It really is a shame, too, because Castle Crashers is delightfully enjoyable. The game, for those who have somehow missed out on the previews for the last two years, is a four-player, arcade-style side-scroller in the vein of classics like the arcade versions of X-Men, Dungeons & Dragons, or The Simpsons — colorful stages filled with busy backgrounds and dozens of enemies, and distinct player-controlled characters with brutal combo-based fighting moves and over-the-top special attacks. Behemoth’s typical humor is in full effect in every aspect of the game, from intentionally crude enemies and unusual items to a constant stream of in-game jokes. Enemy guards sit and read magazines while they wait for you to approach, a forest full of animals get the crap scared out of them by a humongous boss, and a river stage can be navigated while floating on the corpse of a fallen baddie.

The comparison to the D&D arcade game is also relevant thanks to the RPG-style character progression that Castle Crashers brings to the table — players are able to keep persistent profiles in their save files, keeping track of gained gold, experience, weapons, and other collectibles as they progress through the game’s many levels. Gaining a character level allows you to add points to your character’s strength, magic, defense, and agility, which becomes quite necessary as the levels start to contain harder-hitting monsters and Behemoth’s usual lineup of massive, difficult bosses. Castle Crashers also allows you to reset any of your characters back to level one, mind you, if you’ve leveled everyone up too high but still want to try the game from scratch.

As such, Castle Crashers is an enjoyable, challenging, and very amusing game. The game’s emphasis, however, and where it really shines as an enjoyable social experience, is in the multiplayer. It’s perfectly possible to run through Castle Crashers by yourself, but you will truly be missing out on the heights to which the game can soar. Bringing in up to four players will scale up simple things like treasure drops, enemy numbers, and boss strength, of course, but you really haven’t played Castle Crashers until you’ve attempted to keep up with the truly chaotic levels of mayhem occurring onscreen when the game is fighting back against a full group. Combat becomes a hysterical rush of joyous multiplayer combos as baddies are juggled from one player to the next. Scrambling for fallen treasure turns friends to foe in one moment, while seconds later, the appearance of health-restoring items suddenly drops everyone into a cooperative survival state (”No, you need it more than I do”). Multiplayer-specific mechanics even appear in the game, including the ability to revive fallen comrades in the heat of battle. Truly hilarious fun can be had while one player scrambles across the screen to lure a fearsome boss away from another player, who is desperately performing “don’t you die on me” CPR on a third player.

The game also pays homage to several staples of the beat-em-up genre, including an obstacle-dodging “vehicle” sequence a la Battletoads, end-of-stage “Fight for the Girl” PvP sequences a la Double Dragon, and more. Castle Crashers is full of little memorable moments like these, many of which are produced by the varied stage design and triggered story events, but there is plenty of opportunity to generate your own by playing with a good group of friends.

Not every element of Castle Crashers is a winner — there are occasions where the chaotic art is detrimental to the gameplay (a sequence involving chasing a wedding coach through a hail of confetti is nearly impossible to see), and it seems like the character progression during multiplayer could have used quite a bit more testing and balance. The game is friendly in that it allows drop-in/drop-out multiplayer allowing any group to pick up from the most advanced player’s progress level, but unless all players are of similar level, this can prove to be a less-than-ideal experience. Characters on the low end of the food chain will be overwhelmed by enemies in the latter stages, and find it frustrating in earlier stages to try and get kills for XP while their overpowered teammates are plowing through appropriate-level enemies quickly and easily. In addition, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the assignment of items and accessories to the players: One of our team saved up a huge deal of gold in order to purchase an especially attractive accessory, at which point he dropped it long enough for someone else to pick it up — thus permanently granting the latter player permanent, free access to said item at no cost. In groups that play through Castle Crashers together from start to finish, this will likely be a welcome addition to allow easy mutual advancement, but it’s just as likely to lead to arguments between pick-up groups who may not be as eager to share with strangers. Finally, the game’s extra modes, “Arena” and “All You Can Quaff,” are mildly amusing but largely forgettable. The former is simply a repeat of the game’s earlier PvP duels, and the latter is a button masher akin to Track and Field — fun to watch the first time, but too tiring and shallow to bear much replayability.

Which brings us, sadly, to the online multiplayer. Castle Crashers, which absolutely begs to be played with other people, includes the option to play games via Xbox LIVE with friends or strangers, but this option is, as of launch, completely broken. Attempting to use any online options at this time causes the game to fail in several different ways, from suddenly dropped games, to being dumped back to the menu, to the game outright crashing and freezing one’s console.  We tried fully a dozen times to get an online game going through quick matches or private match-making options, but each attempt met with failure, and further reports coming in from all corners of the internet confirmed it wasn’t just us having a problem.

In another game, I’d be willing to chalk this problem up to unforeseen launch bugs — which can happen to anyone — but here, it’s really a major disappointment. The fact that this game has been in development for such a long, long, time (and the fact that it was allegedly complete back in mid-May) really leaves one wondering why such a glaring bug wasn’t ironed out. In addition, for a game whose emphasis is so firmly on multiplayer fun, crippling the online connectivity is going to be a dealbreaker for a large number of players. Behemoth is working on the problem already, and we’re sure everything will be fixed eventually, but it needs to be stated that Castle Crashers was released with a glaring defect. For now, at review time, this is a major problem that cannot be ignored, and we can’t give Castle Crashers an unqualified recommendation as such.

The offline portion, on the other hand, is a very positive experience. Behemoth has sunk a lot of love and character into the game, and it shows — if you can play it under the right circumstances. If you have access to three real-life friends, and an adequate supply of controllers, and the time to all play the game together from front to back so nobody is left behind progression-wise, Castle Crashers should absolutely be purchased and enjoyed. We hope to be able to say the same to everybody else at some point.

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The Magic Toy Chest, as a child-friendly game, naturally boasts that it is “for the whole family.” This much, at least, is quite true; the game is accessible, intuitive, and unimposing, presenting a colorful world full of amusing toys and an extremely basic premise and goal. Further, it can be played on most any Windows PC — its system requirements are so basic as to fit any family computer from the last decade or so (Pentium 300MHz or better). Parents needn’t worry about their kids running this game, nor playing it — nothing even remotely objectionable can be found in The Magic Toy Chest, whose sole plot point is “The house is a mess. Clean it up.”

Cleaning house, in The Magic Toy Chest, takes the form of 80 or so individual puzzles, in which the player is presented with a 2D arrangement of toys and platforms, and tasked with moving one particular type of toy to the titular storage apparatus. Doing so requires proper placement and use of the various toys; baseballs will roll down inclines, dart guns will knock other toys about, and toy rockets will propel themselves (and anything in their path) across the screen rapidly. If you’ve played The Incredible Machine (and if you haven’t, you ought to), you already know how to play The Magic Toy Chest. Admittedly, this game isn’t going to win many points for originality, not when following in the footsteps of so many other Rube Goldberg games. The new ingredients it does add to the formula, though, are all clever enough to interest experienced puzzle gamers.

Where The Magic Toy Chest primarily differs from The Incredible Machine is in its fully real-time gameplay. In The Incredible Machine, solving the puzzles was about setting up every last element just right, hitting “start,” and standing back to watch the results. The Magic Toy Chest, on the other hand, is interactive from the get-go, meaning you can’t place gravity-affected objects in midair and then prepare something for them to land on; everything needs to be placed and used in proper sequence. This adds an additional layer of thinking and planning to the solutions, and occasionally, a few objectives based on timing and reflex. This also means that certain puzzles can be solved by hammering away at them with repeated actions; shoving a ball across a platform can be accomplished by dropping a block on one side of it, picking it up, and dropping it again, until you’ve nudged it to its intended position. However, the game rates every solution on time and efficiency, allowing you only so many actions in order to receive gold stars for the level.

The difficulty and progression of The Magic Toy Chest works exactly as you’d expect for an object-based puzzle game: The game introduces a new toy, pits you against half a dozen puzzles centered around its use, and then repeats the process, adding in new gameplay elements one by one until you’re working with all 16 toys. A few noteworthy additions include little flipping toy dogs, gravity-altering robots, and water balloons that can be flung from the player’s POV at the toys, sending everything flying away from the point of impact. Combine these elements for 80-odd puzzles, and throw in a nice, competent level editor for added replay value, and you’re looking at 4-6 hours of good, clean, reasonably challenging fun — not including any levels you might design yourself.

As such, I was nearly prepared to give The Magic Toy Chest an emphatic thumbs-up, but there are a few elements of sloppiness and poor programming where the game comes up short. As often as a puzzle requires a clever solution, there are more than a few occasions where you’ll find yourself at the mercy of a slightly flighty physics engine; a block that tumbled into the toy chest once will take a bad bounce on another playthrough and get stuck, requiring a level restart. Sometimes, in fact, a simple stack of square blocks will remain perfectly still, while other times it will shift inexplicably to one side, the blocks somehow being squeezed to one side by the ones above them. Further, while any puzzle can be retried simply by pressing “R,” this drops you back to the level intro screen, and makes you wait while it reloads the entire set-up. It only takes 5 seconds or so, but when you find yourself up against a puzzle that you need to try dozens of times to get through, it can get annoying. Also, I’m not sure exactly what’s wrong with the in-game timer:

Mind you, I’d been playing for maybe 90 minutes at that point.

The Magic Toy Chest is a fun game, it’s true. It’s quick to learn and has a good amount of variety to its puzzles, and its cheerful motif will put a little smile on your face. Parents looking to amuse their young gamer progeny would do well to consider this title. For the adult gamer, however, $20 is asking a bit much unless you have faith that there’ll be some compelling user-submitted levels later on. It’s a decent re-tread of The Incredible Machine, but it’s a re-tread nonetheless, and while it brings a few new toys to the table, most of them are a little dusty by now.

On the other hand, Graduate Games does offer an unconditional 60-day money-back guarantee. So you might just want to give The Magic Toy Chest a whirl, if you’ve got a penchant for puzzles. The Magic Toy Chest is available now for Windows PC here.

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There’s two types of gamer who will need an answer to that question. If you are a Homestar Runner fan, there’s a good chance that, like me, you already knew you would buy this game the day it was announced. To you, I am pleased to announce that you will not regret your inevitable purchase. If you have never watched Homestar Runner or do not count yourself as much of a fan, I must admit, you will probably not like this game as instantly as a fan might, but you will enjoy it nonetheless. With any luck, in fact, it will help the characters to grow on you, and you may rethink your fan status by the time the game is over. The first episode of SBCG4AP is fantastic for fans, and is a decent way to meet the characters for fans-in-progress.

If you’ve played any of Telltale’s Sam & Max games, you already know how to play SBCG4AP; the interface is nearly identical to the developer’s previous adventure offerings. We played the PC version of SBCG4AP, but on both PC and Wii, the game is controlled by pointing and clicking where you would like Strong Bad to move, and/or clicking on various hotspots to interact with them. The process is instantly intuitive to any gamer who has so much as looked at an adventure game in the last two decades, but should you require it, Strong Bad will deliver an overly-rehearsed tutorial sequence, much to the chagrin of his fellow characters. It’s a great introduction to Strong Bad’s characteristic brand of cleverly worded humor, and while I honestly can’t remember the last adventure game I played where the protagonist didn’t break the fourth wall, it actually matches Strong Bad’s typical antics perfectly.

The same can be said for the entire length of the game. Strong Bad, Homestar, and all the rest are in top form, delivering a constant stream of hilarity, some of which is lifted directly from their prior cartoons, but mostly original content. The effect is just like playing through a new H*R cartoon — I had occasion to show off the game to a friend while working on my review, and I was asked, “So when does the actual game begin?” after I had actually been playing for several minutes. My observer had been under the impression that my dialogue choices and actions were merely a 3D H*R cartoon leading up to the gameplay segments. SBCG4AP has nailed the look, feel, and (naturally) style of the web-cartoon series perfectly.

This isn’t surprising, of course, given the full involvement of the Brothers Chaps in the writing, art direction, and voice work. Furthermore, Telltale has managed to get their game engine, and the entire 4-5 hour game episode, into the Wii’s restrictive memory limits. This is an impressive feat of engineering, but the downside is that the PC version feels a bit unpolished by comparison. The graphics are incredibly simplistic, but that’s not our complaint; SBCG4AP is attempting to emulate the iconic, simple style of the Homestar Runner flash cartoons, and at this, it unquestionably succeeds. Clever camera tricks, as explained to us during a prior interview, keep the characters facing the player from the angles one is used to from the cartoons, and the full cast has been translated faithfully and excellently into their new 3D forms. The world, too, is made of the bright colors, green “lush” outdoor scenes, and all the familiar rooms of the House of Strong. These extremely basic designs allow for quick and easy rendering, making the H*R world a perfect candidate for WiiWare.

The downside, sadly, is the sound. The voice work of Matt Chapman (and Missy Palmer as Marzipan) is in full effect, handling the characters’ voices with his usual comic timing and hilarious delivery. The music, ranging from Videlectrix’s retro chiptunes to familiar Casio synth BGM for various scenes, is spot-on. Unfortunately, most all of the sound has clearly been compressed far too much in order to squeeze the high quantities of dialogue into a low space limit, and it suffers as a result. The voices all have that “compression garble” to them, frequently sounding like they’re coming through an AM radio or a cellphone on the last of its battery power. As vital as the voices are to the humor of the H*R characters, this is a truly unfortunate detriment to the game. Still, the actual content of the dialogue, and the on-screen action, should be enough to let players enjoy themselves regardless.

Of course, the biggest sticking point of all is: Will non-fans enjoy SBCG4AP enough to warrant a purchase? My opinion is, yes, they will, if they are prepared to accept that more than a few jokes and references will go over their heads. SBCG4AP, just like its source material, is incredibly self-referential, and the game makes no effort to explain any of the established eccentricities of the H*R world. This isn’t limited to simple character elements like “Homestar manipulates things with no arms” or “The King of Town eats pretty much everything,” either: Unfamiliar players may find themselves wondering why Strong Bad is carving a hedge into a one-armed dragon, or why Strong Bad has a comic about perennially slaughtered adolescent girls.

What keeps SBCG4AP accessible to fans and non-fans alike is that none of these inside jokes are allowed to affect the puzzles or progression of the game. Intimate knowledge of the characters and their habits is never required to advance through the plot — basic adventure-game logic and a reasonable sense of humor will see you through every obstacle in the game. The puzzles are all very straightforward without being blatantly obvious, and not once did I encounter the eye-rolling FAQ-required non-sequitur that has felled many a game. To top it off, the bulk of the humor isn’t predicated on any prior H*R experience; a number of jokes might not make complete sense to an outsider, but the humor in SBCG4AP is simply amusing of its own accord. An outsider won’t understand why Bubs is selling chocolate-covered packing peanuts, but let’s face it — none of us do. It’s still funny. And be sure to ask Marzipan why you’re not invited to her party — I think that was the moment I laughed the hardest.

All told, you can expect to play SBCG4AP: Homestar Ruiner for 3-4 hours in order to complete the story, and after that, you’ll unlock an “extended mode” where you get to explore the world for all the bonus items and hidden pick-ups you missed. This is a great idea, I have to say; most games would force you to start over again to look for the extras. This will tack on another hour or so to the game, which makes the episode weigh in at 4-5 hours total. You won’t ever be bored during those 4-5 hours, either, making this inaugural episode well worth purchase for either Wii or PC. The Wii version has an additional feature or two, including the ability to send pictures and emails to your friends, but then, it will also occupy a large portion of your console memory. One hopes Nintendo figures out a storage solution by the time all five episodes are out.

If you’re a Homestar Runner fan, you already believed you needed this game, and you were right. For everyone else, I definitely recommend giving SBCG4AP a whirl. You’ll have no idea why you’re laughing at first, but then it’ll dawn on you — you are laughing. Welcome to the fold, my friends.

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When the time came to review Braid, I had heard only the briefest, vaguest descriptions of what to expect. At an unusual price of 1200 Microsoft Points (US$15), Braid was released yesterday on Xbox Live Arcade by developers Number None — and that’s about what I knew, going in. My knowledge of Braid was merely that it was a puzzle-platformer, whose main mechanic involved the reversal and manipulation of time. As such, I went into Braid expecting a pleasant mental workout, hoping the time-based gameplay would be a good match for recent time-game entries like Chronotron or P.B. Winterbottom. 5 hours of gameplay later, I had experienced a surprising, artistic, challenging, and wholly unique game which is unquestionably worth its higher-than-average cost.

If I had to fault Braid for anything, it might be accessibility. Braid seems to assume you’re already familiar with platforming; in fact, there are a handful of references to contemporaries within the game — each world ends in a distinct Super Mario moment, and some levels are named for past platformers like Jumpman, Elevator Action, and so on. The game doesn’t even start with a menu or a cinematic; as soon as the game has loaded, you’re off and running through the interactive introduction. The game delivers two messages: Use the left stick to move, and use the start button if you want the menu. Everything else is explained through a helpful in-game graphic, or simply learned through experience. The basic object is simply to reach the end of the level.

The similarities to previous platformers largely end there. As soon as you enter the first “world” of levels, you are treated to some thoroughly stunning visuals, putting the 360’s high-def graphics to excellent use. Each world of Braid is set in front of a backdrop that looks like a living, breathing painting, filled with vibrant, lush colors which surge with life. Rain or snow may fall, or a wind may sweep across the green hills, while the backgrounds flow as though their paint were still wet. In the foreground, sharply-defined sprites and platforms guide the action, looking like they were hand-drawn and colored with pencils. Braid’s protagonist hustles through level after level in his modest black coat and red tie, his simple but effective animation keeping the entire experience looking like a piece of interactive art. The music, a set of pleasant pieces in stringed instruments, sets the tone nicely for the bright and friendly backgrounds.

At first, each level of Braid looks deceptively simple — a locked door with a nearby key, a few baddies which can be defeated with a quick head-stomp, and one or two collectibles to snag along the way. Why, then, is the first world prefaced with an emotional tale of love and loss, joined with a wish to live free of irrevocable mistakes? What if, the game asks, we could go through life being not punished for our sins, but rewarded for the wisdom we gain from our errors? Braid then promptly obliges this wish, allowing the player to rewind time by holding down the X button. The mechanic is simple but effective, much like in Prince of Persia, though here, it allows complete renewal — holding down the button long enough will rewind all the way to the beginning of the level, not just the last few seconds. Beyond the obvious novelty of watching yourself traverse platforms and stomp baddies in reverse, the mechanic is also a delight to watch; the undulating colors in the background will start to flow backwards, the music plays in reverse, and the speed can even be altered like a DVD player, moving at 2x, 4x, or 8x. Of course, it’s here that Braid turns every conception of time-altering gameplay on its ear.

Soon, the player will encounter certain things which have an odd glow about them, which prove to be immune to time alteration. Keys can be retrieved from inescapable pits by rewinding time while holding on to them. Doors will remain open through the rewind, allowing the player to recycle their otherwise single-use keys. On occasion, even the player himself will be immune to the timeslips, allowing him to rewind events on the stage while standing in a more favorable position. Every level contains a handful of time puzzles to solve, ranging from the simple to the fiendish — and they are never dull. Each puzzle requires a new and inventive application of one’s time abilities, and once you’ve mastered them, the next world changes the effects of your powers entirely.

Once through a few levels, you’ll traverse a world where the flow of time is dependent on your lateral position on the stage, allowing enemies to proceed and doors to open only while you’re moving to the right. Another world retains your last rewound actions as a shadow, which persists and interacts with the stage, a la P.B. Winterbottom. Still another world allows you to alter portions of time, generating a field on the level which drastically slows down everything within a small radius. Furthermore, each world is introduced with its own continuation of the love-borne story, each chapter containing a metaphor in prose for the time mechanic which will guide the next few levels.

The story told by Braid is abstract, but very charged. The final stage, in fact, culminates in such an unexpected use of the time-based gameplay and such an incredibly surprising and emotional game sequence that I can’t bring myself to spoil even a bit of it for you. Suffice it to say, I played the last level with my jaw agape, and then went back and played it three more times.

Puzzle games are a major passion of mine, so I was fully prepared to like Braid. I did not expect to love it. From my meager understanding of the title, I was hoping for a game which would play like Toki Tori meets Chronotron, and found that and so much more contained within its quirky and curious confines. Further, while your experience may vary, from a personal standpoint I was utterly delighted at the game’s perfect difficulty level. I often felt challenged, once or twice momentarily frustrated, but never once was there a cheap, obtuse trick to solving a puzzle. Every solution makes perfect sense and can be reasoned out without consulting an FAQ.

Braid is a wonderful game. It costs a little more than your average XBLA title, true, and you’ll probably beat it in 4-5 hours or so, but those 4-5 hours will be extremely well-spent. Braid is beautiful, inventive, surreal, and mixes some of the best platforming puzzles I’ve played with a stunning mix of visuals and haunting narrative elements. I can almost guarantee you that Braid is going to join the list of titles on the “pro” side of the “games are art” debate. We would be fortunate to see more games like this come to XBLA, so do the world a favor and give Braid a whirl. You will feel no desire to hold down X and rewind your life once you’re done.

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Reset Generation is a collection of every gaming cliché, cultural reference, inside joke, and archetype that developers RedLynx could find. The objective, as such, is the oldest and most time-honored video game task: Rescue the Princess. Each player in a 2-4 player game has a princess of his own, and should another player “rescue” that princess out from under him, he will be eliminated from the game, awarding victory to the last player standing. The game, which is turn-based, works out to be a mix of strategy and luck, with more emphasis falling on the latter as the number of players increases.

The game’s single-player “story” mode plays somewhat differently, guiding you through a series of missions with varying objectives and rules. You’ll want to play through it, regardless; the first few levels serve as helpful tutorials and introductions to the various game elements, and it also introduces you to the game’s cast of cleverly re-imagined characters, from Plumber to Hedgehog to Monster Summoner. As we touched on in our preview, each character was conceived and rendered by one of gaming’s more notorious artists, and their over-the-top personalities are helped along by amusing voice acting and the occasional cut-scene.

It’s important to note, though, that Reset Generation doesn’t rely purely on these character parodies for its humor; every gaming joke, both old and new, has been crammed somewhere into the game, and even sometimes into the very gameplay. Level 50 Elf summons her mighty LARP powers by shrieking, “Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt! Lightning Bolt!” Ninja defends his honor by declaring, “Rescue? Forget it! Try my fist!” Dr. Lovebomber, a tiny mad-science arsonist, giggles at a successful attack with a jab at our favorite legal pal, “Murder simulator, indeed!” The voice samples will almost all make you chuckle, and are thankfully varied enough to last a while before wearing thin.

The “regular” game, either in single-player arcade mode or online multiplayer, plays out quickly and easily; one can expect a full match to last 5-10 minutes. Given that this is a mobile game, this is a good length for getting in a match or two while on the bus or waiting in line. Mind you, you’ll want headphones; the constant chatter from the characters and the boisterous sound effects and chiptunes from 8 Bit Weapon will get you a lot of stares if you’re playing in a crowd. The graphics, full of color and personality, are mostly a good match for a mobile phone; the pixelated look is wholly appropriate to the Reset Generation’s uber-retro theme. On the other hand, the graphics do contain my main complaint about the game: Often times, you will find yourself playing on a game board that is larger than your screen, and the display doesn’t automatically move to focus on what’s going on. In a game where random items may appear just off-screen, or a new warp pipe might allow your opponent to get directly to your princess on his next move, you’ll be forced to constantly scroll all around the screen with your own controller, or else be caught off-guard by the one crucial game element you couldn’t see.

The flow of the game is simple. Play begins on a random board, with each player starting at their castle. Each turn plays out in three phases: Place blocks, which provide movement and attack bonuses for only your character; fire cannons, which can destroy certain blocks and any item pickups; and move, which also encompasses using items, stealing princesses, attacking other characters, and executing special moves. Placing blocks and firing cannons are all done simultaneously — each player has a limited time to decide where they will lay their four-tile piece, or to aim their two cannon shots, and then all 2-4 choices are resolved at once. This places a real offensive/defensive split on each, since blocks placed on the same squares will cancel out, and cannonballs heading for the same square will both bounce away to a random new location. If there’s a handy item near your character that you think someone else might be trying to destroy, you might want to use one of your own cannonballs there to knock away any incoming shots (of course, if you’re the only one who shoots it, you’ve just destroyed the item).

From there, each character makes his individual move in a pre-set turn order. Careful block placement will typically determine your best course of action, but randomly-appearing items will present new options on the fly, often providing you with an unusually lucky chance to turn the game to your favor. More items show up when there are more players, so a 4-player game that goes on long enough will frequently devolve into a minefield of random chance, as a suddenly-appearing weapon or teleporter prevents even the best-planned princess rescue from seeing completion. In addition, rushing headlong into an enemy castle before items can fill the playing field is inadvisable — if you die in the game, your princess is instantly thrown into the waiting arms of your killer, meaning that if your opponent kills you while standing on his own castle, he automatically resuces your princess, and you lose. Of course, this doesn’t mean you can just hang out at home and wait for the other players to deliver your victory; after a few turns of sitting on or around your own castle, your princess will angrily accuse you of camping, and boot you out onto the playing field by force.

Still, Reset Generation’s random occurrences and game-altering items are by design, even though they always seem to show up when you least want them. Once you have a few games under your belt, Reset Generation is the kind of game you’ll be able to pick up and play at a moment’s notice. Thanks to its short match length, well-paced game phases, and enthusiastically announced in-game events, Reset Generation is very n00b-friendly, while containing a wealth of jokes and homages that long-time gamers will instantly appreciate. If you own an N-Gage capable phone, this one’s worth the download.

If you don’t, well, boo hoo. I guess you’ll just have to play it for free, you poor thing.

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You could maybe rescue some princesses, fire a cannon or two. What’s not to like? Live a little, Bubelah. The game’s right after the jump!

If you like what you’ve played, there’s more to see at the game’s home page, including a full set of Reset Generation assets, an RG community, and the beginnings of some new RG homebrew games — including one by Zero Punctuation’s own Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I need to practice for GameCyte’s round in tomorrow’s tournament…

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To be fair, it was probably a foregone conclusion that I would enjoy Geometry Wars 2, given how much time I spent with its last XBLA incarnation. It’s therefore entirely obvious that fans of the original will enjoy the sequel, given how many elements have been carried over, but this demands a new question of such a review. Geometry Wars 2 is a fantastic game when viewed in a vacuum, for reasons I’ll get to in a while, but when measuring a sequel — particularly in a game without any story, or characters, and whose gameplay is largely the same as the last game — one must also measure the added value for owners of the preceding title. Is there enough here to warrant a purchase, or will gamers be shelling out their points/money for the same game twice? The answer is an emphatic “yes” to the former: Geometry Wars 2 may look and play similarly to the original, but once you get into it, the experience is incredibly different from a score-hungry, strategic point of view.

In a shmup without any level architecture, story, power-up selections, or end goal, the only possible measure of success is one’s score. The game relies on the oldest hallmark of classic arcade gaming: Play ’til you lose. If you’re good enough, you can be that legendary denizen of the game, the guy who could play forever on one quarter, whose initials and unbreakable score would forever be burned into the top of the monitor. Granted, nowadays one’s initials are replaced by a Gamertag, and the monitor burn-in is an online leaderboard, but the sentiment remains: Geometry Wars is a game about fighting for higher and higher numbers. As much fun as the last game was, for those of us who are competitive about these things, the high scores were rather underutilized; the game would merely display the highest score achieved since the last time it had been loaded. If you wanted a look at your all-time best, you had to visit the leaderboards. Comparatively, the first thing I noticed about Geometry Wars 2 was the presence of in-game leaderboards, which brought a broad smile to my face. When you start up the game’s single-player modes, you are immediately greeted with up-to-date leaderboards for each of the game’s six modes, populated by the names on your Xbox LIVE friends list. I enjoyed quite a rivalry with my friends over the original Geometry Wars, so this feature is perfectly suited for an improved experience; every time I start the game, I can now track my friends’ scores at a glance, and if someone has beaten me at a particular mode, I know which one I’ll be playing that day.

Conversely, the first thing I noticed about Geometry Wars 2 that worried me was the utilization of locked content. Allowing/forcing players to unlock content in a game can be quite fun if used properly, providing replay value and an extra sense of achievement, but done poorly, it’s a blatantly artificial means of providing illusory advancements in a game, often times locking up basic essentials like vital interface options. So, when I started the game and found that five of the game’s six advertised gameplay modes were locked, I became concerned. However, my fears proved to be needless; each game mode becomes unlocked when you have played the one preceding it for an adequate amount of time (typically 3-4 games each). I unlocked everything the game had to offer in roughly half an hour, and in doing so, I found myself now familiarized with the various rules and methods of each type. This is a refreshingly clever move on Bizarre Creations’ part: through a briefly forced repetition of each mode, the player creates his own trial-and-error tutorial.

The first game mode which Geometry Wars 2 gives you is called Deadline, which takes the time-based trial version of Geometry Wars and turns it into an entirely whole experience. In Deadline, you are thrown into the game’s typical gun-and-bomb survival routine, but strictly limited on time: You have infinite lives at your disposal, but the game will end after 3 minutes. It’s a great way to experience the new game in controlled bursts; no matter how terribly or incredibly you’re doing, the game lasts the same 180 seconds, every time. In addition, you can even play Deadline in its entirety for free — folks who pick up the trial version of Geometry Wars 2 get to play the full version of Deadline, and it’s worth the download just to get a taste of the rest of the game.

One would think this mode would allow amateur players to recklessly die over and over again and still rack up huge scores, but if anything, Deadline makes prolonged survival that much more crucial to success — though losing a life will only cost you a few lost seconds of available scoring time, each time you die, the pace at which enemies appear is drastically reduced, which means you’ll be wasting valuable time on easy foes while you wait for the opportunity to really start raking in the points. This also makes your screen-clearing bombs that much more valuable – they provide you with the necessary respite from your foes without dampening your rate of progress, and they also fill the screen with Geometry Wars 2’s biggest change of all: Geoms.

Geoms are tiny green shapes that are left behind when an enemy is destroyed. Picking them up with your ship will increase your score multiplier, a bonus that had previously been attained by killing a sufficient number of enemies. Furthermore, your multiplier no longer resets to x1 when you are killed; over the course of a game, it’s not uncommon for your multiplier to start reaching rates of x500 or x1,000. The first time I saw this, I had assumed this was merely a shift in the scoring system — a way to let scores grow exponentially higher, and let everyone reach those ego-boosting multimillion numbers. After having played for a significant amount of time, however, I’ve realized that Geoms have singlehandedly changed the way one must play in order to really rake in the points. In Geometry Wars, keeping one’s multiplier up and one’s score high was a matter of survival. If you kept shooting the enemies and passively building your multiplier, eventually you would be pulling in massive points. As such, a perfectly viable strategy was to pull the growing horde around the screen, firing behind you as you led enemies on a merry chase. Geoms, on the other hand, appear on the screen where your enemies fall, and don’t last very long. If you want to collect them — and you do want to collect them — every so often, you’re going to have to double back towards the horde, or you’re going to have to charge your enemies headlong. With the simple addition of a pick-up element, fighting for a high score in Geometry Wars 2 is a whole new animal.

With a few games of Deadline under your belt, Geometry Wars 2 unlocks the next mode, “King.” In King, you have only one life, and no bombs, and you can’t shoot most of the time, making it a frantically defensive game. The twist in King is that the screen is populated by a number of circular zones, which enemies cannot penetrate, and which allow you to shoot while you are inside them. However, the moment you enter a zone, it begins to decay, giving you only a few precious seconds before the circle shrinks and vanishes, leaving you unarmed and vulnerable, meaning you need to head quickly to a new zone, grabbing as many Geoms (which mercifully last much longer in this mode) as you can on the way. Prolonged survival is a matter of reaching a zone, quickly figuring out which one to go to next, and blasting a path there before making the dash. Being caught outside of a zone when new enemies spawn is deeply unfortunate.

It was while playing King that I realized how much has been done with the music in Geometry Wars 2. The arcade-techno tune of the original is back in remixed form, along with new tracks for each game mode, but the game also uses the music dynamically to reflect in-game events, providing very clever audio cues as to what’s happening. In King, the music changes when you’re in or out of a zone — thumping beats drive you on when you’re in the blast-happy safety of a zone, but the music goes percussion-free when you leave, making the tune take on a haunting feel to reflect your immediate danger. The music also changes, on the fly, in the other game modes if you die, use a bomb, if a black hole collapses, and more.

Playing King for a while will unlock “Evolved,” which is as similar as Geometry Wars 2 gets to its predecessor. Three bombs, three lives, and whatever moves you’ve got against a neverending horde of enemies, with only the occasional score-granted extra bomb & life to comfort you. It plays just as the original game did, albeit with the Geoms and a collection of new enemies, including the rockets from Geometry Wars: Waves, immobile magenta square-things, reflective gates, and other polygonal miscreants.

Evolved eventually gives way to the fourth mode, “Pacifism,” which is possibly the hardest of them all: One life, no bombs, and no shooting at all. Thankfully, the only enemies present (at least, in the patheticly short games I managed) are the blue diamonds, which home in on your position while moving relatively slow, but this becomes a moot point when there’s, like, a zillion of them. You can only destroy enemies through the new “gate” obstacles, which will cause a very small explosion if you pass through them — but will kill you if you touch the sides. Butterfingers! This mode, too, is crawling with long-lasting Geoms, which is nice, since going back towards your foes with no guns isn’t the best idea ever.

From there, you’ll unlock “Waves,” which is simply an adaptation of the earlier Geometry Wars: Waves minigame which appeared in Project Gotham Racing 4. Constant “waves” of rockets will swarm in from the edges of the screen, zipping back and forth in straight lines until there’s too many on-screen to deal with. Like other modes, you get one life, and lots of Geoms.

Finally, you will receive “Sequence” mode, which, despite offering Geometry Wars to you in quick, 30-second bursts of pre-set patterened spawns, is absolutely manic. Each level in the sequence consists of hundreds of enemies at a time, often in bafflingly difficult formations. How would you like to be surrounded by rockets on all sides? Maybe you’d like to deal with 40 black holes at once? Hey, how about 300 of the really fast homing enemies that split into smaller enemies when shot? Sequence is like if WarioWare was a shmup. It is absolute split-second-reaction and overwhelming gameplay lunacy with the occasional chance to breathe, and it is wonderful.

Then, there’s the multiplayer. Sweet, marvelous, screaming-in-hilarious-panic multiplayer. Each of the game’s aforementioned six modes can be played with up to four players, in either cooperative or competitive play, and it adds both the joy of social gaming and wholly new strategies to each one. In every cooperative mode, the players share everything — a score, a multiplier, and a pool of lives. Co-op King can become a game of blasting around your fellow players while they greedily collect Geoms, while co-op Waves can put you back-to-back with the others, huddling for safety while each man handles the enemies spawning from one direction.

The competitive modes even go so far as to sprinkle power-ups into the mix — collecting a floating star can temporarily beef up your weapon, or attract all on-screen Geoms to your ship, or freeze your opponents in place. Players can’t shoot eachother, but the mad scramble for Geoms and points is plenty of fun, with quick on-screen prompts signalling who has taken the lead. Also, since the game is solely based on score, if the player in the lead loses all lives before the others, the game turns into a “bottom of the ninth” bid for survival for the remaining players, who need only exceed the top score in order to emerge victorious.

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 is a masterpiece of twitchy arcade madness. The controls are still dead-on, the gameplay is twice as frantic, and there’s enough game modes for competitive shmup fans to stay at eachother’s throats for hours on end. I fully recommend an immediate purchase.

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I played Off Road on the PC, though it’s also been released for the PS2, PSP, and Wii. This combination of systems more or less spells out the visuals you can expect from Off Road; don’t expect a stunningly-rendered high-definition experience. What’s there is passable — the trucks are all modeled well, if a little on the low-polygon-count side, textures are distinct enough, the vehicles have reflective surfaces, and the lighting actually manages some impressive bloom effects when you crest a hill and start driving into the sun. There’s even a moment when you’re racing down a riverbed and a waterfall comes into view, presenting a very picturesque scene for you to race past at 80mph. The rest, though, is run-of-the-mill stuff. Late 1990s dust and smoke effects, the vehicle models barely show damage, and the majority of the racetracks’ only major variety is a collection of two-dimensional, non-interactive sprites (e.g. scrub and bushes). On the plus side, the game has some decent audio to it. The sound effects are your standard “revving engine” fare, but the generic-rock background music is catchy. It reminded me right away of the Uniracers soundtrack, which I rather enjoyed. It could stand to have a few more tracks, though; they start looping pretty quickly.

Off Road’s gameplay isn’t bad. The game will accept keyboard input, or any gaming peripheral you want to throw at it — a gamepad or driving wheel is easily linked to the game through the configuration utility, providing fully analog control. Piloting your truck is a simple, arcade-easy affair. You’ve got gas, brakes, e-brake, and steering. That’s it — you don’t even shift gears. The controls, as mentioned earlier, are forgiving and simple: despite the dirt and sand roads, you’ll never fishtail more than slightly, the e-brake will let you drift around turns even in massively heavy SUVs, and walls & obstacles won’t ever present more than a minor slowdown — you shouldn’t have to worry about finding yourself at a dead stop, facing the wrong way.

Realists will be deeply disappointed by Off Road, for the game emphasizes fast and easy racing over expert turning and finding those perfect lines. There really seems to be no difference between racing on the road or off it; I was able to plow directly through clumps of desert weeds, taller than my truck, with no effect or consequence. Drifting is possible in even the most top-heavy SUV. The trucks take damage, but only via a nebulous “damage meter,” whose effect seems to be the artificial dampening of your top speed & handling, and whose reasons for filling are fairly arbitrary. Grinding for a few seconds against a fellow racer can fill your damage meter nearly to capacity, but plowing into a massive boulder at 90mph? The game is happy to let you off with a warning. These aren’t bad things, per se, it’s just important to accept them and understand this is the sort of game you’re dealing with. If you want realism, pick up Gran Turismo. Off Road, comparatively, is the type of game anyone can pick up and play instantly.

The flip side to this, unfortunately, is that there isn’t a whole lot to the game once you’ve been through a few races. My first race, getting used to the handling, I placed 3rd out of 6 trucks, and from there on out, I was coming in 1st, again and again — often finishing more than half a lap ahead of the pack. The game’s tracks do start to get a little trickier, but never by that much, and though the game promises 24 tracks, it’s counting the fact that you can race 12 different tracks both forward and backward, so the variety does start to wear thin after a while. There isn’t much strategy in picking the cars, either: Rather than providing a selection of different vehicles where one has to choose between speed or handling, there’s merely a list of trucks which just get better and better. They’re unlocked in the game’s “career” mode, and you simply start with the vehicle which has low handling, acceleration, and top speed, and unlock more expensive models where the statistics all go up in near-unison. Needless to say, once you’ve bought the most expensive truck, there is no reason not to use it for every race.

To the game’s credit, it tries very hard to mix things up by offering a dozen different racing modes, but a few flaws keep these choices from being truly interesting. For one thing, everything is locked behind the game’s career mode, making it essentially mandatory if you ever want to race more than one track. The career mode isn’t a bad addition, presenting a broad enough variety of game modes and tracks to keep the player interested, but forcing the player to go through it in order to experience the full extent of the game is tedious. Off Road is such a simple and accessible game, it would have been better off playing to that strength instead of trying to put forth an appearance of depth (since it really isn’t there).

The aforementioned dozen race modes are a nice touch, but they can ultimately be distilled down to three basic archetypes: Beat the race quickly (race, elimination, time attack, checkpoint race, gauntlet, point to point), beat the race carefully (overtake, damage control, slalom), or beat the race while grabbing stuff off the track (gold rush, expedition, seconds out). They make for a good mix, with some being executed better than others (slalom is pretty terrible), but they start to blend together too soon — even after being forced to unlock them.

In the end, the thing that provides replay value for a good racing game is the multiplayer, and this is a notable shortcoming for Off Road. I can understand restricting multiplayer to 2-player split-screen on the PS2, but for the PC? That’s a fairly poor choice. Nobody wants to crowd awkwardly around a keyboard these days when there are so many better options for social play. The PSP version has 6-player wi-fi, so it’s a fairly glaring omission not to have provided online play for the PC version. This might have been a good addition ten years ago, but it just won’t cut it by today’s standards.

Honestly, that’s the major sentiment that will present itself more than any other when playing Off Road. It’s not a bad game, not at all. It’s a perfectly competent little racer, and if you’re on a tight budget, grabbing this out of the bargain bin will keep you busy for several hours. It’s just that it brings absolutely nothing new to the table. Most any game on the market could replace it, and provide a better presentation with innovative gameplay. On the other hand, if you’re of the opinion that racing games (and graphics) peaked back in the early 1990s, then you’re all set.

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“Sure, the game’s a chore to play through all by your lonesome,” I’d find myself writing, “but wait till you check out the hilarious co-op mode!”

“Yeah, it’s a three-year old piece of PS2 shovelware, but it’s actually kind of fun to reel in the fish,” I would relate.

But this week, I don’t have to hold back, because there is nothing — absolutely nothing — to save SPOGS Racing from being eviscerated at my hands.

If you were sentient during the mid-1990s, then like it or not you probably know pogs — the small cardboard discs school-age children used to gamble, trade, and generally use to assert dominance over their peers. And in an age when video games still looked like this…

…it wasn’t terribly surprising that children might choose fancy cardboard instead. This trend did not go unnoticed by developer Pronto Games. In an display of mad genius, they decided that over ten years after pogs had been firmly buried in the annals of history, the cardboard coins would be reborn — as the riders of butt-ugly, translucent racing machines.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are now looking at a very representative sample of SPOGS Racing. That’s you in the center, with the four gigantic chrome schlongs and a pathetically underpowered, single-use nailgun. To your left is a rival SPOG which has just activated a pair of booster rockets, guaranteed to leave you in the dust… for about the next ten seconds, at which point the game’s utterly ridiculous rubberband effect will kick in, and your speed will visibly increase by at least 20 miles per hour until you catch up.

Directly ahead of you is another rival SPOG, which has likely just used the same effect to pass you — even though you left him behind only moments earlier.

All around you is the race track, complete with plenty of visible seams; curves so shallow you’ll never need to brake, even at 200MPH; walls you can grind along without losing any speed, up until the moment the game arbitrarily registers a crash and brings you to a dead stop; and graphics that, once again, will have you longing for simple cardboard. Imagine effortlessly navigating a track that looks just like this, for several minutes per lap, trading places with fellow SPOGS like clockwork every half-minute, and you now know exactly what it feels like to play SPOGS Racing.

To be fair, there are a few variations on this theme. In “Sudden Death” mode, the addition of weapons means you can ostensibly destroy your foes before they reach the finish line. In practice, though the projectiles never miss, they do so little damage that even in protracted play sessions you’ll be lucky to see a single SPOG explode. Meanwhile, most enemy weapons will send you flying, at which point you’ll usually impact a wall, and find yourself at a dead stop facing the wrong direction.

In “Crash ‘N Grab™” mode, which the developers felt was important enough to trademark but not quite so important that they’d make it a fundamental part of gameplay, you can ostensibly ram into your foes to steal their performance parts. In practice, the game’s shoddy collision detection means that most times you bash another vehicle, either nothing happens… or you bounce off, impact a wall, and find yourself at a dead stop facing the wrong direction. When it does work, you can choose one of your opponents’ parts to steal, but as your SPOG automatically installs it, you will typically lose control, impact a wall, and find yourself… but I’m sure you can finish that sentence for me.

In “Season” mode, you can accumulate points as you race through all six of the game’s tracks. You get points for being in the lead. You get points for passing another SPOG. You get points for how quickly you complete the race, and you get points for performing stunts. Stunts? As soon as I heard the word, golden visions of Mario Kart Wii-like motion-activated bursts of speed danced in my head. However, what SPOGS Racing refers to as stunts are actually existing elements of the track — like jumps, and loop-the-loops — that are in no way optional. In fact, if you approach a loop going 40 miles per hour, the moment your tire hits the wooden frame you will put on an uncontrollable, ungodly burst of speed, and lurch forward at about 150 MPH. What this all boils down to is that the objective of Season mode is still to be in first place, because all SPOGS will accumulate the same number of points for stunts, and the rubberband effect will ensure points for lead and passing other SPOGS will even out. Ridiculous — but not as ridiculous as your sole reward for completing Season mode:

Though the game allows you to save your progress and current score should you quit mid-Season, the moment you finish, that score — and any indication you beat the game — disappears entirely. There’s no high score chart, no trophy collection, no unlockable content… the only reason anyone will ever know I beat SPOGS Racing is this picture I took with my own digital camera.

And there are far more poor design choices where those came from. But whether you take issue with the crappy draw distance, the poor framerate,  the imbalance across control schemes (the Nunchuk analog stick is not only more precise, but actually allows SPOGS to turn harder than the Wiimote alone), the absence of real customization (trademarks not withstanding, the FaceMaker™ mode doesn’t actually allow you to Get your face in the race!™ as advertised, merely select from 15 pogs), the lack of rumble or the mere ten minutes it takes to see everything the game has to offer, it’s all meaningless when the core racing mechanics are so tightly rubber banded that they are devoid of anything remotely resembling fun.

The bottom line? SPOGS Racing is a god-awful waste of ten dollars and 264 Wii memory blocks; and in all honesty, I had more fun playing Yaris.

Steer clear.

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Catan Online World (henceforth referred to un-ironically as COW), having been designed for early-21st century PCs, is extremely minimal in terms of graphics and sound, but the flipside is that it’s extremely low in terms of necessary machine power. Any modern PC is more than adequate to handle COW, and so is any modern OS; the entire game is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux, with one exception (one non-essential game add-on is handled through a secondary, Windows-only client).

Once inside COW, all graphics and interfaces are handled through Java and colorful 2D graphics, whose colonial European style meshes quite nicely with the traditional Catan motif. Players can generate an avatar through the usual method, producing a reasonable variety of appearances through combinations of provided face, hair, and accessory selections. With your new Catan persona at the ready, you can thus leap directly into the game — if you feel like shooting yourself in the foot.

COW is not a game to be picked up and played right away. This is not to say that it’s completely inaccessible, but there is a lot of required knowledge in order to make any real headway, and the game never holds your hand or fully explains what’s going on. COW assumes you know what you’re doing, which can be a real detriment when it turns out that you don’t. In addition, the in-game tutorials require the player to actively engage them, and rather than slowly explaining each new game mechanic as they are introduced, they simply hammer the player with the full volume of knowledge all at once. It can be daunting for newcomers, and experienced gamers who feel sure that they can handle all things MMO may foolishly skip past them. Likewise, the in-game board games — the main activity to be found within COW — do not contain tutorials; instead, an abstract ruleset is provided all at once upon beginning a game. Taking the time to read these will likely just confuse players who are trying to absorb too much at once, and frustrate their fellow players who have to wait for them. In a somewhat odd choice, there is actually a selection of helpful, interactive, step-by-step tutorials for the board games, but they’re located outside COW, on a separate website. COW’s hands-off approach to guiding new players may prove frustrating for the gamer who is expecting to pick up and play from the get-go, especially owing to the unique nature of COW’s MMO elements.

I must admit, in writing this review, that I don’t feel I was able to adequately experience the over-arching meta-game that is COW. To properly explore the game world would require several weeks, possibly even months. This is not, however, owing to the amount of content contained therein; it is because COW forces you to play for weeks on end in order to advance. Amassing wealth and resources in COW is not a matter of more time spent in-game, it is a matter of time elapsed in the real world. You read right — COW has a forced pace dictated by the passage of actual calendar time. Grinders and speed-levelers need not apply. As a matter of fact, more than half of your in-game rewards don’t even require your participation. If you have an account in the game, congratulations; at the end of each week you will have received 63% of your potential maximum wealth just for existing.

Here’s how it works: COW, as befitting a game centered around The Settlers of Catan, revolves around the collection (and subsequent spending) of the five traditional Catan resources, namely, wood, bricks, sheep, grain, and ore. Once each real-world day, you will be given one of these resources. That’s 7 resources you’ll receive each week with zero effort — you don’t even have to log in each day to receive them. If you have played so much as a single board game during the week, at the end of the week you’ll get one extra resource; you get two if you’ve played five or more games. There’s also an incentive to actually win the board games: one win during the week is worth yet another bonus; three wins gets you two resources. In total, that’s a maximum gain of 11 resources per week — and no more. Considering even the most basic purchases in COW (a nicer house, some snazzier clothes) will cost you four or five resources apiece, this means it’s going to take you several weeks to start advancing to the upper echelons of society, and no amount of extra play time can change that.

This non-traditional method of advancement is a double-edged sword in a wide number of ways. For one thing, it removes any benefit (and thus incentive) for grinding, keeping all players on relatively equal footing. Even the most cunning strategist in the world can only get two more resources per week than someone who takes the time to merely play one game of Settlers on each weekday. On the other hand, this is likely going to frustrate the aforementioned power-levellers or achievement junkies — gamers who are used to immediate gratification may be turned off by COW’s deliberately glacial pace. This also raises a number of questions when one considers that COW’s premium content is only accessible through a traditional monthly subscription fee (which actually fluctuates for American gamers, due to being priced in Euros). On the one hand, this may repel players who feel cheated by the inability to advance at their own pace and get their money’s worth. On the other, it makes no illusions about the perceived value of a subscription, since that fee gets you exactly the same thing every month — no more, no less. It’s worth noting, in fact, that the meta-game MMO elements are only accessible to premium players. As with every element of the game, it’s vital that you familiarize yourself with the rules and caveats before getting yourself in over your head.

An exploration of the game rules will reveal quite a bit of content available for folks who really want to immerse themselves in the meta-game. If you have the patience for it, you can build up your house and get nice enough clothes to be able to qualify for the city council, you can accessorize your home with flowers and decorations, and you can even participate in your local civics through an out-of-game forum. In addition, the management of those carefully-portioned resources looks to get harder and harder as time goes by: In an interesting Prisoner’s Dilemma, one can spend one’s resources either on one’s own home and appearance, or one can donate them to the city guard and other public works. If you don’t improve yourself, then you look like a bum and are denied access to better treatment by the NPCs, but if not enough people donate to the city guard, then thieves and arsonists will strike the town, thus harming everyone collectively. I have to admit to not adequately reviewing this portion of the game — it would take several weeks longer to really experience it, and now you know why.

This isn’t to say that a premium account is needed to have a good time in COW. If you don’t care about the meta-game, in fact, a free account still allows you to make an avatar and play full games of Settlers of Catan with the entire game population, as often as you like. You’ll also get access to the Settlers Card Game (the aforementioned Windows-only portion), and a handful of single-player browser games. A premium account, on the other hand, besides opening up the slow-moving MMO meta-game, raises the number of available board games to over two dozen, if you include the 18 or so which are variants on the basic Settlers game. Most of them are distinct enough to be called their own game — beyond the obvious inclusion of the popular Cities & Knights and Seafarers expansion sets, COW contains nearly every customization, expansion, or variation of Catan to have ever existed. I consider myself well-versed in Catan, and there were well over a dozen types in COW I had never even heard of. One scenario puts a canal down the center of the island, another one uses the Catan rules to recreate the Trojan War, and one even involves recovering treasure from an island full of dragons. Seasoned Catan experts will find themselves rediscovering the game in any number of ways, most of which are definitely worth at least one try.

If, in fact, you think you’ve mastered all Catan has to offer, you should check out MultiCatan — a six-player variant with elements of Seafarers where you don’t know where the other players are (you have to discover them), and you don’t even take turns. That’s right – simultaneous Catan play, on a board that would stretch clear off your coffee table. I would love to see this recreated in real life somehow.

Holy crap, that’s a lot of Catan.

Rounding out the selection are a handful of other games by Catan designer Klaus Teuber, most of which will be familiar to board game aficionados — Elasund, Domaine, Realm of the Desert Sons (an Entdecker variant) to name a few. Each game whisks you out of the MMO world and into a private board, where the game is handled in its entirety through a simple (if not always straightforward) interface. The games are simple enough to play if you know what you’re doing, but the first time through, some of the commands can be mildly confusing. Simple animations and blinking board areas do an adequate job of communicating what’s going on, though if you happen to turn your head or leave the PC for a minute, you may miss a few crucial moves. Every game, however, has made the jump to digital completely intact, and are generally enhanced by the journey; the strategic, resource-management elements inherent to all of Teuber’s games are made much quicker and easier when there’s a machine handling the stuff like shuffling out cards, keeping track of the ever-shifting points, and so on. A game of Settlers, which typically takes no less than 30-40 minutes in real life, can go by twice as fast in digital form, and the same holds true for the full catalog here.

This brings us to another issue that always crops up in online board games: drop-outs. Even at its increased pace, a game of Settlers is a 20-30 minute commitment, and a lot can go wrong in that time. Connections can drop, players can have personal emergencies, or they can just plain ragequit like jerks, leaving you with an unfinished game. COW does not, as other online games do, fill in the vacant seat with an AI and proceed with the game. It will, however, re-post your game as “unfinished” in the tavern (lobby) area, and anybody at all can request to take the absentee’s position. This is actually a rather nice idea; it gives the remaining players control over who rejoins the game (if they happen to know, for example, that the missing player is on his way back), and in the case of permanent departures, there’s usually at least a few players on hand willing to jump right in and help the rest of the table get some closure. In addition, it eliminates the risk of a poor AI ruining the game by trading that last resource to the guy with 9 victory points.

On the other hand, I can’t let it go unsaid: I saw a whole lot of the “unfinished game” feature, not due to poor sportsmanship, but due to stability issues with the client. I don’t think I managed to get through a single game in COW where at least one player wasn’t forced to log out and rejoin the table because their client had locked up in the middle of their turn. At best, this is a minor inconvenience, but I had at least one occasion where I found the table had completely emptied in my absence after the fourth consecutive crash. In addition, there are certain parts of the game where the American version is just plain incomplete — calling up a help file presents a few screens still in the original German. A few missed translations here and a few bugs there, and the game’s shortcomings can start to really impact the play experience.

In the end, Catan Online World is a number of things. It is undoubtedly different than any game out there; an MMO fueled by board games whose RPG elements advance through time rather than effort. It contains quite a bit of content, gameplay-wise, assuming that you’re prepared to accept board games as the entire scope and breadth of that gameplay. It is fairly engaging yet highly difficult to approach. It contains a relatively complex meta-game but a sadly unpolished interface and client. Is it worth playing?

For free, absolutely. I would absolutely recommend signing up for an account and enjoying unlimited free Settlers of Catan. Is the premium account worth it? I don’t know that the majority of gamers will be prepared to accept paying a monthly fee for a time-based meta-game with strictly limited advancement. On the other hand, you get twenty-odd different board games. Those, alone, are worth a few bucks — though, bear in mind, the price will fluctuate from month to month since it’s in Euros.

I know it’s kind of a cop-out to say “It’s for fans of Catan,” but in this case it’s absolutely true. Playing Settlers of Catan will be roughly 80% of what you do here, so if you don’t care for Settlers, you’ll hate COW. If you like Settlers, though, I’d say buy yourself one month’s worth here. Just one. You’ll get to check out the whole catalog in that time, and they’re worth at least one playthrough — if for no other reason than they might clue you in to a few good board games you can play in the real world.

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