Game Forward

Developed by Arika, 3D Classics: Urban Champion is a revamped version of a fighting game originally released for the NES in 1984. Though the action is rudimentary and crude by today’s standards, this two button brawler has a good presentation and can be entertaining in short bursts.

In 3D Classics: Urban Champion, you play as a blue-haired combatant trying to rise the ranks of the local underground fighting scene. Starting out as the “Lonely Champion”, you must survive 99 rounds of bare knuckle boxing to become the undisputed Urban Champion.

The combat in 3D Classics: Urban Champion is essentially a tug-of-war. You can defeat your green-haired opponent by knocking him off of the right side of the screen or by being on his side of the fighting area when time runs out; at which point as police car arrives to make an arrest. The police car also passes by from time to time, sending both fighters to their respective “corners” and resetting the balance of the fight.

Conversely, you are defeated when knocked off of the left side of the screen or caught on your side when time runs out. You only get three chances at making your way through round 99, with no opportunity to get more along the way.

Fights take place outside of four businesses: a snack bar, a discount store, a book store and a barber shop. Aside from signifying progression down the street, the areas are functionally identical. Each business has five windows above it from which an angry business owner will occasionally drop a flower pot. If you or your opponent are caught in its path you will be momentarily stunned, giving the other fighter a chance to land an uncontested blow.

An Isometric View adds DepthEvery three rounds you will knock your opponent into an open manhole and be showered with confetti by the business owner’s daughter. After six rounds you receive a new grade, though in subsequent playthroughs you start with your highest-achieved grade and won’t get a new one until you surpass your old record. Should you complete 99 rounds and become the Urban Champion, you can keep playing, though the round counter and grades will no longer change.

The actual fighting mechanics in 3D Classics: Urban Champion are quite simple. You are armed with a light punch that is quick but weak and a heavy punch that is very strong, but quite slow. You can aim high or low using the d-pad or analog slider and can also block and dodge incoming punches.

The default control scheme has your punches mapped to the A and B buttons of the 3DS, though you can map punches to any of the available buttons.

You start each round with 200 stamina points that get used by throwing and landing punches, getting hit by your opponent or a flower pot. Should you run out of stamina, you will be momentarily winded and will resume the fight with low stamina if you aren’t knocked out first.

The presentation of 3D Classics: Urban Champion is understandably simple, but has some nice touches and uses bright colours. In addition to an option to adjust the depth of the 3D effect in-game, you can turn on an isometric camera angle that gives the game an even greater sense of depth. The sounds and music are typical of early-era NES titles, with no noticeable enhancements.

My main issue with 3D Classics: Urban Champion is that it never really gets harder as you go. Once you learn the timing, you can easily land uncontested heavy blows ad nauseum and the game becomes more about endurance than honing your skills.

Though it’s simple, shallow and repetitive, 3D Classics: Urban Champion can still be fun, especially in short burst play sessions. There isn’t a lot of replay value to be had once you’ve become the Urban Champion, but there is a two player mode playable via local wireless connection.

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Fruit Ninja Kinect from Halfbrick Studios is a high energy game that has you slicing a veritable supermarket of fruit while challenging your dexterity and hand-eye coordination. This title features precise and accurate control that is among the best on Kinect, but suffers from calibration and usability issues inherent to the platform.

The premise of Fruit Ninja Kinect is simple: slice fruits lobbed from the bottom of the screen with virtual swords using your hands and/or feet to score points. Though a bit short on content, the game offers three single player modes, two local multiplayer modes for two players and an addictive challenge mode.

Classic Mode begins with a single piece of fruit being launched onto the playfield and quickly ramps up. If you let a piece of fruit fall back off of the playfield you are given a strike. Three strikes and you’re out. This mode will also launch bombs onto the screen, which will end the game if sliced.

Should a Pomegranate—a fruit not present in the iOS version—appear, you can frantically slice it more than 60 times to score a huge point bonus and it will negate one strike should you have any. Occasionally a rare fruit, like dragon fruit will appear and slicing it will be worth 50 points. While most fruits are worth a single point, hitting combos of three or more with one blade slice will award bonus points and randomly occurring critical hits are worth ten points.

Arcade Mode is a score attack mode with a 60 second time limit. There are three power up bananas that will appear from all sides of the screen in this mode. Freeze will slow everything down, Frenzy will launch a thick stream of fruits from the sides of the screen and Double Score is self-explanatory.

Bombs in Arcade Mode do not end the game, but detract ten points from your score and will cancel any active power ups. You can really boost your score by stringing combos together in a “Super Combo Blitz” and maximizing the hits of a pomegranate that appears at the end of every round. A final tally also awards bonus points for the number of combos you get, hitting power up bananas and even for hitting a certain number of bombs.

Zen Mode has no strikes, power ups or bombs, only a 90 second time limit. This mode is all about waiting for the perfect time to strike and maximizing your combos.

The Challenge mode of Fruit Ninja Kinect is my favourite way to play. Here you are given challenges in all three main modes based on the scores of those on your friends leaderboard. If you don’t have any friends playing the game, it will assign challenges based on score plateaus and does a great job of incrementally making you a better player and working towards the high scores needed to unlock some of the achievements. It also creates a sense of variety by mixing up the modes.

Fruit Ninja Kinect also offers two local two-player varieties under Party Mode. You can play Co-Op Arcade that tallies your collective score or a competitive Battle mode. In Battle, fruits are colour-coded in red and blue. Players must slice their own fruits while avoiding the other player’s. Slicing the other player’s fruit will detract from your own score.

As you play, you will unlock “Sensei’s Shwag” from the Dojo menu such as new effects for your blade swipes, backgrounds and player shadows. Unfortunately these unlockables are merely cosmetic and have no effect on gameplay.

What makes or breaks any Kinect title is its controls and the team at Halfbrick Studios did an excellent job adapting the frantic, touch-based swiping gameplay of the original iOS version to a hands-free motion control system. Slices with both hands (or feet if you’re brave) are extremely precise and accurate at a level well above the majority of software for the platform and there is little to no input lag.

A shadow of the player is projected on the background, allowing you to easily tell where your hands are and aim your slices. Should you swipe too frantically, your shadow will turn into a puff of smoke and you won’t be able to slice for a few seconds unless you stop.

Unfortunately, a calibration problem sometimes prevents your shadow from returning for 10-15 seconds, which in a one minute game ruins your play session. The game will also recalibrate if you change positions, remove a hat or even when you sit down to take a break. This constant calibration was likely a choice to allow players to drop in and out in a party or family situation, but in practice it can be quite frustrating as a single player.

Fruit Ninja Kinect also tends to act funny when first starting up the game and even moreso when trying to start a two player session. This sort of thing is common among Kinect titles and will generally be accepted by most players, but it can hurt the overall experience.

The menu system in Fruit Ninja Kinect is intuitive and uses the same slicing mechanic as the gameplay, but icons are bunched together in a way that makes it easy to make a wrong selection because the game recognises even the slightest up or down swing of either hand. The Dojo menu is also a mess.

This long list can only be navigated by swiping and it can be difficult to stop on what you want with any sort of accuracy. Toning down the sensitivity in the menus and adding up and down keys to the Dojo menu would make for a huge improvement in the UI experience.

Fruit Ninja Kinect is one of the more accessible titles available on the platform, in that you can play effectively while seated. I wasn’t able to play from my couch, but got the game to calibrate properly by setting up a dining room chair a bit closer than I would normally play and was able to reach all corners of the screen.

Your mileage may vary depending on your play area, location of the Kinect sensor and height of your chair, but it is possible.

The game could technically be played with one arm, but achieving high scores is virtually impossible without the use of two. The game also uses a distinct audio cue to tell you when a bomb is launched onto the playfield, which leaves deaf players at a disadvantage. An option for a screen flash could help with this a lot.

On the plus side, those that have use of both arms, but limited manual dexterity like me should be able to play Fruit Ninja Kinect at a high level. I’ve played with open hands, closed fists and with wrist weights without any detection issues.

Fruit Ninja Kinect benefits from a nice presentation that features clean and colourful graphics. Each fruit makes a distinct squishing or splatter sound when sliced and the remnants behave realistically when they fall.

There is no music outside of the main menu, but the sound effects including sword swings and bomb explosions are well done. The sensei will appear on your post-play results screen and offer facts about the fruit you’ve been slicing, which gives the game some personality.

While it does have a few issues and will essentially be relegated to party game status once I’ve unlocked the achievements, I would consider Fruit Ninja Kinect a must-buy for any content-starved Kinect owner. The Challenge mode offers some replay value, the controls are a showcase for what the Kinect sensor can do and it’s a great way to get your heart going and work up a sweat in a few minutes.

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Available through Steam and playable on both PC and Mac, Dungeons of Dredmor from Gaslamp Games is an addictive and accessible entry in the dungeon-crawling Roguelike genre that features many player customization options, a robust crafting system, high replay value and a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour.

In Dungeons of Dredmor you play as a hero with abnormally large eyebrows summoned by the king to defeat the evil Lord Dredmor, who is freeing himself after being bound in the depths of the earth long ago and must be stopped before he can destroy the world.

When you start Dungeons of Dredmor, you are allotted seven skill points to customize your character with and can choose from 34 different skills such as weapon and magic proficiencies, vampirism, master of arms and fungal arts, to name a few. You can also have the game randomly assign skill points to your character or choose the skill set you started the previous game with.

Once you’ve created your character, you are dropped into a dungeon that is randomly generated from a pool of pre-made room layouts every time you start a new game.

For those unfamiliar with Roguelikes, the basic premise is that when your character moves or performs an attack action, every monster in the dungeon will make a move or attack as well. It’s part turn-based, part real time and often requires strategic thinking.

There are ten floors in Dungeons of Dredmor, each littered with monsters, traps, chests and loot like weapons, potions and armour. Each floor is quite large: it took me over three hours just to fully map the first one, though multiple staircases allow you to move on whenever you feel your character is strong enough. Floors often have side quests that can be triggered by praying to a statue as well, though your primary goal is to simply survive until you meet Lord Dredmor.

Of course, to survive you need weaponry and Dungeons of Dredmor has a large variety that includes axes, swords and wands, as well as less traditional weapons like softballs and IEDs. Your character can generally use any weapon he finds, though bonuses and passive skills come with using equipment geared towards his proficiency.

Armour is also a must and you can outfit the hero in a number of items like helmets, greaves and rings of all kinds. If you don’t find what you’re after while traversing the dungeons, you can always try to make it yourself.

What sets Dungeons of Dredmor apart is a robust crafting system that allows for alchemy, distilling, smelting and refining of metals, blacksmithing and tinkering. Using equipment that you either find or begin the game with based on your chosen skills and recipes, you can craft weapons, armour, potions and stronger raw materials.

Should you find yourself over-encumbered, you can visit a merchant to unload your unwanted goods and bank some zorkmids, the in-game currency. The merchant will often have better weapons and armour than what you currently have, so it’s advisable to explore each floor and locate the shops, which also act as safe zones.

Roguelikes are often quite challenging and Dungeons of Dredmor certainly can be as well, though some difficulty options allow for accessible experience. By default, the game has a “permadeath” feature that does not allow you to reload your game session and character when you die.

With this turned off, you have more freedom to explore and can get the jump on (or avoid) a room full of enemies that may have dispatched you before; provided you remember to save often. For a truly hardcore experience, you can play on the “Going Rogue” difficulty with permadeath turned on.

You can control Dungeons of Dredmor with a mouse alone, or use your keyboard for hotkeys and quick use of inventory items. The left side of the screen holds a “belt menu” and you will find your spells and skills on the right hand side. You can expand the size of the map or move your main inventory around, but these settings are not saved after you quit a game session.

Dungeons of Dredmor looks like a PC game from the Windows 95 era or something put together with RPG Maker. The tile-based graphics aren’t much to look at, but everything is drawn with great detail, information is clearly displayed and the game has a certain old school charm to it. Status effects are displayed in the upper left of the screen, along with a turn by turn recount of the action. There is a smooth scaling option, but I prefer to play with it off.

A great deal of charm can also be found in the humour of Dungeons of Dredmor and it’s clear it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The game over screen reads “Congratulatons, You Died!”, enemies will taunt you as they approach, each area is named in a silly manner and items are named things like “Togzar, the Exultation of Foes”, which happens to be one of the worst items in the game.

Dungeons of Dredmor has some great, catchy music in it that ranges from fantasy-esque to loungy jazz and thumping industrial beats. The squishing and screaming of enemies dying can be a bit grating, and there is also a crude-sounding announcer that tells you when you’ve scored a critical hit or your health is low.

There are a few kinks in the presentation and gameplay of Dungeons of Dredmor, but these usually amount to no more than a small nuisance. For example: your character’s pathfinding isn’t perfect, which leads to some inadvertent trap triggering. The door system creates an odd void of space that you can’t walk on, but enemies can and golems that you can summon often behave erratically, get in your way or stop following you all together.

It should also be noted that even though you can play the game on PC or Mac, it does not make use of the Steam Cloud save game feature, so you can’t just swap devices at will without having to start a new game.

Problems aside, Dungeons of Dredmor is a shining example in its genre that can be both beginner-friendly and an extremely hardcore gaming experience. It should take most players at least 20 hours to complete the game on the medium difficulty and thanks to randomly generated floors and the extreme variation found in the skill tree, it can be replayed multiple times and represents excellent value at a mere five dollars.

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I can’t think of another iOS game that has chewed up as much time or battery life as Tiny Tower, and frankly I have no idea why. This free-to-play title from NimbleBit tasks you with managing a tower by building businesses, staffing them with residents called “bitizens” and maintaining stock levels. It’s simplistic and shallow, pointless and seemingly endless, yet I just can’t stop playing it.

A brief tutorial starts you off with a business floor and a residential floor to house your first bitizens. Each residential floor can hold up to five bitizens and each business can be staffed with three workers. One item can be stocked for each worker you have in a business.

Each item in a business costs progressively more coins and time to stock, but also yields a higher sale price. Successfully stocking a business with all three items will earn you a cash bonus or a Tower Buck. Tower Bux can be used to speed up stocking, to move bitizens into residences or speed up the construction of a new floor. Every floor you build costs both more time and coins than the one before it.

Businesses are placed in five categories: Food, Service, Recreation, Retail and Creative, each with a demand level based on the number of bitizens you have in your tower. Each bitizen has a proficiency rating from 0-9 for each type of business. The higher the rating of your employees, the more of a discount you get on the cost of restocking items. bitizens also have dream jobs and matching them will yield a large stock bonus and earn you a few bux.

You can also earn bux by manually operating your tower’s elevator and receiving tips and you get two coins for each floor your passenger travels. There are several elevator upgrades available, allowing you to move more bitizens per minute or simply save some time as your tower grows.

Occasionally VIPs will arrive at the elevator. These bitizens will increase the customers on a floor, buy out one type of item from a store, move a bitizen into an apartment or knock a few hours off of the construction of a new floor.

Detailed Pixel Art Gives Tiny Tower CharmFinally, you can earn bux by playing a Where’s Waldo type mini game that simply asks you to locate a bitizen. As your population grows this becomes more tedious and often devolves into simply tapping on each floor until you find who you’re looking for.

Though they’re all the same size, bitizens have unique names and physical traits, which lends to the charm of Tiny Tower. They will even update their “Bitbook” social network statuses with funny quips or how they feel about their assigned job.

Each business and residence is unique as well and the game’s pixel art look manages to pack a ton of detail onto your screen without being cluttered or unusable. There isn’t much to the sound, but there are distinct alerts to tell you when to stock a store, what type of store you’ve tapped on or when someone is waiting for an elevator ride.

You can set the game to notify you when to restock a store when you aren’t playing Tiny Tower. The game world is persistent and your bitizens continue to live and work when you aren’t around, earning you coins. For the sake of real life productivity, I find it best to leave these notifications off. Unfortunately, the game won’t notify you when a business is completely out of stock or closed.

Tiny Tower has Game Center support for achievements and leaderboards and you can also view friends’ tower progress in relation to your own.

Unlike other games of this nature such as FarmVille or Animal Crossing, there is no real penalty to leaving your tower unattended for some time. Shops will simply close when out of stock and your income will stop. You can jump back in and get everything humming again within minutes, even after a day or two away.

Like most free-to-play games, you can gain an advantage or speed up wait times in Tiny Tower by purchasing bux in-game with real world money. However, unlike typical “freemium” games, there isn’t a feeling of needing to pay to win or progress and you can get a lot of enjoyment out of the base package.

I spent $0.99 on a few bux at the very beginning to give me a head start, but have put at least 10-15 hours into the game since then without spending another dime, though you can really only “play” for 5-20 minutes at a time without running out of things to do.

Tiny Tower is a great quick fix game and despite its simplicity manages to create an addictive experience that has had me saying “just one more floor” since I downloaded it. I’ve played it while watching TV, in the bathroom, while playing other games and even while eating. In fact, I should probably check on my tower now.

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The 3DS from Nintendo is a worthy upgrade and sets the tone for the next generation of portable gaming. It features a solid build quality, the ability to take 3D photos, real-time online functionality and built-in augmented reality software.

Of course, the 3DS can also display content—from the system menu to games and videos—in 3D on its upper screen without the need for glasses, which is arguably the biggest appeal of the hardware. However, there are some quirks and limitations to the 3D technology.

To view the 3D effect, the 3DS should be between nine and 14 inches from your face, directly in front of you. The “sweet spot” for optimal viewing can vary widely from person to person, so luckily the hardware includes a slider to control the intensity of the effect, meaning users can optimize their viewing experience.

The 3D effect can be turned off completely, which leaves you with a crisper, brighter 2D image and often results in game software running at a higher frame rate. 3DS software is typically limited to 30 fps in 3D mode.

It is recommended that those with children under seven years of age disable 3D using parental controls, to prevent their children from potentially damaging their vision.

3D is not mandatory and Nintendo is actively discouraging developers from creating software that is 3D dependent. While this means more people, including young children and those incapable of seeing stereoscopic 3D (stereo blind) can enjoy playing games on the 3DS, it also means that 3D will be relegated to a display enhancement and not a gameplay revolution like the Wii or DS were upon release.

From a personal standpoint, the 3D works and I usually have it set to 80-100% strength. However in the case of playing Pilotwings Resort, I need to turn it down to about 30% or the image will become blurry and defocused.

I also have difficulty seeing the 3D effect without my glasses as one of my eyes is substantially weaker than the other. I suspect that if I was equally blind in both eyes the effect would work again. Also, I have never been able to see “magic eye” posters, but can see the 3D effect of the 3DS.

The Aqua Blue Version of the Nintendo 3DSThe 3D, widescreen upper display looks very nice It’s crisp and bright and is a great showcase for the increased horsepower of the 3DS compared to its predecessor or the PSP. Graphically speaking it looks in line with Wii software and the 3DS undoubtedly has the best graphics of currently available handheld devices.

The audio fidelity also seems better than previous DS consoles, though it could just be perceived because of better speaker hardware. The 3DS has a fully-featured music player that includes eight visualizations, the ability to adjust tempo and pitch, add effects or even play along with a kick and snare drum.

The Nintendo 3DS Sound application also allows users to record and edit almost 200 samples of ten seconds or less.

Also built into the 3DS operating system is the AR (augmented reality) Games application. Each 3DS system comes with six cards featuring familiar Nintendo characters. When these cards are placed on a flat surface and scanned using the AR Games application, they transform the world around you into a gameplay environment.

I won’t ruin the surprise for you, but using the AR Games cards for the first time gave me a sense of childlike joy I haven’t felt from a gaming device in some time. It’s a really cool feature that could be implemented into retail games. Hopefully we see Nintendo release new sets of cards or package them with retail games as an enhancement.

Face Raiders is a built-in AR game that uses projects photos you take onto floating heads that you must shoot with the A button. You must literally look around your environment, utilizing the built-in accelerometer and gyroscope of the 3DS to aim. Its a fun little novelty that showcases the features of the 3DS, but its quite shallow and didn’t hold my attention for even an hour.

The Mii characters that became ubiquitous on Wii are integrated into the 3DS experience in a major way. When you open the Mii Maker for the first time, you will create your personal Mii that essentially serves as the main identity of your system. You can make a Mii from scratch, use the inner camera to snap a photo, or even import from your Wii.

The StreetPass Mii Plaza acts as an online hub of sorts. When in sleep mode (on but closed), or while playing a game, the wireless StreetPass technology actively looks for other 3DS signals in the area and can transfer game information and Mii data. Using this feature allows you to populate your StreetPass Mii Plaza.

There are some games built into the StreetPass Mii Plaza also. Find Mii is a dungeon-crawling adventure of sorts that requires you to hire heroes. This can be accomplished using StreetPass, or by spending Play Coins. Play Coins are earned by simply walking around with your 3DS in sleep mode and utilizing a built in
pedometer system. You can earn up to ten Play Coins a day, which only takes 1000 steps to get.

Once you hire heroes, they set off on a journey to find your Mii and will encounter enemies along the way. Defeating enemies will earn you special hats to place on your Mii. Your heroes can perform one action before they are exhausted, so getting through Find Mii could take a while.

You can also use Play Coins and StreetPass encounters to play Puzzle Swap. This simply entails collecting a number of pieces to view a 3D picture.

There are some more practical features built into the 3DS as well. Game Notes allows you to jot down notes for suspended game software, which can be very useful if you need to stop playing suddenly and don’t want to forget what you’re doing.

A detailed Activity Log tracks your play time for software and system functions, as well as your pedometer data. It can be sorted in a number of ways and even keeps a cumulative monthly total.

There are a ton of bells and whistles included in the 3DS operating system, but Nintendo still can’t seem to get the basic user interface experience right. Menus are needlessly cumbersome and obtuse and managing your friends list or data can be a real chore. It’s familiar and somewhat expected, but if there was one thing I’d improve about the 3DS, it’s the UI.

The actual 3DS hardware is a bit thicker and shorter in length, but isn’t that much different from a DSi outside of its technological upgrades. The d-pad, face button and trigger hardware haven’t changed, though there are some layout changes.

Face Raiders is a Built-In Augmented Reality GameThe d-pad has been moved down to accommodate the new analog-style circle pad. The circle pad is tight and responsive, however I found that the d-pad is set a little low to operate comfortably during long play sessions.

Start and select have been moved to under the touch screen, along with a new home button that allows you to access the UI while using software. The camera has been moved to above the top screen and an Infrared port has been added.

A change I did not care for at all was going from a digital volume control back to a tiny slider like on older DS hardware. A wireless switch that can be toggled at any time is on the other side of the unit. The SD card slot has switched sides and the telescoping stylus housing has been moved to the top.

The hardware feels solid for the most part, but can clearly be improved from both a functionality and an aesthetic standpoint. Battery life could also be improved, as you can expect the unit to last about 3 hours on a full charge when using 3D and wireless functionality. The included charging cradle is really more of a necessity than a luxury.

I’ve spent a solid week with the 3DS and a number of games and for me, it was a very worthwhile upgrade from the DSi. It’s not a huge generational leap in terms of gameplay or even graphics just yet and the 3D effect is primarily cosmetic, but it’s just enough of an advancement to be relevant and feel fresh.

I would highly suggest researching the available titles and even trying an in-store display to be sure the 3DS is for you. The launch lineup is rather thin, with the next wave of major titles not expected until Fall of 2011. Of course, the 3DS is backwards compatible with your DS and DSi cartridges as well.

It should be noted that an update will be made available in May of 2011 that will allow you to transfer your DSiWare purchases to the 3DS and access the 3DSWare store and utilize the built-in Internet browser.

Positives:

+ Glasses-Free 3D Display Works as Advertised
+ 3D Photo Application and AR Games
+ Solid Hardware Build

Negatives:

– Relatively Short Battery Life
– Can be Tough to Find the “Sweet Spot” for 3D Viewing
– User Interface is Cumbersome