Jack Thompson Gets Freedom Award

Provo, Utah has given Jack Thompson, best known for his anti-GTA lawyering, a Freedom Award. It's a different definition of freedom, alright. Even when he's disbarred and forbidden from practicing law in his home state for a decade, he's a hero of conservatives, apparently. Follow the link for a complete story, or at least a link to a complete story.

YetAnotherReviewSite.co.uk

I've started writing all my reviews for www.yetanotherreviewsite.co.uk, so anyone interested in reading my reviews should head straight over there right now. So far, you can find my Puzzle Quest, Political Machine 2008, and Metal Gear Solid 4 reviews on there. Check it out.

My DMC 4 Walkthrough Published

Here it is. I know you don't care, but I do. I'm too busy with Metal Gear Solid 4 to post anything interesting.

Review: Puzzle Quest

I've been stuck at the beach for a week, leaving me unable to play Metal Gear Solid 4, so I decided to play an old game for my PSP while I was here. The game I picked up was Puzzle Quest, which gained a lot of popularity from Penny Arcade's Tycho's recommendation of the PC demo when it came out. Otherwise, the game is so awfully marketed that it's incredible anyone ever played it. Even the title immediately makes it sound just awful, guaranteeing that no one would ever enter a game store and buy it unless they already knew about it. Even inside the game, it just looks like you'd be embarassed playing it. Despite all that, it somehow manages to be just fun enough as a game.

Puzzle Quest (for the DS, PSP, and also at some point it came out for the XBLA, PC, Wii, and PS2) casts you as a fairly generic hero (you pick your picture, name, and class) in a fantasy world that is facing an odd resurgence of evil. The story is advanced through text bubble conversations between your character and others, with no voice acting, and a single expression that tends to look comically inappropriate the majority of the time. Your character must quest against lots of orcs, undead, rats, and whatever else. However, you don't fight through an RPG engine or with real combat, but instead with special Bejewled-style puzzles. Matching sets of three or more skulls cause direct damage, while other objects give you gold, experience, or mana for spells. These spells allow you to actually take advantage of your enemy beyond the mostly luck-based regular puzzle, which means you can actually come up with some fairly interesting strategies for taking it to those ogres. Like the rest of the game, this may all sound like a really bad idea, but it magically just works.

The interesting combination of spell strategies with Bejewled gameplay actually makes for an interesting take on combat that will stay intersting, at least for several hours. I tended to get sick of it after about five separate combats, which is pretty much exactly the amount of time I want to play the PSP anyway. I would still be interested and ready to play again after a few hours, making for a good general gameplay experience. Though enemies have different abilities that will make combats somewhat unique, you still will tend to repeat the same offensive strategies against them, meaning you'll want to turn to the mini-games for some variety. After earning a bit of gold from combat and quests, you can unlock the ability to play mini-games (all still based on the tile-switching puzzle system) to get new spells and mounts. These are fairly welcome, but the fact that you're still only playing a slightly modified form of the same puzzle system means they aren't totally refreshing. Gold from combats also allows you to get new equipment, giving you new abilities in combat, which is also an interesting option to keep you playing.

It wasn't too long before I actually all the mini-games bought and what I thought was the perfect set of equipment for my character, meaning that the gold I earned from then on didn't interest me very much even though I wasn't even halfway through the story. This was somewhat disappointing, but goes to show that the hours of gameplay to actually beat the story are very satisfying if not too much.

In conclusion, Puzzle Quest is a seemingly horrible idea with an awful marketing campaign that is fun to play. It's right for everyone (well, not FPS enthusiasts) on some level, be it the RPG elements, Bejewled casual gameplay, or strategy. I've decided that my reviews shouldn't have scores or even letter grades given the recent controversy over them, so I'll stick with an Ebert & Roeper style recommendation. Thumbs up, I suppose.

Spore Creature Creator Impressions

Over the past two days I've been casually messing around with that new trial for the Spore Creature Creator. I enjoyed creating a few monsters and things, but got fairly tired of it after a while. One very important observation, though: Kids freaking love it. When I let kids play with the creature creator, they couldn't stop. It was infinite entertainment for all of them. Penny Arcade had a similar revelation yesterday as well. It's incredible just how fun and intuitive this is for kids, which has great promise. They even made me buy the full version of the Creature Creator for them. Very exciting.

There has been a huge marketing campaign for Spore come out of nowhere just recently, which is apparent if you check out YouTube or Wal-Mart or their masterful information releases to Joystiq that are spaced just right to keep everyone waiting every second until September 7th or whenever it will finally come out. I think this is guaranteed to be a huge hit that most actual gamers claim to hate because of the extreme hype.

While messing around with the Creature Creator, I did make an honest attempt at a few Mario characters. I had a go with a more impressionistic view of Birdo, but here's the YouTube video for my Koopa Troopa. At least that gives me a video upload that's not just a walkthrough for Echochrome.

My First Published Letter to the Editor (Escapist Magazine)

I wrote a letter to the editor at Escapist Magazine last week on a story about a game store owner of some sort and his problems dealing with parents and controversial games. He stated that "some games are lucky to get an M rating", which I thought showed that the ESRB ratings need a switch-around. There are basically no games in the United States that really would deserve AO, but anyone who doesn't understand the system perfectly (i.e., everyone) would think that games like GTA and the like must be upgraded to it. I proposed that the rating system move M up to where AO is now, and introduce a new name that might better indicate that the old M rating is the same as the movie R rating, and AO is like X or NC17. Even R-rated movies tend to be technically a bit dirtier than M-rated games, so, well, read the letter.

Distractions Upon Distractions As Another Walkthrough is Begun

Last time, when I began writing my Devil May Cry 4 walkthrough, I assumed I'd have less time to write online. Somehow, I wrote even more on those days then stopped writing after I finished it (it's currently awaiting quality-control review at Mahalo.com). Now I've begun a walkthrough for Folklore and started to read Ian Bogost's book Persuasive Games in the hope of finding more material to write about. Theoretically, all that combined with my upcoming week-long beach trip should make me write less here, but that will probably turn out to be exactly what doesn't happen. We'll see.