On Saturday, October 15, I’ll be participating in the Extra Life charity. I will be playing games in a 24-hour marathon session in the name of Children’s Specialized Hospital, part of the Children’s Miracle Network of hospitals in an effort to raise money for them. I think this is a fantastic cause and I encourage anyone to please help out and sponsor if you can. You can sponsor any amount you wish, with the minimum being $1, one dollar, an hour.
Thanks very much! 
Surprisingly, Nintendo seemed to have uploaded their free Nintendo Entertainment System games for their 3DS ‘Ambassadors’ a day earlier than they had announced. Typically I’m sitting around in the afternoon to evening waiting for something new to show up on the Virtual Console. I think Nintendo is still trying to figure out this newfangled “internet” business the kids are raving about today.
The NES games are Nintendo’s thanks to folks who purchased their Nintendo 3DS device at the original $249 price tag before it was officially lowered to $169 last month due more than likely to unmet sales expectations. 10 Game Boy Advance games were also included in this reward package. Five have been confirmed.
The following GBA games have been confirmed as of this entry:
*Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi’s Island is a Game Boy Advance port of the 1995 Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island originally on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990, 2003) has been rumored to be part of the package.
Leave it to Nintendo to refrain from keeping it simple, however. Their interface for browsing has typically been notoriously convoluted. Unless there was another way some of us completely missed, this is how you access your free NES games:
I’m not even kidding. When it asks if you’d like to continue, you are taken back to the first eShop menu, and it becomes a lather and repeat process for all six steps. I use a very good internet connection at home, but folks who aren’t so lucky may be sitting tight for a bit.
Nintendo released the following games, and I will be talking about some of them today:
Possibly the most successful spin-off of all time. /kanyewest
Super Mario Bros.
A long lost gem by Nintendo, never to be ever revisited–who am I kidding? You know what this is. Your grandmother knows who he is. Moses knew what Super Mario Bros. was and he split the Red Sea in two to find a copy. This was just the beginning of an empire, domination of a world whose subjects would lovingly get down on their knees and bow to a little man in red overalls. To be honest, I’m not one hundred percent on whether Super Mario Bros. was actually a launch game for the NES. Eventually Nintendo sold NES consoles that included the more common Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt two-in-one cartridge in addition to the gray Zapper gun accessory (I think). It is famously Mario’s first real grand adventure having legally changed his name from “Jumpman” and moving to bigger and better things from climbing ladders and avoiding barrels in Donkey Kong (1981). Super Mario Bros. is just about my age, and it’s still one of the most accessible games ever developed. The challenge is perfect. It’s still a fun way to kill a little time if you decide not to use any warp zone pipes. The concept and world design was crazy enough to keep running with it for decades. Its retro graphics have not aged well, but arguably everything else has. In a time now where people are playing quick games on their mobile phones and people embracing indie-developed homages like Super Meat Boy, the old has inverted into new. Playing this straight (that is to say, without any warping), I was able to get to 7-3 before I finally saw a Game Over screen. Remind me to try that Koopa turtle 1-Up trick next time.
Joust, Nintendo style.
Balloon Fight
Balloon Fight is the surprise hit of this collection for me and possibly my favorite in this collection. This is most likely because of my strange obsession with the 1982 Williams Electronics arcade game Joust. In Joust, you repeatedly tap a button to make your character’s giant ostrich fly around while trying to take out enemy characters on their ostriches before they have a chance to do the same to you. You are, well, jousting. I am not a great Joust player, but I love the idea and the design and the execution. Balloon Fight takes this idea and spins it into a friendlier “I’m a guy floating on a balloon and I need to take these birds out before they take me out over water instead of lava.” I think it’s even better embracing the game as an adult because of the hilarious concept and the hilarious idea of birds needing to float on balloons rather than just flying around. The fact that a man is taking birds out of the sky when they may have more of a right to be there than he does is something to ponder. Maybe they believe in fair competition, which explains why it’s one man versus about five or six birds per stage. Not to recycle the point, but much like Super Mario Bros. I found it to be a very fun pick-up-and-play kind of game and it’s the kind of thing you will find today in some mobile app stores. There is a two-player mode, but I’m not actually sure that’s supported on the 3DS. The third mode is “Balloon Trip,” which has the player trying to keep the balloon guy afloat dodging lightning bolts and popping other balloons. Thumbs up, I say.
The world's hungriest dragon.
Yoshi
To be perfectly honest, there isn’t much I feel I can say on Yoshi. It seemed like Nintendo wanted to get its fill of puzzle games in like Dr. Mario and Yoshi’s Cookie after the success of Tetris on Game Boy. In this game, you mix and match Mario’s recognizable rogue’s gallery and essentially score points connecting the same enemies together. Score good combos and keep the queues from spilling over and resulting in a Game Over. Occasionally, top and bottom halves of Yoshi’s eggs will drop, and if you manage to sandwich in many enemies in between the halves, you can score a lot of bonus points and hatch a Yoshi. This is an okay little time-waster, but there is something more appealing about Dr. Mario and Tetris. Yoshi feels rather limited.
Cruelty in a box.
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
I should probably alert you to the fact that I didn’t exactly play this on the 3DS, but I recently did play it on the Wii Virtual Console from beginning to end. Zelda II has a bit of gained infamy over the years because it’s a bit of a departure from the design of The Legend of Zelda, which preceded it. The side-scrolling combat of Zelda II would never really see its way into any future two-dimensional entry of the series, nor would the idea of gaining experience points to strengthen health or magic or attacks. We would see the idea of visiting towns and talking to non-player characters who dispense more useless advice than useful in future games. Zelda II might be remembered for two things, if anything: “I am Error,” and its difficulty.
Like the first game, the player travels to several palaces to defeat the boss and find an important item for later use. Honestly, it feels like you as the player don’t have much to go on when not only unlocking new spells, but discovering locations and especially the locations of the palaces of Hyrule. In 2011, this would be a complaint, but I remember that in the ancient calendar year of 1988, a lot of secrets that weren’t hinted at were most likely only available through an issue of Nintendo Power. It’s probably how Nintendo got you to get a subscription! A lot of the game’s difficulty comes in the palaces, where you meet an entirely different set of enemies compared to the ones you run into in the game’s overworld map. In addition, many enemies are just as skilled with a blade as Link is, and you have to maneuver and time your hits to even get a hit in of maybe five just to get to a new area. The palaces become mazes and some areas are accessed in ways that are so not made clear. Unfortunately, if you lose all of your lives (yet another feature that would never be revisited in this series), you start all over from Zelda’s palace where she rests (until you wake her by acquiring the Triforce of Courage) and you have to make your way all the way back. This got especially infuriating at Death Mountain on your way to the final palace. Death Mountain is the stuff of nightmares, with its cruel enemies and their cruel patterns. It is also the game’s real test of courage not only for Link, but for us, who were willing to toil away all those hours gaining strength, to summon the courage needed to face that final palace, where heroes are forged. *ahem* Sorry, got carried away there. The point is, that place is a bitch!
Haunting your childhood dreams.
Zelda II is arguably the least appreciated game in the Legend of Zelda series, but it does have its charm and its difficulty is the stuff of legends. I always applauded Nintendo’s efforts to experiment with different ideas (and that does not include slapping Mario sprites on Doki Doki Panic! and calling it Super Mario Bros. 2) when they did. I was personally relieved when I finished the game finally, compared to my sadness when I finished Ocarina of Time 3D.
It may be a little off for me to jump right into talking about Zelda II without even discussing The Legend of Zelda, but I intend to get to it soon now that I have access to it again. I used to have the Gamecube Collector’s Disc edition from 2003, which had the NES games, Ocarina of Time, and Majora’s Mask but I sold it off.
The next entry will, of course, cover more NES games in this package as I get to them.
When we stopped at the sixth floor of the giant tower Vincent finds himself climbing in his nightmares, my friend and I were pleased with our progress and decided we didn’t have much more to go before the conclusion of Catherine. I don’t remember the last time I was so wrong. It goes on for far longer after the “final” floor.
The disembodied voice that haunts Vincent’s nightmares exclaims that there are eight floors to ascend until the path to true freedom is opened. The puzzles get harder as new obstacles are introduced. Once you progress through the new puzzles you are back in the real world, in Stray Sheep, looking at provocative images on Vincent’s mobile phone in a bathroom stall. It wasn’t until the story slightly picked up the pace that we had started to become kind of annoyed with these characters. This is mostly because of the way the dialogue was translated and interpreted into English. Nearly every line skirts around the point it’s trying to make. You know when you know someone has something to say, but they stammer, mutter, stutter, and they just don’t spit out what they want to say, so they just choose about ten different words and mix them into a so-called sentence? That is the majority of the dialogue in Catherine. Maybe it’s because we were rather pressed for time, but watching Vincent and Katherine struggle to make their points and move the plot forward was painful.
In my last post I mentioned that I was enjoying the game up until the point I stopped and decided to write my impressions. By the end of it, I still enjoyed myself. The plot itself progresses rather clumsily. It tries to teach us of the complexities of relationships, but it uses characters who seem to believe in absolutes and black-and-white life choices. It pulls back too often. In fact, it would seem a lot of the conflicts that occur in Catherine could easily have been averted with a few lines of dialogue, but it would subvert the journey this man makes in his mind for personal growth. Catherine wants us to decide Vincent’s fate, as evidenced by its multiple endings. It asks us how much we’d be willing to pay for temptation. An oft-repeated line in the game is “There is no right choice.” So it would seem.
I wish more games like Catherine would find their way to this continent. Any game that at least attempts to strike a conversation about how we function as people is worth a look.
Catherine is rather extraordinary. If you were to simply pick up the box and see the artwork, you might put it back and dismiss it as a quirky Japanese dating sim that somehow washed ashore here to indulge the very, very lonely. I’m maybe an eighth accurate on that. Who or what is Catherine, you ask? Where to begin?
We’re introduced to Vincent and Katherine, a couple struggling to keep their relationship afloat. Katherine is ready to commit, while Vincent is, well, not so sure. He’s breaking in a new job, and he seems to be an overall nervous wreck about entertaining the notion of marriage. After a rather curt discussion, Katherine leaves, leaving Vincent to drown his sorrows in pizza and glass after glass of rum and Coke at The Stray Sheep, where he (and, consequently, the player) spends a lot of time at. A woman who I can only describe as anime’s take on Cindy Brady (commence cringing!) sits down at Vincent’s table and heavily flirts with him. She is Catherine, and she is temptation and sin personified. Later in the night, Vincent retires, heads to sleep, and has a nightmare. This is where the journey begins.
Perhaps the main course of Catherine, we guide Vincent through a puzzle of climbing, pushing, and pulling block after block in some deranged setting that may very well be a swinging bachelor’s version of Hell. All I’m thinking about moving through this introductory puzzle is the game Q*Bert — a version of Q*Bert that delves into the psyche of the neurotic male.
Survive the nightmare, and Vincent wakes up in terror, unaware he has spent the night with the mysterious Catherine, and from there we’re to determine how Vincent will handle this.
When we’re not guiding Vincent through the nightmares, we’re answering his text messages. Much like the dialogue wheels and choices seen in games like the Mass Effect and Dragon Age games, we can choose the tone of Vincent’s replies to Katherine and Catherine, whether apologetic, condescending, angry, or pathetic responses. There is, of course, some “morality” bar represented by an angel and a demon that determines whether Vincent is heading down a path of sainthood or debauchery. I couldn’t tell you the outcome of this, since I’m not completely done with the game yet. These choices possibly determine the future of his relationship with Katherine and whether or not Vincent achieves a certain kind of nirvana.
The game follows a particular pattern, but doesn’t feel repetitive or formulaic. Every new nightmare Vincent has is a different set of puzzles where he has to arrange blocks in a certain order and climb and race to the very top while the area is either collapsing and disappearing, or a manifested demon appears to try and kill Vincent. There is almost always a new obstacle, my least favorite being ice blocks that can send Vincent skidding along and falling to his doom. The puzzles definitely become more difficult, and I’m on EASY mode! If Vincent makes it through, however, he is given a challenge of morals at the end and then proceeds to go about the next day in the real world, trying to relate his nightmares to his relationship problems.
The entire game has an interesting style. Because of its more grounded, psychological tale of relationship woes and wants compared to the more direct, physical conflicts we get in most games, it takes advantage of traditional animation and tells the story as if we were watching an entire anime series. Sometimes the pacing becomes rather slow, especially as every visit to The Stray Sheep involves hearing whiny, expository comments from its patrons. Sometimes you’re bombarded with messages from Katherine and Catherine.
Although I can commend the game for exploring the more complicated facets of relationships compared to the more narrow approach taken by other games that include a romance arc, Catherine suffers from the typical Japanese style of dialogue where many lines can be rather misinterpreted and sometimes makes what is supposed to be an exploration of social functioning appear rather black and white. Of course, that is one person’s take on it, as there are people out there who may completely relate to these characters. This is certainly one of the few “mature” games that actually does feel like a game for adults.
Catherine is brought to you by Tokyo-based studio Atlus and as of this post I am hearing that this is, in fact, their most successful game in North America to date, which is great. The game itself is well-done (seemingly, as of the 6th floor level) in many respects and as the icing on the cake, the English dubbing is not half-bad.
It takes a crazy man to face the trauma, horror, and insanity a second time that haunted him years earlier, and Isaac Clarke is crazy enough to do it. He took on monsters that invaded the doomed spaceship the Ishimura in 2008′s Dead Space, a surprise hit from EA and Visceral Games (then EA Redwood Shores). The game drew its plot and mood from films like Alien and Event Horizon. It drew its control from Resident Evil 4 and even improved it in ways. The combination worked well enough to continue Isaac’s troubled journey in Dead Space 2, set years after the events on the Ishimura.
We find Isaac this time in a hospital on a station called the Sprawl. Seemingly, he’s being treated for the trauma from the Ishimura, but his reintroduction is so brief that before you take in the fact that he now has a voice, you’re practically hitting the ground running the moment the game begins. Isaac is strapped in a straitjacket and you have to dodge the game’s enemies, the Necromorphs, as you make your way to an elevator to escape. The game feels like it really starts the moment you acquire the first of a few engineering suits in the game.
Isaac is greeted by an old friend.
Most of Dead Space 2 will feel familiar right away: the RIG (health meter), the stasis function that allows you to freeze enemies in place, the weapons, the overall feel and mood. The gameplay bears the same concept: proceed to an objective, battle the Necromorphs hidden everywhere, get something done, upgrade equipment, try not to die. The kind of game that Dead Space is means it doesn’t require a whole lot of retooling, just a few fixes here and there, a few this game did get.
As you guide Isaac through the Sprawl, you will encounter a few characters along the way: fellow patient and crazy guy Stross, who seems to be the key to destroying the Marker, the symbol of being and hope and life for the game’s Unitology cult that spawned the demonic and murderous Necromorphs. There is also Ellie, a pilot for CEC, the mining company that made the whole “planet cracking” process possible that more or less allowed this whole mess to happen.
Throughout the story, Isaac has moments of hallucination and breaks down as he is haunted by the ghost of Nicole, his girlfriend who served aboard the Ishimura before the Necromorphs took over. One of Dead Space 2′s themes is acceptance, and Isaac is struggling to accept Nicole’s death, but that part of him that can’t let go is infected by the Marker, who wants Isaac to get to it.
Certain elements of Dead Space are gone. In replacement of boss battles and shooting asteroids, the game has ramped up the amount of Necromorphs you fight. There are many moments where Isaac will have to destroy a swarm of them and they come in waves. In one fight, I counted about five or six in one swarm. Sometimes it gets frustrating and can feel cheap, especially when some of the monsters appear from right behind you without you even knowing. The final segments of the game take this to a whole new level, for better or worse. Hopefully you will have enough ammo for your weapons. Speaking of which, in addition to their upgrades, done at benches that can add more ammo to a clip or increase damage, you can actually reverse the process. For 5,000 credits, you can remove nodes from upgraded weapons and place them somewhere else. I didn’t actually use this feature, but it’s certainly nice to have.
The zero gravity areas are back and improved upon. Isaac can now travel anywhere in the Zero G area rather than find hopping points. If he strays too far from a landing point, a simple push of the button will orient him to the ground for landing. There weren’t that many to be found and, although it’s nice to see improvements, add very little to the experience.
Although the game remains identical to the first, the overall plot was underwhelming. Although I truthfully consider the entire Unitology and Marker plotlines to take a backseat to the intensity and fear, one aspect of the plot that was especially disappointing was its exploration of Isaac’s mental stability, or lack thereof. His anguish actually has a purpose, but its primary source feels like a copout. That could have been something, and didn’t deliver. The game also doesn’t do a well enough job to get the player to sympathize with the broken relationship between Isaac and Nicole. We didn’t know that much about them before the Marker entered their lives although we’re supposed to assume they were very close. I actually saw more chemistry between Isaac and Ellie.
Dead Space 2 is an improvement in all of the right places, and leaves alone what isn’t broken. For better or worse, it takes the “action packed sequel” route but does a decent enough job in execution. It is wonderfully produced though. The visuals are some of the most beautifully dreary set pieces in a game, and the lighting is exceptional. Although I find it to be a decent at best sequel, I commend Visceral Games for the effort they put into its design.
4/5
