Both M rated titles, and both on Nintendo platforms.

I played a good bit of Madworld, lumbering my way through a couple of the earlier levels before I really started to “get it.”  It’s really more like a puzzle game combined with a fighter, and a tiny bit of pixel hunt.  You’ve got to combine prop kills with environmental kills to really get things going, but sometimes, finding the props is difficult because everything is in black and white.

The exception of course, is blood.  Which is everywhere.

Madworld is the other answer to that knock knock joke.  “What’s black and white and red all over?”

Chinatown wars is well, it’s top down cel-shaded GTA on the DS.  It’s like a deeper version of the 1997 client.  This time, there’s a bit of Dope Wars (remember that on the Palm?) as well.  Money seems quicker and easier to come by if you’re running merchandise to different parts of the city.

It’s not bad although I’ll probably get sick of it around the impossible missions.

Madworld is just too over the top not to play through.

There are music games, yes, and there was the brilliant in concept but flawed in execution Jam Sessions guitar simulator for the DS.  (Full disclosure:  I spent about two weeks just trying to play Jonathan Coulton’s RE: Your Brains.  It’s just too unwieldy on a directional control pad and a strum bar on the touch screen.)

The KORG DS-10 Synthesizer for the Nintendo DS is exactly what it says it is.  It is not a title for a KORG Synthesizer based game for the DS.  It is, in fact, a synthesizer and sequencer for the DS.

I’m going to let that sink in for a second.

It’s not a musical instrument simulator of any sort, it’s actually a synthesizer and a sequencer.  And on top of that, it uses the DS screen like a poor man’s KAOSSilator.  Which is a lot of fun.  Here’s a video showing what four of them together can do.

They wirelessly synchronize for beat matching and playback.  Of course, you’ll need a mixer to take full advantage of that, but who doesn’t have one laying around?

In short, it’s awesome.

Review based on doodling in the sequencer window and editing note lengths and values, and then adjusting the drum kit sequencer so that it repeats doom-tch-doom-tch-doom-tch while panning speakers from left to right and repeating for several measures before using the kaoss pad function to adjust peak and cutoff values for synth 1, while synth 2’s track is all doomp-doompdoomdoom-doomp and synth 1 and 2 mixed through the flanger FX at the end with the knob turned all the way wet and mixed so that the bass line on synth 2 isn’t overpowering the entire song at 142bpm.

I did not get to try the multiplayer mixing aspect of this program but god help me if I get another copy.

1. The World Ends With You, by Square Enix for the Nintendo DS
2. City of Heroes, by NCSoft, for the PC (and MAC!)
3. Fable 2, by Lionhead studios for the xbox 360

The World Ends With You had a great system of character growth. Your skills are attached to wearable pins. The more you use them, the more they level up. What was also interesting was the fact that they would earn experience when you weren’t playing, but only to a certain level cap.

In addition to being a great game, it was always a major draw to come back to it after a couple of days to check on the pins and swap them out so that other attacks could become more powerful. Even when I wasn’t playing, my characters were getting stronger. It felt like the game was going on, even when it was switched off.

In MMOs the world goes on without you regardless of whether or not you’re in it. But nothing directly happens to your character. There’s no growth–at least in most cases. (World of WarCraft toys with this idea, but it’s merely a case of accruing a period of time where you earn double “rested” XP. This is done, presumably so you can log back in and level up twice as quickly to make up for the time you’ve spent falling behind your friends who raid full time, in addition to their 40 hour a week day job.)

The conventional “grind” method of character growth is a prime example of what’s wrong with most MMOs. When you grind, you have a character repeat a skill based task until they have enough skill to repeat a more difficult task. For combat, you attack monsters that you defeat until you can defeat more difficult monsters.

In many ways, it is a reward system based on whether or not you can read a bottle of shampoo.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Counter to this model is EVE Online skill development. Skill development in EVE Online is related to the number of hours spent training, and this happens if your character is logged in or not. They’ve been doing this for years now and at the time it was revolutionary. Now it just seems five years ahead of the curve.

I have often been tempted to play EVE Online, if it wasn’t for the extremely punishing learning curve and the surreal mirroring of real world cons and political intrigue. (It is interesting to note that EVE Online has only one server, and there is no “role playing” distinction. If you’re playing EVE Online, you’re playing EVE Online and you’d better take it seriously.)

Similarly, but adjusting the play mechanics to fit the super hero concept, City of Heroes is adding “Day Jobs” where, depending on where you log out, your character earns experience (separate from leveling xp) towards promotions in a job, which then confers bonuses to your character.

I think these have great appeal for the casual player.

Fable 2 has integrated this into the gameplay–if you so choose to do it. In Fable 2, you can earn enough gold through various other jobs, such as blacksmithing, chopping wood, or serving drinks in a bar. With this gold, you can then purchase property, such as vendor stalls, shops, taverns, and even people’s homes. You then can set prices or rent out the property.

Then every five minutes or so, you earn money based on a town’s economy.

Even when you are not playing.

I have spent most of my gold on vendor stalls and a couple of affordable properties in Bowerstone. I spent a day away from Fable 2 and ended up with about three thousand gold when I started up the game again. It was a great “bonus” for returning to the game and allowed me to purchase a house in rural Oakfield, a small town outside of Bowerstone. Now I’m renting that out and looking forward to some revenue when I get back in to Fable 2.

I’ve read that there’s a “cap” to the amount of money you can earn, but that’s fine. I think it’s just more incentive to put the game in every couple of days, and that’s a great mechanic to get people to play the game.

Of course, the next time I play, I’m planning on purchasing everything and then orchestrating my own virtual economic downturn.

To make this even more clear, I am earning gold in Fable 2 and leveling up stats for my City of Heroes characters, right now.

And that is awesome.

Article written by playing City of Heroes consistently for four years, with one hero to the level cap, beating The World Ends With You, and playing Fable 2 up to the point where I started feeling uncomfortable because they haven’t patched it yet and I can’t back up my save file.  (Just about to recruit the third Hero of Legend.)

It’s a tower defense type of game, mixed with Rampart, and PixelJunk Monsters, with some combat thrown in. The combat is simplistic, and really isn’t the focus of the game, but it’s handy. In “tower defense” games, it’s frustrating when that one enemy slips past your defenses and you end up having to do the entire level over again. Granted, that’s part of the game, learning the waves and building appropriately, but it’s still frustrating.

In PixelJunk Monsters, you had to watch as an enemy flyer gets through and takes out your last villager.

By comparison, in Lock’s Quest, if there’s a Clockwork Soldier hammering away on the Source Well you’re supposed to protect, you can run over there and hit him with a wrench.

Yeah.

Much more satisfying, much less frustrating.

The game consists of a build phase and a battle phase. During the build phase, the game definitely feels like rampart, where you select parts and fit them together to make walls. You can place turrets and traps during this phase, which is timed. Then the battle phase begins and you guide Lock through the battlements you made, repairing walls and turrets as necessary, and taking the wrench to various Clockwork enemies, as necessary.

I find that I was doing more repairing than fighting, although I do select certain types of Clockworks to fight, as some are more damaging to turrets than others.

DS owners, and people who like any sort of “Tower Defense” game should definitely look into Lock’s Quest.

Both are classified as rhythm action games, a niche for which I have a little bit of an itch.

You know, I wrote that out and I can’t believe I’m hitting the “Publish” button anyway.