The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena Updated Impressions

Starbreeze and Tigon show off the latest content in this half-remake/half-sequel to the original Vin Diesel-starring game.

With his pair of sharply curved knives in hand, Riddick stalks the halls of the pirate ship Dark Athena, looking to deal some pain. Creeping through the shadows in a room full of cargo crates, Riddick is hidden yet surrounded by a number of drone soldiers--mindless automatons that patrol the ship and that can be remote-controlled by members of the Dark Athena's crew. Skulking in the shadows, Riddick sneaks up behind an unwitting drone, takes him out, and tries to take his weapon from him. But wait--the gun is attached to the drone's hand. No problem for Riddick; he simply picks up the drone and begins blasting the other enemies to bits with the attached weapon. It's just one of the grimly enjoyable approaches to combat in the upcoming The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, which we had a chance to check out at a recent Atari press event.

Though the game was initially conceived as a fairly straightforward remake of the classic original Xbox game, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, the developers at Tigon Studios and Starbreeze have pushed the project beyond a mere port to include both a remake of the original game and an entirely new chapter in the Riddick storyline, Assault on Dark Athena. Picking up more or less directly after the events in Escape From Butcher Bay, Assault on Dark Athena finds Riddick and his captor, the bounty hunter Johns, onboard the Dark Athena, a pirate craft that's led by a mysterious captain that Riddick might have a history with. After being locked in cryostasis for a good long stretch, Riddick--being the badass that he is--manages to wake himself up and begins stalking the corridors of the Athena, looking to escape.

During the demo, the developers at Starbreeze showed off the trademark multiple gameplay elements that began with the original game and certainly continue here. Stealth is obviously a big part of the fun here, with Riddick sticking to the shadows (complete with the familiar blue tint to the screen when Riddick is concealed), and either sneaking around, or sneaking up on, his enemies. Then there's the wet work with the aforementioned ulaks that Riddick acquires early on in the Dark Athena storyline. They're perfect for making short work of an opponent you've snuck up on, and they seem to be pretty effective even in a face-to-face fight.

But where Dark Athena really shines is with the drones. As mentioned previously, drone soldiers are mostly mindless, zombie-like humanoids that patrol the halls of the ship. In their unoccupied state, they seem to be easy enough to avoid; however, if a drone is being "piloted" remotely, it's a different story. They'll be more alert, and they appear to have quicker reaction times, too. You can capture a drone that you've taken down, but you'll only be able to walk backward while holding up a drone. As a result, if you want to use its attached arm gun and still stay mobile, you'll need to move quickly from one downed drone to the next.

Regardless, the best use of a drone is actually piloting one yourself, which we got to check out in the demo when Riddick made his way into the drone control room. After quickly dispatching of a crew member who was in the process of controlling a drone, Riddick saddled up and took a few for a ride. Although most of Riddick's gameplay is stealthy by nature, controlling a drone feels most closely akin to a run-and-gun first-person shooter. The kicker is that drones are expendable and, as a result, you can charge right in with drone gun blazing. That said, during the mission we watched, there was only a finite amount of drones available to Riddick and, once one went down in a hail of gunfire, Riddick simply fired up the next drone and continued on his way.

Given that the demo focused entirely on the new content in the game, we didn't get a chance to re-experience Butcher Bay for the first time on the Xbox 360. What we do know is that, even though the original game is being remade in Dark Athena, game upgrades will touch on all content in the game, both old and new. One example is that AI enemies will use improved team tactics to take you down. That's in addition to the stunning graphical upgrade that the original game is getting, completely remastered audio, and user-interface improvements such as a radial weapon-selection menu. Naturally, Vin Diesel will reprise his role as Riddick, with actress Michelle Forbes (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar Galactica: Razor, Al Roach: Private Insectigator) taking up the role as the captain of the Dark Athena.

When you add the fact that the content for Escape From Butcher Bay and the Assault on Dark Athena seems to be about the same length, as well as multiplayer features that the company has yet to reveal, it looks like the game will be jam-packed with features. We look forward to peeling back the new pages of Riddick's chronicles in the coming months and will keep you up to date on all of the latest developments until the game's release, due for spring 2009.

By Brian Ekberg, GameSpot

Heroes Over Europe Hands-On

English biplane versus Nazi battleship? It's no contest in this upcoming arcade flight game.

A lone squadron of Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers roams the skies above the English channel, patrolling for Nazi destroyers and a battleship that have laid claim to these waters. Suddenly 10, 20, maybe 50 German fighter planes fill the sky, their jet engines easily outclassing the British biplanes that were considered outdated in 1939. But it's 1941, and you're outmanned, outgunned, and, well, you know the drill. But you and your wingmen have three things going for you: this is Heroes Over Europe, the upcoming arcade World War II flying game; a slow-motion bullet time mode; and rockets...unlimited rockets. The Germans don't stand a chance.

Let's also give credit where credit is due. The Swordfish were unsung heroes of WWII and crippled the mighty German battleship Bismarck in 1941, so repeating such a feat in Heroes Over Europe is not outside the realm of possibility. The sequel to 2005's Heroes of the Pacific, HOE puts you in the cockpit of authentic Allied fighter planes in a fight against the mighty German Luftwaffe. American, British, Canadian, and New Zealand aircraft comprise more than 40 total planes, including such classic hits as the Spitfire, Mustang, B-17 Flying Fortress, and the de Havilland Mosquito, a British fighter bomber made mostly of laminated plywood, affectionately known as the "timber terror."

Each aircraft is rated in top speed, agility, and weapon power, and after playing with both the Swordfish and Mosquito, the differences quickly become apparent. Dive-bombing in, say, a B-17 is a bad idea because it will take you much longer to pull out of your dive and you'll likely dive right into the English Channel. At least your controls are fairly simple. Moving left or right on the left stick controls your rudder, while moving up and down climbs and dives, respectively. The right stick controls rolls by moving left and right, while up and down will increase and decrease your speed. Fans of Heroes of the Pacific or, more recently, Blazing Angels, will feel right at home.

HOE focuses mostly on dogfighting, though bombing missions will be sprinkled in. At first, the game doesn't do much to separate itself from previous arcade sims. You simply maneuver behind enemy fighters and fire unlimited bullets in their path. Against bombers, you dive in from above so as to avoid their gunners. But Aussie developer Transmission Games added a nifty adrenaline meter to spice things up. As you have an enemy in your sights, a meter will slowly fill around your targeting reticle. You can then press a left shoulder button to slow down time and target individual sections of the aircraft. It's still difficult to pull off as the reticle is quite shaky, but taking out a wing or the fuselage makes for a one-hit kill, and then you're free to move on to your next target. Currently, weapons are limited to guns and bombs. Ironically, our Swordfish torpedo bomber was armed with unlimited rockets rather than actual torpedoes. Though fun to fire, we hope that actual torpedoes will be added. Fans of Battlestations: Midway will recall the thrill of dodging antiaircraft fire to successfully deliver our payload, and we hope torpedoes are added before the game's release.

HOE still has a ways to go in development, but the view from the sky was a treat. There was a noticeable amount of texture pop-in and some of the plane models were unfinished, but the landscapes and cities looked as if they were pulled from a 1940s version of Google Earth. One notable omission is cockpit view--try as we might, we could only select between two different follow cams. Let's hope that feature is added before release, because nothing puts you in the cockpit of a WWII plane like a, you know, cockpit view.

The single-player missions will begin with the German bombing of London and finish with the final bombing of Berlin. The game will also have you play as three different Allied pilots in an attempt to immerse you in the story. As for multiplayer, Atari is promising 16-player online action and four different modes, though we have yet to see it in action. When we do, you'll be the first to hear about it. You can fly the unfriendly skies for yourself when Heroes Over Europe is released in 2009.

By Jon Miller, GameSpot

Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir Review

Storm of Zehir tries to be the square peg in Neverwinter Nights 2's round hole, with predictably lackluster results.

Obsidian Entertainment attempts to turn back the clock with Storm of Zehir, a Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion that tries hard to emulate the seminal single-player role-playing game Baldur's Gate. But even though nostalgia makes this notion appealing, this attempt to shoehorn an old-fashioned strategic RPG boasting a full party of adventurers into an engine built to showcase a story-driven tale about a single lead character hasn't really succeeded. So while taking a trip back in time might seem like a nice idea for an RPG vacation, the result is a clumsy affair that plays more like an above-average homebrewed mod than a full-blown official add-on.

Storm of Zehir feels different from the very beginning. The story is extremely stripped down, especially in comparison with the cataclysmic original Neverwinter Nights 2 showdown against the King of Shadows and the epic first expansion, Mask of the Betrayer. Here, you play as a pedestrian low-level hero not looking to save the world but to escort a trade mission on a ship heading from the overexposed Sword Coast to the never-before-seen jungles of Samarach. The game takes this concept so far that you can even sell goods between towns and set up trade routes to make a few bucks as actual merchants. The plot won’t necessarily grab you throughout its 20 hours or so of play, and the first few hours seem to have plenty of RPG clichés--you’ll lose all your gear early on in the game, for instance.

Instead of tackling the usual earth-shattering events of a Dungeons & Dragons game, here you take on the duties of a mop-up crew coming in after the party's over. The King of Shadows has already wreaked his havoc, and you're just some poor schlub out to try to make a buck by ensuring that merchants can once more ply their trade. The quests reflect this mundane storyline. You run a lot of lame errands to kill specific monsters and recover lost or stolen merchandise, and you clean out a bunch of formulaic dungeons, caves, graveyards, and the like. Most locales are fairly small, so they seem more like minor obstacles that can be raced through in a few minutes than the huge strongholds and lairs typical of RPGs. Trading feels more like a minor irritant than a worthwhile feature. Generally, you acquire the game's three goods--ore, lumber, and skins--in one place and then sell them at a profit somewhere else. Transactions are handled on simple menu screens when you enter a town, so you don't do anything more than hit a few buttons to add money to your coffers. And the concluding reveal and battle come up so suddenly and are so anticlimactic that you won't believe they're the ending of the game until you've exited to the desktop.

Rather than playing as a solo hero chosen for some great destiny, you roll up a party of four average joes just like you did way back when in D&D classics like the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale franchises. While you start off with a single lead protagonist meant to be your alter ego, you add three adventurers to the party roster almost immediately and can then add two more cohorts as the campaign moves along. You can take total control of all of these characters and fight battles in a style similar to the quasi-tactical struggles of old-time strategic RPGs, which makes the campaign ideal for multiplayer adventuring online. Where both the original campaign and the one in Mask of the Betrayer didn't seem to do much with the outstanding multiplayer options in the Neverwinter Nights series, this one seems almost designed to be played with friends, even though, oddly, Obsidian doesn’t recommend the scenario for multiplayer games.. The atmosphere is different from that in the previous Neverwinter Nights games; the emphasis on a single hero and a heavily scripted story has been dumped in favor of more traditional, more wide-open role-playing. If you pause the game enough or play with some friends, you can almost pretend that you're back in a turn-based game circa 1989.

Unfortunately, it seems like the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine wasn’t quite up to the task of making this experience consistent. Artificial intelligence is a big problem. You can switch between having full control of your party members and letting the AI handle things, but neither option works all that well. If you go for total control, you're constantly pausing the action to wrangle with an interface geared for looking after just one character. The pull-down menu that never worked smoothly for the original Neverwinter Nights 2 is far worse when dealing with at least four characters. A proper turn-based interface would require a lot less messing around and investment of your time. You can turn on the AI to automate party decisions during combat, though this can lead to even worse results. Leaving the game on its default settings leads to suicidal melee attacks and all-out magic assaults that can empty your spellcasters' arsenals in moments, often in battles with piddly opponents, such as a swarm of bats. Actions can be thoroughly customized, but it's tough to come up with a formula that works in all battle situations. You can find yourself fussing with the settings so much that it makes more sense to simply shut the AI off and do everything manually.

Additions to the main aspects of Neverwinter Nights 2's gameplay are sort of adventurous, if not entirely successful. The best and worst new feature is an overland map used for traveling between quest locales, like towns and dungeons. This is a simple, old-fashioned interface where you pick a party leader and he or she then leads your adventurers into the wilderness. The good news is that this map allows for open-ended exploration that adds a sense of venturing into the unknown that hasn't been incorporated into a D&D RPG for years. You can discover loads of hidden goodies just by wandering around, from secret lairs to magical artifacts to bundles of clothing you can use to make an impromptu health kit. The bad news is that this map is loaded with a crazy number of random encounters. Unless you have a party leader like a ranger who has serious points dedicated to skills like hide, move silently, and survival, you can't help but stumble into one pack of monsters after another every time that you hit the overland map to head to a new quest. One moment you're set upon by skeletons, then it's a gang of gnolls, then zombies, then earth elementals, then spiders, and so on. Monsters can hit so hard and so often that you can never rest, which turns map travels into tedious slogs that wear you down over time. Still, the overland map could be a great feature with some serious tweaking. It will be interesting to see what modders do with it.

The expansion’s other extras include tweaks to the game engine that hardcore fans of the series may appreciate, but more-casual players may gloss over. Conversations have been tweaked to enhance the use of character skills that often go ignored. A menu featuring all party members now appears in the dialogue window, allowing you to change speakers on the fly to open up different conversation options and best use abilities such as intimidate and bluff. Parties are further emphasized with teamwork benefits that can give you bonuses such as fearsome roster, which can scare off enemies on the overland map, and circle of blades, which hits opponents with extra damage whenever you can flank them. You also get two new races (Gray Orc and Yuan-Ti Pureblood), a trio of new prestige classes (Doomguide, Hellfire Warlock, and the Swashbuckler), some minor changes to crafting, and the usual handfuls of new items and spells.

The visuals do a better job of building a believable setting than the plot does. Many scenes are gorgeous, and the jungle is the most realistic-looking terrain presented by the Neverwinter Nights 2 franchise. Just about everything is green and covered with lifelike lichen. Lighting effects and spell pyrotechnics are also spectacular. The voice acting, however, is awful. With the exception of the subtly slimy take on Forgotten Realms' ne'er-do-well Volo, the actors here seem to have just two gears: way over the top and dull monotone. It's a long way from the stellar acting found in the original Neverwinter Nights 2. On the other hand, the soundtrack is absolutely brilliant. This subtle, sweeping score is right up there with the best that Hollywood has to offer, giving you something to hum long after you've shut down the game.
Storm of Zehir isn't a terrible addition to the D&D gaming canon, although it is a lot less refined than you might expect. You have to suspect that this is the result of straying too far from the original Neverwinter Nights 2 formula, and ultimately this expansion pack isn't as enjoyable.

By Brett Todd, GameSpot

Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ Review

Pesky controls and irritating slowdown curtail the fun you'll have in this zombie shooter.

If there is anything that can turn even the most banal of arcade shooters into a grotesquely adorable slugfest, it's zombies, and Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ is loaded with an impressive array of undead. It also boasts a great sense of humor and combines fast-paced shoot-'em-up gameplay with twisted fairy tale characters to create a more unique experience. Unfortunately, control issues, frequent slowdown, and a slew of other quirks often undermine your joyful zombie slaying, reducing Zombie BBQ to just another mediocre shooter on the DS.
Little Red Riding Hood's latest adventure opens in Fairy Tale Land, where a devastating zombie plague has turned the lovable denizens of folklore, such as Sleeping Beauty and Pinocchio, into gruesome flesh-eating zombies. You'll assume control of either Riding Hood, who is deeply fond of her machine gun, or Momotaro, who riddles his enemies with ninja stars, as you search for the source of the infestation to save the world. Though the simplistic, disjointed plot barely holds the game together, it still emphasizes Zombie BBQ's refreshingly dark humor, which should be a treat for fans of classic zombie films.

Gameplay is straightforward, spanning both screens with an isometric perspective and challenging you to plow through zombies as you advance through a stage. Zombies appear on either screen and slowly shuffle their way toward Riding Hood, who is positioned on the bottom screen on a horizontal, seven-panel movement field that you tap to dodge enemy attacks. You simply select a zombie or touch the screen in the general direction you wish to fire and hold the stylus down to shoot, while lifting the stylus reloads; if you get touched by a zombie or level obstruction, your health meter depletes, and if it diminishes entirely, the game is over. The lack of objectives, character ability growth, or even weapon modification is disappointing, but there is sufficient weapon variety to keep things interesting. Weapon icons are conveniently displayed on the bottom screen, which you merely tap to select, making weapon cycling fast and efficient--a necessity when a horde of zombies is stumbling your way.
The game's most fun aspect is its healthy zombie variety and inclusion of minibosses, which are steadily introduced as you progress. You'll encounter spitting zombies, slimes that cover the field in goo, creatures that lob objects at you, and even flying skulls and laser-projecting nutcracker men; you'll also notice creative, if simple, boss design that forces you to pummel zombie bosses while quickly memorizing their attack patterns in standard arcade fashion. Though defeating bosses can be exciting, there is very little depth or strategy involved other than memorizing these attack patterns or shooting the occasional exploding barrel, which is often oversimplistic and dull.

While slaughtering zombies should be quite enjoyable and extremely entertaining, poor controls can make it frustrating at times. When you tap Riding Hood to instruct her to duck, for example, the game will sometimes register the command as shoot and you'll end up as zombie fodder. Similarly, when you target a zombie that has approached your movement field, the game will often misinterpret this as a movement command and position you in the path of imminent danger. The poor controls are accentuated by a drastic leap in difficulty that occurs about a third of the way through; at this point, disposing of zombies requires more luck than skill due to cheap enemy attacks that block you into a corner, where you're forced to take damage from other foes because you're unable to move out of the way. Furthermore, some boss attacks or even environmental objects significantly obscure your field of view.

Despite the game's control errors and steep difficulty jump, its most vexing problem is frequent slowdown, which occurs whenever multiple enemies are onscreen in conjunction with gunfire or explosives. This slowdown is highly disruptive when you're dodging attacks, cycling between guns, or dispatching a large zombie horde that's dangerously close to surrounding you, because it slows the action to a crawl. It's also incredibly frustrating when the slowdown causes you to die, because the game only autosaves between stages, which forces you to restart the level from the beginning. The slowdown is also often accompanied by bullets that go through zombies without dealing any damage, or even by the occasional freeze.

Graphically the game's 3D environments are rather primitive, but they're adequate for a DS title, with colorful, slimy dungeons and moderately detailed enchanted castles to blast your way through. Zombies are usually 2D with 3D bosses and are sufficiently grotesque; they spout blood as they take damage, and you can easily spy beating hearts and fresh zombie brains spewing everywhere. Very peppy, exaggerated rock music supports the action without being too annoying, while ambient sounds, such as explosions and zombie gurgles, are sufficient if not spectacular.

You should find yourself soaring through Zombie BBQ's 21 stages in a few hours since each stage is about three to four minutes long, but this will depend on how much bad luck you're having with certain bosses and what difficulty setting--normal, hard, or extreme--you're enduring. You could go back through the game on a harder setting, but you may find anything other than normal mode absolutely grueling considering the rate at which you experience slowdown or die from poor controls. Three additional modes--Survival, Boss Attack, and Stage Select--offer a bit of fun if you enjoy slaying bosses in succession or revisiting a favorite stage, but they don't add any new gameplay aspects. There's also no point in completing the game a second time to achieve a high score because you aren't awarded points. While there's no denying that Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ is an occasionally fun shooter with a good sense of humor, its low replay value, finicky controls, and frequent slowdown may make it a more frustrating than pleasurable experience.

By Shiva Stella, GameSpot

Chrono Trigger Review

This perennial time-travel adventure is worth falling in love with all over again.

It's been more than 13 years since SquareSoft first released its time-travelling epic Chrono Trigger on the SNES. With an endearing cast of characters and a fantastic story that took place throughout the ages, it went down in history as what many would call one of the greatest games ever made. It was later rereleased as a part of Final Fantasy Chronicles on the PlayStation, and though it included several new features such as anime cutscenes and a detailed bestiary, it suffered from long and frequent loading times. The Nintendo DS rerelease includes new areas to explore, an all-new ending that better ties into its sequel, Chrono Cross, and all of the additions of its PS1 predecessor (minus loading issues), making it the definitive edition of Chrono Trigger.

When the Kingdom of Guardia gathers to commemorate its millennial anniversary, the young Crono celebrates by sleeping in. Roused out of bed by his mother, he rushes to the festivities to catch the public demonstration of his inventor friend Lucca's latest creation, and in his haste literally runs into Marle, a hyperactive girl who looks more than a little familiar and insists that he show her around. With little choice in the matter, Crono brings his new companion to Lucca's show, where an experimental teleportation device malfunctions, sending Marle through a rift in the space-time continuum. Armed only with a wooden sword and dangerously spiky hair, Crono follows Marle into the past to attempt a temporal extrication, only to begin a long and arduous journey to prevent a tragic future from unfolding.

Along the way, Crono and his friends encounter an exceptional cast of allies, including the heroic Frog, a medieval knight sworn to defeat the sinister Fiendlord who turned him into an anthropomorphic amphibian; Robo, a humanoid robot from the future with a penchant for gardening; and Ayla, the hotheaded and enormously strong chieftain of a prehistoric tribe. Together, these time trotters face down a memorable cast of villains, from the cold and calculating Azala, queen of a race of hyperintelligent dinosaurs, to Magus, the scythe-wielding sorcerer supreme better known as the Fiendlord, in their quest to defeat the evil entity known as Lavos. From beginning to ending (all 14 of them!), Chrono Trigger offers a deeply satisfying combination of storytelling and character development that few games have managed to top, and that even the most stone-hearted will find emotionally stirring.

To this day, Chrono Trigger is a fairly nonstandard role-playing experience due to a number of innovative design decisions, but this was especially true at the time of its release. Its combat system allows for your three party members to attack separately or to combine their skills to create double or triple techniques of enormous power. Given that enemies are not randomly encountered and instead appear to wander the various dungeons that you explore, it's very possible to skip the vast majority of your fights should you choose to. As a result, the world map, which is represented by an extreme birds-eye view of your party, can be peacefully explored without fear of ambush. Considering that Chrono Trigger deals with the concept of time travel, any decision you make can have world-changing--and often not immediately noticeable--effects on the future. For example, your every deed at the Millennial Fair in the very beginning of the game may potentially come back to haunt you not long afterward. This cause-and-effect gameplay forces you to consider the short- and long-term consequences of your actions, and is also used to great effect in completing side quests.

In addition to all of the bonus content originally added as part of the PS1 port, the DS version of Chrono Trigger includes an optional touch-screen control scheme, the Lost Sanctum quest hub, the Arena of the Ages monster battleground, a series of dungeons called the Dimensional Vortices, a revelatory new ending, and a polished-up retranslation. The touch-screen controls move battle commands from the top screen into the bottom to free up more space, and the new translation maintains the charm and gravitas of the original while reinterpreting some words and lines to give them a bit more meaning. The Dimensional Vortices and new ending offer additional challenges, new items, and story closure on several ambiguous issues directly relevant to Chrono Cross. The Lost Sanctum is an isolated region that exists in two different eras and is ultimately forgettable thanks to its unimportance to the story and the frustrating fetch-quest nature of its missions. The Arena of the Ages is a new area that lets you adopt a monster and train it to battle against other monsters for potentially useful items. As with the Lost Sanctum, the Arena serves no story purpose, and even the ability to pit your monster against a friend's via local Wi-Fi isn't enough to make it worth accessing regularly.
Visually, Chrono Trigger hasn't changed one bit throughout the years, and its rich, sprite-based graphics, beautiful vistas, and colorful spell effects actually look better than ever on the DS. Similarly, the epic and moving soundtrack brilliantly crafted by famed composers Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu continues to amaze years later.
Chrono Trigger is a fantastic synthesis of excellent storytelling, game design, music, and gameplay that has withstood the test of time and should be considered required playing for any fan of role-playing games. Though its extra content is hit or miss and it's essentially a direct port of a game released 13 years ago, the DS version is easily the definitive edition of this masterpiece, regardless of whether Chrono Trigger is one of those games you've only ever heard of before or you're a dedicated fan who has played through it dozens of times.

By Lark Anderson, GameSpot

Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia Review

Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia improves upon its predecessor just enough to make it a fun, solid addition to the spin-off series.

Just over two years ago, Pokemon Ranger gave Nintendo DS owners an unorthodox spin on Pokemon with its unique touch-screen capturing controls. It turned out to be an enjoyable game, eschewing the franchise's traditional evolution and "Gotta catch 'em all!" tenets. With Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia, Nintendo gives more of the same, though with a few small but welcome improvements that add a little depth to the experience while keeping its quick pace.

You start out as a fresh-faced student at a ranger school, where you learn about the various aspects of taming and helping Pokemon in the wild. Like in the original Pokemon Ranger, there's no battling here: rangers and students instead strive to keep the peace between Pokemon and humans. You capture the critters as in any other game in the franchise, but in this game you do so by expressing friendly, benevolent feelings through a device known as a styler, and once you use the Pokemons' special abilities to help you, you kindly release them back into the wild. There's no Pokemon leveling up or evolution here. As you progress from student to full-blown ranger, you take on the job of stopping the fiendishly named Team Dim Sun criminal organization from brainwashing Pokemon to do its nefarious bidding. The entire concept sounds a little trite, and many of the story's surprises are predictable, but it's got just enough lighthearted mystery to satisfy a younger audience.

In any case, the real star of Shadows of Almia is its refreshing capture system. The core idea entails drawing a circle around the Pokemon you're attempting to capture. If it bumps into the line you've drawn, it gets destroyed and you have to start drawing again. If its attack hits your line, you take damage. However, where the last game required that you draw a certain number of consecutive circles around a creature (without interruption) in order to succeed, in Shadows of Almia you need to fill up an empty friendship gauge. One complete circle fills up the gauge a little bit, with the catch being that it gradually depletes if you wait too long in between scribble attempts.
These changes make the capture process a bit easier because you're not forced into an all-or-nothing situation, and they also add a hint of strategy. Instead of just scribbling circles as fast as you can, you're now employing an exciting stick-and-move strategy in some of the tougher encounters--lifting your stylus just in time to avoid a series of attacks or catching an especially quick Pokemon when it pauses briefly. Each Pokemon has different attacks and movement patterns (though a number of them are similar) such that almost every new monster encounter brings a unique capture experience and a slight level of intrigue and uncertainty. Save for the large boss encounters, each capture instance can be completed in tens of seconds. Therefore, capturing rarely gets boring thanks to its brisk and varied nature.

Any Pokemon you capture can be used for its special ability during other capture sessions. For instance, you can use a fighting-type Pokemon to enhance your capturing power or a grass-type Pokemon to slow down your target by causing it to sprout foliage. You can also use special abilities on the field as you explore Almia. Like in the last game, the exploring portions are less exciting than capturing, and they employ the same obstacle-clearing mentality. For example, you can't clear a stream without a Pokemon that can swim; if there's a boulder in your way, you'll need a Pokemon with a high-level crush ability to smash it. These parts get progressively intricate and sometimes require a little use of your noggin. But you'll also quickly learn that in many cases, either the Pokemon you need for especially taxing obstacles is close by or a unique-looking Pokemon encountered for the first time will come in handy later in whatever dungeon you're in. This takes away some of the challenge, but at least it saves you some of the frustration of backtracking just for one little critter.
Exploration has changed too: Shadows of Almia includes optional (but highly recommended) side quests. Bystanders will ask you to help find, rescue, or calm down their Pokemon, among other similar tasks. It's nice to take a break from your main Team Dim Sun-thwarting duties to wander around a bit and fill out your catalog of monster encounters, but the quests also offer you the opportunity to meet partner Pokemon--those that never leave your side until you substitute in another partner--and to power up your capture tool with a variety of offensive, defensive, and elemental bonuses. These additions help flesh out the game a bit more, and leveling up your styler might satisfy those who would miss leveling up their Pokemon. The only slightly annoying factor here is that the quests must be taken one at a time, forcing you to backtrack to clients before taking on new quests instead of just queuing up quests as you encounter them.

The world of Almia is presented with vivid 2D graphics and large detailed sprites. Each area you travel to has a distinct feel, with colors that pop off the screen and its own collection of inhabitants. Though this variety is primarily due to the predictable use of lava, snow, desert, and underwater environments, the world is no less pleasing to the eye. What should have been improved upon are the Pokemon calls that you hear whenever you pass by them. They reek of 8-bit audio, and hearing a Ninetails or Shieldon in this game roar at you is incredibly grating, though not in the intimidating way a roar should be.
Nintendo hasn't made sweeping improvements on the original Pokemon Ranger, which is a slight disappointment given the two-year gap between entries. All told, however, the improvements do make for a more complete experience overall that provides the same invigorating mechanics introduced in the first game. With a meaty adventure that could easily take you past 25 hours, the return of downloadable side quests thanks to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, and the same core that made the original game so refreshing, Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia is a worthy addition to the series.

By Austin Shau, GameSpot

Neverland Card Battles Review

Neverland Card Battles gets off to a poor start and goes downhill from there.

Turn-based strategy and collectible-card gaming collide in Neverland Card Battles, the latest release in the little-known Cardinal Arc franchise from Japan. And when we say "collide," we mean it, because this strategy-card hybrid is awfully close to a train wreck. Breaking out a regular deck of cards for some 52 Pick-Up is a better use of your spare time than firing up this exercise in frustration, which is afflicted with an obtuse tutorial, brutal difficulty, tedious gameplay, and eight-bit visuals.

Even with all those negatives, Neverland Card Battles could have been a contender. Developer Idea Factory certainly starts from an interesting place. The single-player campaign's backstory (there is also a storyless ad-hoc multiplayer mode) is based on tales told in the Japanese anime-influenced Neverland universe, which gives the game something of an exotic vibe from the very beginning. You play Galahad, a human gambler blessed with the ownership of a pack of magical Spectral Cards, shards of a gate that imprisons the evil god Hellgaia, who wants to destroy humanity. Given that this gate is in the process of breaking down, you are summoned to do battle by Egma, the leprechaun-like teen guardian of the gods, with the survival of the entire world of Neverland at stake. Or so it seems. Making sense of the story developed here relies on you already knowing something about the world on which everything is based, and we don't, so some of the finer details may be a bit off-kilter.
Game mechanics are also mildly innovative. Play is based on an oddly fitting mishmash of the classic board game Othello and traditional collectible-card gaming in the style of Magic: The Gathering. Instead of building decks and throwing down cards in straightforward duels, you earn the points needed to play cards by taking control of spaces in checkerboard battle arenas. In each turn, you move both your hero Galahad and any summoned allies to change the color of the board and thereby gain more card-playing power. The idea is of course to take control of more boxes than your opponent and use the points earned to play and maintain the most formidable card army on the board. Combat itself plays out in a fairly conventional fashion for a collectible-card game, with each card representing warriors, mages, monsters, and spell effects. All have various special attributes: stats such as hit points and attack damage, costs for use and maintenance, and so forth. As with every other card-based game out there, battles involve a mix of strategy and luck. You need good fortune when drawing cards and solid tactical thinking when it comes to determining the right time to play them.

Sound simple? It sort of is, although Neverland Card Battles sure doesn't take it easy on you. The tutorial is more of a sample battle than an actual primer on how to play the game. Your supposed teacher, Egma, tosses off a couple of brief comments about the fundamentals of play, but then simply settles in to a duel that is awfully tough for a novice to win. No actual tips are provided regarding card selection, movement strategy, when to play specific cards, or even how to move. You're just stranded in the middle of a match and have to figure out what to do by watching your opponent's moves. Expect to lose this opening "tutorial" battle a couple of times while figuring things out. You can't skip this fight, either, because the campaign isn't unlocked until you emerge from it with a victory. Even a draw isn't good enough.
Things don't get any easier when you progress to the actual campaign. Battles are extremely tough, considering that you have to face a computer-controlled opponent that not only knows the deck inside and out, but also seems to get some incredibly favorable draws while you get stuck with underpowered crap that you don't want to play or overpowered crap that you can't afford to play. The learning curve levels off somewhat as you move through the dozen or so matches, but it still takes many hours before you learn the deck well enough to feel like you're on a level playing field. The game's checkerboard battlefields tend to be huge, too, which drags out the frustration early on because it takes so long to stumble through each match. Even after you've mostly sussed everything out, the big maps still put too much territory between you and your enemies when duels begin. Limiting you to drawing just a single card per turn throughout games, even when you're down to holding one card in your hand, also slows everything to a crawl. Almost all of these irritants would have been avoided with a more thorough and comprehensive tutorial, which could have at least explained the card limitation and the strategy that you might employ when starting at such a long distance from your opponent. It's hard to imagine why the developers didn't make more of an effort here. A proper walkthrough of the deck and the strategic concepts behind play is sorely needed, especially for those without collectible-cardgame experience.

You don't need to have any experience with other collectible-card games to know that this one is ugly. Aside from the close-ups of the oft-beautiful card art displayed when you go into battle or pull up a card to check its numbers, everything here is blurry. The battle visuals are so rough and indistinct that it is just about impossible to tell one summoned creature from another; they're all little more than colored blobs on a checkerboard. Dueling screens are even worse, with slightly larger blobs duking it out via simplistic animations that you would normally need a time machine to see in this day and age. Audio is similarly old-timey. The soundtrack is the same old triumphal ode that has been featured in games going back to the Sega Genesis, and the voice acting is the standard sub-Saturday-morning-cartoon junk depressingly common to anything inspired by anime. Vocals are at least unintentionally hilarious at times, especially when characters start yelling in the middle of sentences for no reason whatsoever.
A sense of promise wasted is what lingers after giving up on Neverland Card Battles. Combining turn-based strategy with card-based combat is certainly an intriguing concept, but a series of terrible design decisions blows any opportunity of blending these concepts into a successful game.

By Brett Todd, GameSpot

Midnight Club: LA Remix Review

Almost as much an RPG as it is a racer, Midnight Club: LA Remix would be a very good addition to any patient car nut's portable library.

The last PSP version of Midnight Club, Dub Edition, was plagued with frame rate problems, insanely long load times, and hammy acting during its crummy story bits. The only issue that remains in its newly released sequel, LA Remix, is the duration of the loading screens. Actually, there are still some over-the-top trash-talking and too-extreme-for-you characters, but the thin story serves its purpose to motivate you to demolish the competition. With its big list of varied vehicles, a substantially sized city, and great visuals, Midnight Club: LA Remix is a surprisingly dense PSP game. Remix is packed to the brim with hours of intensely fast racing as well as addictive aesthetic and performance upgrades, making for a well-rounded racing experience. Its crushing difficulty will have you agonizingly restarting races during anything tougher than the easy-rank challenges as you arduously advance through a slow career--but even that won't deter you from having a good time behind the portable wheel.

Intricate shortcuts litter the metropolitan playground and you'll be forced to find and exploit them to get ahead of the overly talented competition. Whether you're sprinting to reach a goal or doing laps around the city center you'll immediately notice that the AI competitors are a tough crowd. Opposition suddenly becomes violently aggressive when you graduate beyond the easy-class matches, forcing you to restart races at a constant and aggravating rate. Though you can easily be smashed off course and into a wall by the annoying trash-talkers that burn past you, they will barely budge when nudged, slammed, or grinded against. It's almost as if they are immovable on a preset course. Blasting by the competition at almost 200 miles per hour after a turbo boost or drafting an opponent's rear-end slipstream to finish first is an immensely satisfying feeling, though it rarely happens without you limping through the city in a dozen tries as you attempt to figure out the critical path to the finish line.
In spite of this punishing career challenge, Midnight Club: LA Remix is ridiculously fun. Tearing across cities, launching over freeways, and drifting through tightly woven Los Angeles traffic is surprisingly exhilarating on a portable screen. The sense of speed, heightened by a subtle screen shake, makes for intense and exaggerated driving with surprisingly tight vehicle controls on the PSP's analog nub. And whether you're rotating in midair or dipping between lanes on two wheels, you'll find that you're almost always able to navigate your ride exactly as you intend.
When you're not in the middle of one of the high-octane races you'll be navigating the shrunken version of Los Angeles in a free-roaming mode in search of new events or rival racers. When you approach one of them, flashing your headlights with the D pad initiates the race, or a minigame-like race to the starting line that can earn you a little bit of reputation before the real deal kicks off. The reputation, or rep, is very similar to a role-playing game's experience system. Each win earns you a certain amount of experience with increased difficulty yielding more rep as you build up your name as one of LA's finest racers. Once you've earned a ridiculous amount of rep, you can take a trip to Tokyo for an entirely new layout with all the same fun and frustrations. Since you're earning so few rep points at a time, however, you might start to feel like LA Remix is a little too like an RPG at times. Though it never stops being fun, the repetition of driving the same routes in the city's racetracks begins to irk as you grind your way to a better rep with repeated matches. It's a slow burn, but you'll feel the reward when you unlock delivery or payback missions to break up the standard competition.
Vehicular customization is also a rewarding process, and it's where Midnight Club shines. Pining over which hood would look best with your brand-new Camaro concept car is something you wouldn't expect to have such a profound effect on you, but detailing your vehicle with personalized parts and paint jobs allows for incredible aesthetic tailoring. While it's not quite as deep, performance customization offers an incentive to save some of your earned scratch to drop on better engines or exhaust instead of patterned paint jobs and side skirts with boosts in acceleration and handling to help you in your rep-race to the top.
You'll definitely see advancement in your own skill as you progress, but it seems to do little against the previously mentioned crushing AI. You'll find yourself relying on your vehicle's special abilities and power-ups when you're in a tight squeeze: slowing down time with the Zone ability allows you to focus on sharp turns or slaloming between pedestrian traffic, while Roar sees you blasting traffic out of the way with a deep pound and Agro allows you to simply smash through it without consequence. More special abilities like the vehicle-launching Pulse or slick-controlling Ice are available during the four-player competitive ad hoc multiplayer. You can take any of your 58 tightly tuned cars or bikes against a few friends in standard races as well as a few other unique game types: Capture the Flag is full of ramming and slamming as you try to steal the flag marker from your opponents to score points; Paint is a trial of checkpoints as you try and paint the city in your colors before the clock runs out; and Tag is exactly as you remember it on the playground--except you're T-boning and fishtailing opponents' rides instead of tapping their shoulder.

Midnight Club: LA Remix is an extensive game with loads to offer, but the difficulty might hamper your experience. You'll spend plenty of time retrying and redoing races as you attempt to rack up your rep, but the grinding rarely becomes a problem because you're enjoying the intensity of kicking off of ramps for crazy hang time, drifting around tight bends with the help of automotive super powers, and creaming your pals in the crash-heavy multiplayer modes. As one of the better-looking and best-controlling PSP racing games on the market, LA Remix is a must-play for portable racing pros thanks to the variety of game modes, substance of the city, and a mess of great customizable rides.

By Mitch Dyer, GameSpot