Conventional wisdom states that you need to spend some time with a videogame, really dig in there, in order to review it. Most days I’m with conventional wisdom on that one: just not today. Lately, I played Project Minerva for a few hours, and it committed so many unpardonable sins out of the gate that I was already writing the review in a corner of my mind from the first moments of the game. I couldn’t help it. My brain needed some kind of other stimulus to make the time go by faster, as the heroine plodded, hunched over, across an endless grassy plain.

Before the game has even properly started, an uncanny valley effect hits: in the opening video you’ll notice that the heroine looks much more human than everybody around her. This is a D3 Publisher joint from 2001, early in the PS2’s life. Though D3 had not yet figured out the whole “Simple Series” business that would bring them to success, the production values are certainly on the same level as that series. Bare-minimum character models dance the robot through every animation and cutscene.

The standout exception to this is the M-16-packing girl in fatigues, of whom the camera is very fond: the opening video consists mostly of closeups of her unusually detailed face between quick cuts back to the other, much uglier characters jerking back and forth. It’s jarring, and it’s something you’ll be seeing a lot of. As it turns out, this game was actually a promotional vehicle for a Japanese celebrity. Here, I’ll even send you to Wikipedia: her name is Norika Fujiwara. There were probably better ways to reach the masses.

When you start up the game proper, there’s an opening credits sequence that can’t be skipped. There are only two names, though: Ms. Fujiwara as “planner and star”, and that of the director, Akinobu ABe (yes, spelled like the otaku-favorite artist Yoshitoshi ABe: relation or just style-biting?). This is not a game I would brag about having made, and it’s a little baffling– though perhaps understandable with an celeb-related project– that the game is so proud of itself.

After this tiniest dash of hubris, the game tutorial begins, and it’s a doozy. Project Minerva is a defective squad-based shooter. The box promises realism, and the game delivers a bunch of AI-controlled robots running in random directions (everybody has the same hunched-over SWAT-style run animation) across a barren plain.

All the maps I played were typical search-and-destroy missions, and to this end your squad is completely useless as they scramble in straight lines on the battlefield, making regular 45-degree turns and often running in squares. There’s no such luxury as a simple map in this game, and combined with the desolate environments you’re left nearly as clueless and desperate as your stupid machine compatriots.

The user interface is actually designed with the uselessness of the AI in mind, as the player is forced to “mark” every enemy as a red dot on the radar so that the squad members– who apparently have eyes but cannot see independently– know where they are. Only two squad commands exist: “fight” and “search”, and there appears to be little difference between them.

The only enemy I saw in my few hours of play was the “android”, whose robotic appearance is supposed to cover for the fact that he moves and acts in exactly the same manner as your own squad mates. Actually firing at anything requires you to stop and aim, so the only strategy is to make sure you deal with them one at a time and run away if you suddenly find a lot of laser sights suddenly converging on your character.

There’s only slightly more variation in the maps themselves than in the enemies. Upon finding a stage that took place inside of an industrial building full of narrow balconies and stairways, I was nearly excited… until, of course, I realized that most of the maps are flat and empty (with invisible walls at the edges) for a reason.

This game’s squad AI cannot deal with obstacles of any kind. In one stage, I found my squad-mates gathered at the bottom of a tall hill, firing intently at it. Of course, the enemy really was on the other side, just staring at the hill. When I got to the building level, my squad-mates helpfully ran underneath the balcony snipers and fired away at the impenetrable metal that separated them. This was about the point at which I put the game down altogether.

What awaited me? Well, killing androids gets the player money and experience points: the latter make her rifle do more damage (RPG logic, you know) and the former can be used to buy new outfits– of course there’s an “ogle heroine” mode!– and guns. After five or six missions, the game had only made one of its many guns available for purchase, and the price was ludicrous. This game expects you to spend quite a lot of time farming android corpses in the wastes.

There is a story somewhere in here– I saw a cutscene or two after finishing certain levels– but after a few stages of this I just didn’t care at all. This pseudo-action-movie bullshit in the cutscenes couldn’t be taking place further from where this gimped game of hide and seek actually was.

D3 would eventually make this kind of thing work, when they realized they needed to bring the game’s quality up to C-grade and bring the price down by $40. A somewhat fixed version of this game, Project Minerva Professional, would later appear in the Simple series itself. Even as a $5 used title at Book-Off, though, Project Minerva is an unmitigated disaster. Project Minerva Professional came out in English in the UK, but I suspect there’s no hidden gem waiting past the language barrier and underneath the bugs here: just a shitty game.

The Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace is rife with half-baked ideas and poor production values. Its existence as a place for amateur programmers to showcase their talents and test new ideas is admirable, but rarely does it translate into an actual, solid game. I’m more than willing to pay a couple bucks for an interesting concept, but REVOLVER360 is one of the few times on the Indie Games Marketplace I felt like I paid a couple bucks for an actual game.

A 2D shooter at heart, REOLVER360 is rendered in 3D with a visual style that’s reminiscent of 90s console tech demos and their blurry, not quite accurate promises. You have two attacks, your basic “bullet” weapon that can destroy enemies and a “laser” which can destroy both enemies and most enemy bullets, but takes time to charge between uses. The game’s name comes from the fact that the left and right triggers on the controller are used to rotate your enemies and their bullet formations.

This rotation mechanic is used to avoid barrages of enemy fire, but more importantly it’s used to line up enemy bullets to be destroyed with your laser. Destroying bullets gets you more points and bonuses, so the more bullets you can take out in a single blast, the better. It’s a simple idea in practice, but like any good shooting game mechanic, takes considerable time to master. Switching between attacks and rotating bullet patterns takes a fair amount of coordination, resulting in a learning curve that it’s difficult, but not insurmountable.

With two game modes (one with a limited number of levels, the other with the only limit being your health meter) the emphasis is clearly on replaying the game to achieve better scores. In this regard, it succeeds as well as any 2D shooter can: the simple, yet nuanced, game mechanic encourages you to keep playing, and a rudimentary online ranking system (which, unfortunately, is often buggy and doesn’t work) lets you share your scores and compete against yourself.

Visually it’s a step above most indie games, but there’s only so much polish you can put on abstract 3D objects. The backgrounds are nice and consist of vaguely recognizable scenes of blue skies, city streets and alien planetscapes. If you have a fondness for early 3D games, you’ll find the style charming, but for everyone else it’ll just get the job done.

While it lacks the robust feature set or visual flourish of a full priced shooting game, REVOLVER360 offers a lot for a $3 game. By doing so it provides a worthwhile alternative to expensive import shooters, offering a game value far surpassing its cost.

Impressions by Chris:

This week Index Holdings released the free playable demo of Catherine on the Playstation Store and Xbox Live in Japan. Like the good Atlus fan I am, I checked it out dutifully. Before the demo, it wasn’t entirely clear to me what sort of game Catherine would be, aside from some sort of puzzle/action game with boxes, some climbing mechanic, and horrific and nightmarish bosses.

After playing the demo, the sort of game it was became pretty clear. The narrative frame of the game is executed in a very Japanese adventure game style – which is to say it has anime movies, fully voiced cutscenes of characters talking on and on, and occasional interactive decision-making (in this case, in the form of replying to mail messages from your girlfriend on your phone).

The actual gameplay occurs whenever the main character has nightmares. It’s a stage-based, score-driven action puzzler where you race against the clock to climb a tower of blocks, all the while picking up various tokens and powerups. As time counts down, the bottom of the tower starts to give way, and if you don’t climb fast enough you’ll fall to your doom.

The gameplay involves pushing and pulling certain blocks to create footholds and paths to progress higher in the tower. Pushing a block completely off the structure has the potential to collapse an entire column, which might alter the structure such that the tower might become unsolvable later on as you go further. Figuring out how to best manipulate the blocks to create the fastest path without altering the structure is the main goal of the stages.

Overall, I found it fun but not particularly addictive. Even though I got poor rankings in the two stages in the demo, I’m not particulary compelled to return and better myself. The concept is certainly original, but it just doesn’t feel extremely engaging. However, the tone and execution of the narrative are far more compelling. A cross between modern Persona games (in music and art direction) and Haruki Murakami novels, the story presents the tale of a man approaching mid-life crisis having to deal with his long time girlfriend wanting to get married. The writing is surprisingly realistic, and tackles themes of his insecurity along with the temptation of infidelity while mixing it up with visuals right out of Persona’s nightmare worlds.

Considering the game’s relatively high price tag of 7800yen on both PS3 and Xbox360 platforms, I find it hard to take the plunge myself, or to recommend someone else to. The demo didn’t seem like it was quite enough to convince me that there is enough variety or value to justify the price. It’s certainly an interesting and unique title, and one worth keeping an eye on, but I’m not quite ready to open my wallet for this one yet.

Impressions by Trevor:

Like Chris, I’ve been interested in Catherine since the first announcement, and the Haruki Murakami comparisons I’ve been able to draw have had me prepared to pull out my wallet for the game from first sight.  The main character is of a similar age and station with many Murakami protagonists. He’s unmarried, he’s directionless, he’s uncommitted, he’s a bit of a hipster, he spends a lot of time at a bar, and he (apparently) plays a lot of an arcade game (a variation on Murakami characters’ love of pinball). Plus, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions by threatening and/or mysterious women – and he dreams of tie-wearing sheep. The character, his anxieties, and his world are more compelling to me than anything I’ve seen in videogames in recent memory.

The actual demo, however, is fairly puzzling (sorry). I find it inexplicable that an adventure game with the amount of care and polish put into its development has been married to a puzzle game that I wouldn’t even purchase on a download service.  The puzzle portion is amusing enough, certainly, and carries a certain amount of tension, but it’s just not very compelling, and not nearly as exciting as the “fluff” of the game (the art design, the story and its implications, the characters). The full game will need to bring a high level of cohesion and continuity between the story and puzzle sections, because otherwise I feel that the full experience will be jarring and unfulfilling. And this isn’t helped by the fact that the background music in the puzzle game lifts several sections directly from Holst’s “The Planets.” What?

Additionally, the puzzle sections seem odd in the amount of audiovisual polish that has been laid over relatively abstract mechanics.  Pre-release media of the game shows an in-game arcade machines that closely resembles the puzzle sections, but with a simple and early 80s-ish graphical style. I’m a lot more interested in trying this version of the puzzles than what the demo served me, though it’s evident that Vincent’s addiction to the faux-retro game structures his dreams. (Surely we’ve all dreamt of falling, rotating blocks after a few too many rounds of Tetris.)

Impressions by Jeff:

I’m not feeling quite as cold as my comrades on the gameplay of the Catherine demo, with one big ol’ caveat: I’m hoping that the difficulty of the game and the complexity of the puzzles, especially when played for score, will ramp up significantly as the game goes on. Confine it to Hard mode, if you must, but I think it’d be a terrible waste of potentially interesting mechanics if the game only intends to ask the player to test the limits on a repeat play for score. I like score attack games as much as the next arcade rat, but it’s not as interesting if I don’t actually feel threatened by the obstacles I have to thwart to boost my score. My deaths in the time I spent in the demo were caused by mishaps experimenting with controls or mechanics, not because of the environment itself.

Of course, we only got to taste one part of the game in the trial version. If the team’s previous efforts, Persona 3 and 4, are any indication, the “hanging around at the bar and drinking with your friends” sections of the game should be at least as much of a focus of the final product as Vincent’s nightmare world, but in the demo, we only really get to mess with the game’s cute way of picking from a dialog tree for sending text messages. (Vincent erases a line he’s just typed, mumbling to himself, and replaces it with another one when you press the cancel button.) Demos which section off a small slice of the tutorial-packed first level and then show you the more exciting and expansive details of the game in a trailer are a pet peeve of mine. You don’t gotta give it all away for free, but would it kill you to include a little more of the cool stuff you get to do in the final product?

Even if they’re lifting very heavily from master literary recycler Haruki Murakami, it’s refreshing to see Atlus tell a story about ordinary thirty-somethings, rather than magical teenagers or soldiers. Since that’s the most exciting part of the game for me, and since my Japanese knowledge is limited to the top 20 most overused phrases in children’s cartoons, I think I’ll sit on this one until the inevitable American release comes around in six months or so. I’ve hardly a shortage of other games to play in the meantime.

Impressions by Yang:

I wasn’t sure what to expect with the Catherine demo. The initial Soejima character designs shown by Atlus months ago had perked my interest, but somewhere along the way, I lost track of the game’s development. I was still in the grips of Gundam Musou 3 last week when Toni reminded me of the demo’s release. I’d heard mentions of its story being wrapped around a puzzle game, but had no clue how it would work out; now I would be able to see for myself whether or not Atlus could pull it off. After trying the demo, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.

The introduction was a well put-together spoof of a cinema studio opening, and throughout the demo, I felt that Atlus did a good job of transitioning from animated sequences to in-engine sequences while presenting the story. The game runs on the GameBryo engine, which shows up in the start-up logo sequence, and gave me a fright as it conjured up images of Bethesda’s Oblivion abominations. Thankfully, we get none of that in Catherine. I’d also like to mirror Jeff’s view that it’s nice of Atlus to give us a story centered on 30-somethings rather than the usual teenagers-saving-the-world pap we’re accustomed to seeing.

As for the gameplay section of the demo, I found the puzzle aspect to be simple, but enjoyable. I can’t say I’ve ever played anything similar to it, but it certainly wasn’t difficult to pick up and once the tutorial prompts ended, I found myself doing my best to keep the combo going and grab all the coins I could manage. As for Trevor’s comment about the musical bits lifted from Holst’s The Planets, I too found it surprising, but in a good way. Here you have a dreamscape where Vincent has grown ram horns, carries a pillow, and is being chased up a tower of blocks by an unseen monstrosity [that may or may not represent a deep psychological block that hampers his relationship with Katherine]; things are meant to be wacky, jarring, and out there so how better to accentuate that than with some classical music? Based on what we know of the pre-order pack-in CD, there will be more pieces of classical arrangements, and I look forward to hearing them in-game.

Overall, I had a good time with the demo. My first time through, I got Bronze on both puzzle stages, and I didn’t get far with the cellphone-reply section, but on my second pass, I achieved a Gold and Silver, and managed to unlock an extra bit of interaction with Katherine by being sympathetic towards her concerns about their relationship in my cellphone responses. I think fans of Atlus’s usual RPG offerings need to approach Catherine differently and adjust their expectations accordingly; instead of going on dungeon romps in-between your story sequences, you have puzzle gaming interludes and what seems to be a slightly more involved adventure aspect. I found it to be a refreshing change of pace and I look forward to the final release in two weeks, though I may have to postpone my import until after a certain Koei release in March.

Speaking of combat, it’s interesting how faithful TR:L is to what the original required of the player when bullets start to fly. The best way to approach any given combat situation in the game is not to use stealth, not to use cover, but to flip and dodge and roll around, using Lara’s acrobatics and athleticism to simply move faster than enemies can aim. None of the enemies are particularly smart, and none of the combat encounters are challenging or well-constructed enough to feel compelling, but it’s still satisfying to use Lara’s abilities to completely stomp the rather dull mercenaries present here.

Rather than using the wide-open, sprawling rooms and ruins seen in the first Tomb Raider, Legend keeps its paths relatively narrow and easy to follow. It’s quite rare that the path one should follow isn’t clearly marked. Puzzles are only nominally such – rarely does any one puzzle require anything more than finding a switch in plain view, using the grapple where clearly marked, depressing a plate with a box or ball, or solving a simple physics problem. This does keep the levels moving swiftly, but the player never has to do the sort of surveying and careful scrutiny of the environment that TR1 often required. The physics engine is very well-utilized, however, and the puzzles that require clever use of physics are satisfying to solve. Like Half-Life 2 before, it TR:L should serve as an example for effective and consistent use of physics in gameplay as realistic physics become more common.

This reliance on context-sensitive actions tends to make each level feel like the sequence of keypresses it is, instead of allowing the player the illusion of really hanging from a ledge that’s ten stories above ground level. In TR1, many of the high spots are places the player reaches after several minutes of climbing, so the drop is very real and very present. Most of TR:L’s chasms are bottomless pits that drop the player right out of the level’s environment. The world might as well not exist outside of the main path through a level. TR:L is generous with checkpoints, too, making the setback one faces for tumbling into a gap no more than a few seconds’ worth of a replay and another shot at a jump. While this is a nice way to remove punishment for failure and make the game an even experience for unskilled players, it removes any sort of real tension from exploration.

An interesting side effect of this rather linear approach to level design is that each of the levels is very well-suited to speed play. There’s an unlockable item available for completing the time trial for each level, and while it’s not that difficult to beat the required time, it’s quite satisfying to see Lara flipping and dashing through a level as the player navigates all its hazards without pause.

In fact, that kind of play is what suits Legend’s presentation best. It’s more cinematic than any previous game in the series, and its quick pacing and snappy dialogue are much like what one would find in a Hollywood summer blockbuster. When Lara is navigating a level with ease, without stopping to ponder an obstacle, savor the atmosphere, or admire a vista, the game’s scripting is allowed to portray Lara’s adventure as just the sort of light, fluffy confection that the designers intended.

Fans of the original Tomb Raider, then, would be advised to explore the optional Croft Manor level to its fullest. Its nonlinear flow and the wide-open exploration it allows, ironically, provide the sort of unguided challenge that the first game is best known for.

And as a side note, I really enjoyed hearing Keeley Hawes as Lara this time around. I’m not sure if it was just Hawes, or both the performance and Lara’s lines, but she has a certain humanity and genuine likability here that wasn’t apparent in previous games. Lara is still intended primarily as a male fantasy object – that much is apparent from her costumes and animations – but she’s well on her way to becoming a respectable character.

The Genshijin had the player’s focus divided evenly between finding ways around barriers and effectively defeating sometimes-tricky enemies. Here, there are no longer weapons to equip or detailed combat encounters. Rather, most combat is resolved by simple melees, and the outcome is usually decided your strength in numbers. The threat of having one’s army offed by a single enemy isn’t present here. Rather, when an enemy hauls off with a swing of his daikon radish, you’ll be more worried about whether you’re near any bottomless pits or water hazards, because a single blow can knock your troops around but good.

Instead of Genshijin’s weapons, here, there’s a selection of jobs to which you can assign your villagers. Messengers can run fast, acrobats jump high, miners can break through barriers (actually, giant rice crackers!), firefighters can handle flaming items and brave infernos, and so forth. Your troops can be divided into as many as three separate squads, which can be assigned different jobs and controlled one group at a time. This adds a new dimension to Nekomura’s puzzles: quite a few of them involve splitting your team up to carry out multiple parts of a task in coordination.

Each level ends automatically when you find whatever item Pug sent you to fetch, but you can return as many times as you like to collect items or seek out hidden pathways. As your party gains abilities, you’ll also gain access to previously-blocked areas in levels you’ve already explored.

Enemies drop various goodies upon death, just as in Genshijin, though you can’t use them directly this time around. Most items you can pick up are composed of several different ingredients, which you can combine in your item-making machine to produce Japanese meals (health restoratives) or decorations for your boss-cat’s room. While none of these are essential to getting around in the game, the process can become pretty addictive, especially as you find and collect more of the scrolls that reveal more and more recipes. A few of the trinkets require ingredients that are only available from items that are rare drops, which ensures some extra oomph for the collector who likes to go the extra mile. Between opening up new passage ways on multiple visits to levels and hunting that last ingredient to make that cool new recipe, Nekomura has a satisfying momentum. There’s a good deal less loading than in Genshijin, too, which makes extended sessions much more bearable.

The Genshijin could be quite difficult at times, with enemies content to squish your party all at once and many sticky corners that tended to trap cavemen. Nekomura is comparatively smooth sailing: the difficulty has been reduced as a whole so that you’ll spend more time solving puzzles and making expeditions for ingredients than picking yourself up after a defeat. Watch out for that last level, though. While its spooky theme is especially cool, it’s got dodgy platforming and relatively vicious enemies that can easily spell multiple retries. And while the camera requires less babysitting than in Genshijin, thanks to larger and relatively wide-open levels, one would be best advised to simply leave the right stick alone when the camera’s tracking automatically through tighter passageways. When you fight the camera, it fights back, and it’s a recipe for frustration.

There is a language barrier to account for if you’re not Japanese-literate, as there’s very little game text in English. But the game’s items and level layouts are so iconic and easily-digestible that figuring things out shouldn’t be a problem for any experienced player.

So while a few of Genshijin’s flaws are still present here, they’re in reduced form, and the good bits have been shined up and made quite a bit more inviting. There’s nothing earth-shaking or essential here – just a good, solid, adorable game with enough to collect and explore to last you ten or fifteen hours.

Here’s a promotional video from D3.