Short reviews, mega micro getting out of the house edition

From both a story and a gameplay perspective, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance would've been better had you have played as (to steal from someone on the 1up forums) triple-jumping Romanian ninja Maxim, the actual catalyst for the game's events. As it stands, Harmony's chosen hero, the obscenely overpowered Belnades-Belmont hybrid Juste, saps any challenge out of the title, and though it tries to be an origin story for the whole "two castles" idea, the game storywise is kind of too incoherent to explain goddamn anything. Harmony isn't a bad Metroidvania and has a couple original levels - a bone gallery that serves as a exhibition of the franchise's skeletal foes; an open walkway on the very top of the castle framed by an ever-racing sky - but a sedate palette (Death's amazing technicolor dream portal up there notwithstanding) and uninspiring level design make this one of the lesser entries.



The popular pitch for Lone Survivor goes like this: a) it's just like Silent Hill 2, because b) it has zombies in it. (Never "and."  Always "because.") Those astute readers who might recall that Silent Hill 2 has no zombies will promptly grasp Lone Survivor's storytelling approach: it attempts to ape Silent Hill - and David Lynch's filmography - without having any clue as to what made those works successful. Thus the characters ironically sock-hopping in an all-American diner with checkered floors framed with heavy velvet curtains, or the hero facing an incarnation of his beloved in a jail cell scene - the latter, of course, without the insightful twists of dialogue and framing that Silent Hill 2 used to comment on the protagonist, because insight is not in Lone Survivor's wheelhouse. The controls are atrocious, spreading actions out across about twenty unintuitively-chosen keys ("Was it Z to take out your gun?! How about A - no, that adjusts the gamma! Wait, why is gamma hotkey--" ::protagonist collapses:: "Well, never mind."), and I got tired real fast of the main character whining about needing to go back to his room to eat and sleep every five minutes. And the resource management is unbalanced; my run ended after I realized that a single wrong turn down a corridor had completely screwed me over supplywise and that my only recourse was to restart the entire game. Distinctive take on pixel graphics, though, with the subtly ever-shifting palette. Even though your character's surgical mask makes it look like he's wearing a singularly maniacal grin throughout the game.



I can't call WarioWare: Mega Microgames as good as my own introduction to the series, the DS installment Touched! - the DS's touchscreen capabilities add a lot of variety and just plain fun to the proceedings, and the system's improved visuals and sound do enhance the franchise's anarchic, pop-media-pastiche feel. But the series was pretty strong out of the gate, and even the ur-microgames collection still provides a few solid days of fun. Bonuses: you can unlock a full version of Dr. Mario fairly early in the proceedings, and that lovely and lyrical paper-plane minigame is a work of art in its graceful simplicity that I would never have expected on a WarioWare cart.



I'm including The Mirror Lied here solely as a warning: despite its pedigree (its creators are also behind the acclaimed To the Moon), the title barely qualifies as a game, as a runthrough takes forty minutes tops and gameplay is largely restricted to one big recursive key hunt. You play a Palette-esque faceless young protagonist holed up in a large Victorian home during something that greatly resembles the London blitz except in an age of desktop computers and IMs. A series of vague warnings are issued to the heroine from the outside world, which culminates in an ending that I'm sure the creators thought was profound but in-game is trite and derivative and answers nothing. The sprite work and sepia palette are well-done, and there's an atmospheric tension between the setting's hominess and its claustrophobia, but the game just has no damn reason to exist, as it's not telling any sort of story. I don't mean the plot is ambiguous; I mean that there's simply not enough story here to make an actual narrative. This is one of those cases where less is actually less.



Speaking of less: A Very Pink Game is a very short game (~15 minutes) rendered solely in black, white, and various shades of pink about a young girl who wants to meet an estranged friend who moved to a nearby town. Sounds sweet and looks darling, but the game design is extremely rudimentary and not very logical, and the typo-ridden LOL script seems to have been written by someone failing their sixth-grade English class. This person has expressed a desire to make more color-themed games, and I'd like to see more of her art style, but she needs to team up with some folks who know more about game design and scriptwriting.
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