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Zuma's Revenge

Susie Ochs — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:44:17 -0600

The name might remind you of an unpleasant side effect of drinking the water in Mexico, but this Zuma’s Revenge won’t make you run for the bathroom. Instead, you’ll be glued to your chair, clicking away at ever-harder levels in four fun game modes.

The sequel to Zuma doesn’t change the fundamental gameplay: You’re a frog who shoots colored balls at an advancing train (or trains) of colored balls, trying to match three colors to make them disappear. The trains double back on each other, making it hard to get the right shot, and the balls just keep on coming until you rack up enough points to fill the Zuma meter. Then no new balls emerge from the start point, but you still have to clear all the balls on the board before they advance to the end point--or you lose.

All we wanna do is Zuma zoom-zoom-zoom.

To assist you, Zuma’s Revenge tosses in power-up balls, including three new ones not seen in the last game. You’ll get to explode parts of the train, shoot lasers, fire cannonball spray, eliminate all the balls of one color, slow down or reverse the train, and so on.

The frog doesn’t even stay fixed. In some levels, he jumps between two vantage points to shoot from. Other levels let the frog slide back and forth on a track. After every 10 levels you’ll fight a boss character, who showers you with obstacles that slow you down, make the balls wildly change colors, and more. The linear, 60-level Adventure mode doesn’t let you progress until you beat each level, but save points, free lives, and a generous continue system ebb the frustration.

Once Adventure mode is complete, you can play Iron Frog mode, and Heroic Frog, more difficult twists on the main game. Challenge mode offers one-off levels, where you try to achieve a set score within a time limit. The more you beat, the more are unlocked, 70 in all.

PopCap’s bright, tiki-inspired graphics and island music give the game polish, with the 3D balls seeming to glow against the backgrounds. We experienced a crash or two on our 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, but for the most part the experience was smooth.

Spore: Galactic Adventures

Zack Stern — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:08:19 -0600

Spore’s first true expansion pack--and we’re not counting the weak Creepy & Cute, an assortment of extra body parts--fundamentally changes the game. In the original Spore’s final stage, you’re bound to a spaceship, but Galactic Adventures lets you park on planets and stretch your legs. These away missions beget a whole new universe of gameplay, including combat-based action sequences and story-driven adventures heretofore unseen in Spore. Unfortunately, the quality of these tweaks is just as open-ended, often resulting in frustration and untapped potential.

Like the millions of creatures that can inhabit your game, these new intraplanetary missions are largely created by other players. Galactic Adventures includes fairly understandable tools to script these sessions, and the tutorial does a good job of explaining the basics.

Just don’t expect adventures to congeal as easily as sticking legs on a creature and watching as the game makes it dance. In fact, crafting an enjoyable adventure that lasts just a few minutes can require hours of work on your part. At the very least, you’ll write all of the dialogue and events and pick all of the objects and characters from Spore’s huge catalog.

In a Robot Chicken story, you've got to conquer a malfunctioning intergalactic rest stop.

A simple checkpoint system lets you advance as a player by killing or befriending another creature, bringing two objects together (such as a key to a gate), or otherwise interacting with your story. Layer small events like these together, and you can create complicated adventures--although they all result in linear stories.

Still, you can personally craft nearly everything in the game: individual creatures, planetary environments, background music, ambient structures, building interiors, and more. If you have the time and creativity, Galactic Adventures can generate astonishing, unique results.

But at what cost? As a player in other people’s sandboxes, you’ll encounter many more first-draft worlds than masterpieces. Theoretically, a ranking system should help you find crowd-approved favorites, but weak organization somehow doesn’t bring the best to the top.

Spore’s developers built in a few dozen adventures, but even those include some duds, such as the high-concept retelling of The Metamorphosis that mostly leaves you scurrying between characters to read their dialogue. An adventure by the creators of the off-kilter TV show Robot Chicken mixes a funny story with terrible design: You pick from several doors to progress, but we spent a half-hour wandering around without knowing we’d lost. Worse, we regularly had problems moving in many adventures, getting stuck behind objects, walls, and ambient characters.

Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword

Zack Stern — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:27:57 -0600

Beyond the Sword is the Costco of expansion packs: You’ll get more than you asked for, and for a really top-notch experience, you’ll have to suss out pockets of quality rather than stuffing yourself with sheer quantity. There’s a lot going on in this game--and there’s a lot to like.

This Civilization IV update twists the game’s global-dominance strategy with new nations, buildings, and other alterations. Changes to the franchise’s fundamental gameplay turn this iteration of Civilization into various new games, from space conquests to fantasy adventures. Without a good index, the add-ons can feel overwhelming, but with persistence you’ll find new favorite ways to play.

Boldly go beyond a typical Civ game in one of many completely converted modes.

Beyond the Sword’s basics are similar to Civilization IV’s, but some clever changes improve an already excellent game. As before, you use a turn-based strategy model to build up a society from meager beginnings. In the end, you can win by defeating others with a military, getting the most votes in a U.N. popularity contest, dominating the world economy, and more.

A single game, made up of tiny turns that last between seconds and minutes, can stretch to 10 or 15 hours. One of the new updates lets you begin in a later stage, moving past some of the dull opening turns. It can be a lot more fun to buy cities, units, and technologies from a fixed allotment, instead of earning your way up from the dawn of civilization.

Beyond the Sword adds additional victory conditions too, although most are moderate updates. For example, instead of just being the first to launch a spaceship to colonize a foreign planet, you now have to add enough engines to be the first ship to reach Alpha Centauri. The upshot is that a faster ship can win even if launched after an opponent’s.

Outside the standard games, a dozen new scenarios provide overwhelming variety. You can play in space with altered rules, swapping the global map for a star chart. Tactical combat scenarios add dozens of new units re-create historical situations (such as WWII) or take fighting into a sci-fi future.

Luxor

Susie Ochs — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:17:17 -0600

Some of the App Store’s 12,000-plus games are new ideas conceived expressly for this new platform, while others are retreads of more familiar fare. Overnostalgic for the Neon ’90s, we were excited to play two recent remakes of classic puzzle games.

Combining elements from Zuma and Breakout, Luxor has you firing your own colored balls at advancing chains of other colored balls. You’re trying to remove balls from the chain by matching three or more of the same color. The chains move along tracks that twist and turn and double over each other, so you can’t always get a clear shot. And if you don’t clear them fast enough, they reach the end of the track--and you lose.

Luxor's marble-matching gameplay is set against an Egyptian background.

Luxor for the iPhone plays well, with 88 levels and sharp graphics and music. You can catch falling coins and power-up tokens that slow down or reverse the chains or give you more powerful ammunition. And Luxor supports the Plus+ gaming network, letting you challenge your friends on Twitter and Facebook.

See also: Bust-a-Move, another recent remake of a classic puzzle game.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert iPhone

Zack Stern — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:16:04 -0600

You can hide the clutter on the right, but you'll often need to use those commands.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert translates a great Mac and PC game into an adequate iPhone title. Instead of designing the action around the portable device, this version feels like developers crammed in as much of the full computer game as possible. We wanted a nimble, portable, action-strategy blitz, but got a clumsy game that frustrates as much as it entertains.

Red Alert casts you as commander of either a U.S.-European alliance or Russian threat in an alternate-history battle for the world. Fanciful sci-fi units, including attack bears, zeppelin bombers, and electrified turrets create most of the excitement.

You'll occasionally need to construct buildings before battle.

The strategy unfolds from those units' specific abilities. Bombers go unchallenged unless you have fighter planes or surface-to-air guns available; and tanks roll over rocket-launcher infantry in close range but are in danger if the soldiers are perched in buildings. This depth is the best part of Red Alert, although if you just amass enough powerful tanks, for example, you can often muscle past strategic attacks.

Red Alert downplays its building construction. You'll still want to strategically place defensive turrets to keep foes out of your base, but in the story mode, most everything is built for you already. And in those situations, you'll almost never run out of money, so you don't have to create buildings that mine resources for money. The cost per unit feels irrelevant; just keep buying more to slowly chip at the enemy.

Select missions cast you as an army of one, tossing strategy aside.

While sufficient, the game controls left us wanting a mouse and keyboard. You'll tap single units to make selections, and tap an enemy to attack. Double-tap a unit, and the game will select all of the same type. A mode lets you draw a box around units, select everything on the screen, and even toggle between three collections of your own choice. But we needed more precision, getting frustrated by trying to tap a vulnerable engineer out of a cluster of tanks. And a big palette of building commands often gets in the way of on-screen action.

The game felt buggy and slow on an iPhone 3G. Especially after creating a big army, audio effects stuttered, and we had to make multiple scroll and zoom gestures to see results. Red Alert took about 35 seconds to first load, and often 30 seconds to begin a level. It crashed occasionally, too.

Braid

Susie Ochs — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:56:05 -0500

A triumph of game design, Braid mixes 2D platforming gameplay, ingeniously crafted puzzles, time manipulation, and a melancholy story open to multiple interpretations, beautifully packaged in stunning hand-painted artwork. It’s not an incredibly long game, it doesn’t have a multiplayer mode or online play, but what’s here is more than enough to suck you in, keep you engrossed, and make you really use your brain.

Designed by Jonathan Blow with artwork by David Hellman, Braid took Xbox Live by storm in 2008, winning numerous awards from gaming magazines. It was later ported to Windows, and Hothead Games brought it to the Mac. The puzzles and story are the same, and the Mac’s keyboard controls couldn’t be simpler: arrow keys to move, the space bar to jump, and the Shift key to rewind time.

Just because you're progressing in the game doesn't mean you'll know what's really going on.

That rewinding-time mechanism is the game’s foundation. Each world starts by introducing a time-manipulation ability that you use in the world’s levels to collect inconveniently located puzzle pieces. The puzzle pieces are hard to get to, and figuring out how to access them can keep you confused for hours. Luckily, you don’t have to restart a level if you die or just screw it up somehow--thanks to the time-manipulation tricks, just rewind to a point before disaster and try again. The soothing music and the sense of satisfaction you get when a particularly tricky problem finally presents its solution kept our blood pressure low enough to keep playing--for the most part, anyway.

You can continue on to the next level without collecting every puzzle piece, and return later on to a level that’s got you stuck. But you do have to find all 60 puzzle pieces in Worlds 2 through 6 to unlock the final level, World 1. Why are they out of order? That has to do with the game’s enigmatic story line, which deals with love and loss, forgiveness and redemption, and possibly the creation of the atom bomb (seriously). We don’t want to give anything away--and the plot can be interpreted a few different ways--but after you’ve finished the game, Google “Braid ending” to read some eyebrow-raising theories. It’s mature for its headiness, but not necessarily inappropriate for kids, who might skip the story entirely and just play the levels. We’d feel comfortable letting a 10-year-old play.

Bust-a-Move

Susie Ochs — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:56:54 -0500

Some of the App Store’s 12,000-plus games are new ideas conceived expressly for this new platform, while others are retreads of more familiar fare. Overnostalgic for the Neon ’90s, we were excited to play two recent remakes of classic puzzle games.

Taito’s Bust-a-Move, also known in Japan as Puzzle Bobble, resembles the 1996 Mac puzzle game Snood. You fire colored balls at a puzzle of colored balls, trying to match three and make them disappear. The balls gradually move down the screen, and if they reach the bottom before you clear the board, you lose.

Bust 'em before they move.

Bust-a-Move has a totally forgettable story, plus bright graphics and two ways to fire the ball: with a simple tap or using a slingshot technique. We had a hard time aiming, but if you fail a level and retry it, the game inserts a dotted line to help you line up your shots better. Special pieces include cannonballs that wipe out everything in their path and exploding balls that take out an entire color at once. Plus, you can bank shots off the sides and even the top of the screen. Bluetooth connectivity lets two players battle in Versus mode (not supported by the first-gen iPod touch), and Challenge mode is a never-stopping barrage of puzzles.

See also: Luxor, another recent remake of a classic puzzle game.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Nic Vargus — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:20:12 -0500

The sixth Potter book's excitement is magically transformed into a linear collection of minigames.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince places you in Harry’s robes as he progresses through his sixth year at the famous wizardry school, Hogwarts. At its core, Half-Blood Prince is basically a well-polished minigame collection with flashy franchise backing. The graphics aren’t terrible, especially when bumped up to the highest resolution, though they may seem a tad dated. The terrific music is pulled straight from the film.

The game consists of three main parts: dueling, potion-making, and Quidditch. Each section is enjoyable at best and bearable at worst, but none are fantastic, and the best part of the experience is exploring the beautiful Hogwarts backdrop.

Players can join clubs to practice their skills and earn badges for outstanding performances. Of the clubs, Dueling is the most fun and arguably the simplest. You get five spells to choose from that either stun or injure your opponent. The combination of stun-and-charge attacks works almost too well, and seasoned gamers will quickly dispatch their foes.

Harry's duels are far less bloody than, say, Zorro's. Today's kids are so coddled.

Quidditch is nearly as simple: You steer Harry through obnoxiously large, glowing stars as he nears the golden snitch. But Harry’s broom is gliding along a preprogrammed track--you need only wiggle the mouse toward the stars and let the game do the rest of the work. Hitting pumpkins or flying directly through the stars awards you with more time.

Potion-making is more complex. Players will feverishly shake potions to bubbling and drop crunchy green worms and rats into boiling cauldrons before the allotted time reaches zero. The most difficult potions come with a laundry list of ingredients and a merciless timer.

Though Electronic Arts opted for an open-world approach, Harry is shuffled from one quest to the next in a decidedly linear fashion, each mission unlocking the perpetual “next area” for exploration. Nearly Headless Nick ensures you can never get too lost, walking you straight to your next objective with the press of a button.

The game is short--expect to spend a breezy 8 hours beating the main story, while collecting everything Hogwarts offers could double that playtime. For many wizard wannabes, the game will satisfy and remain enchanting, despite its shortcomings.