Good, but weird.

The first half hour of L.A. Noire sets up a game that I think is likely to be very good, but very weird. It’s good because it looks great, channeling post-war America through the gameplay elements and obsessive detailing familiar to Rockstar fans. It’s weird because I’m not sure what in the hell I’m doing.

The opening section introduces you to hero Cole Phelps, an LAPD beat cop (although we all know he’ll make detective, since that’s the game’s box art). In short order, the game teaches you to run/drive, investigate crime scenes and interrogate witnesses and suspects. You also get a few flashbacks into Cole’s service in WWII, a plot thread that is obviously leading up to something big.

The process seems easy enough. You come across a murder scene in a back alley, walk around until you find the gun, then trace the gun’s owner through a conveniently nearby gun shop. Things got sketchy, for me, when the game started asking me to be smart enough to leverage crime scene clues during a conversation with a witness.

It seems like your input in the interrogations is backward. The person you’re interviewing will say something, and then the game eagerly awaits your assessment: buttons are mapped to Truth, Doubt and Lie. So far, I feel like the opening statement is way too vague for me to know which to choose. In the very first case, I picked the wrong option on the opener and the witness immediately got angry and clammed up, ending the interrogation.

Example: you find eyeglasses at a crime scene, and Cole points out that the glasses have been repaired by hand. When you go see the victim’s wife, she mentions that her husband just bought new glasses. I interpreted that as a Lie, since new glasses would not be put together with sticky tape. But when I hit Lie and presented her with the evidence of the glasses, she turned insulted… and I got a little X that means I made the wrong call.

I have to ask, if you’re bad at the interview “game,” how will that affect the rest of Detective Phelps’ story? It’s going to be pretty weird to see other cops congratulating Cole on his casework when I know I screwed up 75% of the interrogation scene. I’m not sure I’m a fan of having to guess through the exact way L.A. Noire wants each scene to play out.

The facial motion capture is important enough to L.A. Noire that it warrants a bullet point on the back of the box. There are times when the virtual acting is incredibly impressive, and there are times when it looks Uncanny Valley. On Cole, it can be amazing, but the lesser characters suffer.

And, true to Rockstar’s form, the game is filled with astonishing touches. A spot-on duplication (as far as I can tell from what TV taught me, anyway) of contemporary trends and design and graphic iconography. If your hat gets shot off, you can run by it and automatically pick it up. When driving, your partner cop can be asked to shout out directions.

I think L.A. Noire going to be great. But I also think it may be too ambitious in its estimation of players’ detective skills.

It’s going to be hard for you to ignore this one at retail. Sitting beside all the ridiculous plastic sports and gun Wii Remote props is a cute plush baby, unnervingly large and cleverly resting inside a box shaped like a bassinet. It’s Babysitting Mama, the fourth iteration of the respectable Cooking Mama series.

When I say “respectable,” I mean that I was there when the very first Mama game arrived on DS in 2006, budget priced at $19.99. And unlike the billions of similar mini-game-based releases for both Wii and DS, I found an attention to quality in that first game that indicated a franchise star had been born.

And now she’s pulling down $5 an hour to take care of somebody’s kids.

The Wii Remote slips into a holster hidden in the doll’s back. Once inserted, the only visible buttons are the Home, + and – keys. The game’s higher functions (like menu selection) all run off of the attached Nunchuk.

I can’t believe I was surprised by this, given my affection for games that use the Wii Remote’s speaker, but the baby starts crying and cooing immediately. As you’re playing the mini-games, the baby’s mood is constantly changing, which makes for instant feedback. In half an hour, I’ve played three separate mini-games all based around calming the baby down… the doll starts out crying, moves into giggling, then finally chirrups to sleep and the speaker audio communicates all of this to you.

The single-player mode is presented in a series of diary pages, with each page holding four games. The first set is Calm the Baby, Feed the Baby, Burp the Baby, and then Put the Baby to Sleep. Like previous Mama games, you’re rated according to how well you perform and awarded medals for success.

It seems like a lot of games involve rocking the doll in various directions according to onscreen prompts. Babysitting Mama repeatedly warns the player not to shake the baby or otherwise play too rough with it. Plenty of games involve the Nunchuk, sometimes not using the doll at all.

One game is called “Swat!” and for a moment I was concerned about the game taking an aggressive stand on infantile punishment, but no… this game is about killing buzzing flies that threaten to distract the sleeping baby. You use the Nunchuk analog stick to direct the flyswatter and shake the Nunchuk itself to swat.

If you’ve ever cringed at Mama’s gender-stereotyping career path, Babysitting Mama will not help. I keep hoping that some male figure will show up to prove that Dads can care for babies too, or that Mama will get a minigame based on backing the car out of the driveway on her way to work, just to show that Moms should not be pigeonholed as baby caretakers. Although of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the choice of being a stay-at-home mom… this series is a tough one for gender discussions.

A 2P mode lets two people compete in splitscreen minigames, although naturally one of you will not have an actual doll. I would not be surprised to see Majesco/Taito field test the idea of separately-sold dolls in different designs. Heck, seeing as how the base baby is naked, I could imagine the game trying for a Build-a-Bear-style assortment of doll clothes. It would be like DLC, but for real.

While I have always felt that the original Cooking Mama was challenging, Babysitting Mama – or at least, the first three diary page games – is not. I gold-medaled everything I attempted, but the rhythm-based rocking games may offer enough risk/reward for little gamers. It seems clear that this is the youngest-aimed Mama game yet. The good news is that you’re getting the familiar Mama gloss, which is certainly a cut above most of the slapdash kid-targeted minigames available on Wii and DS.

When I bought this game (yes, I BOUGHT it), in five minutes I talked to two other families looking for it on the racks. Both were Moms not quite clued in to how the game worked. One thought the baby was sold separate from the Wii game, and the other thought the doll was for a DS game. Nevertheless, they both wanted it for their kids. Like I said, this is a uniquely unskippable piece of kit on the Wii peripheral racks.

Fluidity is a new WiiWare release from Curve Studios and Nintendo. It has sort of a similar look to PixelJunk Shooter on PS3 – both games feature water elements in a flat 2D world – but the gameplay is totally different. Taking place inside a giant comic book, Fluidity has you tilting the environment (think LocoRoco on PSP, or those few GBA games that had a tilt sensor) to facilitate the flow of fluid. Naturally, you use a horizontal Wii Remote for motion control.

The premise is that this magical book has been infected by some inky invader (man, ink gets a bad rap all over gaming, doesn’t it? de Blob, Epic Mickey…) and you must manipulate a puddle of water through a series of puzzle mazes to build up the power to defeat the evil. The initial goal is to find coveted Rainbow Drops hidden in the levels, but you also need to locate jigsaw pieces to unlock new boards.

In the first half-hour, I made it through a very wordy tutorial and located about four Rainbow Drops in the first area. The tilting doesn’t seem to angle as far as you would think; you can’t flip the entire level upside-down, for instance. This gave me a small disconnect when the screen moved as far as it was willing to go, but I was still tilting the Remote like a mother.

The starting gameplay screen has four levels, three of which are locked. If the opener is indicative of the rest of the set, then each level will contain a dozen (or more) actual challenges of Drops and Puzzle pieces. As you collect Drops, the level automatically unlocks doors, granting you access to more rooms inside the same level. As soon as you find a Drop, the game makes you exit the level, so you can’t plow through it trying to find all the Drops in one go.

Aside from not being able to kill-tilt the thing, I have found the gravity-based gameplay very natural and easygoing. You want to try to keep your puddle together, because water separated from the main body will evaporate… and too much evaporation ends in a level failure. Sump pumps will shunt your puddle around, waterwheels will purposefully bite your puddle into chunks, and fiery enemies will need to be doused. One early challenge requires you to put out a series of miniature forest fires. Another has you floating a gear to the proper location to repair a broken machine.

Along the way, you unlock new powers for your puddle. In the tutorial, you learn to jump by jerking the Remote (blah, I’d rather it be a button press). Sometime inside the first board, you get the ability to gather the water together into a compact ball shape by holding down the 1 button. If you hold 1 for too long, the ball will explode. Both functions – ball and explosion – are required to navigate certain puzzles.

Fluidity is really nice. I already see it as a unique WiiWare must-have, leagues above the cashgrab dreck we see on the service. Yes, Fluidity is a bit on the pricy side at 1200 points, but the good news is that it has a demo so you can test it out before you give Nintendo your credit card info yet again.

Even as a longtime fan of Rock Band, I can’t deny there’s a weariness to the formula. I mean, what else can you do to make notes-on-a-highway compelling? It’s not like anybody paid attention to Nintendo’s fabulous Elite Beat Agents as a new take on music games.

So it’s with an amount of reticence that I plunge into Rock Band 3. Because, you guys, I could give a crap about Pro mode. I do not want to learn how to play an instrument. Harmonix’s ceaseless storm of Pro talk has me worried, because I can’t see that feature being anything more than a niche inside a niche. I’m sure the teaching system is fine, but I want enhancements and upgrades outside of that particular conversation.

Here’s what I have noticed after my first brush with RB3.

- In certain modes, the game WILL swap in gender-appropriate CPU avatars depending on who is singing the song. Duh! That could not have been hard, but it fixes a weird little detail that has bothered me for years.

- Why can’t the Rock Band games share the same scoring data? They all use the same DLC songs. I hate scrolling through my RB3 song list and seeing that, once again, “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs has NO high score associated with it. Couldn’t the game import the scores I’m accumulated through RB1, RB2 and LEGO Rock Band?

- But the new song list rating feature is a brilliant addition. I went through 250+ songs last night (and that’s without me bothering to export the on-disc songs from RB2 and LRB) and rated everything on a 5 point scale. Songs rated 1 will NEVER appear in any randomized playlist. Suddenly, I’m not avoiding the game’s many Random challenges.

- The new avatar creation system allows for customized heads and facial characteristics. You can make some really ugly people in RB3.

- The lack of a World Tour campaign is disconcerting. There’s a new structure here where, instead of a mostly-linear tour path across world venues, you have several screens of challenges based on the songs and the instruments. Like, if you play 5 songs on Easy and get at least 3 stars on each, presto, you’ve achieved one of the many challenges. Some challenges are more specific and will require you to actively pursue them, while others will just kind of happen as you play.

No doubt to appease people like me, RB3 does have something closer in format to the old World Tour… but it’s a menu or two apart from all the challenges, so I did not see it at first. Called Road Challenges, this subset of events reflects your band traveling and growing from venue to venue. It’s not as all-encompassing as World Tour mode, but it at least gives me a palpable ladder to scale. I’m glad RB3 has both options.

- Although the game has done away with earning “money” to put towards the unlockables, the Road Challenges include a new currency: spades. In Road mode, spades are earned by fulfilling certain pre-designated stunts during the performance. For example, pull off as many x4 multipliers as you can. Spades unlock avatar clothing and stuff.

There’s also a more familiar currency unit found inside the character clothes closet: actual dollars. Some avatar dress-up items will be available for purchase through the PlayStation Store. Hooray?

- The road highway looks sharper to me. I thought the graphics in previous RB games looked a little rastery, so this is a nice visual upgrade. The crowd animations seem more varied, so you don’t get as many fake people performing the same stupid whooping action in exact synchronization.

- Everything loads much faster than RB2. Scrolling through the song list, the break between songs, jumping into play… all seemed to me to be smoother and quicker.

- Live jump-in multiplayer is huge. No more dumping back to the bandmate selection screen to set up avatars and instruments. Nice one.

- Still unsure about the keyboard. For one, I had to go to three stores to find one. Everybody had the game on launch day, but nobody had the actual instruments.

For another, I’m very wobbly on what the keyboard brings to the mix. I think the Pro mode would probably be much cooler, if you have the talent to play actual piano, which I do not. Outside of Pro mode, it’s just five keys, all in a row labelled green through orange just like a guitar. In actual playtime, this means you’re essentially playing a different guitar, frets only. Still, even just adding another guitar means adding another player, which is great for parties. I felt kind of stupid playing it alone, however, since I was just keytaring it. I definitely will put more time on the keyboard to see if it can provide that same spark that you get with the other instruments.

It’s an RPG parody, based on kids trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. Two squabbling twins are separated in the game’s intro, and you control one twin (your choice) in a search for the other. The world, in what I saw in the first half-hour, is simply the suburban landscape of these kids’ home. Cul-de-sacs, parks, driveways and mailboxes. The houses are decked out for Halloween; knocking on any available door will either produce a costumed adult… or a monster battle.

The gimmick is that, when a battle begins, the kids’ costumes are transformed into giant-size attackers. The cheesy cardboard box robot costume becomes a massive, Gundam-worthy battlemech, for example. Each costume has unique attacks that are pulled off through something akin to quick-time events (a lot like the action-RPG elements of Paper Mario.) If you press X at the right time on a fluctuating status bar, you do maximum damage… that sort of thing. Each costume also has a special ability that can be used while exploring the neighborhood. The aforementioned robot comes with skates that allow you to scoot across ramps and access fenced-in yards.

I’m sold on the game’s cute art direction. The big-eyed, big-headed children bring to mind scribbly, sketchy animated shows like “Home Movies.” Although there is no voice acting, the character dialogue is worth reading. I stopped a little girl in a witch costume on the sidewalk and her opening line was “Just so you know, I prefer ‘Wiccan.’”

Talking to NPCs triggers quests that end in loot, such as candy (the game’s currency, of course) or parts of new costumes. You also get to take on additional party members, so it looks like the game will become a Pokemon-esque adventure of choosing the right costume to get through the game’s monster battles.

It’s a cool setup. I really like the visual of walking through Suburbia, following trails of Halloween luminaries up to somebody’s front porch.

My concern at this point is that the game will not provide enough variety to justify the $15 price, and I’ll end up slogging through fetch quests and loot grinds just to become strong enough to beat whatever I’m supposed to beat. In the First Thirty, I only ran into one baddie type, a goblin kind of thing that either had a cannon or a magic wand.

Still, I thought it was pretty excellent stuff, with cute characters and a solid take on a highly streamlined RPG. During the demo, I got to a point where the game told me I would have received a PS3 Trophy if I had purchased the full version… so I bought it.

While perusing the Steam Marketplace yesterday afternoon, I came across a little title called Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes and just from the name alone, I was intrigued.  I sat back, watched the little trailer and immediately found myself captured by this little curiousity of a game.  So, I clicked on the buy, downloaded the program and played through thirty minutes to give you a taste of Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes to find out if it might be worth someone’s time and investment.

Right from the start, you can tell that this might be a rough around the edges experiment, as the Configuration Tool starts out in German rather than English.  Not a huge deal, but this game does come from a European development house, and it does show some quirks that can be prevalent with European PC developers.  However, I set up all my parameters and got to the business of playing.

Grotesque Tactics is a turn based strategy game, but it adds a lot of tongue and cheek humor into the mix.  Right from the start, we have a a character by the name of Drake who has failed out of combat school at the hands of a deadly mushroom.  Okay, it was not that deadly and he was laughed out of school.  So he does what any failure does – looks for a way to kill himself.  All of this misery is presented on the screen, including a little raincloud over the character’s head to let you know his mood.  While we sit in misery, along with two other soldiers who are looking to kill themselves as well, we are approached by a hero in shining armor by the name of  Holy Avatar who wants to rid the land of the evil spread by Dark Church.  Holy Avatar is a complete hero stereotype from an RPG/turn based strategy title, complete with rippling muscles, long flowing blonde hair, and an attitude that makes everyone feel like complete peons.

The entire story behind the game is completely based on humor and stereotypes that you find in most RPG and turn based strategy titles.  From female heroes that are clad in the most ridiculous of armor sets, damsels that throw themselves at the Holy Avatar, even when he is not the one to save the day, the enemy types, including the lowly mushroom.  More than once, I found myself having a little chuckle at the humor that developer Head Up Games and Silent Dreams put into this title.

It is also nice that the tactics are pretty straight foward, and combat is rather intuitive.  There is a rather lengthy tutorial that you can run through, but Iwould suggest just hitting it up for the general basics and then skip the rest.  All the controls are pretty standard and most will have it figured out by the end of the first battle.    I also found the combat to be a lot of fun.  Sure it is the same as about any other turn based strategy game on the market, but it is the little things that add so much charm as you play through.  When you have a critical miss, you don’t just miss your target, but your sword goes flying out of your hand and you frantically pat your hand behind you to find it.

While I enjoyed the charm, humor and the actual battles themselves in the first thirty minutes of play, I did have a hard time with the rough translations.  As stated in the beginning, this is a game that comes out of Europe (Germany I believe), and it looks like some of the dialogue options were run through Babel Fish or Google Translate and pasted into the English version of the game.  It is not a bad thing, but on more than one occassion, I struggled with the  meaning of a paragraph or winced at how poorly a sentence would read due to terrible grammar, punctuation or translation.  It would have been nice to have a proper translation put together for Grotesque Tactics, but it is not a huge hit either.

I wish that there was a demo for the game in English so people could try it before they buy, but at $15.99 through October 22nd, 2010, it is a good impulse buy and I had enough fun with the title in the First Thirty, that I am probably going to keep on playing when I can find time during the hectic fall release schedule.

It’s because the game is filled with nearly naked hot girls who are usually dancing. Shantae is hot. Risky is hot. There’s a zombie girl who is also hot. Even the statues are hot! And it’s a fun hot, very much in the innocent anime style where everybody is impossibly cute. Not one of those “I’ve Just Been To Hot Topic” sweaty gothic hots like we got with the characters of Dante’s Inferno, Darksiders, or the God of War games. And I mean female AND male.

Turns out, the gameplay is pretty damn good. It’s not the second coming of gaming that you’d expect after reading all the breathless genuflection afforded the overlooked Game Boy Color original, but this new DSiWare release is perhaps one of the downloadable service’s first actual games.

Because this game is solid. Beautiful details. Tons of sprite work. Once I got past the story setup (which included a downright fantastic looking boss fight), in half an hour I was surprised at how large the first swath of gameworld is. Given how many treasure chests I saw that I could not reach, I’m guessing future ability upgrades will give reason to run around the map again, Metroid-style.

One thing that Risky’s Revenge is doing a spectacular job at is providing depth to the levels. Imagine five 2D platformers arranged one behind the other, and you can jump between them… in and out of the screen. That’s what the forest is like. Even while standing in one area, you can see several reachable levels behind you, including the wandering baddies. This title is begging for a 3DS version.

I’m disappointed in the presence of Save Rooms on the map… what is this, 1993? Also, there’s no belly dancing yet. I’m going to assume I’ll be unlocking that stuff shortly. I BETTER BE.

Shantae: Risky’s Revenge sells for 1200 points on the DSiWare storefront. It was intended to be three episodes, so maybe WayForward was planning on selling them for 400 points each? The theoretical breaking points for these episodes seems pretty obvious to me: Shantae is combing the countryside looking for three magic seals.

So we’ll see if the full experience lives up to the full price. After all, it’s not like Nintendo would ever put this stuff on sale, ha ha.

I think the minigame genre has finally grown up.

Guilty Party is a multiplayer Remote-based minigame fest with staged photos of a happy family on the back cover. And, yes, the word ‘Party’ is in the title. But there’s so much going on here that you might actually forget about the minigames.

Maybe it’s because I’m only a little into the game, but I’m surprised at how dense this game is. Upon first bootup, Guilty Party foists you into a tutorial mystery. This ten-minute opener both introduces the core game concepts and sets up the storyline-based campaign mode. Right out of the gate, you get lengthy cutscenes, a pile of characters to meet, and a good overview of the game’s structure.

It’s like a board game without an onscreen board. I guess the wacky mansion cutaway map is the board. On your turn, you have a set number of actions you can perform… like moving to a different room, interrogating a suspect or examining an object. As you explore, you collect clues which you must then use to divine the identity of the criminal. In the tutorial’s case, the criminal is an unknown person who ate the grandfather’s pudding, but hey, they can’t all be Ripped From Today’s Headlines.

There’s a cute lie detector bit where your Remote buzzes if a person is fibbing to you. It just means you have to mentally track that the correct clue is the opposite of what that person said.

When I started the next level, the game added a deck of cards to the mix. Plus, the game’s primary villain has the ability to eff with your game… by locking rooms or turning out the lights. You have X number of turns to solve the mystery or the world ends or something.

Between all of this is a bunch of dopey Remote minigames like brushing away dust or turning a combination lock. It looks like you can adjust the difficulty of the game according to player, which should be great for families.

I’ve only done cooperative mysteries thus far, but I’m looking forward to bringing this out for a game night. It’s nice to have accessible motion-based minigames framed inside an actual damn game for once.

So it’s a two-player side-scrolling beat ‘em up in the style of classic two-player side-scrolling beat ‘em ups. To make it special, WayForward has done a heckuva job leveraging the IP. Which, if you haven’t noticed, is the current animated Batman series that takes its cues from DC Comics’s 1960s Silver Age.

My son and I are blasting through the first “episode.” It has Batman and Robin rampaging through an improbably designed museum and cityscape, chasing an unknown cat-based villain. Robin says it’s Catwoman. Batman says it’s Catman. Robin says Batman is just saying that because he has a thing for her. These guys argue like this throughout the entire level.

Rather than just being arcade combat, it’s arcade combat with ongoing, entertaining voiceover. It’s because the game is trying to present itself like the cartoon, which is pretty cool. Even ran the show’s open (just in a highly compressed video codec, bleah.) When you perform a special attack, giant fullscreen animations of the characters play out. Guest-star heroes fly in for special screen-cleaning attacks.

I’ve read online that the game supports the Classic Controller, but the manual does not mention it and I don’t own one anyway because they’re stupid. What I do own is a houseful of GameCube Wavebirds and I can tell you that the game doesn’t support that.

So far, I’m loving the voice work and the hand-drawn character animation. There’s more then enough combat moves and apparently you can buy and upgrade new gadgets for Batman. I imagine if you were blown over by the recent Scott Pilgrim game, this would not make a bad runner-up. Of course, a cartoon Batman game for kids isn’t going to score you any nerd cred.

This Metroid fan was apprehensive about Team Ninja and Nintendo taking back the Metroid mantle from Retro Studios, and I’m still not quite sold on the idea. After a half hour in the world of Other M, I’m all over the pretty cutscenes… heck, seeing the baby metroid buy it in such excruciating detail made me tear up… but I feel like the movement while running around a 3D space with 2D controls is pretty busted. I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually, but for now it’s just annoying.

In the first thirty minutes I did a five minute tutorial, watched about ten minutes of cutscenes, and played for about fifteen minutes before reaching the first save point. The game is really nice looking, but so far, I’m with the existing reviews of this game. They all say Samus’ deciding to not use her weapons to make Malkovich happy is just stupid, and they’re right. It’s a dumb explanation for an outdated franchise device. I liked Retro’s handling of it better, and even that was annoying.