Review - Infinite Space

• Game: Infinite Space
• Format: Nintendo DS
• Other Formats: None
• Developer: Platinum Games/ Nude Maker
• Publisher: Sega
• Genre: Role Playing

Out of all the fictional jobs that we wish existed in real life, starship captain has got to rank near the top. Exploring never before seen regions of space, fighting battles with guns that could take out a small country and sending anonymous crewmen to die pointlessly, it's got everything. Strangely, despite the number of games that try to mimic Star Wars in some way, this Star Trekian life is something of a rarity in gaming, but now comes Infinite Space to satisfy all your redshirt-sacrificing needs.

The story focuses on Yuri, who in accordance with JRPG tradition is a young boy coming of age who must face up to his great destiny and mysterious powers. Said powers in this case being an ability to activate the Epitaphs, magic space boxes that are somehow connected to the Void Gates used to travel between systems. He also needs to face up to the Lugovalian Empire that is rapidly conquering all galaxies that stand in its way. As generic as the overall plot sounds, the characters, dialogue and subplots are consistently well done, as are the numerous homages - and not just the expected Star Trek/ Wars/ Gate similarities either, Arthur C. Clarke fans will recognise a lot of themes within the story.

Frak! Smeg! Frell! petaQ! Drokk! It's not proper sci-fi until someone hurls a made-up swear word at you. Belgium!

At the heart of the game are your ships themselves. There are over a hundred in all, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The game offers an impressive level of customisation, with your design choices making a noticeable difference to how your fleet operates. Shields and armour let you go toe-to-toe with the enemy, radars and long range weaponry let you hold back and attack them from a safe distance, and security offices give a big advantage if you try to board enemy ships. Simply buying the best of everything is not an option, as your ship has fairly limited space for modules, so for every improvement you make there is a tradeoff in terms of something else that must be left out. You also need to manage your crew, hiring staff for everything from First Officer right down to accountants and the serving staff in the mess hall.

Ship upgrades are done through the medium of Space Tetris.

When battle begins, the two fleets are placed at opposite sides of a battleground, with the options to move forward or back, or to fire any weapons that are in range. There is a kind of rock-paper-scissors dynamic to the three main moves - Barrage is made up of three times as many shots as Normal, but can be almost completely negated by Dodge, dodging a Normal attack however just makes you easier to score a critical hit on. As the game goes on, you also gain access to fighters, AA guns, boarding parties and special attacks. The number of combat options is very limited when compared to the ship upgrades, but if anything this goes to underline just what a difference the right design choices make.

The battles use the strangely underused gimmick of turning the DS touch screen into a control panel

All this may seem somewhat overwhelming, and in truth it often can be. This fact is not helped by the often shockingly poor levels of user friendliness. There are dozens of stats to take into account, plus special skills for all your crew and many of the ships, but the only way to learn what they all mean is to drop whatever you're doing and go to the tutorials at a starbase. Ship customisation would also be a lot easier if you had the relevant stats visible on the top screen - as it is you are told what improvement the current module will give, but not how effective you already are. Most unforgivably, there is no way to look up your current objectives, so if you can't remember where you are meant to be going then your only options are a) fly to every one of the dozens of nearby systems, checking every building until you finally reach the one that sets off the plot, or b) GameFAQs.

These annoying problems with accessibility may well be enough to make many players give up in frustration, but stick with it and once it clicks the scale and ambition are truly impressive. A great game at its best, it's just a shame it makes you work so hard to see it.

Score:
7/10

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Review - Scribblenauts

• Game: Scribblenauts
• Format: Nintendo DS
• Other Formats: None
• Developer: 5th Cell
  
• Publisher: Warner Brothers Interactive
  
• Genre: Puzzle

The premise of Scribblenauts is simple enough. You control Maxwell, your objective is to find the Starite hidden in each level, to do this you must use the tools at your disposal to overcome the obstacles in your way.

So what are the tools at your disposal? Well, "archaeopteryx", "water pistol", "lepidopterist", "Higgs boson", "giant enemy crab", "ROFLcopter", "El Chupacabra", "wedding dress", "razor", "Anubus", "jiaozi" and the 22,086 other objects that can be summoned from the game's insanely comprehensive vocabulary. It may well be the first game where the Oxford English Dictionary works as a stand-in for GameFAQs.

Somehow, "Cthulhu" seems less frightening after you shoot him with a "mind control device" and start riding around on his back.

There are a few limitations on what you can summon - trademarks are right out obviously, as is anything vulgar and drug or alcohol references. Also if you name a specific person, real or fictional, then you are likely to get nothing (and a good portion of the names included are just redirects to some generic character - "Einstein" gets you a "scientist", "Blackbeard" gives "pirate", and "Leeroy Jenkins" maps to "knight"). Stick within the rules however, and far more often than not you'll find that whatever bizarrely esoteric object you think of has been anticipated by the developers. You can and will stump the dictionary if you try (a few unused words include "hacker", "australopithecus", "man-eating plant", "crocoduck" and "grid"), but the point is that you usually need to actively look for pointlessly obscure nouns to achieve this, leading to the polar opposite of the old "I don't see any 'unlock door' around here" issue that plagued text adventures.

Not only are so many objects and characters included in the game, but they all have their own properties. Throwing a "toaster" in some water will electrocute anything nearby, "rope" can attach any two objects together, and activating the "Large Hadron Collider" will destroy the Universe. What's more, summoning multiple things will often cause them to interact with each other. Summon a "vampire" followed by "garlic bread" and the fiend will run away in terror, likewise "bigfoot" will run from a "photographer" and a "dingo" will eat any "baby" it sees. There are times when the illusion is broken as two items fail to interact in the way you want (one mission asks you to fix a car, but summoning a "mechanic" is no use), but given that there is literally not enough time in a human life to try every combination, 5th Cell probably deserve some leniency on this point.

Here, we see an "elephant" firing a "rocket launcher" at a "separatist". Buy Scribblenauts.

So far, it sounds like game of the forever, but inevitably there are flaws. The biggest problem is the control system which assigns both movement and item interaction to the touch screen. Touch any unoccupied area of the screen and Maxwell will charge over there with no concern for whatever deathtraps may be in his path. This problem is exacerbated by the camera which snaps back if left alone for a few seconds, causing you to miss whatever you were trying to click on.

Another problem is that unsurprisingly some items are almost game-breakingly powerful., to the point that the temptation is to rely on them almost exclusively. Summoning a "black hole" will get anything out of your path, "Death" can easily win just about any combat mission, and a switch-flipping "engineer" can often skip large sections of a level for you. In this case it could be argued that the game only becomes boring if you are boring, and indeed the game becomes a lot more fun if you avoid the quick and easy path to go for more convoluted solutions. Unfortunately this doesn't work for the annoyingly large number of "move object X to position Y" missions. Most of these only have one real solution - drag it over there with a flying vehicle, so the only real choice is what vehicle to use and how to attach object X.

Plan 1: Have a "termite" eat through the bark.
Plan 2: Shoot the tree with a "shrink ray".
Plan 3: "Glue" a "giant squid" to the "space shuttle" and crash it into the Starite.

Still, these flaws aren't enough to spoil a game where "Abraham Lincoln" can zombify "god" using the "Necronomicon". Learn to live with the controls and experiment with alternative solutions, and it really is an experience like no other.

Score:
9/10

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Review - Pokemon Platinum

• Game: Pokémon Platinum
• Format: Nintendo DS
• Other Formats: None
• Developer: Game Freak
• Publisher: Nintendo
• Genre: RPG

Pokémon… a series that has taken the world by storm, blasting it with tons of anime, 12 of its own movies, a countless number of games, (seriously, I tried, I lost count after a while…), and quite frankly one of the biggest merchandising bases ever to be seen, from bed sheets to cuddly toys, figures, watches and electronics. Platinum is the newest game to come out of the cellar of the Pokémon designers. This one is the third game in the fourth generation to come out, where it's the two first games combined. Now, usually they don't really change too much when making these; they keep the story similar and probably the most ambitious before Platinum was Yellow, as it changed how you got certain Pokémon and most memorably, you had your adorable friend Pikachu following you.

There is quite a big difference between Diamond/Pearl and Platinum, and you'll notice it almost immediately, how you meet Professor Rowan and get your first Pokémon is completely different. They've also changed how the Team Galactic buildings look and in my opinion it was definitely for the better. The whole game just looks and feels a lot better to play than D/P; there's more added content to keep you busy and it seems like they've put more focus into the parts of the game which weren't as exaggerated in the last ones.

Wait… isn't this the final scene of Ghost?

There's also, as has been the trend in most of the third games, a lot more double battles, which means more shared exp which means more levelling-up This is always a good thing, although one problem is with wild double battles you have to knock one Pokémon out to catch the other, which gets quite annoying but thankfully it doesn't happen often in the game.

Another new addition to Platinum over Diamond/Pearl is the fact they have thankfully sped everything up. This means that battling, move animations and talking is all faster making the game a lot more fluent nicer to play.

Overall this game is definitely worth buying if your a fan of Pokémon, and even if you already have Diamond and Pearl as it has new events which means more ways of catching Pokémon, for example the current event is the Rotom event where you get a key to a secret room.

Score:
9/10

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