Anyway, like I said, Q Games is known for their PixelJunk brand, a collection of four (so far) inexpensive, downloadable titles for the PS3. Aside from the common PixelJunk name (great use of branding, by the way), these games have nothing in common. The first was a slot car racing game, the second was tower defense, and the third was a stylized platformer. The fourth, and most recent (not to mention my own most recent purchase) was PixelJunk Shooter.

As you can guess from the title, Shooter is, at its core, a shooting game. The player is tasked with rescuing miners and scientists who have been working to uncover resources under the surface of an unexplored planet. As you fly deeper and deeper underground, you encounter new and different obstacles. At first, these obstacles consist mostly of lava pits, which can be quenched by shooting through weak cave walls and finding water sources (getting too close to lava raises the heat level of your ship, which can be cooled by a dunk in some water). Further in, however, you come across ice, explosive gas, and a strange magnetic liquid that is attracted to your ship. The fluid dynamics are modeled in a very realistic fashion, and it’s fun to watch the different materials interact. In addition, you can find various modifications for your ship: to allow it to shoot lava or water, or an “inverter” which allows your ship to enter lava, but water causes it to overheat. These different gameplay ideas inject a bit of puzzling into what would otherwise be a straightforward action game, and elevate it from being merely “good” to “great.”

PixelJunk Shooter’s length is just right. The game consists of three episodes that contain 5-6 stages. Each stage contains about four “sub-stages,” smaller areas where you need to rescue all the survivors in order to proceed to the next. A stage will probably take you about 15 minutes to complete the first time. So, extrapolating, you’ll get about 4 hours of unique gameplay for your $10. Each stage introduces new game concepts, and you barely get used to one you just learned before it’s taken away and you have something entirely new to learn. The upshot is that the game feels very content-dense, yet each game concept is under-used so that you don’t get tired of it. As far as bang for your buck goes, I can wholeheartedly recommend PixelJunk Shooter; the price is just about the same as going to a movie (my local theater charges $9), but it’s twice as long and has much better content than any movie I’ve seen recently.

After playing PixelJunk Shooter (as well as a few other PixelJunk demos), I’m a Q Games convert. When I next have an afternoon or evening to kill, instead of plunking out cash for a movie, I’ll be checking out a different entry into the PixelJunk series.

I knew that the bulk of new content in ODST was in the form of the campaign, and was able to get my friends to agree to play through in co-op mode. The campaign’s story centers around a group of ODSTs, who have been dropped into a war-torn South African city. After losing control of the drop pod, your character wakes up separated from his squad mates, in a city that is swarming with alien baddies. Your task is to try to find out what happened to your friends, and make it out of the city alive.

As your character explores the city, he comes across certain objects which trigger flashbacks that tell the story of his squad. For example, one of the first objects you come across is the helmet of an intelligence officer that dropped with you. The ensuing flashback, played from the point of view of another member of your team, ends with a cutscene showing how the helmet got there. You get closer and closer to your missing friends, and eventually reunite and complete your mission.

ODST doesn’t add a whole lot in terms of game mechanics or weapons. Your character can throw grenades farther, and his default machine gun and sidearm are silenced now, but all the stuff you’ve grown to love about Halo 3 is mostly intact. In fact, that statement right there is a pretty good indicator regarding whether or not you’ll like this sequel. If you want to fight Covenant aliens in a new, more urban environment, and learn a bit more about the Halo universe, then you’ll like ODST. If you’re looking for new weapons or a different multiplayer experience, your money would probably be better spent elsewhere.

I personally enjoyed playing through the game, even though I skipped a lot of the extra story content. While the plot doesn’t expound a whole lot into the over Halo story arc, I was definitely wanted to keep playing in order to find out what happened to your character’s friends. The levels are all very detailed and well-crafted; you really feel like you’re totally alone, exploring an abandoned city. The ending was a bit lackluster, but I can forgive that due to the fact that the overall play experience was so good. My next step: play through Halo 3 proper.

I’m old and tenacious now. Or maybe I’m just stupid enough not to know when to quit. Regardless, I had the idea that since I’ve finished most of the other games in the Zelda series, I should go back and finish Zelda II. So I busted out the NES (no Virtual Console here, punk!) and played through the game. Having completed it, I now feel like I’m in a better position to comment on the “black sheep” of the Zelda franchise.

Zelda II is usually dismissed by gamers, due to its departure from the “traditional” top-down view that all other 2D Zelda games use. Instead, it is broken up into an overhead “exploration” view, and a side-scrolling “action” view. The “action” view, while being something of a new paradigm for the series, is also notoriously difficult. Even though Zelda II doesn’t contain much of the exploration and puzzle-solving that gamers associate with the name “Zelda,” I still like it. In my mind, it’s a great example of a sequel done right. It takes the characters and world of the first game, and instead of rehashing the first game, creates something entirely new (from a game play perspective).

While the game is difficult, it’s not impossible. The great thing is that it’s possible to progress in the game using tenacity to replace skill. If you are having difficulty dispatching some of the tougher enemies in the game, you can fight weaker enemies until your character’s attack power and life meter increase. Unlike the first game in the series, enemies do not drop health-replenishing hearts. Instead, the main character, Link, gets a “Heal” spell very early in the game. Running out of MP to cast the spell while in a dungeon puts you in a tight spot… or does it? Every 6th enemy drops a magic-replenishing jar, which (if the process is repeated enough) will fill up your magic gauge, which in turn refills your life. Plus, as you progress through the game (and gain skill at the game mechanics), these “helpers” become more and more superfluous.

My conclusion is that I like it. It’s a worthy game to invest time in completing, especially since it’s not really that long by modern standards (maybe 7-10 hours, depending on your playing ability). It’s nice to feel a sense of accomplishment from finishing a hard game, rather than one that is based on item collection or mediocre puzzles. Many games in the Zelda franchise are “going through the motions,” but it’s nice to see this early sequel adding something genuinely new and different to the series.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I did play it. I don’t particularly regret playing. Zelda is Zelda, after all. Whatever faults a Zelda title may have, it’s still been put together by one of the most talented game development groups in existence. The puzzles are sometimes clever, there’s enough new content to feel like you’re doing something new, and the nostalgia that Link evokes are enough to carry the player through.

Twilight Princess had enough to carry me through, but just barely. There’s not a lot of really new things in the game. The art direction is a weird mashup between Zelda 64 and Shadow of the Colossus. The geography in the game is all rehashed. There’s a dark, alternate world that alters your physical form. The few actual new items are kind of lame: you use them a couple times, and then forget about them. The antagonist turns out to be a puppet for Gannon (surprise!). The game is not difficult at all; even in boss fights, there are breakable jars all over the room that supply you with hearts up the wazoo.

There’s a lot of “extra” stuff packed into the game, but I never felt compelled to get 100% of the items. It’s mostly there just for it to be there, not because it adds any sort of fun. This time around, it takes five pieces of heart to get a heart container, instead of four. Why? Just for more tedious collection, I guess. You can collect fish, bugs, ghost souls, and who knows what else. I don’t even have to resist my OCD tendencies to ignore this stuff; it’s just filler content.

What kept me going? The idea of Zelda, I guess. The memories of how fun the other games in the series are. I transposed the fun I had with other titles to what I was currently playing. That and my natural gamer’s desire to finish the game, just to be able to say I finished it. It’s like reading a long, boring classic. I don’t know if the experience itself made me better, but it’s done with, and I never have to do it again.

Like many people, I’ve always had a soft spot for Nintendo’s Metroid franchise. Like all the other old-school gamers out there, I found Super Metroid to be just about the pinnacle of the side-scrolling action/adventure genre. I had hoped that the newest installment of the Metroid series would be able to capture the sense of adventure and general coolness the previous games had come to represent. And while Metroid Prime certainly does have its strong points, it fails as an overall game.

Let me first point out some of the strong points in Metroid Prime. The levels are exquisitely designed. The music is a mix of new and remixed tunes from Super Metroid, which is always a good thing. Of course, the graphics engine is top notch. The puzzles I played through weren’t too inspired, but they were way better than any other FPS game; not to mention, Metroid was never a puzzle-intensive series. In a word, the game made the transition to 3D fairly easily.

My real problem with the game lies in its control system. The problem is that Retro Studios didn’t use the standard FPS control style with Prime. The existing control system is poorly designed. The first problem is that there is no “free-look” aspect of the control. Every other FPS on a modern console uses (or has the option to use) a “dual-stick” control style. That is, one analogue stick controls moving forwards, backwards, strafing left, and strafing right. The other stick controls “pitch” (looking up and down) and “yaw” (turning left and right). Metroid Prime does not utilize this method of control, and it’s extremely annoying to play 3D FPS games without it. The overall feel of the game is that the player is wearing a neck brace: it’s hard to look around naturally.

Prime tries to compensate for this lack of control by using a “free-look” button and “lock-on” button. Both these solutions fail to compensate for the lack of dual-stick control. The free-look button allows the player to adjust the pitch of the viewpoint (the player can look around.) The problem with this implementation is that to look around, the player has to stand still. This promotes annoyance when enemies come at you from outside your field of vision, and you have to stop, allow yourself to get shot at, and rotate your view in order to see the enemies. The problem of having to stop in order to look around also deals with the “lock-on” button. The lock-on button will automatically put the nearest enemy directly within your crosshairs, but the player has to be looking in the general direction of the enemy. Again, this is a problem when enemies come and shoot at you outside your field of view. The player has to stop, look around, and then hold the lock-on button in order to shoot.

Another problem that stems from the control is that platform jumping within the game is really annoying. By default, platform jumping in 3D games is inherently hard to accomplish, especially in a first person viewpoint. This is why most FPS games don’t rely on jumping as a staple of game play. The reason for the difficulty in Prime is because when jumping, the player can’t look downwards to see what they’re leaping from. Not only that, but when jumping to a lower platform, the player can’t look downwards at what they’re leaping to. Apparently when jumping downwards, the camera does slightly pan downwards in order for the player to glimpse what he is jumping on. However, when I was playing, this only happened once or twice, and the change in camera angle was not by a significant enough degree.

I seem to be making a huge point against the control system. Many people would ask why the control is such a big deal. Well, lack of good control is a glaring flaw. In my experience with modern FPS games, a 3D environment is only useful as a game world if the player can totally immerse himself within said world. Without the ability to view the 3D (realistic) world as a normal human would, suspension of disbelief doesn’t work (i.e. it becomes too hard for the player to put himself in the place of the videogame character). If the control system is bad, it’s impossible to enjoy the game, because the very act of playing the game is frustrating.

Of course, some might argue that I’m simply bad at games, and can’t adapt to different control styles. I may suck at videogames, but I’m not a masochist or a fanboy. Although I have a soft spot in my heart for Nintendo and its franchises, I won’t be coerced into playing something I dislike simply because it wears the Nintendo brand. Obviously, control of the game is enough of an issue for me to dislike the game, and therefore I won’t play it.

Others might totally discount my arguments against Metroid Prime, saying that control isn’t enough of an issue for me to really dislike it. However, I’ve admitted that I enjoy Nintendo games. I seriously liked Super Metroid, and admitted to having no qualms about turning the franchise 3D. What reason would I have to purposely find trivial areas of the game that I didn’t like?

Some rabid fanboys claim that I shouldn’t hold Prime to FPS standards, because “Prime isn’t an FPS.” However, whether the fanboys like it or not, all games can be grouped into a few broad categories. For instance, at first glance, Pikmin seems to defy categorization. But when you think about it, the game has many similarities to RTS games: resource management, time management, army management. The exact same is true about Metroid Prime. Although it’s not exactly like, say, DOOM, it has many, many FPS-centric components. Since I expect FPS-like games to play like FPS games, it’s a real letdown when they don’t.

The expectation of control is a significant factor in designing games. Here, a conversation between my sister and me (via instant chat) outlines the frustration of changed game control:

SISTER: I bought an SNES two-pack game today, Tetris and Dr. Mario
ME: awesome
SISTER: but whoever designed it made it so that the pieces in both games rotate OPPOSITE of the way they rotate in the NES games
ME: haha, that’s horrible
SISTER: it is, it pisses me off so much
SISTER: cuz I rock at the NES versions
SISTER: but I can hardly beat the SNES games

Unless the player has extreme will-power to persevere in the face of adverse control, there is no reason that they would feel compelled to keep playing (and yes, she is really good at those games.)

To those of you who would say that no one else agrees with my assessment of Metroid Prime’s control style, I offer the example of EGM. In their January 2003 issue, the review of Metroid Prime notes, “The only real complaint is… with the controls.” (EGM 186) They also note that the control setup “becomes more complicated and time consuming [than the standard FPS control style].” (EGM 186) EGM still gave the game a perfect score, because they felt the rest of the game compensated for the bad control. I disagree, which is my prerogative as a game player and reviewer.

In conclusion, I’ve learned my lesson about buying games before renting them. Although we all know not to believe the hype that some new and improved product might generate, sometimes it’s hard to stay objective. I was able to recoup my losses by selling my copy of Metroid Prime on eBay, but next time I might not be so lucky.