PixlBit

      My friend was home on Friday afternoon, so I went over with my 360 to play. I forgot my controller though and so played my 3DS instead.

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask [3DS] $20 Gamestop:

     Rage quit. Puzzles annoy me. No improvisation or multiple ways to solve a problem. No thanks. Funny how I have so much more patience for this kind of game on my own than with friends. When I get together with my gaming bud, all I want to do is smash things. Thinking games just make me scream. On my own though, I enjoy it. Go figure.

Crimson Shroud [3DS eShop] $8:

     A Level-5 game. RPG. Very basic. It's like playing DnD minis with one other person as the DM delivering the story. You have a map on the lower screen and static graphics of your team and the enemy rendered as minatures on the top. There's no grid or movement of pieces though, which is very disappointing. Here and there you will roll dice on the bottom screen which looks really cool. It's about the most physical action you do in the game. The rest is just choosing an attack, skill, or spell to fight enemies and moving from one segment of the map to another.

      There's a story all told in text. There's no voice work in the game. It's an ok story. I keep thinking of Yasumi Matsuno writing DnD fan fic and asking a few of the artists at Level-5 to make some images and a programer to animate some dice and then pitching the idea to Akihiro Hino. I find it hard to get interested in the story, despite some humerous moments, when it's just text. I'm so used to voice work in even the smallest game these days. I also like seeing my characters on a grid and thinking about positioning. Spending most of the game looking at a menu screen clicking on attack options is not too engaging. I'd rather just chuck dice around. They look like gems. Just add a Final Fantasy Tactics grid to this and I'd be very happy. As it is, it's like playing a spread sheet.

    That was Friday. On Saturday, I returned to my friend's house, this time with my controller and started in on some XBLA games I wanted to try.

Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara [XBLA] $15:

     I looked at these two games, Tower of Doom and Shadow of Mystara, once and yearned desperately for them knowing I would never play them. You had to go and buy the original arcade cabinets or pay $100 or more for the Sega Saturn Japanese import, Dungeons & Dragons Collection. A minute into the demo, I bought the game. The graphics and sound were gorgeous!

      The music was interesting. At one part, there's this crazy sort of pipe organ music and it made me think that pipe organ music, ala Phantom of the Opera, is the perfect sort of accompaniment to an action RPG. I'd love to play some as Ren fair knights battle and I laugh meniacally; Phantom of the Joust if you will.

     The game is a 2D side-scrolling beat-em-up like Final Fight or Street Fighter but with branching paths and secret areas. I played most of the way through Tower of Doom before I just got so annoyed at the hit detection and constant back stabs. You have to be at just the right distance from a target to get a hit and you are always being hit from behind while attacking something else, sometimes from off the screen. It drove me nuts. I got a good rhythm up once. I stayed in the middle and turned left and right alternating hits as enemies attacked, but once more than two or three attackers appeared on the screen, that went out the window. I found there's a little delay in your attacks that makes you slower than most of the enemies - another annoying element. There used to be some special moves you could do with the analog sticks in the Final Fight games, but for the life of me, I couldn't get more than a jump attack move out of this game. Luckily there was infinite continues. I want to get my friend a copy of the game so we can play some co-op, but for now I'm staying away. I just want better fighting controls for this, as gorgeous as it is.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger [XBLA] $15:

    It was good to get back to a FPS. It's the first one I've played this year and the controls were perfect.

      This game has learned something from Bastion. The narrator seems to respond to things that you do. In some areas you are given a choice of paths and the narrator responds accordingly. There's also a funny mechanic where, after you've finished a particular area, the narrator tells you that's not how it really happened and the game rewinds to a previous spot and you then take a different path. The game was really entertaining that way.

     There's also collectible cards that gave you dashes of real history. I've been ignoring them for the moment. I find it strange to switch gears when there's a desperate gunfight going on. I refuse to take myself out of the tense situation and comb for secrets; it seems incongruous. I've picked up a few though and the bits of real history were fascinating and really well written. I'll go back when I've finished the game to find all of them. 

     The levels were really detailed and interesting creating lots of things to use as cover. I alternated between shooting a rifle from behind cover to walking out in the open with dual pisols and activating bullet time (you get dual pistols if you level up the right skill. Yes, there's leveling and skill progression in this game). Experience points were gotten from kills, finding secrets and duels. Duels happen here and there. You have to skillfully control the left and right analog sticks to maintain concentration, pull the trigger at the moment your opponent does, and then shoot. I still don't get the speed meter assigned to the left stick. You can dodge with it, but how does it effect the speed meter? I'm not sure. I haven't had much trouble winning these duels though.

     In sum, the game was gorgeous, had an engaging story, innovative level progression and dialog, perfect FPS controls for precision shooting, and dense environments compelling to investigate. I never thought I'd consider a Live Arcade title to be as good an experience as a disc game, but I do now. I'm not sure how the long the game is, probably not very long, but I will be replaying it for complete achievements for sure.