My Top 13 Games of 2013

2013 was a notable year in gaming in many ways. It represents a sort of Year Zero with the release of the PS4 and the XBox One (and the Wii U, which came out at the tail end of 2012), and at the same time represents the last full year that the previous console generation would reign supreme. While I have no doubt that the PS3 will continue to see releases in 2014 before the PS4 really takes hold, and neither the PS4 or the XBox One launched with anything that could be considered a ‘game of the year’, it’s only a matter of time at this point. 2013 was the pinnacle of one generation and the birth year of another.

More than anything else, though, the reigning theme of the year seems to have been that of disappointment. LucasArts was shuttered by Disney, with over a hundred employees being laid off and games in development like Star Wars 1313 being cancelled. The Android-based Ouya console, after raising millions on Kickstarter, was released and then… failed to make much of an impression. SimCity - which looked incredible in screenshots and trailers - suffered from such a troubled launch and unprepared servers that even multiple patches have failed to make it playable. GTA Online fared no better. There was the whole Aliens: Colonial Marines debacle. The Wii U and the Vita have failed to find their footing. I still don’t know what to make of the 2DS.

And there were some huge, huge games released: Assassin’s Creed IV, Grand Theft Auto V, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Battlefield 4. I don’t play these games (I lack both the time and the interest), so I have little to no opinion on them. Same with games like Animal Crossing and Pokemon X\Y: major sellers on the 3DS that I am just not in the demographic for. Nevertheless, even I can’t deny the fact that the 3DS took the lead with releases like these, not to mention a solid showing of other supporting titles from Nintendo. The Wii U may be floundering, but Nintendo has made something of the 3DS as of 2013, and I commend them for it.

Below are the thirteen games that didn’t disappoint me, but may or may not have been big sellers. These are the games that I invested hours in, that I enjoyed the most, that did something new and interesting and did it well, or that just appealed to me more than the typical fare this year.

(Please bear in mind that I do not currently own a PS3, which skews this list slightly. I have briefly played The Last of Us and Ni No Kuni, both games that have ended up on other critics’ best of 2013 lists, but I haven’t played either of them enough to justify their inclusion here. Since I play mostly on either a PC or a 3DS, only games released for those platforms will be represented below).

Hit the jump to see the full list.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf (Review)

So in addition to everything else going on in my life right now, I picked up Animal Crossing: New Leaf (3DS) after discovering that I have $40 sitting in my eShop account. Actually, I stopped in at my local EB Games to pick up a physical copy first, but they were sold out (not impressed, EB Games! Work on that!) One of the reasons why I went in to buy an actual copy of the game is that I have a spare 3DS sitting around, and once I'd finished with it - not yet realizing that Animal Crossing: New Leaf is not a game that you ever FINISH, exactly - I was planning on giving it to my fiancee. Now that I've been playing it for a few days, though, I can see that this probably won't ever happen unless I end up buying a second copy for her.

Before I get to my thoughts on New Leaf, I want to take a second to talk about a couple of issues I have with Nintendo, and their policies surrounding eShop downloads. In the eShop, Animal Crossing: New Leaf is the same price as it is in the store ($34.99 plus tax - I ended up paying about $40 for it). With an actual game cart, I'm free to play it, trade it in, return it, or give it to someone else to play when I get bored of it or am finished with it. With a digital eShop copy - which again, let me remind you is the EXACT SAME PRICE - I do not have those options. Sure, there's the system transfer option, but that takes EVERYTHING from my current 3DS and copies it to another one, so there's no picking and choosing. As things stand right now, this copy of New Leaf is semi-permanently attached to one system. I really wanted to play it, and as I mentioned I had forty bucks in eShop credit that I'd forgotten about, so it made sense to buy it at the time. But this will probably be the last time I purchase a non-exclusive title from the eShop. The restrictions are simply too draconian, and don't make sense.

None of this is the fault of New Leaf, however. For those who have never played an Animal Crossing game (and I was one of them), it's difficult to describe how it plays - in fact, it's difficult to justify how, exactly, it's a game. Prior to picking it up, I read a semi-sarcastic review of New Leaf on Amazon complaining that the game didn't have any enemies to fight or any action whatsoever, and while this was hardly a surprise to me, I still wasn't quite sure what I was getting into. A game like New Leaf represents such a dramatic paradigm shift in what a videogame is, it almost feels like a parody: "Go catch bugs and water flowers! This is the nicest game ever!"

I've been playing it for about two days now, and I have to be honest: I'm still not entirely sure what I've gotten myself into. On the basis of overwhelmingly positive reviews on other sites, I was expecting something slightly different than the cutesified small-town simulator that I ended up with - it has an 87% positive score on Metacritic, and on Kotaku's review roundup for the game, Destructoid had the lowest score at 70% while IGN gave it a 96%. Critics, it seems, really like this game. But for my own part, I'm still not quite seeing it.

This is not to say that there's anything wrong with New Leaf. Sure, it's a different sort of game than the ones I usually play, but that doesn't make it automatically bad. Part of the problem with something like Animal Crossing is the very slow, regulated pacing: it isn't meant to be played through in a weekend, but - like a Tamagotchi (remember those?) - is a virtual environment to be cultivated over months and even years. Getting a good impression of what New Leaf has to offer in the span of two days, even two days where I've logged at least two and a half hours per day, isn't really fair to the game. I mean, I only just got my house this morning, and my overall approval rating is something like 47% the last time I checked. I didn't buy a bug-catching net until this morning either. So for the last couple of days, I've been learning how to fish, shaking every tree in town, picking and selling flowers, and chatting up villagers. It's a little bit on the repetitive side, but I know that in the coming weeks the game will open up much more and I'll be swimming and playing minigames and adding onto my house and more.

Patience is a virtue in New Leaf, more than any other game I've ever played. There's a certain admirable bravery on the part of the designers, in choosing to dole out parts of the game as rewards for sticking with it; it also means that while I haven't been exactly overwhelmed with options, there has still been a lot to do every day.

Note: I started writing this last week, so I'm now about nine days in at this point.  I've managed to get a 100% approval rating and open up ordinances, so shops are open later.  I've unlocked the island and its minigames.  I've made some additions to my house and I've gotten a pretty good sense of what this game is all about.  And I have to say, I am getting BOOOO-OOORED.

As I mentioned, Animal Crossing: New Leaf is a very well-received and well-reviewed game.  I'd like to offer a dissenting view.  I think that for what it is, it's relatively well-crafted and charming, but there are a few aspects to it that I just don't care for at all.  And while I have invested more than a week into it, I'm getting pretty close to throwing in the towel, because frankly, I just can't be bothered to care.

I said earlier that Animal Crossing: New Leaf is a small-town simulator.  This is only correct on paper - New Leaf is more of a chore simulator than anything else.  It's a very adorable, cheerful, and even occasionally clever chore simulator, but you will spend 95% of the time playing it running around cleaning up, grabbing things, sorting things, re-arranging things, filling out your collection of fossils or shirts or fish or whatever.  None of this is all that problematic except that every single day amounts to the same set of actions: dig up fossils, break rocks, shake trees, run from bees, gather shells, go fishing, sell objects when your inventory fills up.  Talk to villagers, set up a few meetings at villagers' houses, drop off and arrange new items at your house.  Repeat, repeat, repeat. 

There's a certain type of person for whom New Leaf will hold a lot of appeal.  Or certain types, I should say, as there is admittedly a range of things to do here.  The game caters to the hardcore Nintendo fan, first and foremost: the gamer who has played past New Leaf games, or who just really, really loves Nintendo and all of their branding.  Some of the first decorative items I found were Pikmin and a string of banana peels from Mario Kart; these items have no function other than to sit in your house and remind you that you are playing a Nintendo game.  You will also find a Metroid, Mario themed wallpaper, any number of Mario objects, Starfox memorabilia, and so forth.  Now, there's nothing strictly wrong with this, but it seems like Nintendo thinks (or wants to think) that this is far more of a selling point than it actually is.  And in the context of the game, it represents some serious brand over-saturation.

And then there are those with a collector's mindset.  New Leaf has a lot to offer to these types, as long as they're interested in collecting bugs, fish, fruit, flowers and pieces of furniture.  For myself, after catching my 200th fish and discovering that I'd mostly collected zebra turkeyfish and sea bass, it suddenly dawned on me that if I was going to be playing New Leaf as a collector, it would be imperative that I grind.  And I hate grinding.  I mean, I'll do it in an RPG because there is a direct pay-off in terms of XP and stat-building, but New Leaf presents very little to no reward for grinding other than the self-satisfaction of finally finding an elusive breed of insect or whatever.  That lack of game mechanic is becoming more and more apparent as time goes by, and no amount of medals and minigames can make up for that. 

Finally, New Leaf is worth playing if you can't get enough of adorable little animals.  I will admit, the writing in the game is top-notch, if lacking in any sort of plotline or real development.  Your town is populated by a growing cast of anthropomorphized animals, and they each have a distinct personality and set of interests.  Some of the little interstitial descriptions and comments made got a chuckle out of me, and I am nowhere near the target audience for this sort of thing.  But cutesy turns of phrase can only get you so far.  I've only been playing for nine days and I'm already sick of talking to my town's residents, and their constant demands to have me run errands for them.  If you're a big fan of Hello Kitty, or even the sanitized, family-friendly Mario universe, you'll probably get better mileage out of this. 

It could be that I'm missing something here.  Maybe I haven't opened up enough of the game, and maybe at some point mechanics come into play that offer more "game" than "chore".  But so far, at least, I'm not seeing any indication of this.  All I'm seeing is a long, largely-featureless straight road that needs weeding and cleaning up, and I have enough chores to do in real life that the idea of spending my recreational time doing it in a game is losing its lustre fast.

Will The Circle Be Unbroken? (A Bioshock Infinite Review)

"Columbian Blitzkrieg" (t-shirt) by FamousAfterDeth

I don't know that it's possible to review Bioshock Infinite in a traditional sense without giving away any of the major plot points. Since that's the last thing I want to do this early into a game's release, let me just say this straight out of the gate: there are many unexpected developments of consequence in Bioshock Infinite, and you should probably just go play the game yourself if you want to experience them.

Instead, what this review will primarily focus on is the role of music in Bioshock Infinite, which seems like a safe starting place, and how the game fits into the wider world of Bioshock (again, without giving too much away, hopefully.) One day, I do hope to delve much deeper into the actual story of Bioshock Infinite in the same way I did with the original Bioshock, but for the time being, we'll keep things nice and non-spoilery.

Take note: My definition of what might be a spoiler may differ from yours.  If you haven't played it yet and want to go into Bioshock Infinite a complete virgin, and have been studiously avoiding any and all references to it in gaming media for that purpose, you might want to give the rest of this article a pass.  I'll be going into detail regarding some of the basic stuff, back-of-the-box stuff, and the sort of early plot points that set up the remainder of the game, like where it takes place, who the major players are, and how the game plays.  Again, I don't consider these spoilers, but you might, so be warned.

***

"Fallen Lamb" by Emily Lemay

For those of you who don't know, Bioshock Infinite takes place in 1912 in the aerial, floating city of Columbia. Socially and politically, Columbia is split with a heavy dividing line between the haves and the have-nots; here, the racist, elitist Founders and the rebellious Vox Populi. You take on the role of Booker DeWitt, a former Pinkerton agent hired to "bring us the girl and wipe away the debt" - in other words, travel to Columbia, rescue Elizabeth (a young woman being kept in a tower) and bring her to a specified set of co-ordinates. Elizabeth is guarded and protected by the monstrous Songbird, and was imprisoned in the first place by one Zachary Comstock, the hero and original Founder of Columbia.

Comstock, who calls himself "The Prophet", is a preacher, of sorts, in the "old-time-religion" mold. He is to religion, in fact, what Andrew Ryan was to capitalism: he has established this break-away state of Columbia as a way to take his beliefs to their most extreme apex, and the society he has founded has ascribed to his holy word with fervour (at least on the surface). He also idolizes the Founding Fathers of America, and aspires for Columbia to be more American than America itself. It's a fascinating exploration of the psyche of early 20th century America and the intersection of patriotism, God-fearin' religion, and class warfare, amplified to the Nth degree.

I won't get into why Comstock is keeping Elizabeth under lock and key, and why Booker has been hired to break her out, but I will say that Elizabeth has some unique abilities that make her invaluable to a nation like Columbia and a man like Comstock, amongst others.  Bioshock Infinite plays out, in main part, like the least annoying escort mission ever, with Elizabeth staying out of your way, avoiding injury (the game doesn't allow her to get hurt during combat, which was a brilliant decision) and locating ammo, health, salts and money for you at critical junctures.  Her (for the purposes of this review, unspecified) abilities also come in extremely handy, both in terms of gameplay and pushing the story along. 

"Bioshock Infinite" by Melissa Smith
There are a lot of deliberate parallels between Bioshock Infinite and its predecessors.  For example, where Bioshock and Bioshock 2 allowed the player to make use of ADAM-powered Plasmids, Infinite offers Salt-powered Vigors.  Where the first two games featured the now-iconic Big Daddys, Infinite boasts a number of massive, tank-like enemies, including Handymen, three varieties of Motorized Patriot (George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln), and the massive Songbird.  Voxaphones, the equivalent to Bioshock's Audio Diaries, are located throughout Columbia and fill in background details of the story.  And those are just the surface similarities.  Elizabeth's relationship with the Songbird recalls the one between Little Sisters and Big Daddys, though more naturalistic and less creepy, and the concept of a floating city is just as unlikely, and just as beautifully rendered, as an underwater one.

One of the most prominant parallels, however, is the use of music in the games.  In the original Bioshock, Django Reinhardt's 1949 recording of "La Mer (Beyond The Sea)" is a thematically appropriate touchstone for the entire game, and its signature repeated appearance becomes, over time, strongly associated with the environment.  Besides the fact that the song has an aquatic theme, it just feels right for the 1960s period of Bioshock, the sort of thing that might have played in a lounge or cabaret in Rapture before its undoing.  Post-collapse, it remains an eerie reminder of what once was and what could have been.

In Bioshock Infinite, the central song is the traditional hymn "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?", written in 1907 by Ada Habershon and Charles Gabriel and performed here by Maureen Murphy.  While there are superficial reasons why this song is perfect for Infinite - it fits into the time period of the game, and it dovetails nicely with the religious overtones that run throughout Columbia - it works as a somewhat more integral element to the story than "La Mer" did for the original Bioshock.  Saying anymore would bring us a little to close to spoiler territory.  Suffice to say, by the ending of the game, the song is fresh in your mind, and there's little doubt as to why it was chosen to play such a paramount role throughout.

Maureen Murphy, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" (arr. by Marc Lacuesta)
There's a moment, about halfway through, that is oddly affective when you first experience it and intensely emotional in retrospect.  Just after entering the Shanty Town - Columbia's dark, poverty-stricken underbelly - Booker and Elizabeth find themselves descending into the basement of a rundown hovel, where they encounter a terrified urchin.  The kid runs and hides under the stairs; not that surprising a reaction, considering that Booker is heavily armed and probably just shot up a bunch of guys topside.  Booker spots a guitar, and you have the option of sitting down and playing it, while Elizabeth takes up the refrain from "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" and attempts to coax the boy out with an orange.  It's a quiet and reflective couple of minutes: besides being remarkably well-performed, the vignette works to humanize both Elizabeth and Booker, to present them in a light where they aren't constantly running for their lives or towards some ultimate goal.  Instead, they're just hanging out, taking a breather from the relentless action, playing guitar and singing a song they both know.  It's the sort of thing a couple of people might actually do in that situation, and - from a storytelling perspective - it brands that particular song into your memory, to be called upon later.

"Bioshock: Lutece" by Coey Kuhn

Being a century out from the year that Bioshock Infinite is set in, there's enough of a gulf that we don't really identify 1912 as having a huge variety of musical styles and genres.  But the game's soundtrack offers a pretty diverse spectrum: there's barbershop, fairground music, gospel music, ragtime, folk music, Irish jigs, and the sort of Tin Pan Alley output that we now consider 'popular standards', amongst others.  One fascinating creative decision (and one that, as the game progresses, actually takes on more significance) was the featuring of 1912 covers of contemporary songs.  So, for example, you'll encounter a calliope version of "Girls Just Want To Have Fun", or a barbershop quartet singing the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows".  All of these songs are diagetic; they're incorporated into the narrative of the game rather than a disconnected, overlaid soundtrack.  How these individuals circa the 1910s are aware of songs which are nominally from the future is a question that is never directly addressed, although there are implied possibilities.

A Mighty Wind, "God Only Knows"
Whereas music in the original Bioshock games was well-integrated but largely existed to play to the creepy atmosphere, Bioshock Infinite makes use of its non-compositional (ie: traditional soundtrack) songs to not only build its world but also as part of its central narrative. This is used to great, even shocking, effect at times: witness the song that suddenly starts playing as you enter the composer Albert Fink's home, for example, or the strains of a very familiar melody that start to echo as things begin to unravel near the end. 


"Songbird" (t-shirt) by Adho1982
Garry Schyman's score for the game deserves a mention.  Schyman has been the composer for the series since the first Bioshock, and he raises the bar here, referencing his past cues while creating something entirely new for Infinite.  Cognizant of both the time period and the unique environment of the game, Schyman brings in everything from music boxes to tango to full-on bombastic orchestral blood-pumpers, and of course anchors everything with a strong turn-of-the-century choral gospel influence (both in "Welcome to Columbia" and "Baptism", the two framing songs for the game chronologically).  Schyman won a number of awards for the first Bioshock soundtrack and was nominated for his work on Bioshock 2; I have no doubt that his Bioshock Infinite score will garner the same sort of acclaim.

The officially-released soundtrack for Bioshock, which was included with the Premium and Songbird editions of the game, is focused largely on Schyman's score, supplemented by three versions of "Will The Circle Be Unbroken?" (one arranged choral version, and both an abridged and full version of the song performed by Elizabeth and Booker) and only two of the non-score songs from the game: Scott Joplin's "Solace" performed by Duncan Watt and the Irish jig "Rory O’More/Saddle The Pony"performed by David Porter and Rodney and Elvie Miller.  None of the covers that make Infinite so unique make an appearance here, unfortunately - maybe as time goes by, these songs will see some sort of official light of day.


Stephin Merritt, "The Sun And The Sea And The Sky"
(The above song, incidentally, is in no way related to Bioshock Infinite, but I did want to share it here, given its content.  I came across this track, fortuitously enough, when I was about halfway through the game last week, and felt like it was thematically appropriate not just for Infinite but for the series as a whole.  Make of that what you will.)

"Bioshock Infinite Poster" by William Henry

Bastion Review: Get Up, Now.

(Disclaimer, before we get started: I would not personally consider myself an indie game purist. I'm far more interested in playing unique games, and supporting the designers who want to put something different out there and push the boundaries of what a videogame can be, regardless of who was ultimately involved in getting that game from the concept stage through development, and ultimately into my grubby mitts. In fact, I'm only assuming that there is such a thing as a contingent of "indie game purists" out there, the gamer equivalent to indie music hipsters who insist they played Super Meat Boy before it was cool and hate everything that Warren Spector does because they consider him a sell-out. I have never met such a person, but I'm assuming they're out there, doing I Wanna Be The Guy speedruns and writing vitriolic screeds about the lost potential of Cave Story.)

"Squirt" (t-shirt) by Ashley Hay

What makes an indie game truly independent? Once upon a time, indie games were a verifiably underground phenomenon: small developers, or sometimes just a single person playing the role of designer and programmer, would release a game on their own website, or occasionally just on forums of likeminded enthusiasts. These games would get traded around, built up by positive buzz, and sometimes - rarely - ended up making their way into the mainstream consciousness.

There's no question that this still happens, and that there is still a vibrant community of DIY game development going strong. What has changed - what started to change around 2008, when indie classics like Braid, Castle Crashers and N+ were released on XBox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network - is the way that independent games are able to reach their audiences and gain recognition: namely, through established channels rather than in forums or through simple word-of-mouth. And part of gaining access to these pre-existing channels is for developers to partner up with big-name distributors and publishers.

While it may not be quite as "indie" as something like, say, Kian Bashiri's You Have To Burn The Rope, Bastion most certainly falls into the category of the contemporary indie game, in that it was developed by a small studio (Supergiant Games) and was later picked up to be published by a big company (Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment). These days, this is the status quo: it can be compared to the most common mode of independent film distribution, where an individual or small production company create a movie, take it on the festival circuit, and, if they're lucky, garner the interest of an established distribution. Kevin Smith's "Clerks" is still considered the definitive indie movie, even though it was distributed under the auspices of Miramax. By the same token, Bastion should still be considered an indie game even though Warners was ultimately involved in getting it into the hands of players.

"Bastion Squirt Plush" by Arixystix

I guess my point with all of this is to try and place Bastion on the spectrum of games ranging from extreme indie (Mark Leung, ie: the indie-est game I know) to entirely commercial (Call of Duty: Black Ops, the biggest-budget, most by-the-numbers videogame ever made) and coming to the conclusion that it falls somewhere just indie of center. Thanks to its high visibility on a console channel, it's hardly underground; but it's also very clearly a labour of love and a product of individuals with cool ideas and a desire to push the boundaries of what games can do, rather than a full-force team of industry developers.

And Bastion does a number of very interesting things. The most apparent example of this is The Narrator, who is both an NPC and, quite literally, the game's narrator. Games have played with the role of omnipotent narrator in the past (everything from Dear Esther, which was more narration than game, to the episodic Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse, where the Narrator shows up in-game as an interactive character, not unlike how Bastion handles its Narrator) but where Bastion differs is how it incorporates and utilizes its Narrator. Narration is done on the fly, recapping your actions as they occur: this may be as simple as a pre-scripted commentary when your player character, The Kid, takes damage or uses a special skill, or as off-the-cuff as the Narrator telling an unrelated tale as you battle your way through a level. The sheer amount of scripting is impressive, given that The Narrator is the only speaker for the game's duration, and that the fact that it comes across as dynamic and dependent on one's choices raises Bastion from the realm of the established interactive narrative to one which is being written as the game is being played. It's a highly novel experience and hopefully the success of Bastion sets the stage for this sort of mechanic being used to even greater effect in the future.

Nominally, Bastion is an action RPG based on a three-quarters isometric level system. There are weapon upgrades, character levels, buffs, achievements and a shop; there's even, through the amusing mechanic of praying to a particular deity, a means of implementing handicaps for boosted XP or monetary benefits. All of these elements of Bastion have been done elsewhere and are not particularly new, but they're presented in such a simple and straightforward way that they feel fresh and serviceable. At times, Bastion reminded me of a less-complex roguelike, or a more artsy Diablo. It's a short game - my playthrough lasted less than six hours, and I would consider myself a moderate completist... I would imagine a single playthrough of the primary campaign could be stretched out to no more than ten hours or burned through in four. The New Game+ mode allows the player to retain their character, XP, items and all, while playing through the same levels with various additional elements and options.

"Bastion Arrives" by Jen Zee

The artwork and visual style of Bastion deserve special note. Designed by artist Jen Zee, there's a painterly, oils-on-canvas feel to the game's look, similar to that of Braid. Each landscape that The Kid visits stands unto itself, from lush green forests and jungles to snow-covered ruins, and the "road rises up to meet you" mechanic - in which the world seems to be assembling itself around you - is a clever take on the traditional "fill in the blanks" style of map exploration. The world of Bastion comes off as having a history and despite the repeated references to The Calamity that destroyed the world, it never feels post-apocalyptic or monotonous. Played in high-definition at the highest resolution settings possible, Bastion is absolutely stunning.

But perhaps the most impressive thing about Bastion is how Supergiant Games clearly saw a number of failings in modern videogames and sought to address them as effectively as possible. One might not even notice these subtle design choices on a standard playthrough, which only speaks to the thoughtfulness of the designers. For example, there are no lengthy Wall of Text descriptions or narrative expositions anywhere; instead, presenting The Narrator or one of the other NPCs with an item will prompt a close-up of the item along with a short, typically one-line descriptive response. The Narrator spins tales of The Calamity, Bastion, The Kid, and various other characters while The Kid plays through a level simultaneously; the information being provided is only necessary to the background story, not to the actual gameplay of Bastion, and so listening to it with half an ear doesn't really impede anything. Rather than providing an endless number of modifications, upgrades, character levelling options and so forth, Bastion offers a minimalist RPG experience without ever coming across as simplistic or stunted.

It's a fascinating experience, playing a thoughtful game. Unlike the Saints Row IIIs and Street Fighter x Tekkens out there, which are no more and no less than they appear to be, there's something very refreshing about playing a game like Bastion that strives to be something more than the sum of its parts. This isn't to say that it's a perfect game, by any stretch; besides being on the (far too) short side and doing just one thing well (that one thing being isometric hack-and-slash), Bastion does have a tendency to come off as explicitly self-aware, just falling short of injecting meta-text into the proceedings. Whether or not this is a negative depends on how much you like thinking about the game that you're playing: a game like Diablo requires very little of this and instead demands immersion, while a game like Braid is, in my opinion, all the more enjoyable for its slight detachment, not to mention its deconstruction of certain traditional gameplay mechanics.

While Bastion is in no way as intellectually detached as Braid or Dear Esther, nor is it a meta-textual joke like You Have To Burn The Rope, Barkley: Shut Up And Jam! Gaiden or Cthulhu Saves the World, it does have elements of both, and shares something of the same underlying self-reflective commentary on games and the game industry, whether it realises it or not. The fact that it skirts this potential pitfall and avoids becoming the dreaded "Game About A Thing" is a testament to the skill and sense of consideration on the part of Supergiant Games, and I look forward to see what they come up with in the future. As for Bastion, I think I can honestly say that it's a game I'll be coming back to repeatedly.

Alan Wake Review: Omega 3 Fatty Acids Are Good For Your Heart!

"Remedy's Alan Wake (Minimalist Poster)" by L--Bo

Reviewing a game like "Alan Wake", which is so heavily focused on narrative that gameplay tends to take on secondary importance, is no easy feat. This is hardly meant to imply that the gameplay is weak, or that the story is overbearing; in fact, "Alan Wake" manages to balance these two elements admirably, compelling story segments interspersed with a unique - and, I have to admit, fiendishly difficult at times - gameplay mechanic. However, the interactive "game" parts of "Alan Wake" exist largely to serve the story, and while one might make the argument that games should be built around a strong narrative, making a fair assessment of "Alan Wake" requires that one approach it not so much as a game as an interactive novel.

It's probably worth mentioning here that the interactive novel videogame genre is a very real, very defined thing (see, for example, "999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors") and I don't mean to suggest that "Alan Wake" falls into that category. What I mean instead is that "Alan Wake" deals with the themes of writing and storytelling so innately that the game itself begins to take on the quality of a book. The difference here is that, where an interactive novel game offers relatively weak puzzle- or adventure-game trappings, bounded by lengthy choose-your-own-adventure-ish dialogue trees and exposition, to justify its 'game' designation, "Alan Wake" is equal parts game and narrative.

I'm drawn to videogames that tell a good story. "Bioshock", for me, was one of the greatest games of all time, because it merged its story and its actual game portions in a sophisticated, and occasionally shocking, manner. "Alan Wake" attempts something similar, and pulls it off skilfully enough (though perhaps not with the same impact as something like "Bioshock"). The game is divided into six episodes, the intros and conclusions of which play out like actual television episodes, with a "Last time on Alan Wake" recap and often ending with a cliffhanger. Each chapter tells a distinct chapter in an overarching narrative arc, typically confined to a particular environment and often completely revising the terms set out by the prior chapter.

For example, Episode I involves Alan and his wife Alice arriving in the Pacific Northwest town of Bright Falls and heading up to a rented cabin. After some misadventures, the Episode closes out with the apparent death of Alice after she sinks beneath the surface of the nearby lake. Chapter II, however, suggests that not only did Alice not arrive in Bright Falls with Alan, but there is no cabin by the lake, or even the island the cabin resides on. While Alan never truly doubts his sanity, the player is given a number of cues - some subtle and some overt - suggesting that Alan is in denial and there is more going on that we are privy to, confined as we are by Alan's limited knowledge and perspective.

"Bright Falls Deer Fest" by Nathan Bayfield

I talked a bit about the unreliable narrator role in videogames back when I reviewed "Bioshock", and I think that for the most part, the same thing applies here. The story we are being told is done entirely through Alan's eyes, and believe me when I say that Alan clearly has some issues. The lack of objectivity in the game, combined with the deliberately obtuse ending, add up to a certain external portrait of Alan which does not match his own internal self-impression. Whether or not Alan has lost his mind or is vindicated in the end wholly depends on how you choose to see the increasingly pervasive supernatural elements of the game.

In "Alan Wake", Alan and the townsfolk of Bright Falls are plagued by creatures called The Taken - regular people, their friends and neighbors, who are consumed by shrouds of darkness and shadow which must be burned away by a high-powered flashlight before they can be harmed. The Taken are animalistic and violent, often hiding in wait to ambush their prey, and repeat certain catchphrases which, in context, have lost all deeper meaning and are simply the lion's roar of The Taken. There is no clear indication of what The Taken are and very little exposition on that subject, the game preferring instead to explore the themes of dark vs. light, liminality, perceptions of reality, and the psychological import of storytelling. As time goes by, The Taken appear with more and more regularity. Although they do seem to impact others (Alan's agent Barry Wheeler, for example, is just as affected by them as Alan, over the course of the game,) The Taken are somehow Alan's problem to deal with moreso than anyone else. Hints are dropped regularly to suggest that Alan is not exactly sane, and if this is the case, then The Taken may very well be a rather alarming figment of his fevered imagination.

If one chooses to see The Taken as actual, physical manifestations of a malevolent supernatural force, then Alan is the sanest guy in the room. After all, others can see them, most notably Barry but also the sheriff Sarah Breaker, and a number of secondary characters are killed by The Taken. On the other hand, if The Taken exist only within Alan's mind, then he is at very least suffering from a severe narcissistic disorder and at worst is not only manipulating his perception of reality to match his psychotic delusions, but may very well be harming others in the process. The last person Alan meets in the course of the narrative who has been independently affected by The Dark Presence (the force behind The Taken) is Cynthia Weaver, a woman who has some psychological shortcomings of her own; once he leaves her he becomes essentially the last human in a world dominated by Taken, a world that becomes increasingly less coherent the deeper he delves into it.

"Alan Wake Demake" by PyramidHead

The fact that we can ask questions like, "Did the entire thing take place in Alan's imagination?" and not come up with a simple, satisfactory answer is both the genius of "Alan Wake" and its shortcoming. Given that there is so much manipulation of the player's expectations, by the time the story ends, it isn't possible to give a conclusive explanation and say, "Okay, this one is the REAL truth." By that late stage in the game, we inherently distrust the narrative, since it has lied to us a half-dozen times already. Since "Alan Wake" is such a profoundly subjective experience, the real truth of what is going on is less important than how successfully the game has presented a study into the character's psyche. By the time I finished playing "Alan Wake", I didn't exactly know how things resolved, but I had a pretty clear idea of who Alan was. The game paints a fairly complete portrait of a damaged fictional individual.

I can honestly say that "Alan Wake" is one of the better-looking games I've played in my time. Living as I do in the Pacific Northwest, the forested, mountainous landscape felt authentic and immersive; lighting and water effects were about on par with what I've come to expect from a contemporary game, and I never felt a sense of the foliage or objects being texture-y or repetitive. Much of "Alan Wake", though not all of it, involves Alan running through the woods at night, with paths that may disappear into the underbrush and an impressively large area to suddenly find yourself lost in. It's both a testament to the game's high level of tension and a recurring source of frustration to me that I didn't really have as much of a chance to explore as I would have liked, but when you're high-tailing it through the trees at night with half a battery left on your flashlight and six rounds in your handgun and there are a solid handful of aggressive Taken right around the corner, poking through every nook and cranny in the game takes a back seat to survival. I never felt like the game was a walk in the park, in other words, and while I made an effort to track down every thermos and manuscript page hidden in each episode, at times they felt like such typically videogame tasks detracted from my suspension of disbelief.

The central gameplay mechanic - that of burning away the shadows of enemies before shooting them - is a unique one which stayed fresh throughout "Alan Wake". It added a new element to the survival horror (and at the end of the day, "Alan Wake" is of that genre) experience, where one must not only conserve ammo but also battery power. I never felt like it was a slog to get through, and played on "Normal", the challenging moments were present but never insurmountable. If I have one criticism of the game, from a purely practical perspective, it would be the lack of a fall-back melee weapon: at one point I was surrounded by Taken, burned through the last of my ammo, and had to restore from an earlier save point and try to scrounge up some more bullets before venturing forward, a process which took significantly longer than I particularly enjoyed. In fact, I found it so astounding an oversight that I went online to find out if maybe there was just a mapped key or something that I was missing that would allow Alan to put away his gun and whip out a Bowie knife. I'd much rather find myself backed into a difficult corner that I have the option of fighting my way out of than be left high and dry because I missed an ammo cache fifteen minutes earlier.

That said, I think that "Alan Wake" is a viable, and even important, entry into the recent slate of narrative-driving action games. While the "Silent Hill" franchise takes its inspiration from J-Horror films and "Resident Evil" from Western action-horror movies, "Alan Wake" draws from a uniquely American literary tradition in the vein of Stephen King and Dean Koontz, and has as much to say about those authors as it does about the stories they've told. And Alan makes for an interesting videogame protagonist: rather than being a cartoon superhero with incredible physical skills, he's limited by his physique, running out of breath while sprinting and occasionally being drunk or hungover; rather than subscribing to a cavalier, kill-the-bad-guys, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later philosophy, he's haunted and lost and trying to piece together the mess his life has become. Along with games like "Heavy Rain" and "L.A. Noire", "Alan Wake" makes a priority of addressing character and narrative simultaneously, and the fact that the gameplay doesn't suffer for it is, I would say, a significant victory for Remedy.

"Alan Wake for Atari 2600 Box Art" by Element

The AFK Tavern (Everett, WA)

(This past weekend, Heather and I trekked down to Seattle to visit our friends MrH and his wife Anna. From the early-morning train journey, to the visit to - or more like drive-by of - the Nintendo of America headquarters (MrH works for Nintendo,) to the fish-tossingly frantic exploration of Pike Place Market, all parties involved deemed it a highly successful venture. Without question, though, the most memorable part of the trip was the AFK Tavern, which we hit up Saturday night.)

Our first indication that we were amongst our nerdy brethren was when we pulled up and parked next to this motherfucker.
You can just make out the corner of MrH's red Nissan Juke next to it.

The AFK Tavern is, as the name implies, a gamer bar. Upon our arrival - and after about a half an hour on the wait-list - we were given the "grand tour" by a maitre d' in a sparkly top hat and bow-tie: stations are set up throughout the bar featuring classic (Atari 2600) to contemporary (PS3) consoles and PCs for gaming purposes; a vending machine in the back offers polyhedric dice, bags and Magic cards; the majority of the tables are either four-person booths or long tables that seat a minimum of six (and from what we saw, more like eight to ten). Along with our food and drink menus, we were given a menu of board games, RPGs and videogames that we could check out. Our wonderfully ridiculous maitre d' gave us a quick rundown of the house rules: GMs can order from the Happy Hour menu, wireless internet is fast and free, and had we arrived on a quieter night, we would have had our choice of table to suit whatever game we intended to play.

A small sampling of some of the games on tap at AFK.

Given that it was a Saturday night, the place was absolutely crammed full of more nerds than I've ever seen in one place at one time, and as mentioned, it took a while before we got a table. This gave us the opportunity to check out the Delorean, along with a pretty bad-ass Akira street bike and any number of vehicles with undercar LED lighting kits. Seriously, I didn't know that was a geek thing, but we saw at least three newer-model cars in the parking lot with lighting kits installed. After about half an hour, our names were called and we were shown to a table. Since most people had arrived in large packs, the four of us ended up jumping the line and getting in, much to the chagrin of the group of ten ahead of us who had been waiting for roughly an hour already.

This was not our line, but ours was pretty much identical.

Half of the fun of AFK is perusing their food and drink menu (which you can check out in PDF form here). After debating between a ULT (with real unicorn bacon!) and an Iron Dragon Steak, I ended up going for the Street Samurai - a burger with pineapple, provalone and wasabi mayo. Heather got the Triforce of Taste (cucumbers and cream cheese on a ciabatta) and MrH got The Reaver (an open-faced chili burger). We also went for the Dragon's Hoard, an appetizer combo platter featuring deep-fried dill pickle chips, mozza sticks, +2 tots, and pita and hummus. Drinkswise, I started off with a Werewolf lager before moving on to a Spires of the Morning and a Critical Hit.

It may have been the fact that it was insanely busy, but truthfully, our food was not great. My burger was passable but definitely nothing special, while MrH's Reaver, while definitely looking the part (it resembled an eviscerated corpse on a plate) was more presentation than taste. And I can't honestly say that we did any better with drinks. The Spires of the Morning doesn't appear in the current drinks-menu patch available on the AFK website, but from what I recall, it was comprised of tequila and lime in a glass rimmed with smoked sea salt. The smoked salt was without question the most memorable part of the drink, and not necessarily in an entirely good way. Our Critical Hits were somewhat more palatable, if only because they were a little bit less consciously self-aware (it's essentially a barley wine). By that point, however, after the incredibly high alcohol content of the SotM, I was no longer in a position to objectively judge (and I'm hardly a lightweight). This was by far our biggest criticism of the drinks at AFK: rather than offering unique cocktails based on a particular theme, the drinks at AFK are apparently made by throwing a ton of liquor into a glass on the basis of color. As Heather pointed out, they really need to hire a talented mixologist.

AFK, NOT on a Saturday night. We were seated just off to the right of this.

Another thing the AFK needs to work on is their service. Our server, nice a guy as he seemed, was without question the worst I have ever had. Even taking into consideration the fact that it was clearly peak hours on their busiest day of the week, and that we were seated next to two long tables with about ten people sitting at each, we were astounded by his lack of due capability and basic respect. When Heather pointed out, rightly so, that her sandwich should have contained avocado, he bluntly replied, "No it doesn't" before racing off to wait on our neighbors. It took 15 minutes for us to flag him down again and point out that, according to the menu, it should in fact contain avocado; rather than offering to replace the sandwich, he simply brought over a few slices of avocado with a very perfunctory apology.

Not only that, but as the night progressed, we saw him less and less. It's important to understand the context of AFK Tavern: the appeal of the place is that you and your friends can sit down, have a bite to eat, and then hang out drinking and playing games at your table for as long as you like. Unlike certain establishments where, once they get busy, they use various polite techniques to move you out the door and free up your table for the next group waiting, the AFK is built on the principle of getting a table and staying there until your game is finished and you're ready to leave. This is precisely why the line-up and wait-list were so crowded when we arrived - once inside, every group had a minimum three-hour stay.

Closer to the kinds of crowds we experienced when we visited.

Having said this, there was a sort of "changing of the guard" effect with regards to the patrons of the place that we noticed around 10:30pm. While the place hardly cleared out, the groups that had gathered around 7:30 or 8pm wrapped up their games and headed up, and a different sort of customer - the regular, apparently - showed up and took their place. The regulars arrived in singles or pairs rather than in packs, but mostly knew one another and congregated together once inside. This amounted to a much less chaotic atmosphere, but also meant that most tables were occupied by faces familiar to the staff of AFK.

By about 10:45pm, we were ready for our next round of drinks. We looked around for our server, who was over by one of the regulars' tables, chatting away with them. We waited patiently until he was done, and were determined to flag him down as he passed, but... rather than making his established rounds, after about 20 minutes of chatting he instead took a route along the front of the place, directly to the bar, and returned momentarily with the regulars' drinks. At this point, after dropping off the drinks, he went to the next table - also people that he appeared to know - and repeated the process. Only this time, when he returned with their drinks, he sat down with them and started to play whatever game they were setting up. We tried flagging down someone else, but from between 11pm and midnight, not one server passed by within waving range. I would have loved to try one of their Sonic Screwdrivers, or a Miskatonic Martini, or any one of a number of drinks, and never got the chance.

So given the mediocre food, strange drinks and appalling service, why would you ever want to go there? Hell, why would I want to go back? Well, simply put, it's the atmosphere. This is a geek's paradise, like your friendly neighborhood games store only with bigger tables and tableside drinks service (well, sort of). Everyone in there were Our People, like-minded nerds who had carved out their own niche and were loving it. Even the bathroom graffiti was clever and nerdy, referencing Portal and Star Trek transporters (the girls' washroom had poems about unicorns and rainbows apparently), and the walls of our entire section of the pub were covered with similar permanent-marker mottos, tirades and references. Rather than playing the games available there, we brought our own (Last Night On Earth, a zombie survival board game) and once we got that going, surrounded by similar groups playing similar games with a similar degree of enthusiasm, nothing else really mattered. There's a powerful sense of community and goodwill at AFK Tavern that I've never encountered in a bar before, where everyone is on the same page and all the competition is friendly.

A couple of years ago, I worked in China for about a year as an ESL teacher. One of the most incredible things that I experienced while I was there, that would have been impossible to explain to me prior to going, was the bond and sense of fraternity amongst members of the ex-patriate community, almost all of whom were geeks and gaming nerds. One of my best friends there owned a bar himself, and had dedicated one small room upstairs to gaming activities (which typically took the form of either Magic: The Gathering or Settlers of Catan games). I spent five nights a week at that bar, and is one of the things I missed the most when I came home. The AFK Tavern is the closest I've come to recapturing that - bad food, shitty service and all. I'm willing to forgive AFK for its faults (and yes, it has many) as long as it never sacrifices its core qualities and continues to cater to gamer geeks.

All images, except the Delorean, courtesy of the AFK Tavern Facebook page.

Review: Solatorobo: Red The Hunter

See that sword-gun? There's no reason for it to exist, because Red never once uses it in the entire game.

SOLATOROBO: RED THE HUNTER

I can pretty definitively state that there a certain things that I hate in a videogame, and sassy, back-talking, anthropomorphised animals are pretty close to the top of that list. Earthworm Jim gets a free pass, for obvious reasons, but the likes of Bubsy The Bobcat, Conker the Squirrel and even Crash Bandicoot just grind my gears: they feel more like brand-mascots than genuinely likable videogame protagonists, and always remind me of that one episode of The Simpsons where the network execs assemble Poochie The Dog to raise the edge-factor of the Itchy & Scratchy show.

But those are western games. Japanese games featuring anthropomorphic animals have a more authentic pedigree (no pun intended), right? I mean, there's a whole artistic tradition in Japan of kemono, dating back hundreds of years, that in its modern form has given us such brilliance as Usagi Yoyimbo. Except that the term kemono is less about artistic tradition and more about furry culture in Japan nowadays, and the insane popularity of what have been colloquially-termed "Petting Zoo People" - comprising everything from cat-eared girls to Star Fox - has a profound, indelibly creepy vibe underscoring it.

All of which leads me to Solatorobo: Red The Hunter, and my expectations going in. Cutting away all of the expository chaff, Solatorobo is a game about anthropomorphised cats and dogs riding giant mechas in a fantasy world of floating islands, where supernatural and technological elements co-exist without any sort of friction or discord. Even considering the great deal of slack I'm willing to cut Japanese RPGs, the game demands a lot from you on this premise alone, simply because it's been done to death elsewhere.

Let me say, for the record, that other than the whole Furry thing, Solatorobo manages to pretty enthusiastically embrace a handful of other elements that I dislike in videogames: yawn-inducingly long cut-scenes, unskippable mini-games, and pointless hunt-and-gather quests. Let's start with the cut-scenes.

It took me approximately 40 hours to complete Solatorobo: Red The Hunter. This is an impressive game-length for any handheld RPG, until you take into account the fact that half - and that is not hyperbole, literally 20 hours - of the game are actually cut-scenes. These cut-scenes are either animated or, more often, simply pages and pages and pages of text-based dialogue, most of it drawn out and utterly unnecessary. Whoever translated this game severely dropped the ball, and just about every time I put the game down and walked away was after dialogue-fatigue. Any RPG that asks you to save TWICE during a single cut-scene (and this was something that happened frequently with Solatorobo) is one that is treading the fine line between game and interactive manga, and needs to do some soul-searching. If any of the dialogue was even remotely interesting, I might feel differently; as it is, I was left with the feeling that I'd been suckered into wasting my time. Literally every single fight and change of scenery prompts a conversation between different characters, and at some point this starts to feel like a game designer padding out the length of the game to make it seem more substantial than it really is.

Less irksome than the unskippable cut-scenes, but still obnoxious, are the unskippable arcade mini-game sequences. This would not have been nearly as big of an issue if these mini-games had been designed and implemented better. I don't mind a temporary break from an established style of play, especially if the game in question is a turn-based RPG (my favorite example of this would be the mini-games in the Dragon Quest series, particularly the Treasures & Trapdoors "boardgame" in Dragon Quest V), but when progress in the main narrative of the game is hampered by having to beat a poorly-designed arcade sequence, I lose my mind. Solatorobo is particularly schizophrenic when it comes to its mini-games, trying to cram in at least half a dozen different ones, many of which are required to continue on with the game. Most egregious of these were the races: the flying mechanism was so poorly handled, and the barriers for the track so difficult to determine thanks to a wonky camera and the questionable design choice of making the track borders semi-transparent, that I very nearly quit the game in disgust right then and there. Other mini-games include fishing (bizarre, overly-sensitive controls make it a confusing endeavor at best), duelling (which is basically repurposed combat), trivia games (which are, as a rule, the random-guess-and-memorize-for-next-time variation) and beat-the-clock platformer challenges (which were challenging at their best, and infuriating the rest of the time).

Let's be fair, though. Nearly every RPG has the tendency to get bogged down in its own blabbermouthed self-importance, and mini-games are par for the course in just about every genre of videogame released nowadays. Neither of these two aspects, alienating as they can be, are enough to qualify Solatorobo as a bad game. No, Solatorobo's greatest offense is that despite its best efforts, it is inherently inconsequential. It does not give you any good reason to play it.

Case in point: early on in the game, you're given a side-quest involving a seemingly inexhaustible number of young ragamuffins, who have stolen a tourist's photo album, torn up all the pictures into quarters, and then disappeared off into the wilds of Shepherd Republic. Occasionally, you'll find one or two of them hiding in barrels, and if you manage to scoop them up (which, with enough patience, you will, otherwise they'll just continue to barrel around that room endlessly) you get that piece of the photo. If you get all four pieces, they'll assemble into a full Solatorobo-related image which you can view from your airship cabin. These pictures have no benefit other than that they're kind of nice to look at, I guess. There's a similar side-quest where you search the world for organs and musical plants to somehow 'harvest', and then use to purchase in-game music. There's a shop you can buy commemorative plates, which take the form of cut-scenes. ALL of these things are things you've already experienced in the game and add nothing new. They do not give you any sort of internal benefit or edge. Your gameplay experience is not enhanced by them in the least. And yet, Solatorobo makes a big deal out of them, and you'll be finding photo-carrying waifs and musical plants right up to the end of the game.

Solatorobo designates itself a role-playing game, and indeed it does have many of the trappings of an RPG, but most of these are more aesthetic than functional. There are three separate, and as near as I can tell, wholly unrelated levelling systems present. First, there's your actual level, which increases as a result of XP earned from combat; this system appears to have no actual impact on the game whatsoever, and exists no further than a number in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Second, there's your Hunter rank. Ostensibly, your rank determines the tier of quests you're able to undertake, but again, I could find no evidence of this being the case; rather, new quests are released after each chapter that you complete, and never once was I turned away from a quest because my rank wasn't high enough. Finally, there's your mecha, the DAHAK, which can be levelled up through the use of a grid system. Powerups for speed, attack power, defense and "Hydraulics" (the speed at which your mecha can lift objects and enemies, the central mechanism of the game's combat system) can be purchased at shops around the world, and new grid squares can be unlocked through the use of P-Crystals which are found hidden in various corners of different rooms and terrains. This last system is the only one that actually has an effect on the game, and hunting for P-Crystals is one of the few highlights of Solatorobo.

Combat can be generously described as repetitive. Again, this is a criticism that could be levelled at just about any RPG; the difference in, your standard RPG has special attacks, magic, weapons of varying attributes, and so forth. In Solatorobo, there are two types of combat: regular fights and boss battles. In regular fights, you'll dodge an attack, run up to an enemy, tap 'A' quickly to lift it up, and then throw it either on the ground or at another enemy. Repeating this three to four times is usually enough to finish off any enemy you come across. Boss battles, on the other hand, involve tapping 'A' at the right time to grab a thrown projectile, 'A' again to toss it back at the boss, and then a quick dodge out of the way as they attack with one of a handful of designated patterns. There is no variation with this. Every boss battle functions identically.

But let's get back to my original point: Furries. The main character of Solatorobo is Red, a Caninu, or dog person. His 'sister' Chocolat is a Felineko (I'll leave it up to you to decipher that one). Everyone that they meet, with a couple of notable exceptions, are Caninu or Felineku, and until very late in the game, they all behave exactly like their human counterparts might. It's perhaps a testament to Solatorobo that the main storyline does eventually delve into the origins of these two species... And without getting too spoilery, humans do make an appearance. More importantly, Red gains the ability - again, quite late in the game - to transform at will from Caninu to human, a transformation that, AGAIN, seems to have no practical effect on how the game is played, and seems to be present simply for the novelty factor. And by novelty factor, I mean "appealing to creepy Furries" factor.

Solatorobo does not shy away from its inherent creepiness. There's a transvestite Caninu who shows up periodically in the first half of the game to creep on Red. The secondary protagonist, Elh, is a female Felikenu disguised as a male - not because there's any societal pressure or stated purpose for this, mind you, but because once it is revealed it will make Red react with typical Japanese red-faced, temple-sweat-beaded embarrassment. Repeatedly. Opéra, who starts out as an antagonist but later joins forces with Red, is a semi-sexualized Felineku, and there is a pop star named Cocona who represents the sort of sexy-cutesy Japanese idoru thing. It behooves me to say that there's nothing wrong or unpleasant or gross with any of these things taken on their own, and Solatorobo is far from the only game (or cartoon, movie, or comic book) aimed at kids that includes one or more of the above. What is creepy is that Solatorobo includes all of the above things AND a knowing wink at Furry culture. This is not Bugs Bunny dressing up like a girl and smooching Elmer Fudd for laughs; this is a world that explores bona fide sexual orientation and lifestyle choices of anthropomorphised, cartoon animals.

This, in itself, does not make Solatorobo a bad game. I think there could be more games exploring sexuality and alternate lifestyles and perspectives and we'd all be better for it. I can't even damn Solatorobo for dancing around the edge of Furrydom, no matter how creepy I personally find that. No, what I hate about Solatorobo is that it is a frustrating gaming experience, and allows itself to get bogged down by - hell, it wholeheartedly EMBRACES - its flaws and even tries to present them as intended features.

Graphics: 7/10 - Not a fan of the anime style, but for a DS game they're consistent and look pretty good
Audio: 7/10 - I've heard worse, but not a soundtrack that will stick with me
Gameplay: 4/10 - The novelty quickly wears off and becomes repetitive with occasional forays into frustration
Design: 3/10 - Too much dialogue, too many cut-scenes, and what little game there is feels half-finished