Imagine finding the perfect mate, someone gorgeous who bakes you cookies, jets you to Paris, grouts your tiles and treats you like royalty.
Skate from EA Black Box allows players to use simple controls in tandem with the game’s physics to pull off flashy moves.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: PHANTOM HOURGLASS
Developed and published by Nintendo for the DS; for all ages; $34.99.
SKATE
Developed by EA Black Box and published by Electronic Arts for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3; for ages 13 and up; $60.
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, made for Nintendo’s hand-held DS, uses maps in an ingenious way.
Now imagine that this same person periodically attacks your widescreen TV with a baseball bat, shaves an obscene word into your dog’s fur and sets your hat on fire.
This is what it is like to play The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.
Hourglass begins, as all Legend of Zelda games do, with the adventurous, green-clad Link setting off to save a kidnapped damsel. He has to sail from island to island searching for clues to the location of a ghost ship.
Hourglass is a brilliant action-adventure game filled with ingenious puzzles, entertaining characters and imaginative monsters. It is made for Nintendo’s hand-held DS, and it is wonderful to see how creatively the game uses every feature of the system. On the touch screen, you can move Link and make him swing his sword. You can also draw notes on a map, sometimes using that map in ingenious ways. One puzzle involving an uncharted island is absolutely inspired.
The DS’s dual screens are also used well, notably in a fight with an invisible monster whose position you have to gauge by looking through its eyes on the top screen. There are even some clever new ideas for the DS microphone, like stunning big-eared monsters by shouting at your DS.
For the first several hours, I thought Hourglass was a perfect game. But its Achilles’ heel turns out to be its central gimmick, the Phantom Hourglass itself.
The Hourglass comes into play in a large temple containing a series of dungeons. The dungeons contain some deadly substance that is neutralized when sand runs through the hourglass; if the sand runs out, Link dies almost immediately. When this happens, you have to start again from the first dungeon, doing the same tasks in the same places in the same order, trying to do them fast enough to give yourself time to make it to the exit.
There are two schools of thought regarding forcing a player to pay for slowness or sloppiness by repeating early levels over and over to reach later ones. Some people consider it a great way to create suspense by making every decision feel crucial. Others say that since this style of gameplay was originally developed by arcade designers trying to get players to drop in quarter after quarter, it is an inappropriate choice for home games, creating an artificial, frustrating style of play that is more about gritty determination than fun.
I stand firmly in the latter camp, and games like Hourglass make my point for me. In contrast to Tetris and other games that randomize elements so that each replay is a new experience, Hourglass makes you do the same thing in the same way — you have to memorize the quickest route for each dungeon and do it without mistakes. When I finally got through a series of dungeons, I never felt a sense of accomplishment; just relief that the nightmare was over.
But the Hourglass nightmare is never truly over, because after the player returns to its terrific nontimed levels for a while, the game once again sends Link back to the temple for another clue.
The dungeons would actually be perfectly fun without the timed gimmick. They’re all fun to go through once, but none of them are fun enough to go through 20 times.
Hourglass is so good for the most part that I still enjoyed the game, but the time I spent racing through dungeons removed all thoughts of its being perfect.
Still, most gamers probably won’t complain much about Hourglass’s timed dungeons, because it’s just one of those things that games do. That’s what makes the skateboarding game Skate so remarkable: its designers bravely broke with gaming traditions to try something radically different.
When you say “skateboarding game,” most people will instantly think of the Tony Hawk series, which has been the unbeatable leader in extreme sports videogames for the last eight years. Not only have the Tony Hawk games been hugely successful, they have also been used as a blueprint for anyone making a similar game. When you play Aggressive Inline, Wakeboarding Unleashed and many other games, much of the control layout has been lifted straight from Tony Hawk.
But Skate’s development team, EA Black Box, did something unheard-of: they sat down and thought, how would we design a skateboarding game if Tony Hawk had never existed?
The result is the most intuitive control layout ever created for an extreme sports game. Rather than pushing down a button and letting go to jump, you simply pull back and then snap forward the analog stick. The direction and angle of the snap affects the nature of the jump. If you want to ride a thin railing, you don’t jump on the railing and press a button for “grinding”; jump on a railing at the right angle with enough momentum and you will glide.
Tony Hawk-style games are fun, but they often depend on complex, arbitrary button combinations to pull off tricks. Skate’s controls are very basic — flip a stick, press a trigger for the right or left hand. Using those simple controls in tandem with the game’s dead-on physics lets you pull off flashy moves.
Skate involves wandering around finding people who challenge you to perform some maneuver involving grinding or jumping or showing off for a magazine photographer. Even when I couldn’t pull off a trick, I always felt that it could be done. For the first time in my life, I feel I really understand how skateboarders do what they do, although I’m sure I still couldn’t ride a real skateboard more than three feet.
While Skate has some small flaws (it would have been a good idea to make your skater translucent whenever he blocks something important on screen), it is rare to find a game that comes so close to doing everything right.
In life such perfection is hard to find, which is why we sometimes have to accept some imperfections. Those of you walking dogs with obscene words shaved into their fur know what I’m talking about.
