Introduction

As many of you on this list know, I make it a point to keep up with what's happening in the world of video and computer games. I do this both because I like playing games, and because I learn a lot in the process. I'm finishing up a book on what's generally called "interactive fiction", and games are our best insights into that world today. I generally don't play many sports, simulation, or combat games, so you won't see any of those here (if you feel like some sporting action, I heartily recommend the snowboarding game "SSX" or its equally rewarding sequel "SSX Tricky").

My game reviews differ from those in the media in two ways. First, when I start a game I am heavily biased. I am strongly in favor of the game, and I'm cheering it on. I've paid my money, I'm giving it my time, and I want the game to be wonderful. I'm happy to overlook and forgive any and all problems that I possibly can - I'm actually eager to do so. I work hard to throw all expectations out the window, and take each game on its own terms. I want to love every game I play. I'm on their side. My goal is to have fun, and I don't have any specific theories or criteria that the game has to satisfy other than that it's fun to play. Once I'm done, I think about the experience, and try to understand why I enjoyed the parts I did, and why I was let down by any parts that disappointed me.

Second, I usually only review games that I've played all the way through. I feel that each game's creators deserve the respect of an informed opinion. It's easy to discern that most published game reviews are based just on the manufacturer's literature, a demo, and a few minutes of gameplay. That's not unreasonable: many modern games take many hours hours to play, so there's just no way a professional reviewer has enough hours in the day to crank out reviews by playing games all the way through. But that's a serious problem, because many games have design flaws that are not obvious during just a short test play, or at the start of the game, yet can become increasingly problematic over the course of sustained play. Some games that start out wonderfully turn into torture somewhere along the line. Similarly, some games that start out as uninspired pick up depth and become better and better as they go along. You can only find these things out by putting in the time. A couple of my reviews below are for games that I didn't enjoy and couldn't manage to finish, despite trying my best to persevere. The reviews indicate which these are.

In this brief collection I'll keep things much shorter than my usual reviews. If you want to know more about any of these games, type their names into Google and then stand back to avoid getting buried in the avalanche. Here are the games in this collection, along with their final scores out of a possible 100.

Grand Theft Auto III (40)
Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter (95)
Star Wars: Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II (70)
Star Wars: The Clone Wars (70)
Final Fantasy X (95)
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (50)
Starfox Adventures (40)
Super Mario Sunshine (45)
Kingdom Hearts (95)
Grand Theft Auto Vice City (95)
Blinx: The Time Sweeper (40)
Syberia (20)

Grand Theft Auto III
PlayStation 2
Score: 95/100

You play a small-time hoodlum working his way up the ranks of the mob by carrying out a series of assassinations, demolitions, and other deadly havoc in a violent, over-the-top modern American city. You get around town by carjacking vehicles that appeal to your whims or needs. Between missions, you can drive or walk around, sightseeing or causing mayhem as the spirit moves you. Liberty City is geographically huge, and it hosts a number of radio stations that you can listen to as you drive, many of which are populated by delightfully deranged DJs, talk-show guests, and advertisers.

This game is just wonderful. People who haven't played it, or have played it only a bit, react strongly to the violence. And there's plenty of that. Lots of pedestrians get run over. You murder lots of people as you climb the mafia's ranks. You can also rob people, and hire prostitutes and pay them for sex in your car. On the other hand, you can steal a police car and dish out some vigilante justice, swipe a firetruck and run around putting out fires, or steal an ambulance and get paid for saving lives.

The game is no more violent than The Sopranos, and you kill no more innocent people than Godzilla flattens in a typical power walk through downtown Tokyo. The radio stations are very funny. The physics of the vehicles are totally unrealistic, but they feel just right, and the cars are a pleasure to drive. The game is filled with dozens (if not hundreds) of fun little elements tucked away all over the place.

This isn't a game to teach morality, but to give you a chance to enjoy creating mayhem in a consistently over-the-top world. It succeeds wildly.

Star Wars - Jedi Starfighter
PlayStation 2
Score: 70/100
Star Wars - Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II
Gamecube
Score: 70/100
Star Wars - The Clone Wars
Gamecube
Score: 70/100

I've put the three Star Wars games together because they're pretty much all the same. You get a little bit of exposition in the form of an opening cut-scene, which gives you an elbow nudge to bring back all your positive Star Wars emotions ("Hey, this is Star Wars! Remember? How about that great John Williams music? The text crawl at the start against a field of stars? Here they are again - woohoo!"). Then you're introduced to some characters who want to save the galaxy by blowing up the bad guys and everything they've got.

The result, depending on the game, is that you fly your ship in the air or just above the ground, and you try to shoot down the very many bad guys before they shoot you down. If you fail, then you get blown up and you have to try again. If you succeed, you get some more Star Wars music ("Hey, this is Star Wars! Remember?") and then another cut-scene that usually shows someone telling you that, yes, okay, you got through that battle alright, but this next battle coming up, well, boy howdy, it's going to be a big one, and it's absolutely vitally imperative that you win this one or the Sith Warlords are going to conspire with the droids and the clones are going to launch a walker at the radar dishes or some crazy thing.

Frankly, the plots of these games are as disjointed as the plots of the last couple of movies, and about as relevant. You could take away all the cutscenes and the game would remain unchanged: fly around and shoot all the bad guys before they shoot you. By and large there's nothing particularly "Star Wars" about any of these games, except for the music and recognizable visuals (e.g. the spaceships, droids, references to Yoda and the Force, etc.). The gameplay is usually quite good: if flying and shooting is what you're looking for, these games are great examples of that genre.

Although there's little that's novel here, one thing that these games have going for them are the great production values. The visuals are superb, and the two Gamecube games are among the best real-time 3D stuff being made today. The music and sound effects are usually just as good, though sometimes there are mixing problems. Voice acting is a place where many current games take a big belly-flop. Most of the time the voice work in the Star Wars games is a bit better than average, which means it's not horrifying. An exception is the voice of Anakin Skywalker in The Clone Wars; his delivery is even flatter and more monotonic than in Episode 2, making me wonder why they bothered to hire an actor at all. Subtitles would have had evoked more emotion.

Final Fantasy X
PlayStation 2
Score: 95/100

The first thing to know about this game is that it is HUGE. It took me over 120 hours of play. Okay, I know you read that twice, so I'll assure you it's not a typo: over one hundred and twenty hours of sitting in front of the TV with the console controller in my hands.
I'll acknowledge right off the bat that this makes no sense at all. If you're an adult in a relationship, this game's going to take you weeks or months to get through. If you're single, or a kid, you can make better time. You can also rush through: some people on the net claim they've flown their way through this game in 40 or 50 hours. I believe them, but they're missing a lot of the fun along the way.

The game is set in a fantasy world. It begins with your character, a professional "blitzball" player, walking to the stadium for his next game. Suddenly, Something Very Bad appears out of nowhere and everyone's yelling and shouting and there's a big fight and someone throws you a sword and you have no idea what's happening and you fight fight fight and now you're transported somewhere else and just what the heck is going on here? Frankly, it takes a while to sort it all out, but eventually you begin to get the bigger picture. A dark force has been steadily attacking villages and killing everyone, and the attacks are gaining in power and frequency. You meet someone who can help stop this force, and you and some of the other characters you meet along the way enlist yourselves to help her out. The story of the game is as much her story as it is yours, as you seek to help her discover how to stop the evil force, and to find out more about yourself and this world you've been transported to. Along the way you learn some very disturbing information about the situation that gives the whole enterprise another layer of meaning.

The game has four basic modes: cut-scenes, movement, battles, and the sphere grid. Let's look at these in turn.

There are a lot of cut-scenes in this game, some produced in real-time on the console's 3D hardware (a technique known as machinima), and some already rendered, and simply played back off the CD. These latter cut-scenes are often very rich and sometimes have wonderful detail and subtlety. The camera work, lighting, sound, and other production values are usually very good in the cut-scenes (as well as the game itself). The voice acting is ranges from hardly-awful to truly-awful.

Movement is pretty straightforward: you point your guy and he goes. The world is an interesting mix of 2D and 3D. You don't get to control the camera in this game, but the camera does move around along pre-defined paths. Because the designers knew where the camera could and couldn't go, they were able to focus their resources where they matter. Through a careful mix of elements, you get parallax and a strong sense of 3D, though if you look at some of the scenes with a technical eye you can tell that there are a lot of tricks being played (and being played very well).

Battles pit you (and your allies) against monsters that appear out of nowhere. You take turns, almost like a card-playing game. When it's your turn, you pick what you (or your ally) should do: slash with a sword, cast this magic spell or that one, and so on. Then the bad guys get their turns, and they whomp on you. Winning a battle means knowing what your characters are capable of, and what the bad guys can do offensively and where their weaknesses are defensively, and then carefully putting together a game plan to take them out. There's no timing or twitching in these fights: they're all about strategy and tactics (and some luck). Once you get to know the monsters in an area, this strategizing becomes a lot of fun. I played with the cheat book by my side, which has an encyclopedia-sized chapter that describes each monster, and spells out out its strengths and vulnerabilities. I don't know how you'd make it through without that information, but with it, it's a lot of fun.

Finally, the sphere grid. Each time you defeat a group of monsters, everyone who took part in the fight gets some experience points. You can "spend" these points on the sphere grid, which is a big loose network, like something a drunken spider might weave. Basically your experience points let you move along this interconnected web of lines. When you reach certain nodes, or intersections, you can spend a "sphere" (something that's sometimes dropped by monsters that you defeat in battle) and gain the ability associated with that node. The nodes are spatially grouped into themes: physical strength, magical ability, thievery, etc. So you might have a character that starts off in a region of the sphere grid that's all about physical strength. Once he's filled up all the nodes in that neighborhood, you can decide what new skills to add to his repertoire by taking him to the appropriate part of the grid. Once you "spend" your experience points and spheres you can't get them back, so these choices are important. The nodes are clearly labeled, so you can make informed decisions about where you're going and why, and thereby customize your party's skills in a way that suits you.

The game isn't perfect, but the flaws are far outweighed by the consistency of vision and gameplay, and high quality of almost all production values in the game. There are hundreds of little things to stumble across and enjoy. The big elements are very well handled. The story is a little wacky, but it holds together, and while the characters aren't novel quality, they do have moments of depth. There are also plenty of moments of treacle, too, but they eventually pass.

The game was very intelligently designed to be played in chunks. You save by walking up to a "save sphere". These are placed just far enough apart that you have to fight your way to them, but not so far that you can't get there in a single game session. So it's very attractive to pick up the game for a while, play until you hit the next save point, and then put it down and return to your life. I think this is one of the reasons why I was willing to continue playing once I realized just how enormous the game is: there's always a reasonable place to stop just up ahead, and there's always something rewarding along the way.

This is a huge game. You should only play if you have the time, and I strongly recommend using a hint book (I used the one from BradyGames, and was very happy with it). In terms of sheer hours of pleasure per dollar spent, no other video game comes close. The game is repetitive in structure but not in detail; e.g. the monster fights are pretty similar, but the monsters are different and that keeps the battles interesting. There are dozens of side quests that you can take up along the way if you want, or simply ignore if you don't.

The production values are generally very good and sometimes excellent. Every now and then I'd be crossing a bridge, or walking down a path, and the camera would follow me, and I just thought to myself, "Wow, what a beautifully-composed camera move. These guys actually think about foreground and midground and background!" This is a huge game, but one that is consistently, frequently rewarding.

I enjoyed this game tremendously.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
Gamecube
Score: 50/100

You play a young woman who is investigating her grandfather's death. Soon after arriving at at his spooky old mansion, you discover his secret lab and within it an old book, which serves as a portal to different places and times. You fight monsters and solve puzzles as you slowly discover the secrets of the house, and the plans of a terrible dark enemy who is planning to plunge the world into chaos, because he's a... because he wants to... because when he was just a young monster he... look, he's bad and evil and wants to ruin the world, and I'm sure he has a good reason, even though he keeps it to himself.

This game obviously had high ambitions in terms of story and atmosphere. And although they get a good start, both of these elements fail to quite work. The story is way too fragmented to ever quite come together, and the spooky atmospheres get repetitive.
There are important pieces of the game that just never make any sense. For example, near the start of each section of the game, you're inexplicably transported to a place where there's a creepy old book you must open. Do so, and you're transported back to where you were, but now you can cast magic. Whaaaa?

The game has lots of arbitrary puzzles, and unlabeled choices. For example, near the very start you find yourself in a room with three objects, each a different color. You're supposed to pick one. At this point you know nothing about what's going on, what these objects are, what the colors mean - nothing. But your choice here is very important. It determines what kind of game you'll get: lots of physical fighting, or lots of magical fighting, and so on. It determines what kind of monsters you'll encounter, and how hard they'll be to fight. In other words, this is a chance for you to shape the kind of game you want to play. But they don't tell you this! Not only do you not know what choices the objects represent, you don't even know the nature of the decision you're making. So you're making a random choice for unknown reasons. Only if you cheat (e.g. by reading the cheat book, or going to the web) can you discover that this choice makes a big difference to the rest of the game, and what your choices mean.

This is just nuts. Game designers that force you to make important choices at random may think they're being clever, but they're simply lazy. They should be forced to build a stone wall for eight hours a day, every day for a month, carrying one rock at a time along a mile-long road from the quarry to the wall. We'll paint the rocks so it will be impossible for them to tell which ones are feather light, and which ones are back-breakingly heavy. An overseer will make sure that whatever rocks they pick up at the quarry, they have to carry all the way to the wall. A month of this and they'd stop with the unlabeled choices.

The game has one very clever new idea: a sanity meter. Each time you encounter a monster, it scares you so much that you lose a little bit of sanity (as measured by a green bar at the top of the screen). There are ways to get some sanity back, but usually over time your sanity slowly drains away. When you get sufficiently insane, really really weird stuff starts to happen. That stuff is the best part of the game, and somewhat reduced my ire over the disconnected plot and random puzzles.

Starfox Adventures
Gamecube
Score: 40/100

This is a straightforward adventure game. You play a space-traveling, adventuring fox who has been hired to oust the bad guys from Dinosaur Planet, and in the process reassemble bits of the planet that have flown away. You spend most of your time fighting with bad guys and solving puzzles. An unusual touch is that you fight with a staff, so much of the combat is hand-to-hand, though the staff can also fire energy pulses, so it doubles as your standard science-fiction phaser.

The game is obviously meant for kids, so it feels a bit slow-paced and dim-witted for an adult. It has many nice visual features, such as lovely grass and pretty good water. Most of the environments are fun to walk around. One sour note in the visuals is that the main character is visually unappealing. The designers obviously decided to stay very close to the face of a real fox, but that means his facial expressions are severely limited. He always looks to be in pain: smiles look like grimaces, and when he cheers you wonder if he's trying to get someone to drive him to the hospital. The sound is about average, and the voice acting is the usual not-very-good.

Even so, I might have given this game a better score were it not for the tug-of-war. This is a skill challenge you have to pass about 2/3 of the way through the game, so you've put a lot of time into it so far and you're reluctant to walk away. The idea is that you must prove your "strength" by besting a warrior at what is essentially a tug of war. The way you win this contest is this: hit the A button on the controller as hard and as fast as you can. That's it - that's all you do. And I'll tell you now that it's all but impossible. I tried a dozen times. I went to the web, and read up on what other people were saying. Hardly anyone could get past this. There were all sorts of tricks posted: put your fingernails on the A button just so, and move your wrist like this. Or try cradling the button with your thumbs and rocking it back and forth. I tried all of these and more, and frankly decided that it just wasn't possible. So I went to the store and bought a new "turbo" controller that electronically simulates rapid-firing of the A button. That worked, and I got to finish the game. It turned out to be a great investment: there are times in this game when you have to rapid-fire your staff to defeat an enemy, and I could just set my controller to turbo and not wear down my thumb pushing that button over and over ad infinitum.

But this is obviously an absurd demand in an otherwise reasonable game, and I just can't imagine how it survived play testing.

Future archaeologists will wonder what disease swept through our nation in the early twenty-first century, wearing away a groove in the bones of people's thumbs. I'm only guessing, but I'd look for today's video-games companies to be quietly buying up pharmaceutical firms that manufacture anti-arthritis medication. I can see the ads now: "Sure, Sony's ThumbEase Cream works great for PlayStation 2 thumb pain, but I played a lot of Gamecube games, and nothing makes my joints feel better than Nintendo Knuckle-B-Good suppositories!"

Super Mario Sunshine
Gamecube
Score: 45/100

We get to once again join Mario the plumber as he travels through a variety of different 3D environments on his obsessive-compulsive search for golden coins. This is a twitch game, pure and simple. Can you mash the buttons fast enough? Can you press them with sufficient precision so that Mario jumps and then spins at exactly the right instant to land on the rotating platform? Can you move the camera around fast enough to shoot at incoming rockets while aiming with your own water-filled jetpack to put out the flames of the fire-breathing robot monster while you're carried along on a roller coaster? I'm not making these activities up; they're from the game!

I like Mario games in general - they're colorful and light-hearted and good for just simple happy jumping around and exploration. But I found that this game was too hard for me. Maybe 15-year-old reflexes can perfectly execute a complicated spinning triple-jump at just the right moment, but my reflexes can't. And the price you pay for messing up even once is huge. Mario makes his way through some very big environments in this game. If you miss a jump, you often have to start the whole level all over again. I usually could figure out what what I was supposed to do, but I just wasn't able to carry out some of the multi-button sequences with sufficient speed, timing, and overall precision to make my way all the way through, and thus would have to start over from the beginning and repeat everything again.

Eventually the process of going through everything again became unbearably tedious and boring, and I just couldn't stand to go through any of the environments available to me even one more time. This high cost for even a single failure was an unfortunate design decision, and made the game less and less fun with each passing moment, until I ultimately gave up in frustration.

Kingdom Hearts
PlayStation 2
Score: 95/100

To make "Kingdom Hearts," follow this simple recipe: Take a copy of Final Fantasy X (reviewed above), add real-time fighting, 3D environments and camera control, create a series of environments based on Disney movies, add in a couple of Disney characters as your sidekicks and fighting allies, add in a bunch of Disney villains as bad guys, throw in a few characters from prior Final Fantasy games for spice, and then do the most improbable thing of all: make the result a huge amount of fun.

This game is just terrific. As is typical of these games, you play a boy in his early teens. The adventure starts off with some very well presented mood-setting, followed by a chance to run around on your home island a bit to practice fighting and get used to the controls. When you're ready, you're transported to another world and the adventure begins. Over the course of the game you travel to over a dozen different worlds, each modeled on a famous Disney film, where you typically find good guys from that film to help you out while there, and the villains from that film to defeat. This whole experience could have easily been nothing but a prolonged marketing gimmick, and of course it is exactly that, but it is so well done that the game rises above that imprinting purpose and is a genuinely fun experience.

Because it's so much a Final Fantasy-type game, it inherits many of that genre's conventions. The basic idea, as always, is to bash a series of monsters until you get to the chief monster of that environment, and then bash him too. There's a lot of monster-fighting in this game, but they've set things up so that you can generally get an edge by using your knowledge of your opponent, rather than simply wailing with your sword. I remember one bad guy that seemed to be invulnerable until I realized that if I jumped on his head (easily done), two strokes would do him in. Experimenting is encouraged in this game, because the cost of "dying" is small.

The levels are beautifully designed and executed, and reminded me of the architecture of the Disney theme parks: the spaces aren't physically very big, but they appear larger because they're filled with useful or interesting nooks and crannies.

Your nearly-constant companions in this game are Donald Duck and Goofy, who never break character in voice or physical performance. Throughout the game you encounter Disney characters, many of whom are voiced by the original actors, and the others by sound-alikes. There's no question that the voice work in this game is by far the best of any game out there: the vocal tracks are beautifully produced, the character's body language matches the vocal delivery, and the voice acting itself ranges from good to excellent, with most of the characters near the high side of the scale. The game uses sound effectively to help you make sense of the world and what's going on inside.

Music is important. I was once in Disneyland, on the "Pirates of the Caribbean" boat ride, when the ride broke down and we came to a halt. We sat in the boat for what felt like ten or fifteen years as they worked to get us moving again. I must report that the charming musical refrain "Yo-ho, yo-ho, it's a pirate's life for me" becomes rather less charming after hearing it repeated without pause for what feels like several thousand years. By the end, I was ready to admit that the moon landings were frauds filmed in a hanger in Utah, I was ready to eat worms, I was ready to gnaw off my own forearm; I would have done anything they wanted of me to get off that boat. But without demanding a ransom they eventually fixed it and we were on our way. So you can see that I may have felt some trepidation regarding the music in this game. I'm happy to say that the music was wonderfully, gloriously inconspicuous and innocuous. It was a fine bed for the action, but never drove me crazy.

This game isn't flawless, which is why it's not getting a score of 100. Some of its flaws are very small, and some are bigger, but none are show-stoppers. The problems produce the same feeling you get when trying to drive across town, and just when you're ready to turn you find it's a one-way street going the wrong way, forcing you to have to overshoot and then come back. It's a little more inconvenient than you'd like, but after a shrug of the shoulders it's left in the past.

I enjoyed this game so much that I played it through until I'd completed every one of the side quests and other little bits. I frankly didn't want it to end, and so I kept exploring every corner and taking on every optional challenge until I knew I'd seen and done everything and no longer really had an excuse to keep returning to it.

Very highly recommended.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
PlayStation 2
Score: 95/100

Everything I said about "Grand Theft Auto III" (reviewed above) is also true of this sequel. It's basically more of the same game, though it takes place in a different city. Just about every element of the game is bigger: there are more cars to drive (as well as boats and helicopters and motorcycles), more errands to run if you want (like delivering pizzas), and more missions to carry out. Your job is also bigger: rather than just doing odd jobs for the mafia bosses, your goal in this game is to take over Vice City for yourself.

The game has a few odd quirks, most of which seem to come from a lack of consistency. For example, most of the characters move in a stiff and awkward way, which you come to accept as part of the world. Then every now and then a bit of motion-capture appears, and it leaps out because suddenly one character seems to be moving 100 times more fluidly than any of the others. Similarly, sometimes a character you expect to move in a very realistic way (like the dancers in the strip club) are surprisingly clumsy. Some textures are sharp, and others right next to them are blurry.

But that's small stuff. The game is simply a lot of fun to play. The new talk-radio stations are very funny, and the music stations are programmed with the actual music of the times (the Latin jazz station is particularly good). The vehicles are fun to drive and handle just the way they should, the city is fun to explore, and the jobs you need to carry out are creatively diverse. Although you can solve many of the missions through very skillful shooting and driving, you can also accomplish many of them with normal skills by scouting the area first, watching the targets, thinking it through, and coming up with a good plan. The game doesn't care how you get the mission accomplished, and there's usually more than one way to do it.

Once you finish a job you can pick up another one immediately, or you can take as much time as you like to cruise around the city, holding up shops, visiting clubs, delivering pizzas, putting out fires, buying car dealerships, racing toy cars and helicopters, and otherwise just having a great time with the many amusements that are part of the landscape of the city.
The violence is again over-the-top, and a lot of people (gangsters and innocents) get killed before it's all over. To interpret this game as a morality play is to miss the point; it's a cheerfully violent cartoon. And a whole lot of fun.

Blinx: The Time Sweeper
Xbox
Score:40/100

This game has an original and very creative gimmick. You play Blinx, a cat who's out to destroy some monsters who have gotten loose. You use your vacuum cleaner to suck up garbage that's lying around, and then blow it back out at the monsters to hurt them. The gimmick is that along the way you can pick up crystals to control time. You can slow and pause time (so you can avoid dangerous moving obstacles by effectively slowing or stopping them), rewind to jump back a few seconds, and fast-forward if you want everything to speed up. The most interesting control is record: while the record button is active, you can "tape" 10 seconds of your activity. Then it plays back automatically, and now there are two copies of Blinx on-screen at the same time: one of them repeating what you did a moment ago, and the other under your live control. This lets your "old" self and your current self cooperate to bash monsters, push switches, and otherwise work as a team.

Other than the time control idea, this game is firmly in the "Mario" genre: run around and pick up precious artifacts that have been left lying around while taking out all the bad guys you encounter along the way. The game adds a time limit: if you can't clear a level in 10 minutes you'll need to start over again.

The time-control gimmick is a really nice idea. But sadly, it felt to me like it was squandered. The fun thing about time travel seems to be the chance to actually play with time and do interesting things. But in this game, many of your time-travel tricks are essentially pre-scripted solutions to puzzles. For example, at one point you walk up to a bridge that you need to cross, only to see it fall down as you walk up. So you use your reverse control to go back in time, watch the bridge re-assemble, and then run across it. It's not like you need to get the bridge back up somehow, and you figure out that reversing time is one way to do it, but rather that going into reverse is the one and only right answer. Other than the time-travel trick, the game isn't very good. The art direction is ho-hum: the main character isn't appealing to look at, the environments are dull and busy, the lighting is flat, and even though there are only a few types of enemies, they're simplistic and unattractive. The game's controls have a mushy feel to them, like you're playing in a world of transparent, viscous goo. Blinx seems to take a long time to cover a small amount of distance.

The old problem of bad automatic camera control rears its head here. I often had to fight with the camera, particularly in boss battles, jamming the control stick all the way to one side while running and still finding myself unable to point it where I was going. Another camera problem crops up when you get hit by a bad guy and knocked out. If you have a "retry" available then the scene "rewinds" and you get to to pick it up again from just before that moment. But the camera goes back to the same place too, so if you were stuck in a corner, or looking the wrong way, you frequently get knocked down again right away, which is frustrating. I found that after a while I was forcing myself to continue playing, hoping that the game would get better, but each level was really just more of the same. Eventually I stopped at about a third of the way through because I wasn't enjoying the experience much at all, so this is one of those games that I couldn't bear to play to the end.

Syberia
PC
Score: 20/100

Ah, I left this one for the end on purpose. Writing this review is like dessert. I played the other games in this email over the last year or so, but this is the game that actually got me to get up and write reviews and send this out.

"Syberia" is an adventure game in the classic tradition, which is a genre that has all but disappeared in recent years. You play Kate Walker, a New York lawyer who's come to a small, declining European town in order to wrap up the contracts for selling a toy factory. Upon your arrival you discover that your business contact (the owner of the factory) has just died, and that to get the contracts signed you must embark on a search for a mysterious heir. You control Kate from a third-person viewpoint as she moves through a series of fixed-view, pre-rendered environments. The gameplay involves solving puzzles and holding conversations with the people you meet along the way. Kate picks up little bits of information as she goes, and from these you can start to form a picture of your elusive client. You also occasionally receive cell-phone calls from friends and family back in New York, designed to give you a window into Kate's emotional and professional life.

This game is so bad that I had to write this to warn you.

It's getting great reviews, which I think has more to do with the sociology of adventure game fans than the game itself. Basically this genre has all but disappeared, so people are pleased as punch to see a new entry, and are willing to overlook its many serious flaws. They hope that by praising this game to the skies, it will sell well, and then more new adventure games may start to appear. This is not unlike people who dote on their beloved but sociopathic pets: "Sure, Mister FluffyBottoms ruins the furniture and throws up on my carpets and brings dead birds into the house, but he's my sweety-weety kittykins and I wuv him even when he jumps up on my houseguests and shreds their faces with his razor-sharp claws, don't I Mister FluffyBottoms-poo?" In other words, they're crazy.

This game has some positive qualities. First and foremost, it's beautiful. The overall design style is art nouveau in a world that is slowly crumbling. I love the look they've given to the world of machinery that's past its prime, rusty and creaking but still just able to work. The architecture is always good and sometimes stunning, and every now and then I'd see a desk or window treatment or lamp or ornamental statue and just wish I had one in my own home. The game is simply beautiful, and each time I moved to a new screen I felt like I was unwrapping some marvelous new present.

The rest of the game goes downhill from there, though, and it picks up speed pretty quickly. The game is firmly in the Myst style of adventure games, which means that they're repeating all the cliches and contrivances of the genre. Though we've learned a lot over the last decade about these kinds of games, this product manages to even forget some of the lessons that were learned in the production of Riven (the sequel to Myst). There are so many basic, easily articulated problems with this game that it would make a great case study of all the things that no game should ever do again. The list of problems is long; here are just a few representative samples to give you just a feeling for them.

At one point you're in a hotel, and you open the door to a broom closet. Inside is a broom, a bucket, and several shelves full of all sorts of cleaning supplies. On one shelf, among other supplies, there are some bottles of detergent. If you slowly move your cursor over everything in the closet ("Hey kids! Hours of exciting fun exhaustively searching every screen, running your cursor over everything and hoping it changes shape!"), you find that you cannot pick up anything here - but no, wait, you can pick up one of the bottles of detergent. Not any bottle, of course, but this one in particular. Why just that one bottle? Why, because it's a magical item that you'll need later. Why can't you pick up anything else? Why, because you won't need them in the game. How do you know that? The cursor doesn't change shape and so you're not allowed to pick them up. And why is that? Because otherwise the game would be unplayable. So this bizarre game cliche of the magical object that you discover through an exhaustive object-by-object search keeps you on track in the game, defying all reason and appearances.

It gets worse. Kate encounters many mechanical devices on her travels. Sometimes it's clear what these do, and so you might reasonably try to work the device. But if you're doing so before the game thinks you've been given the clue to figure out what that device does, Kate won't even try to work it. Instead, she says (out loud), "I don't need to do that yet." I beg your pardon? How does she know that? And other times, when you try to work a machine again, she'll say "I don't need to do that again." And again, how does Kate know that? At one point after working a machine she throws away key parts, saying "I won't need these again." What? Everything in the story and setup of the game says that she knows nothing of this world, and is exploring it as she goes, just as you are. This ability of hers to predict the future is just uncanny, particularly since it's limited to just these acts. Getting people to do the right things in the right sequence is a staple of adventure games, but this kind of clumsy, ham-handed control over the player breaks any illusion that you're actually figuring your own way through the experience. In this game, you must do the specific right things in the specific right order, or you won't get anywhere.

The game abounds in these kinds of stereotypes and cliches, each of which robs the experience of a little more coherency, or a little more fun. Although exploration is a critical element of this game (that is, you must find the exact right thing to do next), it comes at a very high price. To get from one place to another, you must move Kate there step by step. It's not uncommon to have to walk through a half-dozen screens or more. So if you think you need to be somewhere else, or you need to go back and try another exhaustive search somewhere because you missed some inconspicuous little 10-pixel-high object, you must (take a deep breath) click on the screen to get her moving, watch her run, get the next screen, click to move her to the edge, watch her run, get the next screen, click to move her to the edge... and on and on, plodding wearily through one screen after the next. And then you get there and discover that no, after all, this probably isn't the place you need to be. Maybe over there? And you start the mind-numbing process again.

There is no shortcut, no way to jump to a place you've been before and want to return to. Why not? The only reason I can imagine is that the designers are so in love with their artwork that they couldn't bear the thought that only four or five or ten exposures to it was enough, and that players would welcome being forced to see it again and again and again and again. This would be a wonderful game to give to anyone who thinks that they can design an adventure game, because this evidence shows that people just aren't learning anything from other games. So we should take such people, strap them to a chair, and force them to play "Syberia". We can be humane and give them food and water and bathroom breaks, but we must be strong and keep them at the computer, moving Kate from screen to screen, having one awful multiple-choice conversation after another, searching for tiny little clusters of bright pixels that indicate a button to push or a magic object to pick up, until, choking back tears of regret and sorrow, they have an epiphany, learn right from wrong, feel the pain of their players, and start to see how these thoughtless cliches ruin their best intentions.

For all its beauty, this game is not fun to play. I'd like to bring adventure games back, but praising this game isn't the way to do it.

If you like pounding your head into a wall, you might like "Syberia", but you'd probably like pounding your head into a wall more.