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Available now for the Nintendo 3DS.
Coming to the Nintendo 3DS on October 28, 2012.
Cramming every idea into one game does not make it the greatest game.
Dr. Lautrec, a renowned Parisian puzzle-solver, is thrust into the center of a giant mystery that promises to tax your noggin as you seek the rightful heir to the French throne. At least that’s the way the game starts out. As you work to recover enchanted treasures guarded by cops and secretive knights, you end up doing lots of other things that have nothing to do with solving puzzles. Each segment of the game drags in another popular game component and tries to create the perfect combo-game that will appeal to everyone. Problem is, no single piece of Dr. Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights is particularly enjoyable, so the end product feels like a mix of bland, sequential minigames with a repetitive structure.
And I thought the other games in the series were short!
After the abduction of the Statue of Liberty and Big Ben, as well as the subsequent arrests of two V.I.L.E. criminals, you'd think the V.I.L.E. crew would lay low for a while. Instead, they've gotten more ambitious than ever, stealing the St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow as well as the pyramids straight out of Egypt. With the most linear quest yet, The Case of the Crumbling Cathedral is the shortest of the three episodes currently available on the Wii Shop Channel. While it's home to the best puzzles yet, it's over so quickly that it's hard to pay it any respect at all.
This time Big Ben is missing.
The Big Ben Burglary is the second case in the ongoing episodic production of Carmen Sandiego Adventures in Math. As such, it features the same Professor Layton inspired gameplay from the The Lady Liberty Larceny, with the exception that the puzzles are more rooted in mathematics than general puzzle solving. This makes for a quest that's a bit duller than the first, in addition to being even briefer.
Do it Rockapella!
Funny enough, I never realized that Carmen Sandiego began as a computer game series, only later hitting TV screens with Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?. As such, Carmen Sandiego Adventures in Math: The Lady Liberty Larceny is more a return to form than a modern adaptation of a childhood classic. Thankfully, the developers have applied some modern game design to the over 20 year old franchise, taking cues from the Professor Layton series. While on the short side, this adventure in math will provide some reasonably challenging math-based puzzles for the proper age group as well as a cursory glance at some world geography.
The first week of the second crew of the PixlTalk podcast debuts, complete with Vita whining and a hodgepodge of topics to conclude the show.
As hinted at a couple episodes ago, PixlTalk is going weekly once again. Rather than hearing the same crew every week, each crew will occupy alternating weekly time slots and tonight's episode is the first from the second crew. While Julian will ultimately take over the hosting duties, for this week previous podcast regulars Nick, Chessa, and Jason help break him into his new podcasting role.
