I have fond memories of playing the original Bangai-O on the Dreamcast.

It had both maniacal characters and an unfollowable “plotline” that had me laughing out loud level after level, and it had one of the most enjoyable “two-stick shooter” control mechanics ever. You could shoot in eight directions and your projectiles bounced off the walls, with a bomb blast you could detonate that grew larger and more powerful in proportion to your proximity to enemy weapons fire. It was amazing. I found myself jockeying for high scores by flying straight into danger in order to get max points. Putting your balls on the chopping block was the only way to attain those massive numbers.

The next game in the series, Bangai-O Spirits for the DS, looks to be getting pretty good reviews from critics. It sounds like it’s more puzzle-ey than the original, with smaller levels. There are a wealth of new weapons to try, 160 levels, and there’s even a level editor. Treasure (the developer) came up with a pretty ingenious scheme of sharing levels by encoding them as audio files, then playing the staticky audio back into another DS’s microphone to transfer the data. I guess it’s their way of avoiding Nintendo’s hare-brained sharing and parental controls. I’m pretty sure I’ll pick up this game, that is if I can find it anywhere. Doesn’t exactly seem like a popular title.

Here’s a cool video of it:

So I received my copy of Professor Layton from Amazon today, I ordered it last week sometime. Before I picked it up, each new preview then review of the game made me want it more and more. I love good brain teasers, but so much of the DS market has now been saturated with “brain training” BS games that are all pretty much boring after half an hour.

Layton, however, has several hooks that piqued my interest and dragged me in. First of all, it’s so refreshing to see a new style of art direction, especially from a Japanese studio (Level-5 previously developed Dark Cloud and Rogue Galaxy). It’s got a distinctly European flavor to the animation, architecture, voice acting, etc. The old-school adventure game feel in Layton takes me back to the days of the classic LucasArts games — Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, Full Throttle.

The town of St. Mystere is chock full of residents who just looove them some good old fashioned brain teasers and logic puzzles. Every corner you turn is host to another one of the townsfolk looking to challenge the Professor with some kind of puzzle. There’s a wide-ranging variety of puzzle types to look forward to: spatial comprehension, math, language, semantics, and general logic, the difficulty of which runs from pretty simple to damn near impossible. The best thing about the wealth of puzzles in Layton, though, is how subjective the difficulties are. Some people I’m sure will blow right past the semantics puzzles, while stalling out on anything requiring 3D spatial proficiency. Myself, I love the object orientation puzzles, but can’t stand any word puzzle that involves piddling with semantics and definitions. A little something for everyone.

I’ve played, I think, most of the way through the first chapter (of 4?) in Apollo Justice. It’s the perfect type of DS game for me, at least with the way I’ve been playing mobile games lately. It’s more or less just tapping through conversations, listening to testimony, then once in a while making a decision on what to do next in your cross-examination of witnesses. I’ve been kind of disappointed, however, at how the “puzzle”-ness of the investigation and interrogation shakes out. You just go along, listening to the witness until it asks you how you want to proceed: “which piece of evidence contradicts their testimony?” — “oh, turns out there was totally another person in the room the night of the crime”. That kind of nonsense just allows twists to be thrown into the plot, but up until the point I’ve reached in the game, the player never gets to discover these things on their own. Every major break in the case is just handed to you, and the circumstances are such that you never could’ve figured it out on your own. The prosecuting attorney (your opponent) will just say: “Oh, looks like you’re wrong about that because guess what, I HAVE THIS OTHER PIECE OF EVIDENCE I’VE BEEN WITHHOLDING.” How about you give me all the pieces to the puzzle and let me decide how to proceed? Maybe this will all change in later chapters…