So I haven’t been able to get much game time in this week at all, and won’t really be able to this weekend, either. Our wedding’s coming up on June 14th, so there’s marathon planning and preparation going on for the next few weeks until the big day. I did, however manage to get in a little bit of action this week:

• I played a couple more hours of IV during this past weekend. I’ve now unlocked all the islands and am conducting lots of “business” for the New Jersey mafia (hi, Sopranos references). I completed all of the assassin missions, appropriately adorned in my Agent 47 black suit/red tie getup. So far the only comment I can make regarding the “epic, Oscar-worthy storyline” is that it’s marginally more acceptable and tightly held together than the previous GTA’s, but not exactly the massive improvement referred to in the numerous 10.0/A+/5-star reviews.
• I’ve also been having a blast playing short bursts of many of the casual games on Kongregate. Games such as Dolphin Olympics 2, Fancy Pants Adventure, Gravitee, Chronotron, The Beard, Flash Portal, and Pillage the Village. It’s been a while since I played many games on the web. Flash has come so far that the browser can now be considered a distribution and gaming platform that’ll soon hang with the real consoles. If you haven’t played Offroad Velociraptor Safari, for example: first of all, you’ve missed out, and secondly, check out how technically advanced this game is for an entirely web-driven production. I predict all MMOs will soon be browser-based and platform-independent. You heard it here first (not really, everyone says this).
• Played a few more puzzles in Professor Layton, but not really noteworthy progress. Just played a little on our recent drive up to Atlanta for Colette’s bridal shower.

A few games I’m looking forward to soon: The World Ends With You, LostWinds, Boom Blox.

Wow, I played almost no games through the end of last week. I think I turned on Crackdown on Thursday or Friday, and Corey and I played for a few minutes, but that’s it.

Over the weekend, however, I played a decent amount of stuff. Friday I installed Diablo II and have already finished the first act. Until I started playing it again, I didn’t realize how much I really did play this game back in the day. Grinding through the first few areas took me back: killing Blood Raven, rescuing Deckard Cain, plowing through some catacombs owning skeletons. Aside from the old-school isometric view and spritish graphics, it still holds up amazingly well. Totally worth getting back into, or getting into for the first time if you’ve never played it before.

I’ve now completed 35 of the puzzles in Layton as of last night. I’m lovin’ puzzle after puzzle, with the exception of a handful I’ve run across. I think I’ve determined that my real beef with some of the puzzles is the way that the logic questions are worded. In several of the 40 or so puzzles I’ve discovered, the wording of the question doesn’t describe in enough detail the boundaries inside which you must search for an answer… that is, the rules aren’t well enough defined. I don’t know if this is just poor design, poor translation, or maybe both, but there have been a couple puzzles with appallingly bad questions, forcing me to waste my hint dollars hunting for answers.

I have a tendency to be late to the party with lots of games, too. I finally picked up both Burnout Paradise and Mass Effect from my brother to check out. I popped in Burnout and played for about half an hour yesterday. I’ve read plenty of contentious articles online regarding the open-world format of Paradise. Some folks knocked the openness, claiming they didn’t like not being able to instantly jump back to the start of an event. I can get behind this opinion in certain cases, like someone who’s got 1 event left to complete and has to constantly drive back to the beginning to retry. That would be Frustration City. The omission of the proper Crash mode from previous titles is another divisive issue. Though Criterion replaced it with “Showtime” mode, which I also enjoy, the removal of full-blown puzzley Crash mode is something of a disappointment. On the other side of the fence, these changes to the series (the openness and the new modes) can be an innovative and interesting addition. For instance, I love the ability to define my own route to the finish line of a race. As someone who loves maps (and, by extension, memorizing open-world, in-game maps), taking my own route to the end is exciting and fun. It would add a whole other level of excitement if done during online play. And when you factor in your eventual knowledge of the numerous shortcuts, racing would become even more fun. I also think Road Rage mode is much better suited for the open environment. Returning to the garage for a repair allowed me to rack up 85 takedowns in a single Road Rage event.

I’m looking forward to spending more time in Paradise City, but Mass Effect may call me away later in the week for my epic space journey.

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.