the world the Bioware built for this game is a lot of fun. It is a fine fusion of a lot of popular science fiction ideas. There is a lot of Star Trek in it, with its ships crews and space politics, but there is also Star Wars, with the force-esque biotics and Jedi-like Spectres. While it takes some basic elements from those, it makes its own thing out of them. Mass Effect’s world isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it is interesting and fully realized. It is a world that I am eager to spend more time in. The game is also helped by the fact that much of the game can be completed without fighting. The dialogue and exploration is actually a lot of fun. That is what I want more of. I like it enough to continue with the game and hopefully, Mass Effect 2, true to its reputation, fixes my issues.