Swords+Soldiers: WiiWare (want)

A Review: http://www.edge-online.com/features/review-swords-soldiers

Want to play. Looks fun and colorful like Castle Crashers, but it's a RTS presented as side-scrolling (looking like a platformer).

Scribblenauts!

Scribblenauts!!!
I want to play! A DS game with over 220 puzzles that you solve by simply entering in the names of items (apparently almost any kid-friendly non-proper noun) to help you solve the puzzles!

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars - & our "Mission Kenny"

Today I finished the story part of GTA: Chinatown Wars - but i'm only about 63% complete!

Whew - those credits are long! It looks like they have thanked every single Rockstar office location in the credits for this game. Did they all work on this?

Also - there are new missions that can be downloaded from the Rockstar Social Club site. And because you upload your stats from the game, it can actually provide a custom map of the Rampages and Ride-Along missions that you've not found. I thought I'd found most of them, although not completed them.

holy moly, it's selling at Best Buy right now for $19.99 (huge savings from the launch price of $34.99 when we bought our copies).

Very sad that the US sales went down in April instead of going up: 89,000 units in March (19 days) and 70,000 in April.
But this is such an awesome game!


Notes about the actual game:
I really loved this more than I thought I would. There's something really compelling about it being a portable GTA. It's your own little Liberty City!
The driving is also a lot more forgiving and easier, and the missions are probably pretty easy in terms of a hard-core player, but for me they were just challenging enough to be fun, not so much that they are frustrating.


Unexpectedly fun Missions
(since I suck at GTA driving on PS2 - I can't drive well enough for it to be fun. Is it the analog control? This version actually makes an effort to keep you driving a straight line (as long as you're trying to do so).
The overall goal is to recover your father's sword and uncover what is really going on... but this leads to a wide variety of missions from a cop, other gang lords, etc.
Flying helicopters, hotwiring cars, breaking into gang hangouts, even using a dragon parade costume as camouflage after a bank heist.


- plus drug dealing (think "Dope Wars" or even "Chocolatier"!)
- extra missions (firetruck rescues! vigilante police cars! taxis!) - which all yield special powerups
- shooting out about 90 security cameras (which will eventually yield better drug prices. I have only found 31 of them).
- rampages! (unexpectedly fun to run around causing mayhem with a chainsaw in a tiny simulated game).
- multiplayer!

Back to when I started playing:
About a week after I first got Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars for DS,in mid-March, we had a real-life "Kenny Mission" at the Game Developers Conference.

Those who have played the game know that your character's name is Huang Lee, and the first thing that happens is that your father's sword, which you're delivering to your Uncle Kenny in Liberty City, gets stolen right after you arrive.

I actually felt as if I was part of the game when rushing around during GDC with our Executive Kenny, which was actually pretty fun (and satisfying to make the effort since we actually got some good feedback).

I was going to write this mission as it would be in GTA:Chinatown Wars.


Goal: Get Kenny's feedback and buyin on your project
Setup: "It's been hard for your team to get time with Kenny while he's in SF. You need to get his feedback on your project before he goes back to NZ..."
Top down view of our office - see player character and Kenny character.

(big yellow circle on the ground next to Kenny, who's standing near some cubes.) Player walks into the circle and kicks off cutscene dialog:

Kenny: I have to run to lunch at the W Hotel. If you can walk with me, we can talk and walk. I need to leave right now!"

Switch back to street outside building.
Kenny char in front, with player and design team following.
Kenny character starts walking. Text says: "Keep up with Kenny until he gets to his appt..."
Kenny: ""
player character: running along behind Kenny, who sometimes goes a little faster (like the cars do in the game) - then text will say:
"Don't get Kenny get too far ahead, you won't be able to hear him"

Player does need to stop momentarily to write notes in notebook, which creates some challenge in keeping up with him.

Player and other characters must dash across streets to keep up, sometimes narrowly missing being hit, especially if they were writing notes. (just like in GTA!)

At the W: big yellow circle in front of building (if player has talked enough and stopped and written notes) - player walks into it to get mission complete!
If Kenny gets too far ahead: "Mission Failed: You lost Kenny..."
Hit SELECT to restart mission.

Of course if this were a real GTA:CW mission, the part following Kenny to the W would be just the "travel" portion, which you could "trip skip" when you replay the mission.
After we got there, there would be a secondary goal: "Protect Kenny during his press interview..." with some sort of gang shooting happening which we'd need to defend him from...

Critical and commercial reception:
From the wikipedia page - it looks like - awesome reviews, but lackluster sales:

Chinatown Wars generated lower than expected sales in its first week in the United Kingdom, and did not even sell to level with the debut of Vice City Stories, which was Rockstar's expectation.[38] In the United States, it sold just under 90,000 units during its first two weeks on the American market.[39] This has led Best Buy to begin selling the game for $19.99 for a limited time, a discount of 43% from its standard retail price of $34.99; the response to this has been very positive.[40]

Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure

A mash-up of a Tetris-like match-3 with platforming... you are Henry Hatsworth, an Indiana-Jones-like archaeologist (complete with young and old versions like in Last Crusade).

You're trying to find the pieces of a golden suit and foiled along the way by various dastardly villains. On the top screen your character is walking along, throwing projectiles (bombs, shooting guns) at enemies, jumping around on platforms, gathering treasure...
On the bottom screen (puzzle world) you have falling blocks that you must do match-3+ puzzles with.
The cool part is that you have power-up squares on the bottom screen, and if you match them, you get powerups on the top screen! (your character gets hearts, longer power meter, etc)
And, every time you kill an enemy on the top screen, they fall down to the bottom screen and become a block. If you can't get rid of the monster block by the time it gets up to the top of the grid, it will appear back up on the main screen, and fall on poor Henry.
So you're constantly killing enemies and jumping around on top, and then freezing the action to match blocks on the bottom.

I played through the first world (4 levels?) and partway through the 2nd world.
Up until I stopped, I was pretty engaged. Sometimes because of my fairly bad platforming skills I'd have to replay a level over and over again, but I always seemed to break through just as I was about to quit.

When in the middle of the 2nd world it just got to be too much restarting. (one reason may have been that I haven't been buying power-ups as often as a normal person, because the only way to launch the SHOP is to use the L shoulder button on the main screen. Oops, my L button is stuck. Why couldn't they have made this a touch screen button, or at least something you can select wtih the d-pad...)

The feeling of frustration starts to overpower the "oooh fun" feeling and after a while I just didn't want to play anymore.
Story not that exciting and I do have a lot of other games to play.
For example, on GTA:CW I also would replay missions over and over, but it never got to the point of
Plus I didn't have the impetus of "I need to get my money's worth out of this" because it's a PF library game.

But, until my frustration and overall ineptitude at platforming interfered, I really liked it.
Great music, great multi-tasking feeling, but it the end the failure kind of overshadowed everything else (especially since I feel like I should have been able to play it better).
I did really love the small amounts of VO -- "Good show!" when he powered up into the robot version (TEA-TIME!)