This just in: Red Sox would gave draft choices!
Good work, AP. Editors are expensive.
So while I’m already bitching about video games
You played this Puzzle Agent game? It’s on Steam. Doesn’t cost very much. It’s like: not bad.
Basically, it’s Professor Layton, only it looks like it was drawn in crayon rather than anime’d by somebody in the nineteenth century. You play this dude who works for the FBI’s puzzle division, and you have to investigate a mystery in the back end of absolutely nowhere. And, in true Professor Layton fashion, everybody has puzzles for you to solve!
Much like Professor Layton, there’s a sly absurdist bent at work here, as people cheerfully talk about devising puzzles and solving puzzles and how they won’t help you unless you can solve this puzzle. Unlike Layton, the characters in Puzzle Agent appear to be somewhat aware of the absurdity of this situation. Maybe that’s a good thing, and maybe it isn’t, but it does lead to the occasional amusing dialogue, such as: you meet with the sheriff to review the evidence from the crime scene, which consists of security camera images. He’s brought them along with you, and he tells you that he took the liberty of mixing them all up so now you can put them back in the right order. That’s not bad. The game also could teach Professor Layton a thing or two about suspense and drama; there’s at least one moment where the game’s legitimately creepier than any blood-smeared, door-bangin’, dark-and-stormy-night survival horror adventure game I’ve played lately.
If you’ve played Professor Layton, then you know everything you need to know about how Puzzle Agent plays. You talk to people, solve puzzles, and the mystery mainly solves itself around you. The only difference is that, for my money, Layton’s puzzles are more tightly constructed; there have been a few occasions so far in Puzzle Agent where I’ve been pretty unclear as to what exactly I’m meant to do in a given puzzle. When you solve a puzzle, it gets shipped back to FBI headquarters for approval, and you get a tally of how many taxpayer dollars were spent on the solution; it’s something like $78k per attempt, which is pretty funny all by itself. Unlike in real life, though, you get a better agent rank for spending less taxpayer money, which I’m assuming is one of those moments where realism had to be sacrificed for the sake of gameplay.
So is Puzzle Agent worth your ten bucks? Right now, I have to say no, just because the holiday sale is going to start any day now, and it’ll go down to like two bucks. Which is still like twice as much as I paid for it during the last huge Steam sale. I’m serious: don’t pay full price for shit on Steam. The end.
Arise, Serpentor, Arise!
So Opera’s built-in spellcheck dictionary apparently recognises "Serpentor" as a word. Badass.
Anyhow, you played this weird Lufia 2 remake on the DS? It’s pretty weird. They’re calling it "Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals" as opposed to "Rise of the Sinistrals" this time around, and it’s apparently an action platformer, whereas the original Lufia 2 was very much a JRPG.
I was hoping, since Square Enix apparently got itself involved somehow — odd, since neither Square nor Enix had a goddamn thing to do with Lufia 2 — that this would mean that Natsume had gotten itself uninvolved. Regrettably, that is not the case; the very first thing you see when you boot up the game is a big fat Natsume logo. "Serious Fun!" it cheerfully declares at you. Serious fucking bugfest, I retort.
If you played the original Lufia 2, you probably remember it mostly as that RPG with the brainteasers in it that seemed like it would have been killer fun except that Natsume’s idea of cost control involves leaving out the QA phase of game development entirely, and as such it contains a remarkably complete set of all possible bugs. I mean, all the bugs. There are typos, sure, but there are also bugs that cause the item name buffer not to clear, so if you scroll from "Dragon Egg" to "Potion" what you’ll get is "Potion Egg." There are bugs that cause the game to freak out and fuck up your saves if you try to switch the sound from mono to stereo. There are even entire zones that don’t render properly, and display as a giant screenful of gibberish. I mean, really, really, thorough set of unfixed bugs. They released at least four revisions of the code, too, and not one of these bugs ever got fixed. So, hey, glad to see these champions are still on board!
Square Enix’s involvement appears to have been mainly to suck all the style out of the visuals and replace them with bog-standard Final Fantasy-ish brownness. None of the characters look like fantasy warriors anymore; now they all look like hip Japanese teenagers instead. Except for Lexis, who now looks so much like Doc Brown as to make no difference.
If that screenshot didn’t give it away, the game is also written in a really hamfisted, corny "funny" style. The original Lufia 2 managed to have a decent quantity of actually funny lines; so far, the remake contains all of them, and blows them all up into huge dialogue events with other characters having dialogue about the funny dialogue. It’s fucking ridiculous. The writers of Borderlands would be proud.
So it seems to me that what Square Enix really wanted to remake was the dialogue scenes anyhow. They seem to be of the opinion that there were way too many fucking towns and dungeons and quests and things in Lufia 2, so they left most of them out, and you travel around hitting the highlights of the game world. But they didn’t want to lose any of that valuable dialogue, so you get massive, ridiculous dialogue scenes every time you so much as move. I’m not kidding about this: when you first boot up the card, before you even get to the goddamn menu, it makes you watch the entire intro cinematic. You cannot skip it. It’s like forty minutes long. I honestly thought the thing was defective, because I have literally never in my life seen a game show this much hostility to the player before he’s even had a chance to push one button.
On the rare occasion that you actually get to play the game, it’s pretty fun; plays a lot like Kingdom Hearts, except that instead of Donald and Goofy you get nobody and nothing. Since the main purpose served by Donald and Goofy in the original Kingdom Hearts is to stimulate the economy by forcing you to constantly replenish the consumables they burn through, it’s not too much of a loss. The puzzles — which, in the original Lufia 2, were like Professor Layton brainteasers in the middle of the dungeon, which was a really really unusual design but actually kind of fun — seem to have been replaced mostly with stacking crates and searching for keys, which, as any fool could tell you, are the best kinds of puzzles.
Or maybe you’ll get to play a minigame. Will you be pounding on the A button to extend the bridge? Perhaps you’ll be rhythm-gaming with the bandits in the mine? Either way, one thing’s for sure: you’ll be pissed that you’re wasting your time on this shit instead of chopping monsters with your giant monster-chopping idiot sword.
Overall… eh. It’s not bad. Has fun moments, but way way waywayway too much overwritten dialogue. And for all the focus Square Enix appears to have placed on the game’s story, as far as I can tell they seem to have fucked it up completely. Any drama or mystery or pathos or anything that Lufia 2 had is totally missing in the remake, and it’s mainly down to Square Enix’s crazy overexposition and rewrite of the plot into your bog-standard quest to protect the magic crystals from evil space gods. Should you get it? Well, you could do a lot worse. On the other hand, you could download the Lufia 2 ROM and the Fixxxer patch (don’t give me that look; I didn’t name it) and play that instead. Just sayin’.
One thing we can all agree about
The Derek Jeter "will he or won’t he" bore-a-thon will not get any gayer than this.
-
This site supports killing Hitler if you ever find yourself traveling back in time to when Hitler wasn’t already dead.
