Pop Quiz, Hotshot!

‘Sin’ turns the shoot-’em-up into science

I’d love to tell you that I’ve curated a complete library of games from celebrated shoot-’em-up developer Treasure, but I’d be lying.

I’ve struggled through all five stages of “Ikaruga,” played a couple levels of “Gunstar Heroes” and rented “Gradius V” once, and that’s the long and short of it. The games are famously hard, and I’m a wimp.

So I can’t really tell you whether it’s strange for Treasure titles to attack you with pods of homicidal dolphins and bionic hamsters, as “Sin & Punishment: Star Successor” does.

What I can tell you: If you like lasers and a stiff challenge, you’ll like “Star Successor,” released exclusively on the Wii earlier this summer.

You control one of two tween warriors — Isa, who has a jetpack, and Kachi, who has a hoverboard. Aside from a few mechanical differences, that’s all you need to know about either of them up front. They journey forward in three dimensions, switching occasionally to side-scrolling 2-D, and shoot everything that moves using rapid-fire laser weapons, melee attacks and a charged shot that can dispatch multiple enemies at once.

There’s a story of sorts, but if you play the game, I beg you to skip as much of it as possible. It’s nonsense of the lowest order, and even if it were Shakespeare, you’d be tempted to blow past it. The gunplay is the main attraction here, and it’s sublime.

By pinning the movement controls to the nunchuk and the aiming and firing to the remote, Treasure has developed one of the tightest action games to use Nintendo’s novelty controller. Thanks in part to a largely flawless frame rate, everything feels fluid, precise and incredibly responsive. When you get hit in “Star Successor,” it’s usually your fault, not the hardware’s.

Played start to finish on the easiest difficulty, the game takes only a few hours, but if you stop there, you’re missing the point. The real thrills come from mastering the many, many bosses, each with its own tricks and shortcuts, and eventually clearing the game without dying (or, if you’re nuts, without getting hit at all).

And the differences between Isa and Kachi are substantial enough to warrant playing through “Star Successor” at least twice. Isa’s lasers and charged shot are meant to be blind-fired for extra damage, though he can lock on to an enemy when things get hectic.

Kachi locks on to enemies automatically — a handy feature when you’re trying to boost your score multiplier, but an occasionally frustrating one when you want to select your own target.

Her charge shot, however, is much more fun to use. While holding the A button, you sweep your on-screen reticle across each enemy you want to hit. Release, and voila. Lasered dudes.

Punishment: There are a couple of wrinkles, particularly where those terrific boss fights are concerned.

Because you’ll be dying at the bosses’ hands quite a bit, it would be nice to be able to skip some of the cutscenes involved in fighting them. The end boss of the fourth stage, for instance, shouts “My blood is on fire!” after taking enough damage, shrieking as she morphs into a kind of winged jungle witch.

The process takes a few moments, and because this boss’ second form is exponentially tougher than her first, you’ll likely have to start over a few times, which means sitting through the entire sequence again and again.

Hammering on the Wii remote’s plus button will get you past most of the ridiculous story moments. (Pro tip: It even speeds up your Gameover screen.) But not the bosses. We’re talking about just a few seconds here and there, but when they’re repeated every time you die, they can make a stubborn boss all the more frustrating.

The game’s other major design hurdle isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker, though it might scare off more casual players.

Most of the challenge in “Star Successor” is impossible to anticipate if you’re brand new to the game. You’ll be struggling through impossible bullet patterns and boss attacks that seemingly cannot be dodged on your first go round, and though this all becomes second nature with enough repetition, it can feel cheap initially.

If you’re a once-and-done kind of gamer, or one who’s easily set off, this might be a problem.

For example, that same fourth-stage boss — the one who enthuses about her fiery blood — eventually unleashes a flock of blue and red birds that she calls her “ravens of time.” Once the ravens reach your character, they turn into circular blobs that appear to be unblockable.

Only through experimenting will you learn that you have to use your melee attack on the blue raven blob, which will explode nearby red blobs and slow down time so that you can get in a few extra hits.

If you accidentally touch one of the red blobs instead, time speeds up, giving said boss a few free hits on you.

It’s one of hundreds of unpredictable risk-reward scenarios littered throughout the game, and it isn’t unique to the bosses. Do you use your melee attack on an incoming missile to fire it back at your target, or do you dodge the missile to keep your score multiplier safe?

How this sort of thing rubs you could decide whether “Star Successor” is your kind of game. I found it exhilirating and well-crafted, but I’m a patient, nimble masochist. Your mileage may vary.

— PETER MERGENTHALER

‘Red Dead’ among May’s must-buys

By any measure, May was a bountiful month in gaming. But when comparing it to previous Mays — a historically dry month at retail and the traditional start of the summer dry spell — it was absolutely astonishing.

Week after week, gamers’ checking accounts — still reeling from an unusually strong start to the year — were pelted by dazzling releases from Nintendo, Rockstar, Remedy, Bizarre Creations, Black Rock Studio and other proven corners of the industry. Let’s take stock of some of that greatness and prepare for what looks to be a quiet, affordable June.

If you buy one game from May, make it “Mario Galaxy 2” for the Wii, which was reviewed in this space last week. But if you get two, pick up “Red Dead Redemption,” the spiritual successor to a competent but unremarkable open-world Western from the PS2 and Xbox era. “Redemption” builds on that game’s ideas and applies the same polish Rockstar Games typically reserves for its “Grand Theft Auto” titles, emerging as a strong contender for game of the year.

It would be disingenuous of me to tell you precisely how faithful “Redemption” is to the tenets of classic-westerndom. In that respect, I can offer only this — I’ve seen “Tombstone,” I’ve seen “The Wild Bunch,” and one of my favorite TV shows of all time is “Deadwood,” a sprawling, 36-episode dissection of frontier life as civilization creeps in.

Set about 40 years later, when telephones and power lines are making cowboys irrelevant, “Redemption” touches on many of the same concepts. And while Rockstar’s prose is hardly the flowery genius of David Milch, it does the job.

But how’s the shootin’ and stuff? Well, the game was put together by some of the fine people at the developer’s San Diego studio, which builds sturdier, better-looking games than its cousins do. The vistas and weather are absolutely the graphical stars of “Redemption,” lending real credibility to virtual sunsets and thunderstorms.

Guns carry real kick, too, adding some gravity to how you decide to dispatch the desperate, thirsty schlubs that litter the land. Do you lasso and hogtie your bounties, returning them to lawmen for due process? Or do you administer some frontier justice, blasting them off their horses and watching them flail about as they get caught in their own stirrups?

Thanks to some fancy software, people gyrate and stumble believably. If you shoot a guy in the shoulder while he’s running at you, his momentum will carry him forward even as he whips around and falls down. In “Redemption,” bullets hurt.

To-do list: There’s an absurdly generous amount of content here. Aside from the entertaining and varied narrative missions, which take you from Mexico to the mountains and all points between, you have scads of sidequests, jobs and collections to complete, all at your leisure and in any order you please. Treasure-hunting, which forces you to rely on faded clues drawn on in-game maps, is my favorite distraction of the bunch, and it’ll last you five hours or so on its own. Provided you don’t cheat by looking up all nine treasures on YouTube, of course.

Know that the game is stacked with technical quirks — some graphical, some more serious — but they’re as forgivable as they are eye-popping. The gunplay, for one, is functional enough, but “Redemption” occasionally calls upon you to brain bad guys more quickly than is possible.

For instance, while going about your business in Armadillo, Chuparosa or one of the game’s other towns, a prostitute will scream for help as a scorned client tries to knife her to death. This all happens before your eyes, and if you train your sights on the attacker quickly enough, you’ll get the good lady’s thanks and a few bucks for your trouble.

If you’re too slow, or if you can’t be bothered, you watch a hooker die in the street. And if you try to shoot the bad guy after the fact, you’ll confuse the game’s morality system, which decides you’ve committed a crime.

Hardcore, hardly appropriate, hilarious, or a little of all three? In any case, it’s not a dealbreaker. “Red Dead Redemption” is a true milestone for sandbox gameplay, and it cements Rockstar’s reputation as one of the best in the business.

‘Alan Wake’: I’m only about halfway through this single-player shooter from Remedy, but it’s too good not to tease here.

You play Alan Wake, a schlocky thriller writer struggling to put out another mass-market hit. Just as your vacation in the Pacific Northwest begins, shadowy figures kidnap your wife, knock you unconscious and leave you scrambling to account for a missing week.

Shortly after that, you’re burning zombies with a flashlight and picking up pages of a book you don’t remember writing.

The combat controls aren’t as tight as I’d like, but the story more than makes up for the flawed running and gunning. And a well-conceived episodic structure gives you places to pause while leaving you ready for more.

‘Blur’: Bizarre Creations is positioning their latest racer as “Mario Kart” for grown-ups, but it’s more like “Wipeout” with wheels.

The game can feel a little soulless at times, but it pairs solid racing mechanics with versatile power-ups (missiles, shockwaves, nitro boosts and the like) to great effect, and the attractive courses and multiplayer unlocks don’t hurt, either.

— Peter Mergenthaler writes about games for the York Dispatch on Thursdays. Contact him at pmergenthaler@yorkdispatch.com or 505-5439, or follow @Peteybird on Twitter.

Galaxy 2 stands among Mario’s greatest

As Americans, we’re rightfully choosy about which mass-media entertainers we allow to use single names.Think Madonna.

Beyonce.

Chyna.

Gallagher.

Best of the best, right?

But one diminutive Italian dude towers above them all.

Since he arrived on the princess-rescuing scene in 1981, Mario has needed no introduction. You know this guy. He wears blue overalls and jumps on stuff. He likes mushrooms and coins and warp pipes and, above all, shiny things. His best friend is a dinosaur.

And perhaps it’s that universal familiarity that has prompted some videogame writers to pepper their otherwise exclamatory praise for “Super Mario Galaxy 2,” the latest title in a franchise that has sold more than 220 million units, with hints of fatigue.

“Superfluous,” “unnecessary” and one of the best Mario games of all time, declared Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo.

“We should, by rights, be well sick of (the Mario formula) by now,” said The Escapist’s Susan Arendt, “but it’s hard to be cranky when the level design is this good.”

Better than ‘good’: If the cognitive dissonance sounds weird, that’s because it is.

We’ve become such a preening, entitled bunch of babies that most of us can’t bring ourselves to start by saying what ought to be said: “Galaxy 2″ is one of the very best platformers ever made, and it’s certainly the best game on the Nintendo Wii.

There are blemishes — those chintzy star bits from the first “Galaxy” return, for one — but they’re wee ones, and we’d be lucky to get titles this good five times as often.

Pretending as if the first “Galaxy” (and every other game in the Mario canon) never existed, “Galaxy 2″ begins with a five-minute tutorial to establish the ounce of narrative context you’ll need for the next 20 hours or so — Bowser is as big as a planet and steals Princess Peach, but Princess Peach has promised Mario cake.

Time to jump on stuff!

The game cuts you loose with the quickness. In the first 10 minutes, you’ll have careened around asteroids, leapfrogged black holes, hopscotched across disappearing elevators and slaughtered a baby piranha plant.

To the races: And you’ll have driven the laws of physics into humiliating exile, such are the gravity-defying heroics you’ll pull off in “Galaxy 2.”

The sequel keeps the spherical levels of the first game, but just as often, it stretches, perforates and bedazzles them with grouchy turtles, rope swings and other sundries from the Mushroom Kingdom.

These worlds — you travel between them on a spaceship styled after Mario’s face — are the most hazardous, creative, candy-coated obstacle courses ever

And fortunately, they bear revisiting. As with the first “Galaxy” and other 3-D Mario games, “Galaxy 2″ has you tromping about 40 or so stages in pursuit of 120 stars. Collect all of those, and you’ll unlock the privilege of finding 120 more.

Collect all of those, and you unlock a final world — something I’ve not accomplished yet — for a crack at two final objectives, bringing the total star count to 242.

Not alone: Yoshi, Mario’s anatomically puzzling dinosaur companion (he lays eggs), appears in “Galaxy 2,” and he’s in fine form. By eating special fruits purposefully strewn through certain levels, he turns into a blimp, a lantern or a red-hot bullet that can scale vertical walls and run across water.

The fruits are fun, easy-to-use additions to the game; it’s just a shame that you’re given little license to experiment with them. Each power-up is placed conspicuously close to the section of the level where you’re meant to use it.

That makes some sense — unlike the fire-flowers of Marios past, each fruit expires after 15 seconds or so — but you’re never at a loss for what you’re supposed to do.

The same goes for Mario’s four new power-ups. The best of them is a suit that lets you conjure three clouds mid-air, bridging otherwise un-jumpable distances.

You’ll also play with a rock suit and a giant drill; ice flowers, fire flowers and the ghost and spring suits return from the first “Galaxy.”

Again, little room for experimentation, but the mechanics are so tight that you likely won’t complain. The game challenges your fingers more than it does your brain, which will be plenty busy chewing on the finer points of jumping upside-down or running inside a sphere.

There’s so much more to love — the outstanding orchestral remixes of old Mario tunes, the streamlined world map, Yoshi’s heart-melting repertoire of grunts and squeals — but it’s best left to discover on one’s own.

Trust Nintendo, and trust Mario. If you’re looking for a reason to put down “Red Dead Redemption” or “Alan Wake,” you’ve found it.

I don’t assign stars or scores these days, but if I did, “Galaxy 2″ would get a babillion out of five. So there.

Gather your team for the Great Scavenger Hunt

Spurred by my love for movies such as “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World,” “Midnight Madness,” “Scavenger Hunt,” “Million Dollar Mystery” and “Rat Race,” PQH! has always wanted to partake in a real-life scavenger hunt.

Some online searching revealed there is a real-life crazy-fun version of these movies, and the 2010 version is coming up soon. Even better, the organizers of the Great Scavenger Hunt don’t ask you to do anything illegal like sawing the heads off of statues or stealing a donkey.

Instead, teams in the Great Scavenger Hunt have 24 hours to take pictures in hundreds (yes, hundreds) of possible categories as they struggle to accumulate points and beat other competitors from across the country.

Google Images won’t help you either because one of the most frequent requirements in your photo collecting is that team members appear in the photo of the hunted item. As further insurance against snatching a web photo, the categories are often pretty far out there. After all, how exactly do you find a Human Banana Split without making one yourself?

That means you get pictures like this, where the entire team has to smell what the rock was cooking. Or how about the whole group in a bubble bath.

Interpretation is often left up to the team, so if you’re wondering what “Stone Cold Steve Autism” would look like, go here. Or how about “2 Squirrels, 1 Cup,” which must be the cousin to the infamous Internet video.

Another section of photos forces teams to ask for help from a stranger.  In these pics, the team must enlist the aid of a passerby to get their picture.
This year’s event is April 17-18, so gather your team, get your camera battery charged up and get a little crazy.

(And if anyone around here does get a team together, be sure to let PQH! know. We’d be happy to be your stranger or the subject of any humility you’d wish to put upon us.)

Pop culture really pops at Geppi’s

I chalk it up to jealousy. Jealousy most foul of the thousands of people who got to go to Comic-Con, the world’s biggest pop-culture convention. There movie stars mingle with the masses. Comic artists whip out masterpieces, and collectors squeeze out every last dime of their 401ks for their own personal holy grail.

With all the nerd-news flowing from San Diego, I just had to find a way to get my geek on by proxy. Most importantly, I had to do it on a budget. With that in mind, I zipped down I-83 to Baltimore, where I spent a few hours at Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, a world of wonders for anyone with a love of pop culture.

Located right next to the Orioles’ Camden Park and one floor above a sports museum, Geppi’s houses a wide variety of entertainment memorabilia from the late 1800s to today, though it primarily features toys, comics, movie and television collectibles. For some, that might seem a little silly, but instead it’s an experience that honors the artists and craftsmen who have worked in the most commercial of all industries: Merchandising.

It’s that aspect that makes Geppi’s kid friendly and intellectual at the same time because the museum offers unique historical context on the things we loved back then and how they’ve grown into the things we reminisce about today.

Beyond that, Geppi’s is an experience that’s hard to describe, so instead, I offer you the slide show above.

While it may be hard to describe, I can tell you this: Go.

– JOHN SIMCOE

Wii love: Shaun White Snowboarding

Well, the Wii Fit honeymoon is over. I have a new balance board mistress, and her name is Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip. (Yeah, I kinda just called Shaun White a girl and intimated that I’m having an affair with her. Stay focused, people.)

Doing a faceplant has never been this much fun — or this painless.

Huge caveat here, though: Snowboarding with just the Wiimote is weak. I suspect it’s equally unimpressive on other platforms. (Sadly, this also means the multiplayer modes aren’t as much fun, since only one balance board can be connected to the Wii at a time.) If you can’t go all in with the balance board, leave this title on the shelf.

But with the board, Road Trip is a fried Oreo smothered in awesomesauce. Except healthier.

The game does have one nagging issue: Occasionally, most often when your snowboarder is in midair and on the verge of success, the board will halt the action and caution you not to jump on it. The inevitable face full of snow follows, and all your lovely trick bonuses drain away while you shout “OMG! I am so not jumping, stupid Boardy! My feet are still touching you! That’s not a jump; it’s a lean.”

Yes, my household has named our balance board Boardy. We’re not the most imaginative bunch. Ahem. Moving on. More »

I’d get cable if it carried shows like these

The U.S. is really in a sad state when it comes to game shows. Game shows are supposed to reward the contestants ability to know or overcome something. But these days, game shows only reward contestants’ ability to overcome their sense of shame, if they’re asked to overcome anything at all.

The U.K. does it better. Sure, we imported the tedious Who Wants to Be a Millionaire from them, and ABC probably brought Let’s Pick a Briefcase over after its success on the island kingdom. But they have options that don’t treat viewers like morons.

Take Quite Interesting, hosted by Stephen Fry. Fry is an actor, comedian and trivia hound. He was also a long-time writing partner of Hugh Laurie, that guy who plays Dr. House. QI is modeled after a quiz show, but the contestants are comedians. And the show follows the Whose Line is it Anyway mantra: The points don’t matter — except as a punchline. QI does keep track of the points, but it doles them out based, not on whether the answer is right, but by how interesting it is. It’s not enough to know that a duck’s quack echos, to get the points you’d have to know how scientists proved it. Getting the answer wrong is no problem, but giving the obvious one — for instance, saying “none” when asked what the most depressing job is — knocks 10 points off the contestant’s score.

(Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5.)

Many of the shows queries are rooted in conventional wisdom that is simply wrong. Why do boxers wear gloves? What do romans like to wear? If you said “to save lives” and “togas,” you’d be down 20 points. And with four contestants, scores are negative with an amusing frequency.

All these elements would make for a pretty good show if the contestants were normal people. But, aside from the caliber of question asked, QI follows the tried and true recipe of a panel show: Sit four comedians at desks, turn on a camera and have the host ask questions.  Imagine watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and, instead of five minutes of dramatic lighting, false tension and “is that your final answer?” between questions, you get to listen in on five whip-smart people trying to make each other laugh.

QI is the most thought out of the U.K. panel shows, but the format works with no budget and half-assed questions, which is why I’m surprised nothing similar airs over here. The closest we got was a month-long run of  Nevermind the Buzzcocks and Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn, which could have been great had someone other than Colin Quinn hosted.

Shows like 8 Out of 10 Cats, Have I Got News for You, Nevermind the Buzzcocks and Mock the Week could all be made for cheaper than the typical reality fare that you couldn’t pay me to watch, and they’d tap into the same lucrative market that culture-mocking shows like The Daily Show and The Soup hit.

– By PETER RAMBO

Descriptive title: The Space Game

The Space Game is a smooth, free, browser-based tower defense game by CasualCollective, the guys behind the massive timesuck known as Desktop TD.

It is — as the elegant name suggests — set in space. Your job is to mine materials from asteroids while fending off wave after wave of similarly colored pirates. But that’s fair, because you can use those minerals you’re mining to build lasers and missiles to defend your mining empire. All these things need energy to work, so you build solar chargers and energy stations to relay power to your weapons and miners.

The basic game has nine missions. The first few serve as introductions to the kinds of pirates you’ll come across, and they don’t really get challenging until the final mission, when you have to survive 20 minutes against a ludicrous onslaught. But the missions are really just a preparation for the mining and survival modes, where you can compete against everyone else with an Internet connection for fastest mining time and longest survival time.

A preview of the action:

– PETER RAMBO

What I wish Obama had worn to the inauguration

By PETER RAMBO

While giving his Inauguration address yesterday, Barack Obama wore bullet-resistive clothing and rode in an armored Cadillac.

And as impressive as that is, I still think the Japanese have a better understanding of what kind of suit the president needs should he be forced to defend the country from an evil vice president itching for an early promotion.

Case in point:

Pop 5 games of 2008

By PETER RAMBO
2008 was a good year for handheld and PC gaming. I always had something to look forward to on the DS, and I’ve been able to discover a lot of great indie games for the PC. I’m not much of a console gamer — I like my keyboard — so they’re not well-represented on this list, but some serious holiday time with my family on the Wii proved that at least one of its games deserved a spot.

5. Professor Layton and the Curious Village (Nintendo DS): For an E-rated game, Professor Layton and the Curious Village includes some pretty challenging puzzles that integrate seamlessly with the DS controls. But mindbenders alone don’t make a great game. The engaging Victorian story and animations that are far too good for a handheld gaming system put it over the top of close competitors like Mega Man 9 or Ninja Village.

4. Hinterland (PC): The first thing you do in Hinterland is building up your town. You hire farmer, blacksmiths and fortune tellers to toil in your city, all at the request of the king. But the king also wants you to clear the surrounding area of trolls, barbarians and raiders, something you don’t want to do on your own. So you take the swords and shields your blacksmith has been making and distribute them to your farmers. Now you’re ready to hunt. You can set the game length, but even games set to long are quick and dirty. You’re expected to play the game more than once. Each new start mixes up the surrounding areas, so every playthrough is new, and the developer, Tilted Mill, releases regular content updates. The most recent was a Halloween theme that allows you to recruit pumpkin farmers and fight Jack o’ Lanterns.

3. Boom Blox (Wii): My mom hasn’t beaten my brother at a game since he was young and they traded high scores in Tetris on our Windows 3.1 system. But the Wii is a great equalizer, and my mom thwamped him on her first try at the game. As any 12-year-old kid knows, the joy in Jenga isn’t building the tower, it’s knocking it down. Boom Blox plays on this natural joy by letting players bring spires to the ground by throwing baseballs and bowling balls at glass and golden towers. Watching blocks tumble fall evokes the same joy that that made 99 Bricks such a fun game to lose. The single player mode is a puzzle game, where the goal is to knock down a set of blocks in as few throws as possible, but the real fun is in competitive mode. In one mode, players try to destroy each others’ brick castle. In another, they take turns chipping away at the base of a tower, with points earned for every block knocked off. The game is sheer collapsible delight without any cleanup.

2. The World Ends with You (Nintendo DS): In The World Ends with You, hunger and fashion play as much a part in the game as weapon choice. The stylish graphics, quirky story and brooding main character framed Square-Enix’s bold attempt at innovative gameplay. Trying to control two characters at once was frustrating in that pat-your-head-and-rub-your-stomach sort of way, but rewarding when everything clicked and you no longer have to rely on a computer to help you out.

1. Fallout 3 (PC, Xbox 360, PS3): Bethesda did a surprisingly good job with my favorite gaming series. I was afraid it would be thin and humorless, like some of Bethesda’s other games. While they didn’t get everything right — the turn-based FPS element works, but it’s awkward at best, and the slow-motion death animations can be comically bad — they got the stuff that mattered right. The atmosphere is perfect. A mix of brown and gray covers the ruined wasteland, and debris is everywhere. Non-player characters are fun to talk to and present clever dialog options. Like the two previous games in the series, Fallout 3 is full of dark humor. It’s not as subtle or referential as the first two (I didn’t notice any Monty Python references in my first playthough); it’s more environmental and twisted.

For instance, the second game introduces the idea that each vault was meant as an experiment in human behavior. One vault had no spare water filtration chips, another would open after 20 years instead of 100, etc. Bethesda let the authors of Penny Arcade do a series of comics imagining what happened at some of the other vaults we haven’t seen. But their deranged imaginings weren’t much more twisted than those that Bethesda put in the game.

There are problems with the game, but Bethesda gives players the tools to fix them, and with as rabid a fanbase as Fallout has, I expect a lot of the issues I have with the game to be fixed by the time the first of three additional content packs are released.