Puzzle Agent 2 Review

In Puzzle Agent 2, Nelson Tethers heads back to the puzzle-obsessed city of Scoggins, Minnesota to put an end to the eraser factory case. The quirky story of the first game is amped up in this second installment (think Bigfoot enthusiast and outer space), but other than that, it’s the same old schtick.

Beyond a few new characters and locations, the core content from the first game makes up the majority of Puzzle Agent 2. From the same interactive map, to locations such as the diner, the lodge, and the inn, the three hours of gameplay in Puzzle Agent 2 feels more like an expansion pack than a full-blown sequel.

The repetitious nature isn’t lost in the puzzle category. The overused “redirection” puzzles that plagued the first game are back, redressed for further consumption. The balance of puzzles’ difficulty is also once again off; certain puzzles are a breeze while others require draining-aptitude-test level concentration. And some are downright impossible to understand from the instructions.

Taking an overused puzzle and slapping a space theme on it doesn’t make it new.

Too often the puzzles don’t even fit the scenario that’s playing out, making them feel contrived (some are so off topic as to wonder what the hell the developers were thinking). What occurs, then, is rather than the puzzles being an organic part of the gameplay, they’re often unwarranted and uninteresting hurdles the player must jump in order to progress the narrative. For a game with “puzzle” in the title, players will rightfully expect greater innovation.

Time for a good ole astronaut varmint roast, compliments of developer Telltale Games.

What ultimately saves the game is its atmosphere. Strange happenings await around every corner, from the onslaught of whispering Hidden People (i.e. forest gnomes) to an astronaut roasting a squirrel over a campfire, Puzzle Agent 2 never runs short on the peculiar. Characters feel genuine and the voice acting does well to further the mysterious nature of Scoggins. But even with its nuggets of entertainment, a game can hardly be worth revisiting when the gameplay itself is lacking on so many levels.

In order for a series to obtain longevity, each proceeding installment must show signs of improvement over its predecessor. With Puzzle Agent 2, that dose of improvement is substituted for a vile of the all too familiar. And who really wants to take that?

Rating:

6/10

Snapshot Review: Corpse Granny for iOS

Don't mess with the eldery. Especially if they're zombified and wielding a cane.

Haven’t heard of Corpse Granny yet? You will soon. This new physics-based, trial and error puzzler is an appealing up and comer among the other games of the same genre that flood the app store on a daily basis. Corpse Granny’s visuals are appealing and its soundtrack is catchy enough to keep your and ears pleased for hours. But what about your mind?

Corpse Granny plays similarly to Cut the Rope, replacing the rope with electric bolts and the candy with fireballs. By slicing the bolts, you affect the direction and speed of the attached ball’s swing. Thinking ahead will do you well on some levels, but for the most part trial and error and timing are the the names of the game. There are four total types of fireballs used to destroy each level’s zombies, three of which have their own unique power. One of the fireballs self-detonates after three bounces, taking away the cushion of excessive bounces and putting your timing accuracy to the test. Another type of fireball bounces around like a cartoon character who just ate a hot chili pepper, while the third special ball doesn’t really have a “power” per se. By tilting your device, you can swing the ball left and right. The electric bolt that holds the ball begins to stretch the harder the ball swings, allowing you to reach those pesky zombies that were previously beyond your hitting range.

The few bosses in Corpse Granny fight back against your attack.

Though the game looks and runs well, there is a slight issue with the iOS 5’s notification menu. The top of your screen gets a lot of use in this game, which makes the notification menu think you’re calling for its services when all you’re trying to do is cut a a fireball free. It didn’t do much harm to my gameplay experience, but it was an annoyance that occurred often enough to deserve mention.

The best puzzle games keep the player’s frustration in balance, maintaining a clean tightrope walk between engagingly challenging and overtly sinister. Corpse Granny too often errs on the side of simplicity, trading the possibilities of frustration for gameplay that more closely resembles an occasionally bumpy Sunday drive. My abilities with this type of game are average at best, but playing through the three world’s forty-five levels took me under two hours. After adding on another half hour of playtime, I breezed to a three-jewel rating for all but a few levels.

Another zombie down with minimal effort.

But the developers at FreshGem have taken a bold step to add hours of replay value to Corpse Granny by allowing players to create their own levels. Unfortunately, you can’t use your iDevice to create them because the program runs on Adobe Flash. So conjuring up your own zombie-infested levels on the FreshGem website will have to take place at your laptop, and when they’re done you can play them on your pod, pad, or phone. The best user-created levels will be accessible to all Corpse Granny players, but only after they’ve beaten the three stages of the game.

Though Corpse Granny has a humorous and sensory-appealing way about it to make it a viable app on a commercial level, the game doesn’t invoke the smiles that the sound effects and images of other puzzle games like Angry Birds and Where’s My Water? continue to, even hours after play. It’s a cute romp that kept me glued while it lasted, thought it left me wanting more from the game’s developers rather than more of the game itself.

Corpse Granny is a fresh coat of paint on a tried and true formula, but the lack of challenge and ambition make Corpse Granny a title to look out for in its future updates and installments, but as of now, it’s not one for the record books.

Rating:

7/10

Snapshot Review: 8 Ball Pool Quick Fire

I am a huge fan of miniclip.com’s 8 Ball Pool Multiplayer. Everything about the game is entertaining: intuitive controls, beautifully accurate physics, and a recent addition of a search feature that allows you to find your friends and challenge them. It’s a game that you can pick up and play for one round, or sit down for a spell and join in on an 8, 16, or 32-player tournament. When I heard miniclip had created an iOS app for my iPod, I bought it in a scurry of excitement.

And everything went downhill from there.

The premise of the game is simple. It’s you against the clock, racing to pot the balls as quickly as possible. With each ball you sink, additional time is added to the clock. Strings of successful back-to-back pocketed shots result in multipliers for your score. Once one ball is left in a rack, a new rack is set on the table, with the one ball you still haven’t pocketed absent from the triangle.

The lines indicate direction and speed of the balls after impact.

But for a game that relies heavily on physics, it’s both frustrating and nonsensical that the pool balls in this game react like they were hit five times harder than they actually were. But their overly enthusiastic trip doesn’t end there. After a ball has rocketed from your cue ball, it bounces off the table’s railings like a pinball, sending the majority of your shots on a wild run. This defeats the purpose of strategy and precision that players have come to love about its sister game, the ever-popular 8 Ball Pool Multiplayer.

Sporadically absent sound effects and often unresponsive controls that somehow reverse their commands (i.e. you drag left and the stick turns right) top this app off as little more than a hassle. Whether the Quality Assurance step in its production was skipped or miniclip simply wanted to rush a game out to cash in on the popularity of its predecessor, the fact is this app is not worth your 99 cents. That is, unless you find frustration to be entertaining.

RATING:

5/10

Why 3-D Matters (an optimist’s look into the future of gaming)

Checking out a fireworks show with these bad boys. Should be hella sweet.

Technology is an animal that is continually growing in new and exciting ways. But just when 3-D is staring to become a part of home entertainment, there are many who wish to dismiss it as nothing more than a gimmicky fad.

Walter Murch, who won an Academy Award for his sound design on Apocalypse Now, insists that 3-D will never work. In a letter sent to Roger Ebert, he explains that the issue lies with the human mind.

“The biggest problem with 3-D, though,” Murch’s letter reads, “is the ‘convergence/focus’ issue… 3-D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before… This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true ‘holographic’ images.”

And there in lies the answer. The issue is not that 3-D entertainment will never work, it’s just that our current technology isn’t up to snuff. Future advancements in three-dimensional entertainment will fix not only the headaches for many viewers that accompany viewing 3-D, but also the awkward moment when we’ve gotten up to use the restroom and caught a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror wearing those almost-cool-but-not-really glasses.

When the 3DS was released in March, critics were quick to jump on its lack of ambitious release titles and the headaches it caused users, with only a slight nod to the glasses-free technology. The same hot topic issue is seen across any of 3-D’s mediums, including theaters, homes televisions, cell phones, and handheld videogames. But even with all its flaws, it’s apparent that something revolutionary is going on.

Take the 3DS’ use of augmented reality. What better way to bridge the gap between the player’s world and game than to make them one in the same? This is a great leap towards what we’ve been talking about for so long, what we’ve dreamed of since the monochrome days of Pong— a true interactive experience where the game’s doors are opened with your hands and not with the push of a button (something I like to call Interactive Entertainment Immersion, or IEI). We see another budding version of IEI in Microsoft’s Kinect, though its limits, like the current versions of 3-D televisions, are apparent. When motion-sensing technology and revolutionary 3-D have finally matured and joined forces, it will be one truly glorious day whose forecast will be sunny with an all-day onslaught of realized hopes and dreams.

What the average consumer may not realize is that steps are already being taken to alleviate issues and make 3-D an integral part of any home entertainment center. Earlier this year, a 52” glasses-free 3-D television was announced that solves issues involving framerates and dark lines that appear on display screens. Murch’s need for holograms is also in the pipeline as various companies such as Holografika further develop hologram technology. MIT students have even constructed their own hologram recording device using a Kinect camera.

The future is nigh, and it will bring with it great advancements in all forms of technology. But it will take time before they are here, so we must be patient. Do you reprimand a child for the lack of dimension and shading in his stick figure drawing? No. You must realize the young mind’s potential and encourage him in his endeavors. We must do the same with 3-D by encouraging it in its infancy so that it will one day grow to be the big, monstrously amazing form of interactive entertainment that it is destined to be.

But that’s not to say it shouldn’t be smacked on the wrist when it’s not learning from its mistakes.