Professor Layton - A Man With a Top Hat

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a recently-released game for the Nintendo DS from developer Level 5 that attempts to combine a big book full of logic puzzles with a gorgeous adventure game motif. It strays dangerously close to being artificial, hollow and stupid, but it manages to keep all of its wheels on the ground long enough for the whole endeavor to end up being pretty wonderful.

So, hey: most immediately striking to me was the game's art style, which, as a few friends of mine noted, strongly resembles that of The Triplets of Belleville. It's an immediately appealing aesthetic choice, especially considering how eagerly other developers seem to be gravitating towards horrible schlock when it comes to these kinds of things - that's a topic for another day, I think.

Our two protagonists are Professor Layton, who is a man with a top hat, and his ward, Luke. Layton isn't some kind of crime-fighting genius. He's just a smart guy with a reputation. Both he and Luke are big fans of puzzles, which is the important part, because the game takes place in St. Mystere - a town where everyone is obsessed with puzzles.

It's kind of a stupid conceit, because the result is that everyone in town is just a construct, serving only to relay another puzzle to Layton.

"Why not celebrate this fine weather with a puzzle?" says one of the fairly deformed inhabitants of St. Mystere, a man responsible for taking care of the town's long-abandoned amusement park. "Let me tell you one of my favorites."

You are then taken to a completely different screen, where you are told the number of the puzzle (No. 088 in this case), its name, and how many points it's worth when solved. This is the core problem of the game, but also, strangely, why it works so damn well. Even if the adventure game portion ends up being nothing more than window-dressing, the puzzles themselves work so well on their own that you accept the set-up voluntarily. As an example, here's No. 088 itself:

"A tennis ball has rolled its way down into a hole. This particular hole is extremely deep and has a sharp bend in the middle, making the ball impossible to retrieve by hand. To make matters worse, the ground around the hole is made of hard clay, so digging the ball out isn't an option.

However, you have something incredibly commonplace on hand that you can use to get the ball out. What do you use to get the ball out? Answer in five letters."

Feel free to answer in the comments if you think you know the answer!

In-game, you can ask for a hint if you get stuck - each problem has up to 3 that you can use as a last resort, but each hint requires that you use up a "hint coin." Unfortunately, the only way to find hint coins entails tapping every possible point on each screen with your stylus until you randomly find them. Oh, sure, they tried making this fairly reasonable, putting coins in the most visually interesting parts of each screen, but then there are the ones that are hidden in random pixels of floor tiling, and you groan. Even so, the fact that you have to pixel-hunt for objects which have no major influence on the rest of the game means that, even in its failures, Professor Layton and the Curious Village still manages to solve a cardinal flaw in point-and-click adventure games, which frequently required clicking all over a screen for objects required to advance.

Would this game work better as an unadorned series of puzzles? I'm not sure. The huge variety of puzzles (over 130, with a new downloadable puzzle every week) is staggering, and I have a feeling that it would be a little overwhelming without the adventure-game context to keep things moving along. It's flawed, sure, but there's no question that it makes the game significantly more compelling just by being there. Does that make any sense? This is a great game just by the nature of the puzzles themselves. That Level 5 bothered developing a gorgeous adventure game instead of lazily shoehorning all the puzzles into a menu and slapping Professor Emeritus Akira Tago's face on the cover (which, apparently, they were planning on doing originally) is kind of great.

Anyway, even if the characters who give you these puzzles are ridiculous and transparent, Level 5 founder Akihiro Hino promises in this Gametap interview that they totally realized it was retarded and tried to fix it in the sequel, which is already out in Japan and coming out here eventually. Unless the first game bombs miserably in the US, which won't happen because you are running out and buying it right now. If you aren't convinced, you can even go and play a flash demo over at the game's US web site! Yes! Please do this more often, developers!

Maaaannn - the new Advance Wars kind of blows

I've been sloowwwly playing Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, the recently released sequel to Intelligent Systems' long-running portable strategy series. Slowly, because despite all the attempts to reinvigorate the long-running strategy franchise with streamlined play mechanics and a faster pace, the result is inexplicably more slow and ugly than any prior entry in the series.

It's also a really cynical attempt to reboot the franchise with a spookier setting and characters more likely to appeal to non-Japanese audiences. This didn't seem like a terrible idea at first glance, but the execution - goodness, it is bad.

The premise at the outset of Days of Ruin is that a world already plagued with war between massive super-powers ends up getting suddenly smacked around by meteors. Nearly everyone dies, and those who survive have to live under massive clouds of smoke and ash.

This is a sorta-interesting premise, but it simply doesn't work for Advance Wars. The core play mechanics of the series have always revolved around the capture of cities. Cities generate revenue, which you then use to produce tanks, planes and boats, and hey - in a world destroyed by meteors, how can there still be tons of cities and factories lying around ready to crank out weapons of war? It simply doesn't make sense.

You can see the game's scenario writers struggling with this obvious problem through the first few maps. Characters lament their inability to find any survivors. All the cities they find have been destroyed. The world is a pockmarked wasteland.

Then you get to the fifth map, and suddenly you done playin' some Advance Wars. All those cities and bases that you couldn't find are suddenly in ample supply - the constraints of the game's design demand it.

Of course, the post-apocalyptic setting also gave Intelligent Systems the chance to create an entirely new cast of characters, nearly all of whom are boring or obnoxious (see image, then groan). It feels like... what was the point, exactly?

Did I mention that the graphics are totally hideous, a mess of browns and purples with weirdly amateurish, overscaled unit graphics during battle animations? Yup.

Prior to the game's release, Nintendo's PR line was that the reasons for the "radical changes" to the game's tone and gameplay all stemmed from the central idea of a creating a faster turn-based strategy game. And hey, that sounded great! My biggest problem with every other game in the series is how quickly maps would degrade into a big slog, with turn after turn after turn of tedious unit management.

So imagine my surprise when Days of Ruin turned out to be even more tedious than the previous games! Yes, there's a new bike unit that can move as quickly as tanks while still being able to capture cities. And yes, battleships can now move and fire in the same turn, making them absolutely terrifying in most situations.

None of these things, as it turns out, makes the game play any faster. I remember the last map in the original Advance Wars taking something like 30 turns the first time I played it. It was an epic slog, but it felt like a fitting conclusion to the campaign.

Map 21 in Days of Ruin, however, took me 32 turns to finish. Map 22 took about 35, and by this point my brain had had enough. I was sick of putting up with the game's annoying nonsense, sitting around in the bowels of Morgan Library between classes playing a game that I frankly wasn't enjoying.

It's a shame, too, because I was hoping for better. I'm always one to give these kinds of things the benefit of the doubt, but in this case Days of Ruin is simply a case of less being less. Bummer.

Oh, and before I forget - out of the ten games I tried playing against other players online using the "play anyone" setting, eight of them cheated in some way. They either had infantry units that dealt 99 damage, or infinite funds. Oops!