I feel that I’ve been living a bit of a dual life lately – Professor Layton and the Curious Village is my faithful companion that I bring with me, and Mass Effect is my passionate affair in the evening. I tend to play Professor Layton before class and Mass Effect when I have some time to really sit down and enjoy it.

I recently finished Professor Layton after two months of frequent puzzle-solving. I spent nearly 12 hours on it, solving every puzzle (including bonus and downloadable weekly puzzles). I admit to looking up help and using hints on rare occasions, but, for the most part, I solved the 144 puzzles on my own.

Professor Layton is a perfect match of game and platform. The DS is perfect for its point-and-click interface. I had suggested how well this interface would work for a portable game after my experience with Zack and Wiki, and it was fun to see it realized.

The gameplay was flexible enough to allow me to feel satisfied with a play session of three minutes or three hours. I found that most puzzles were relatively short, but for those that required more thought, I could continue thinking about them after I turned off the DS. I would never lose my progress because the game allows you to quit out of any puzzle very easily and to save at almost any point in the game. This made Professor Layton the perfect game to travel with, since I would never get stuck in the middle of something. This also encouraged me to play it more than other DS games because I never had to worry about losing my work.

The game was packed with content that made it really fun for me. There were collectible items that often unlocked more puzzles, such as the inn and painting scraps. The puzzles gave out picarats as a score (and sometimes the collectible pieces as well). The picarats seemed to have little significance other than indicating the difficulty of a puzzle. However, some puzzles with a higher picarat value were easy for me (such as spatial slide puzzles), while others were harder for me (such as some geometry-based puzzles). I found that, if a puzzle was harder for me, an indication of its difficulty would be how many hint coins I had to spend to solve it. Hint coins were another fun collectible item that rewarded me for clicking in many random locations on the screen. I loved the collectible items that encouraged me to fully explore the game.

Aside from the optional collectibles and the short puzzle structure, I found that this game also catered to the portable platform with its audio. The game didn’t require sound to be enjoyed and had subtitles over all the movies. While I am a firm believer in sound enhancing a game experience, a portable game should be designed to be enjoyed with or without sound. When I could have sound, I really enjoyed the music and sound effects, even if some of the characters’ voices were cheesy and had silly accents.

The story of this game was well-paced. Important plot elements were revealed in evenly spaced chapters. The game would give a brief summary of the current events when you loaded a save to get you up to speed. The story was light but engaging because of the many mysteries. I could tell when I was getting close to the end because mysteries kept getting solved. One of the methods of storytelling was short animated movies. They were done in a 2-D animation style that suited the game and its aesthetic quite well. All the movies were short and to the point, so I never felt like I was taken out of the action.

I found very few flaws with this game. I could claim that certain picarat values seemed too high or too low, but a puzzle’s difficulty can be very subjective depending on a person’s intellectual strengths. Another subjective issue I noticed with this game was my dislike of certain character drawings. The character designs looked a little strange to me, but it was all very stylized. After playing more of the game, I got used to it and minded it less. Also, toward the end of the game, the story helps explain some of the characters’ odd appearances.

I was excited to finish Professor Layton, but now I think that I will miss it. I have had some great experiences on the DS, including Elite Beat Agents and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Now I guess I will be searching for the next great DS game, at least until the next Professor Layton game is released.  

I heard wonderful things about Zack and Wiki, most notably in regards to its innovative puzzles and the return to point-and-click adventure mechanics. Since I grew up with a Mac, I missed the boat on many point-and-click adventures, and I hoped this game would be a fun way to educate myself. While I did learn from Zack and Wiki, the lesson that will likely stick is the scar of its intolerable soundtrack.

Zack and Wiki is full of over-the-top cartoon sounds from the very beginning. While I found it hilarious at first, my good humor wore down after only five minutes. Dialogue is not spoken, but is accompanied by annoying, repetitive sounds. My sidekick, Wiki, would make a high-pitched “Oookiki” sound over and over again. It became very condescending when matched with the tutorial text that made me feel stupid for being a beginner.

While I have very little tolerance for games that belittle the player, especially right at the beginning, there was a plethora of other problems that made Zack and Wiki hard to play. First, the colors were excessively vibrant and felt like a children’s show adjusted to maximum brightness. The graphics of the game looked quite poor on an HDTV and the shortcuts taken in the art cheapened the entire visual style. Cutscenes were way too long and there was simply too much text to wade through. Despite all the dialogue I read, the story was sketchy at best.

As for the click interface, I found it quite limiting. I missed the ability to move freely in an environment. The mechanic where you click where you want your character to go feels outdated. The recent adaptation of this mechanic with the touch screen on the DS is a much more organic use of this type of interface. This leads me to believe that this game would likely be more successful as a DS game. The low-quality graphics and simple puzzles would work better on the small screen. I have found the Wiimote pointer to be much less precise than the DS stylus.

After hearing about the innovative puzzles in Zack and Wiki, I was hoping that it would be fun. Unfortunately, the sound and other shortcomings prevented me from enjoying this game. At its core, however, this game did have spunk. Perhaps it can find a better audience someday with a DS version.