Short reviews, outdoor life edition

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is better than it had to be, but not by much. A beat-'em-up whose aesthetic borrows heavily from that of DVD menus and puts a Middle Earth face on the Cody-Guy-Haggar model, it features plenty of "hey, golly gee, we're on DVD; we can stick ACTUAL FILM FOOTAGE in our games!!!" and cringeworthy abuse of actors snared in the most unfortunate merchandising clauses of their contracts. It also has a Legolas with "Dragonfire Arrows" that can run through enemies like anticop rounds and set stuff on fire, a fun Helm's Deep level where you play tower defense with a team of elven archers and run around kicking ladders off the ramparts, and a game John-Rhys Davies showing the others how enthusiasm can overcome lackluster lines. Sometimes, that's enough.



Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon is renowned as one of the worst entries of its franchise, yet that didn't stop its portable farming action from sinking its claws into me. Once you get a few fields in play, managing the grow times of your different crops to space out your workload and racing to water your plants and harvest all your produce before sundown is as addictive as high-fructose corn syrup. (It doesn't hurt that it's a very picturesque game.) Gradually, though, the creepier aspects of the game world as it pertained to my android player character began to wear on me: your creator/"dad" will sever your consciousness against your will if you stay up his past his deemed bedtime, and he mandates that you come in for weekly brain-scanning sessions where he invades your thoughts, reads all your memories, and leaves commands in your positronic brain for you to "love him." Meanwhile, dialogue in-town remains stagnant for months on end, there's not much to do with the money your raise, and the game is far too artificially padded, resorting to tactics like blocking off access to a labor-saving harvesting device until you talk to one person who has a 15-minute window of availability one day a week (and good luck finding out exactly when that window is, since the game won't tell you). I was finally broken by the game's abysmal pacing when I was roadblocked by an objective that could be fulfilled only by growing poinsettias, which first blossom in December. It was July at the time.



There aren't many games out there that can best be described by the word "darling." So goes Girl's Garden, though, an SG-1000 arcade-style game whose young heroine dodges bloom-hungry bears in a quest to pick flowers for her guy. Use environmental features to evade and block your ursine pursuers, and drop pots honey to distract them; watch the buds across the landscape open up, pick your flowers only when they're in full blossom, and watch out for wilted ones ruining the bouquet! The game's palette is strikingly unique with its bright not-pastels, the gameplay is fun and challenging, and it's a delight to watch the puffy little hyacinths bloom. My only wish, as with so many arcade games: a proper ending.
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