Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (XB360)

If there's any one fighting game series that has given me more joy than the others, it is Tekken. While I haven't always bought the latest one or kept up with competitive play, coming back to it after a year or so to see what has changed and who all these weird new characters are is always pleasant. Tekken Tag Tournament was my favourite in the series; while I enjoyed Tekken 3 immensely, I didn't like the changes brought into Tekken 4.

So, now I get to talk about Tekken Tag Tournament 2, which is a bit of a mouthful. Essentially, just like the first one, it is a 2-on-2 fighting game with all the previous Tekken characters included, ignoring plot events totally. Fighting game plots are stupid, so I am vastly in favour of this. It also means my favourite character, Kunimitsu, makes her return, and she has more silly ninja moves than ever.

The 2v2 game-play is as fun as ever, although because of TTT2 inheriting T6's bound system, long-winded juggle combos are even more important than they ever were. In my previous series play I never enjoyed these... while they make perfect sense from a competitive standpoint, I just don't enjoy inputting a precise series of buttons every time I hit a random launcher; it feels robotic. I'd rather play around with the ridiculously huge number of moves every character has. By contrast, Street Fighter IV gives its fighters maybe 50 moves each (counting for punch/kick strength variations, etc.) whereas Tekken gives them upwards of 200 and adds large amounts of stances into the mix to make things unpredictable. The sheer amount of in-game situations possible is mind-blowing and this is what I find interesting in a game. Solved games are less fun!

To let my love for the series shine through, I decided to go for 100% achievement completion. I had tried this earlier on Tekken 6, but I found it difficult to get any online matches (I don't exactly tend to play games shortly after their release date). TTT2's achievements are in the same vein; most of them are fairly trivial, some require on-line vs. play and some are grindy messes. The hardest achievement is definitely getting 1st Dan in on-line mode. That isn't a particularly high rank, but everyone else you come across is probably trying to get there too, and there are many, many characters to learn to beat. I used my time-honoured partnership of Kunimitsu and Lei and eventually got there. However, by far the grindiest achievement to obtain was "become Tekken Lord in offline mode". This took me maybe 25 hours by itself and was not much fun at all. Thankfully I managed to come up with a fairly safe opening which would work against most AI opponents (even the very highest difficulty ones fell for it every now and then) and trashed them quickly. 1000 Gamerscore get!

All-in-all I really enjoyed my foray back into Tekken-land. I'm not a huge fan of the focus on juggling, but the game-play is just as solid as I remember, and I finally get to rock my favourite probably-dead ninja woman again in peace.

NES Remix (WiiU)

Although this is skipping a few games in my play order, I wanted to talk a little bit about NES Remix, which I got by spending my Club Nintendo stars. I didn't know a lot about this before I got it, but Emily said we should both enjoy it.

Essentially, it's a mini-game collection, except the mini-games are NES 'classics'. Instead of playing each game through, you are set some kind of task. These range from taking literally less than a second to beating an entire level. Your time taken for beating a task is then ranked from 1 to 3 stars, with a special 'Rainbow Stars' rank if you go really fast; I have a few of these. Here are the games represented, and some comments on each:

• Mario Bros. - I really don't like this game. Both the physics and game-play are deeply unsatisfying. I dread when one of these stages comes up.
• Super Mario Bros. - everyone knows this game is good, and I'm not disagreeing, but I'm not all that good at it. The more difficult tasks take me a long time to get.
• Balloon Fight - I knew nothing about this, but it's really fun to play and optimise, good music too. In fact, we both liked it so much that we bought the Virtual Console version to play later.
• Wrecking Crew - another game I haven't played before, seems simple enough, reminds me of Lode Runner in a lot of ways.
• The Legend of Zelda - strangely I only ever owned Zelda II as a child, so this is new to me, it's good, the tasks are too short though so it's difficult to get into the groove.
• Donkey Kong - it's not bad, it's not good.
• Donkey Kong Jr. - better than the original, kind of easy.
• Excitebike - blah I hate this game, it's all memorisation anyway.
• Clu Clu Land - not done much of this yet, control scheme seems difficult, optimising it seems even more difficult.
• Ice Climber - argh, this and Mario Bros. could have a fight for worst physics engine and I'm not sure which would win/lose. not fun, but at least the game has more than two mechanics.
• Pinball - barely playable tosh.
• Golf - no

There are also a few games which are only in the 'Bonus' category:

• Donkey Kong 3 - fairly different but incredibly easy
• Baseball - a little unsatisfying
• Tennis - crap
• Urban Champion - reminds me of Karateka, without the charm
• and probably some others I haven't got to yet

Most of the stages are just short tasks (or sometimes gauntlets of tasks), but there are two 'Remix' categories which generally provide some kind of extra strange effect on game-play. Sometimes the entire level will be silhouetted against the background, or the 'camera' will continually zoom out until your sprite is only a pixel large. Maybe you'll have to control two characters at once, or help Link rescue Pauline. These are some of the more interesting and difficult stages.

As Emily and I have different WiiU profiles, the game saves our progress separately. I wonder if there is an area which compares best times for each user? Emily and I have difficulty with different games, so maybe we should create a new profile which we both play on, to cooperatively get the best times! Maybe chase all those rainbow stars...

Overall I'm enjoying it. It's not a particularly innovative game, but I am definitely getting three stars on everything because I'm a speedrunner.

Cing Visual Novels Review: Glass Rose

Glass Rose is a point-and-click adventure/mystery game for the PlayStation 2, released in 2003. It was developed by Cing, and I desperately wanted to play it as soon as I learned of its existence.

You play Takashi Kagetani, a reporter investigating a series of unexplained murders that happened over seventy years ago. As you and your girlfriend, Emi Katagiri, visit the mansion where the murders took place, you are suddenly whisked into two separate time continuums--you, to a three-day span during the murders, and Emi to an unexplained time. You then proceed to investigate and interview everyone residing in the mansion, fitting in quite well as you apparently look identical to someone named Kazuya Nanase, the son of the first murder victim.

The quest for all of Cing's story games

Though I am rather late to say so, considering they are now defunct, Cing is one of my favourite game development studios. I didn't even know they existed until 2008, and unfortunately they were bankrupt by 2010. Since they can no longer make them, I have made it a personal mission to play and review all of their story games in a set of posts on this blog.

So, why Cing? It all started with Hotel Dusk: Room 215. I first noticed it for sale at a local department store in the summer of 2008. The artwork on the front cover was enough to make me curious. I didn't quite know what to expect from the game, but what I received, I was thrilled with. I love mystery novels, and this was essentially a playable one. I found myself enamoured with the main character, Kyle Hyde, and all the supporting characters as well. The world felt alive, and the story was intriguing, with many intertwining plot threads. Despite Hotel Dusk being a story game (and therefore not having much intrinsic "replay value"), I've played it to completion three separate times.

Fast-forward to 2011, before Paul and I were married. I came to visit him for the month of May to make sure that we'd be compatible living together. We visited a game store, and as I perused the DS games, I noticed the cover of one adorned with a character not unlike the protagonist from Hotel Dusk. Lo and behold, it was Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, and the character depicted was indeed Kyle Hyde! (And lucky for me that I happened to see it there--the English localization of this game was only released in Europe. Being an American, I hadn't even known there was a sequel!) I immediately purchased it, and finished within the week. The new cast was as richly designed as the first, and the plot revealed more to us about Kyle's life before the games. I was fascinated, wondering if a third game could be in the works... which is when I discovered, sadly, Cing would never make games again.

I'll start in the next post with a review of the next Cing game I managed to find, Glass Rose. It seems to be a fitting start to this series, as it was their first game. I will then replay and post reviews of Hotel Dusk and Last Window. To finish my quest, I will need to obtain Another Code: Two Memories (a.k.a. Trace Memory in the USA), Another Code: R - A Journey into Lost Memories, and Again.

Solved One Eighth Of The Puzzle On Planet Nirn

Bruce Wilberforce finally boldly went to Fang Lair. Many wolves and skeletons and goblins wert slain, and all that. I enjoyed the architecture in this dungeon; you can clearly see this is meant to be a Dwarven mine, though there are a few defined structures which are useful landmarks. I managed to find the temple at the upper left and looted it most thoroughly. Now Bruce has a couple of Marks of Shield, which could be useful in a pinch.

Eventually Bruce found his way to the prison area in the lower left, along with a logic puzzle that seemed a little too easy to me, so naturally I solved it and didn't get savaged by spiders. Spiders suck by the way - they often paralyse on attack, which lasts quite long enough for me to get my face ripped off. Should probably make a Free Action spell or whatever later. The prison led directly to dungeon floor two. TWO FLOORS?!!

Floor two is very short - a long corridor to a small island in a lake of fire. No enemies to be seen, so Bruce opened a door and sees a FLOATING BLUE HALOED STICK THING which is obviously the staff piece he was sent to get. After nabbing it Ria goes blah blah blah then a bunch of fireballing wolves ported in, so that was kind of scary for a bit, but Bruce prevailed then high-tailed it back to town.

It was about this time I actually reviewed what Ria said, involving some kind of Ice Palace so I assumed it would be in Skyrim, resident frozen north of the Elder Scrolls world. Bruce bobbed around the region a bit trying to get information, then ran into the most helpful NPC ever: Torborn Ulrarsen. Not only did he immediately point out the locations of the Mages' Guild and nearest inn, he also let me know that somebody in town knew where the Ebony Blade was. The freaking Ebony Blade. So I immediately dropped everything to go look for it. In Arena fashion, the clue is only to find a map which leads to the artefact but I went along with it anyway.

You can watch the resulting playthrough here.

The Labyrinth of Sekaml was not only all the frick over in Morrowind but also dull as ditchwater. Looks like Arena's random dungeons are just random collections of rooms with optional rivers/tunnels overlaid on them. Also the entrance/exits locations are very predictable. After figuring this out, Bruce made his way quickly down to the map on the fourth dungeon level. Oh, this was about the time that Jagar Tharn decided to send all his minions after me, which probably spiced up the dungeon delve a little bit. Anyway, Bruce gets the map and tells him to go to some place in Elsewyr. Sigh.

Something something Rattirrogoth was just as boring as Sekaml's effort. In some ways I prefer this to Daggerfall's sprawling messes of dungeons, but it could have done with a little more thought. The Ebony Blade was reasonably easy to procure, not guarded by anything particularly dangerous.

Back in Skyrim, Bruce got a lead on the Ice Palace which will blah blah blah where the stick actually is. It's about this point that I decided to call it a day.

Documents Most Ancient

After watching Jesse Cox and my brother play Skyrim for hours upon end, Emily has been bugging me to start a game of my own that she can watch. In natural Lag.Com fashion I've decided to start at the beginning, with The Elder Scrolls: Arena, and then make my way through the series from there. This is one instalment I've barely touched, but it is very similar to Daggerfall in a lot of ways.

Alright then, the adventures of Bruce Wilberforce begin here! We went through the 'lifestyle questions' and ended up with Spellsword, which is a pretty awesome class, so I'm happy with it. So far he's managed to die a few times in the Imperial Sewers, as any good Elder Scrolls protagonist should. After hitting the shift gate he ended up in Ebonheart, which is about as far away from where he needs to be as possible, so he fast-travelled to Rihad to ask QUEEN BLUBAMKA where on earth 'Fang Lair' is, then got told to go to Stonekeep instead.

On an aside I've never played Stonekeep but I have watched a Let's Play - it's one of the zillion games I own but haven't tried out yet.

Anyway he goes to Stonekeep and it is so freaking scary. I've no idea why I find FPRPGs so tense and scary, well except for dying all the time obviously, it's probably just something left over from when I played them many years ago and was terrified; I had to ask my brother to play for me, haha. At least Arena doesn't play random sounds in dungeons like Daggerfall does occasionally. Still, it was a fairly standard crawl - he ended up swimming for a while because for some reason I chose not to beat down the main door, so he explored rather more of the place than he needed to. He only died a few times; he got pretty lucky with loot and now he has at least -6 Armour Rating everywhere thanks to a lot of jewellery drops with -1 or -2 AR on them. The ending was annoying; there's an island covered in Ghouls and attempting to climb up onto it while they hit you is not much fun. Bruce is now level 8 also, which makes my Heal spell cost a good chunk less.

Also found many random magical items, most of which will probably end up being sold once he gets them identified.

Seeing as the next place Bruce visits will be the 'real' dungeon I'm sure it'll be a good deal harder. I was thinking of investing in a strong Create Shield spell to help prevent the amount of surprise damage he ends up taking when the monsters run up from behind and cave in your skull.

Resolution Update #2

I finished reading From 0 to Infinity in 26 Centuries, and it was pretty good, but sadly I've read most of it before. I used to read around a lot in college, things connected to my subjects and not (I learnt a lot of philosophy at this point for example) and there were only a few things that were truly novel. I guess it's meant to be more of a reference than a read-through book anyway.

Finished Naruto: Rise of a Ninja yesterday. I still think it's a pretty good game, but the controls were really starting to grate on me at the end. The last few races / social missions are also very strict, which would be okay if it were possible to decide what Naruto will do at any given moment. Definitely want to speedrun this game someday.

Still practising Final Fantasy: Anniversary Edition. I have a bunch of modifications to make because Lenophis has managed an excellent time with some route changes.

Not submitted a speedrun yet. I should probably focus on FFAE until Crystals for Life is over.

Made a neat website for Crystals for Life! It'll be live soon.

I updated a few game statuses that were wrong, so now my Backloggery Unfinished percentage is 80.5

Gaming â Arran

What with the inimitable ShadowWraith hanging around my house for a bit, there's been ample time for gaming. I must have watched him play through Devil May Cry 3 about seventy times by now. Like the fighting games I occasionally love, it has enormous potential for humour and it is quite visually satisfying too. We played through together with me as the doppelganger and despite not having all that much control over how the game went it was pretty awesome.

Aside from that, I also got to try out two of the random mystery PS2 games I've been acquiring. Daemon Summoner was a complete mystery to me, being devoid of even a wikipedia page and GameFAQ, so I didn't know what to expect, but it was terrible. Reminds me a lot of Turok with the fog and awful frame rate. The crossbow takes an unreasonable amount of time to reload (though somewhat realistic I guess) and the melee weapon seems to do about zero damage. I got to the second level which is a forced stealth section with absolutely no display of enemies around you or even if you're hidden a là Thief, with numerous patrolling guards. Rather than taking the time to learn the routes and timing I switched the game off. One day I'll come back to it, but it may well end up being the last game I ever finish.

The other one is Haven: Call of the King which is not as unknown, but almost as annoying. An action adventure in the vein of Jak and Daxter, it has the same kind of art style and controls, except Haven is sort of sticky and has a large turning circle. It's a shame because it obviously had good production values but screwed everything up in small ways. The game is linear rather than hub-based and the levels take a long time to explore. I don't dread going back to this one but it will take a lot of patience.

Emily picked up Naruto: Rise of a Ninja for me on a whim and despite the potential for terribleness it's actually pretty good. Exploring Konoha is a good deal of fun and the combat is hectic and visceral. It's a shame the DLC is unavailable as I'd like to replace the awful English voice acting and download the free extra characters. I think I'm close to the end of the campaign as I just beat Kiba in exam stage 2. Not bad at all. The camera is stupid though.

I thought it was also high time I finished my easy play through of Earth Defence Force 2017 also. Easy difficulty is very very easy, so it's not much of an accomplishment, but it was pretty cathartic. The last level has a truly insane roster of enemies and I dread to think how many tries it will take on Hard or Inferno. I also played through the first 5 or so levels with Arran on Hard. I'd recommend this game if you really hate ants. Watching them fly about the landscape as you set off explosions everywhere is neato. Also it cracks me up when the soldiers start chanting EDF, EDF!

Also I got 1000g on Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires. I like this series despite the repetitiveness and playing as every musou character as the achievements demand is a good way to experience it. Meng Huo OP!

what it is my doge

So I've been doing a fair amount of gaming and programming lately, here's some highlights:

• Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires is still a lot of fun albeit a little derivative. Sure, the series basically doesn't change, but it still does what it does, well. I've got most of the achievements already. Just need to finish Guan Du and Chi Bi and play as a bunch of other people. I wish they'd make more interesting achievements for the DW games. Maybe I'll get DW Gundam, those look better.
• Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is also on my Now Playing list. Looks good so far, very WRPG-lets-you-do-anything-you-damn-well-want although the enemies I'm getting to now hit me for about a billion damage so you probably can't do things THAT out of order. I know Aphox speedran the game in about 4 hours so it must be fairly breakable. I'm playing as a Mage which probably blows but whatever. I feel like I'll end up playing this game multiple times.
• Pokémon SoulSilver is back in my DS and I'm actually playing it. It's probably my favourite one yet; the pokémon don't look dumb yet, and the mechanics of Gen4, though there's about eight thousand moves I don't know the effect of now. I just caught Lugia, and now I have to do the dreaded Victory Road. My party isn't very powerful.
• League of Legends still occupies a lot of my time; I've found a few people to play ARAMs with and they're a bunch of laughs.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

So in this game you decapitate like a million orks and then shoot a bunch of chaos. That might seem a bit obvious but the distinction is actually important.
The first half of the game is about wading in, throwing grenades, sniping the rokkit launcher dudes, dodging nob attacks, stunning and executing enemies. In short, it's hectic, and somewhat hard. The game gives you a bunch of different weapons and lets you change them pretty often and it all adds up to an interesting experience. By the end of the third chapter you'll be drained but confident that you can beat all the orks, so the game changes it up.
The second half of the game is about hiding behind cover and shooting everyone from as far away as you can manage. Huh. Sounds like every FPS made in the last few years. This unfortunate change is because the Chaos marines use the same strategy as your own marine buddies do, i.e. dig in and shoot. There are also the Sorcerer units which laser beam you if you stay out in the open for too long, but they make a nice satisfying -pop- when you hit them with a charged Plasma shot, so they're okay. The melee dudes run at you and engage you in some pretty one-sided combat; if you don't have the Thunder Hammer, it's going to be pretty tedious to wear them down. If you do have the Thunder Hammer, you only have your Plasma Pistol and Bolter to go on, and that makes fighting the Chaos horde a lot harder. I guess this section is meant to make you choose between raw melee power and actually-being-able-to-shoot-people-worth-a-damn but the choice is hollow because the Plasma Rifle is too good.
The finale is pretty badass and befitting the whole game, and the ending cutscene made me smile because I basically knew it was coming, but it fits the W40K world very well.

All in all I did enjoy this game. It's a lot of fun and it is definitely intense. I like this take on the W40K game but I'm still, STILL waiting for an honest recreation of the board game in video game format. Not that I expected this to be it; Space Marine excels at what it set out to do, namely: let you tear off Ork faces.

Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3

I didn't play the base MvC3 because I was waiting for this one, so, what do I think?

It's still crazy fun like MvC2, but the inclusion of now-standard features like the mission combos gives some way of actually learning to play it without resorting to wikis and forums. Some of the mission combos are also hella flashy and fun to do, so they're worth the thumbstrain. The last boss fight against Galactus is hilariously over the top and plays out just like it should. There's lots of pretty hard achievements to get, too, so this one will be out for a while.

I'd write more but this is a pretty good description; it's like MvC2. If you liked that, get this.

Anonymous Notes Chapter 1 (DSiWare)

So I played a little more of this dungeon crawler. The exit from Abyss 3 led to a boss chamber. The boss himself was pretty trivial (I got some Minotaur dude that walked around really slowly getting peppered by my arrows) and afterwards he dropped some B-rank axe and let me exit. This reset the entire dungeon and regenerated it, so the areas are different (and longer) and the monsters are tougher (well, more HP/damage). Drops also seem to have been similarly scaled. My save file now says 'Clear: 1', but there's also these 4 star slots which aren't filled in. Kinda sad that I'll be listening to this one piece of music for all the dungeon floors in the game... I hope it changes at some point; the dungeon tiles are the same but slightly recoloured, too.

So now I've played a little more, I can give some kind of judgement on it. It's fun, not particularly profound, would be much better multiplayer. I wonder if Chapter 2 is more of the same or an improvement on the formula. I'll try a little more Chapter 1 before grabbing it.

Edit: Ok, got 2 clears. Now the tileset is white and I forgot to check if the music changed. The game is just throwing good items at me now, and I just got my first S rank item - a ring which prevents all status effects. Damn useful, and it makes using Soul Siphon a LOT less randomly painful.

DSiWare Acquisitions + Anonymous Notes Chapter 1 (DSiWare)

Emily randomly made me buy some stuff from DSiWare, so my results of this are Anonymous Notes Chapter 1 - From The Abyss (200pts) and Castle Conqueror (500pts). Haven't played the latter yet, but here's some reports about the former.

It's fun! You run around and hit stuff, it's fairly easy at first and gets harder. The stealing-skills-off-enemies thing is a cool idea, though considering how often you get bad results by using the siphon spell it's rather annoying. I'm unsure whether it's a good idea to just kill things or siphon them if you're low on health... siphon can get you HP back (a somewhat random amount? is it based on enemy hp when you siphon?) but it can also poison you, which is death unless you have an All Green. Killing stuff often makes them drop nothing or an irrelevant item, but sometimes a health potion which restores quite a lot. Ho hum.

Also weapon types seem horribly balanced so far. Sword is fast and therefore beats a lot of enemy attacks, axe is slow and only has a 2-long combo, but hits for more. Spears have a 3-combo but they only attack straight forward, which is incredibly annoying. Haven't seen a bow yet. Rods only attack once but they give a magic bonus or whatever, which seems hard to use currently because my spells do very little and take forever to actually cast.

There's already a 'Chapter 2' of this game released, which I'll grab if I have fun with this one. Emily has some more films to review if she'll finally get round to it. :)

Final Fantasy and Willow

I still don't hate Zell.

In other news, we watched one of our "must watch" films this week--Willow, starring Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer. I had been interested in the movie for a long time, thanks to a poster my dad got for free and hung up inside my sister's room. My sister and I always wondered about it, but we never rented it for some reason. When HMV had Willow on sale, I had no choice but to pick it up.

I really enjoyed it! Paul had seen it before, when he was a little kid, but didn't remember much of it. I'm so glad we decided to buy it; I'm sure I will want to watch it again.

Final Fantasy VIII (PS1)

Hah, I knew it! I knew I'd forget about this! Anyway.

I'm replaying Final Fantasy VIII so that Emily can see the game behind the hype/nonsense/"Don't think twice for a second" and make her own mind up about it, like I did for FF7. So far things have gone less than smoothly, with my party dying regularly against bosses because I spend too much time in critical, haha. I actually game overed against Elvoret for Pete's sake, but I managed to clutch it out with solo Zell versus Gerogero at least. Now I have 100 Curaga on his HP-J though, so the game is going to be a breeze for some time.

For some strange reason we're naming characters after Wind Waker people and GFs after various types of candy. I may stream our playthrough at some point just to see audience reactions, maybe not.

Anyway I'm up to the "why are Galbadia trying to use the radio tower" part, so it's just about time to show Emily Zell's majorest fuckup in this game. I WILL make her hate Zell!

Four Swords Anniversary Edition (again)

Slightly interesting news: If you want to play The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition on DSi/3DS and your handheld is a different region from your partner's, you're out of luck. Multiplayer simply refuses to work on my and my husband's DSis. It doesn't make much sense to me, considering the only way to play co-op is locally, but oh well...

That said, I did get through the basic single-player campaign today. Having never played the game before, I was pleasantly surprised. The puzzles were nothing too special, but they were still quite fun, although there were some points where having another person play with you would make things work much more smoothly than switching back and forth. Having played the single-player mode of Four Swords Adventures on the GameCube, this did surprise me a little, but left me with no real trouble. I just wish I could play the game with Paul.

Where the game truly shines, though, is the "Realm of Memories": this new section riffs on The Legend of Zelda, Link's Awakening, and A Link to the Past in a fun and great way. The puzzles are also more challenging here (still nothing too brain-breaking; this is a Zelda game, after all), and personally, more fun. I'm nowhere near being finished with the game--I do want to find all the treasures in all the areas, and unlock as many techniques as I can!--but I can see myself coming back to it even after I complete it.

Four Swords Anniversary Edition

I can't believe this happened, but Paul wants to play a Zelda game.

We just got The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition for free on the DSi, and he is the one begging me to play it! I suppose I have had more influence on him than I've realised. Also, this means that one day I may get him to play Wind Waker. Muahahaha.

Now that I'm back in England, I can finish another playthrough of Wind Waker myself! However, I might wait until I play some of my new games first.

Populous (DS)

I was pleasantly surprised to find Populous had been ported to the DS while randomly browsing my local game store one day. It's a reasonably faithful port; you drag the land up and down to change it, and while the interface can only be worse than the original DOS game, it works. The stylus is necessary, but the d-pad and L button are also very useful and using all three at once for longer than about 30 minutes gets painful. Obviously the DS is designed with short bursts of play in mind though.

So, the game. It looks nice; the GUI is very similar to ye olde dos gamme, and the spells are refreshingly familiar, though the 'choose which deity you are' thing looks half-lifted from Populous 2, which is not a bad decision at all. It seems kinda short; there's 4 sets of levels named 'Tutorial', 'Level 1', 'Level 2', and 'Bonus' and single levels within these sets have a time limit, so it has a pretty well-defined upper time investment. Unless you lose the levels, of course.

This port also has FMVs for some deity spells; while I'm not a fan of this kind of japanese stuff, they look okay and they are quite brief. Also a break from the dragging up/down action is welcome; despite the usually slow pace of Populous, on the DS with its slightly different mechanics games tend to be more frantic. Losing when Armageddon is declared at the time limit is possible, it happened to me today!

So far I've done all of Level 1 and Tutorial.

Super Mario World (SNES)

Oops, forgot to do the "hold reset while turning the power off" thing, so SMW didn't save. OH WELL.

Getting a little better. The slidyness is still weird and I really don't like how the game pauses when you pick stuff up, or indeed when Morton tries to land on you, jerk. Cape is top tier, nerf now.

As you might have guessed, got up to Vanilla Dome AND ACTUALLY SAVED THIS TIME so that's what, a quarter finished? We did some extra exits but not that many so if you're talking 100% apparently the title screen says 18% done. Despite being coldridden Emily still rocks my socks at this game. Let's see what she's like in DARKSTALKERS?!

Super Mario World (SNES)

I am really terrible at Mario. I kinda remember finishing Super Mario Bros. when I had my first NES back in the recesses of my memories, but I'm pretty sure I never finished SMB3, and I only briefly played SMW at the school creche thingy.

Emily and I played a little hot-seat SMW and I performed really badly, haha. There's something about the really slidy controls and the fact that there are four buttons (seriously, Mega Drive only had 3, and in Sonic they all did the same thing!!!!) that just makes me die, a lot. Also why can't you let go of the 'grab' button to drop stuff, he just kicks it like a jerk. Damn you, Mario.

Anyway, only played briefly today, and got to Donut Plains 2. Two switch palaces completed.