Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

Katt and I put together a new band in Rock Band for the XBOX 360 tonight called “Cupcake Crisis.” When Katt went to put in a band quote…this is what she entered:

“I ate your freakin’ cupcake!!”

Harmonix, in their infinite sense of humor, put in the following ‘error’ message:

Your band quote is not what most would describe as “classy.” You can still view it locally, but it will not be visible on XBOX Live until you change it.

Awesome.

Known in Japan as It’s A Wonderful World, The World Ends With You is a role-playing title from Square-Enix’s Kingdom Hearts development team and Jupiter (known for portable titles like Pokemon Pinball, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, and Picross DS).

Anti-social protagonist Neku wakes up in the middle of the busy Shibuya district with no memory and a cryptic warning on his cell phone from “The Reapers”, telling him he has to reach “104” in a specific time limit or “face erasure.” Attacked by strange creatures (called Noise) and baffled that nobody can see or hear him, Neku quickly teams up bubbly Shiki Misaki to combat his attackers and piece together the reasons for his involvement in “The Reaper’s Game.”

Much of The World Ends With You revolves around the game’s unique combat system. Neku can equip various pins that he finds in the game world, each of which grants a specific power or ability. As one fights battles, these pins grow stronger, and can even change into entirely different pins. Neku’s partners, while unable to equip pins, can pull off various combination attacks by navigating through strings of arrows (think Dance, Dance Revolution). This can be fairly overwhelming (not even considering the clothing and food systems, which I’ll cover in a minute), so the game will automatically control your partner for you if you’re not feeling up to the challenge.

The combat itself is as difficult or easy as you make it. You can switch between difficulty settings at any time (Easy mode reduces pin drops and the amount of experience you gain per battle, while Hard and Ultimate modes increase both). There’s also a level/drop rate slider; you can set your level (which determines how many hit points you have) anywhere between one and your current maximum. For each level under the maximum that you set the slider to, your drop rate for pins increases by one. Make the game tougher for yourself and you’ll reap the rewards of additional pins!

Each area of Shibuya has its own brand charts and shops. Clothing purchased from these shops can grant you additional powers, defense, attack, or hit points, and each purchase from a shopkeeper makes them like you a little more. Shopkeepers that like you will offer additional items and be more willing to explain the abilities of the clothes that they sell. The brand charts influence your attacks; wear a popular brand and you’ll find yourself twice as strong as you usually are. Wear a weak brand and watch as your attacks function at 50% effectiveness. You can influence the charts by fighting multiple battles in a single area; fight five or six groups of enemies wearing the worst brand on the chart and you may find that it has moved to the top!

The catch with all of this is your bravery score; each item requires a specific level of bravery to wear it, so even though you may be able to purchase that awesome jacket, you may not be able to wear it until you’ve become brave enough to put it on.

Finally, there’s a food system in place to help you increase your statistics. Every 24 hour period, your characters can eat 24 ‘bytes’ of food. Food has immediate effects when ingested, and after fighting a few battles can be digested for a permanent increase in statistics. Everything from noodles to coffee cakes are available, and you can experiment with different combinations of food to build your character exactly the way you want.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s also a cool multiplayer minigame called Tim Pin Slammer available. It’s strange cross between paper football and Battling Tops™ that has to be played to be understood, but the basic gist is that you need to use your pins to knock your opponent’s off of a board. By battling with other The World Ends With You players, you’ll improve your pins (just like if you were fighting battles).

For those who like to socialize, there’s a Mingle option built into The World Ends With You. This mode places your DS in a ‘sleep mode’ with the wireless turned on. Every time you encounter another The World Ends With You player in Mingle Mode, you’ll swap ‘character cards’ that allow you to purchase items that player was carrying at any time. You’ll also earn more pin points to help improve your pins. What makes this mode great is that it also works with DS systems that are just using their wireless connections; you can earn pin points from any DS owner you encounter, not just The World Ends With You owners. Additionally, you may randomly gain extra pin points just by being in an area with WiFi signals (from routers, computers, or what have you).

The audio in The World Ends With You is some of the best on the system, being comprised of decent (wow!) J-Pop tunes of all different styles. The 2D visuals are, hands down, the best the Nintendo DS has to offer. It’s obvious that the Kingdom Hearts team was responsible for the title’s art assets; the game oozes color and vibrancy from every pore.

If you’re an RPG lover with a Nintendo DS, The World Ends With You is a must-buy. Rarely do we get a DS title so deep and polished here in the States, and its multitude of features, amazing combat system, compelling story, and fantastic audio and visuals will have you floored the moment you turn the system on. This one’s a keeper for certain.

There are retro-styled games that are great because of their simplicity and dedication to gameplay over all else. Then there are retro-styled games that are awesome because they include a relevant multiplayer component, scoreboards, and enough levels to keep the most diehard fans busy for a long time to come. N+, an improved version of the free PC puzzle-platformer N, was recently released on the Xbox Live marketplace and it certainly delivers on all of these counts. The premise is fairly simple. You’re a ninja who loves gold, and luckily for you there are hundreds of levels chock full of the stuff. Unfortunately, hordes of robots and turrets are guarding this gold (and the room exit), so you’ll have to be quick on your feet to grab the treasure and escape with all of your limbs intact.

Each episode of N+ consists of five stages, all sharing the same countdown timer. Grab a piece of gold to add 2 seconds to the clock, but be warned:most gold is heavily defended. The objective of each stage is to escape to the next; you’ll have to find a switch to open an exit door in each level before you can progress. Each episode’s levels are progressively more difficult than the last, and N+ eases frustration by allowing you an infinite amount of tries to complete each stage.

What makes N+ so much fun is its simplicity. The ninja is agile, but fragile; a long fall, hitting an enemy, or touching a mine will cause you to burst into chunky ninja bits. Luckily, you have physics on your side! You can leverage your momentum to great advantage to move quickly around each stage, and you have a few tricks (wall-jumping and a wall-cling) to help you get from place to place without dying. Learning how to best take advantage of the terrain and your speed takes practice, but you’ll soon find yourself making ridiculous leaps and tumbles with the best of them.

In addition to a great single-player experience, you can team up with up to three others locally or over Xbox Live to play in cooperative, survival, and racing modes. In cooperative mode, everyone must make it to the exit door before your group can progress to the next stage. In survival, players are thrown into a variety of deadly stages to see who can last the longest. In race mode, reach the exit door before your opponents do to win! Your rank in each mode is tracked over Xbox Live, so you can compare yourselves to other N+ players across the globe to get a feel for how you’re doing.

Although I haven’t had the time to try it out, N+ also ships with a level editor so you can design your own challenges. However, content-sharing over the Xbox Live service is not currently enabled. An IGN interview with N+’s developers notes that Microsoft currently lacks the tools to police inappropriate user-generated content, so until such tools are developed, you won’t see level sharing enabled. Once the tools are in place, one of N+’s developers says that enabling the feature is as easy as “flipping a switch.”

As N+’s creators have stated “Your continues may be infinite, but your patience may not be.” N+ is the old-school gamer’s game; it’s easy to learn, but difficult to master. A certain amount of dedication is required to get the most out of a title like this. A solid (but somewhat laggy) multiplayer experience is icing on the cake, and the game’s 200+ levels will keep you occupied for a long time. N+ is a solid combination of the puzzle and platform genres; you could do much worse with 90% of the Arcade titles on the Xbox Live marketplace. And remember, you can always try the demo to see if you like the game before you buy, or give the PC version a go.

For its merits, N+ gets an 8/10!

After a seven year hiatus and numerous delays, the Smash Brothers franchise saw its latest title hit the Nintendo Wii last week. Boasting an expanded character roster, new levels, a vast single-player mode, improved sound/graphics, and online play, is Brawl what Smash Bros. fans have been waiting for? The answer is a resounding “Yes!”

For the uninitiated, Super Smash Brothers is a multiplayer platformer-fighter using characters and worlds from various Nintendo franchises. There really isn’t anything else quite like it out on the market. Unlike most fighting games, Smash Bros. uses a percentage-based damage system; every attack someone lands on your character boosts your damage percentage. The higher the percentage, the farther you fly when struck. Falling off the side of a stage or off of the screen counts as a knockout for the person who last struck you. Winners are determined by who has the most KOs when time runs out (timed battles), or the last man standing (stock battles where each character has a set amount of ‘lives’).

So what are the most noticeable changes from 2001’s Super Smash Bros. Melee on the GameCube? In general, Brawl doesn’t feel as quick as Melee does. This isn’t a negative thing, it just feels different from the previous titles in the series. Damage mitigation also makes an appearance. Unlike Melee, using the same moves repeatedly in Brawl causes each to deal progressively less damage. This is to prevent players from relying on a single move their character possesses in order to win a battle. Advanced players will notice the removal of wavedashing (air-dodging close to the ground to make one’s character appear to slide) and other mechanics abuses.

Brawl also seems to be a bit more forgiving when it comes to grabbing edges of stages and platforms; it’s almost like there’s some sort of gravitational field that pulls you towards the edges. You’ll occasionally be falling off the stage, make a half-hearted leap to safety (not expecting to survive), and find that you actually made it! Perhaps it’s a concession to all of the absurdly quick characters who seem to be falling towards oblivion every fifteen seconds.

On the single player front, Classic mode (battle a set number of characters one after another) makes a return, but the new experience comes from Brawl’s Subspace Emissary adventure mode. An extremely strange story has the Nintendo world invaded by an evil force of ‘Primids’, apparently bent on total domination. I won’t try to explain the story here, but you progress through individual stages laid out on a world map, collecting new characters for your team as you go. You can collect stickers throughout your journey and place them on certain characters to increase their fighting abilities as well. The mode was an interesting effort, but the mechanics of a fighting title like Brawl don’t translate well to the side-scrolling platformer genre. Many characters lack the jumping capabilities to navigate through some of the levels, and the final stage commits a terrible design sin by making you play through every level over again in the form of a maze. It’s headache-inducing to say the least.

Sporting over 30 characters and a slew of newcomers, Brawl’s character roster is the most varied yet. Most of the new characters have very different playstyles than what Melee players are used to, including the Pikmin-wielding Captain Olimar and ordinance-packing Solid Snake of Metal Gear Solid fame. The amount of ‘clone characters’ has also been reduced; while Falco and Fox were virtually identical except for some speed/strength attributes in Melee, the two have wildly different movesets in Brawl. Other characters like Peach, Sheik, Ness, and Kirby have had various tweaks made to their moves and overall strengths in the interest of gameplay balancing. Needless to say, there’s enough variation in the Brawl roster to please any Smash Bros. player!

Players will also be pleased with the new stages, of which there are 41 in total. Some fan-favorites from Melee return in unaltered form, including the Temple stage from The Legend of Zelda and Big Blue from F-Zero, but the bulk of areas are new. Most pack some sort of environmental effect to mix up fights; for example, the WarioWare-themed stage cycles through various minigames while you fight. If you can complete one successfully, you’ll become invulnerable for a short period. The individual stages really capture the feel of the games they’re based on, and most of the popular Nintendo franchises are represented in the lineup. Of course, some of them are still terrible (Mr. Game and Watch’s Flat Land 2, I’m looking at you.)

Brawl’s characters have received a substantial graphical upgrade in the move to the Wii, which supports widescreen and 480p resolution. The same cannot be said for the various levels and stages; the backgrounds are often kept extremely simple in an effort to keep framerates up. Brawl’s graphics are evolutionary, more like Melee 1.5 than a revolutionary upgrade.

The sound, however, is a different story. Boasting over 300 tracks from Nintendo titles across the years, Brawl’s composers include (but are certainly not limited to) Yoko Shimomura (Kingdom Hearts), Yuka Tsujiyoko (Fire Emblem), Kazumi Totaka (Animal Crossing and Yoshi series), Michiko Naruke (Wild ARMS), and Toru Minegishi (The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess). The orchestral score is nothing short of incredible; I would go as far as to say that Brawl has the best musical selection of any game I have ever played. Period.

So was Brawl worth the wait? Definitely! While the game doesn’t break revolutionary new ground, it’s a great refinement to the Smash Bros. formula. A worthwhile buy!