At least that’s what I think on Microsoft’s new super-feature, the Natal (Nə-tahl). My office is kind enough to provide satellite TV in the break room, so I tuned in to E3 on G4, and saw a Microsoft mouthpiece giving a talk about it.

At first I was thinking it could never work – a pie on the sky piece of vaporware. But from what little I saw, it is an add-on device bigger than the Wii Sensor Bar with more brains. There are apparently 2 cameras to sense 3D movement as opposed to the more “traditional” one, like webcams or the EyeToy and PSEye for the PS2 and 3 respectively. Coupled with a microphone (stereo?), it can pair an audio source with a physical moving body. Neat.

I’m skeptical though, so we’ll see…

Ame and I are hosting a Dungeons & Dragons game at our place with a bunch of people that I’ve known through the years – all from my alma mater. I’ve mentioned Chad and Bobby before, but Dave and Matt and their wives have joined in as well.

I haven’t played or DM’d in awhile, so it’s a lot of fun. I’m running a 4th edition home-brew campaign and so far, the players are really liking it. Ame started off as the Dungeon Master, but I have since taken over duties and made the campaign my own.

The first week, Ame and I thought Snickers would be a big butthole and get in the way. In reality, he caused the least amount of trouble and people spilled their drinks on the floor at least three times. Eris wanted nothing to do with the whole group and sulked in the furthest corner she could find.

Since then, it’s been hard to get people together due to real life getting in the way, even when we try to hold it on Saturday. So far Ame, Chad, and Dave and his wife Traci are the core members. Matt and his wife have since dropped, not because they don’t do D&D, but they’ve moved quite far away to be practical.

This last session though was a blast: Under cover of darkness, my players infiltrated (ala Rambo: First Blood Part 2) and torched the bandit camp west of town and discovered the trapped, secret vault of treasure. Chad’s character, a druid named Elgar, brazenly walked into the main building and threw a Molotov cocktail at the guards and caught them all on fire. As that fire quickly spread, Traci’s cleric, Sam, blocked the door and wailed on them as they vainly attempted to escape.  Ame (Orianna) and Dave (Lyfe) have just discovered the vault of treasure that I’ve yet to roll up. They should hope I roll well!

These characters and players (except Chad) are all still new, so this whole bit of adventure should push them over the top to level 2. I hope they don’t find the treasure disappointing though – they are level 1 still after all. It shouldn’t too bad though, they’re all gamers (except Traci), so they should understand a level 1 treasure might not be the best, but should only get better.

Let me start by saying I love the Ratchet & Clankseries and their double-entendre subtitles for their sequels (except Deadlocked, which, if that’s some sort of freaky sex position, I don’t think I want to know), and Size Matters does not disappoint on that front - just every other front.

I finished the game in about 6 hours, there were only a handful of pea-shooter weapons that upgraded just a couple of times, the comedy “spark” was completely absent, minigames were uninspired and boring (except for the Lemmingsclone), the music repetitively and annoying, unbalanced boss-battles (I found myself tearing my hair out over copious amounts of bullshit), and individual levels that seemed truncated at best.

What happened to you Ratchet & Clank? You used to be cool…

High Impact Games? Where the hell did you come from? What happened to Insomniac? Those are the real developers of any Ratchet & Clank game of mine.

Lowest rating I think I can dole out in my rating system: Half a star out of five. Gross.

I first picked up Super Paper Mario when I bought my Wii in about April of 2007, and I’m finally done! No, It’s not an epic^epic game, but it will run about 20 hours before you’re done, and that’s only if you so some of the optional stuff, so as Mario adventures typically go, it’s got some meat to it.

I’ll be blunt, the game is slow compared to Super Mario Galaxy (a real Mario adventure in my mind). This game is more text and dialogue driven than most platformers I know, and the difficulty level is also much lower. I imagine this is the Mario game that gamers get their girlfriends that “like videogames” but have never played or heard of Battletoads. 

The game starts off pretty exciting though, and the hooks are pretty fierce at that. Running, jumping, hitting blocks – all great Mario stuff. They even put new twists on old staples like the invincibility star. In SPM, collecting this powerup makes Mario grow to fill the screen, and he becomes his 8-bit sprite from the original Super Mario Bros.. While massive, Mario can plow through any obstacle and is unstoppable as enemies bounce off and a path of destruction is left in his wake. The first boss battle against a giant dragon is fairly epic too

Then world 2 starts, and there’s nothing really “new” until world 8. Along the way, you get additional powers like the ability to shrink and enter small spaces or become paper thin and float on the wind.  Most of the puzzles in the game use these new abilities, and while some of them are clever, most of them are fairly uninspired. I feel good for finding hidden chest and items though, so there’s a sense of accomplishment there – that’s good. There are also Cards for all the enemies and characters in the game. You can use Catch Cards to ensnare the soul of an enemy and place them on a card. Possessing a card doubles the amount of damage you do to that enemy, but other than that they are useless. Even more useless though is there are hundreds of enemies with a dozen types of  goomba, so the odds of having the right card in your deck is slim unless you’ve invested gold coins in buying Catch Cards.

There’s a level-up system that I wish was implemented in more games anymore. Your score increases as you kill enemies, and when it gets high enough, leveling up increases Attack, Defense, and Hitpoints. Nothing too deep or innovative, I know, but wish action and action-like games incorporated something like this more often. Also, as a Mariogame if you hop on a string of enemies without touching the ground, you get even more points – and more points still by shaking the Wii-mote a bit to add a flourish to your bounce.

Visually, this game is very clean and clear most of the time. Some things get muddy when flipping to the 3D, but 2D looks pretty damn gorgeous. Everything looks drawn in vectors with a turtle program and an Etch-a-Sketch, and is showcased upon entering a new world: The canvas starts blank, lines draw along outlines, the backdrop props up, colors fill in like a paint bucket, and then Mario enters the scene. I simply love the presentation there.

The controls work great in the 2D plane we’re all used to, but with the ability to flip into a 3D space, things get a little tricky. So very much of the game world is designed on a 2D plane (even though most of it is built and rendered as a projection from 3D to 2D), and the directional pad is only so versatile, movement here, especially jumping, is difficult.

Sound is what you’d expect from a Mario game – a lot of boings and smacks, so not annoying to the player as they’re all well-placed and paced. If you close your eyes though, the sound could get really annoying, so it might not be the best for a mix-tape. I’m not going to knock a lot of points off for this though – this game is a colorful platformer at heart. Charles Martinet once again reprises his role as Mario, so that’s pleasant.

I glossed over it before, but the chief complaint I have about the game is the story. This stilted mass of crap belongs in a bargain-bin RPG setting, not in my platformer thankyouverymuch. The scenes are long, the text windows are small so each speaker has several dialogs to click through, and the worst part is they’re unskippable. Gross, gross, gross. The most offending piece is, there are sometimes important clues for where to go or what to do next hidden in these sections, so if you don’t pay attention, you might wander around in the hub-level aimlessly.

A close second in my beefs with this game is the puzzle scripting and level design. I’m a huge proponent of figure-eights in level design – it minimalizes the amount of back-tracking required. Off the top of my head, Jak II  for PS2 (the sequel to Jak and Daxter) did it best in my opinion, but SPM is very poor in this regard. In one of the later worlds, the game has you searching for an item of an unspecified type from an unspecified set of items. Basically a needle in a haystack that could be of any size, and when a needle is found, I don’t know if it’s the right needle. Later on in the same level, game-progression relies on you remembering a previous wrong items’ effect. I Hope you remembered a item that went in the trial- failure bin; and if you did, hope you picked up two; oh wait, you only needed one before for the trial, so I hope you remembered where in the platforming maze you got it; No? hope you like annoying mazes, twice.

When I buy I game I usually keep it, as it has some redeemable value as a game. This one is going back to a retailer’s shelf for store credit.

This week’s been kind of heavy hasn’t it? With implications of intelligence and such along with my vengeful tree-hugging, let’s lighten the mood a bit.

I’m working on my backlog of games lately. I typically don’t have a lot of time to devote to video games, or I get sucked into games that don’t have an end like Quake Live and Team Fortress 2. I’ve finished Super Paper Mario for Wii (Yes, I know it’s old), and moved on to Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters for PS2 (Yes, another old one).

I’ll have a review for Super Paper Mario coming soon, but I’m looking back and seeing what else I haven’t tackled yet in the past few years. I was briefly considering Halo 3, but why? I was pretty on-top-of-things with the whole Gears of War, so I feel like I’ve gotten my fill of AAA shooters for a while now.

I need a puzzle game, I might pick up Puzzle Quest. We’ll see…