When my sister, who doesn’t play a lot of games, tells me I should get a game, I tend to believe her. She had tried out Puzzle Quest on her boyfriend’s PSP and had fallen in love with it. She told me I would love it because it was like Bejeweled crossed with an RPG. I was sold. I picked up a copy shortly thereafter.

As I have been actively avoiding Chocobo Tales, I needed something new to play, so I finally opened up Puzzle Quest. I wasn’t impressed by the opening credits (in place of fancy cutscenes), but the game itself was incredibly addicting. I was going to play it as I got my lunch ready, which turned into playing during lunch and for most of the afternoon. Surprisingly, one of my most difficult moments was trying to get past the training level, but I shortly developed a strategy for battles and beat it.

Strategy is a large part of the battles, which are basically puzzles like in Bejeweled. You take turns moving pieces in the puzzle, so you always have to think one or two moves ahead. For example, matching three skulls causes damage, so you have to be careful not to create a match that would allow your enemy to match three skulls on his or her next turn.

However, even the most sophisticated battle strategy can be ruined in an instant due to the large influence of chance in any battle. There are a large number of pieces above the board that fall in as other pieces are matched and removed from the game. These can be in any order, and your enemy can suddenly do massive amounts of damage or get three extra turns in a row despite your best intentions. More clever strategists plan with this sense of chance, such as matching pieces only in certain rows where it is highly unlikely for a large number of skulls to fall into place and harm you.

Puzzle Quest is very engaging and seems well-designed. It is a pared-down RPG that makes a great game for a portable system like the PSP and Nintendo DS. I can pick it up for five minutes and solve a puzzle. Unlike normal RPGs where it’s a hack-and-slash battle, the fighting system is good for my brain. I play Puzzle Quest to relax and take a break. I really enjoy it and I’m excited to see how it progresses as I continue to level up.  

I was really excited to play Chocobo Tales the day after I beat that pesky Leviathan. Once I had regained my gamer’s enthusiasm, I set off to gather a couple of items. These items unlocked the final level and soon I would complete the game!

Soon, I had obtained the final items (energy cells) that allowed my friend Cid (who appears in all Final Fantasy games) to reboot his airship. We sped off to a remote tower in the sea and I jumped into the first picture book. It was The Cactuar and the Adamantoise, Vol. 2. I passed all levels up to level three with relative ease. I unlocked a card, but I could not move forward in the level until I had beaten the racing mini-game on level four.

I raced over and over again, but soon I had plateaued. I was consistently coming in half a second to one full second behind Volg, an annoying black chocobo. Once again, I would turn down the music and shout at the screen in frustration. In the race, my chocobo was riding on the back of an adamantoise, who you would steer by moving the stylus clockwise or counterclockwise on the lower screen (around an image of an adamantoise body that moved with the stylus). The adamantoise was slow to respond and the dual screens were distracting. I found that if I messed up in the slightest, I would lose the race.

After my recent frustration with the leviathan mini-game, I promptly quit. After seeing no improvement during the previous four attempts, the happy music and bright colors only served to annoy me. This time, however, I did not come back to my game after an hour. I haven’t touched it for a few days now.

Given the friendly nature of the game, I find these two difficult mini-games to be horribly frustrating. Unlike many longer games, I didn’t need a guide to help guide me along my way; all I had to do was eat one of many red apples scattered about the base level to get a hint. Friendly features like those apples were very helpful, but a couple mini-games exhausted my patience for this otherwise enjoyable game in a short amount of time. I discovered today that even the best design in a game is wasted if someone becomes so frustrated that they quit.  

Over the past few days, I have been whipping through Chocobo Tales. I sit down to play one or two mini-games and soon discover that I’ve been playing for an hour. I have been moving the story forward without too much difficulty. That is, until I reached the Boy Who Cried Leviathan.

Most of the mini-games are exceptionally well-paced. I generally like to play mini-games no more than four or five times in order to beat them. This had been the case for most of Chocobo Tales. Only rarely did I find myself shouting at the DS, feeling cheated or angry. There is a large number of mini-games, all of which use only touch controls, so some of the games fit the controls better, making them easier. It reminded me of playing Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz on the Wii. Some things work well with unconventional controls and some just don’t.

One game that is very unusual in its control scheme is the Boy Who Cried Leviathan. The point of the game is to get a far as possible through a tunnel without touching the edges or other obstacles. The premise is that your little chocobo is outrunning a leviathan. However, you cannot control the chocobo's speed, only his depth. You can do this by moving the stylus up and down vertically on the lower screen, while watching the chocobo move through the tunnel on the upper screen.

The controls seemed simple enough and I had few problems with the controls themselves. However, the chocobo was supposed to be underwater, and the simulated physics meant that he sunk gradually which was slow enough to be annoying. Most surprising was the fact that I could not get past this level. I tried again and again, losing over ten times. I had worked my way up through the easier levels, but, for whatever reason, I just had a horrible time with that particular level. I grew so angry that I would turn down the volume right after I lost so I wouldn’t have to hear the chocobo theme in minor yet again. I began to feel that there should be some flexibility in the game, such as allowing you one free pass to skip ahead if there was some mini-game that was giving you an awful time. Each player is naturally going find some games more challenging than others, and it’s aggravating to get stuck on such a trivial level.

Finally, I decided to take a break. I came back about an hour later and beat the level after three tries. My final record was 15 losses, one win. (This was displayed, which didn’t help improve my morale earlier.) I was so excited that I continued forward and played a few more mini-games. However, my patience had worn thin from the frustration of continually losing, so I quit shortly after.  

I had heard of Chocobo Tales before, but the good reviews somehow managed to slip under my radar. However, this game is right up my alley. After all, it is cute, clever, and screamed Final Fantasy. After a friend told me of his interest in this game, Chocobo Tales flew to the top of my list of DS games to buy. Fortunately, I received it from a perceptive friend for my birthday.

The opening movie for Chocobo Tales was short and sweet. The chocobo theme blared out of my little DS and the screens flashed bright, happy colors. The story is rather ridiculous: an ancient book comes to life, as it is inhabited by a demon, and captures chocobos on cards. This ancient book wants to rule the world, with the help of a few bumbling henchmen and an evil girl with cones that resemble party hats sticking out of her head.

After the opening movie, you gain control of the chocobo. The controls consist almost entirely of the touch screen. You move the stylus and the chocobo follows your lead like a lost puppy. From the base world, there are several pictures books into which the chocobo will jump, each leading to a mini-game. I have described before how I have low tolerance for mini-games, and over half of this game was the mini-games.

I found the mini-game format of many of these games to be superior to many I have played before, making Chocobo Tales much easier to enjoy. The mini-games are all split into five levels. Level one could often be beaten with your eyes closed, but the levels become more difficult at a rapid rate. Fortunately, the story can be moved forward most of the time by only passing the third level. I found this to be a great system, since at that point you have played the game once or twice before, improving your skills. Instead of being prohibitively difficult, each mini-game will let you work up to levels to match your ability. For example, if I won an easy race very quickly, I could advance to level three or right away.

After conquering a few mini-games, I encountered a masked moogle. This moogle was pretending to be a superhero. I had never seen anything so silly in a Final Fantasy game, but I thought it was fantastic. Not only was the game about chocobos, but my all-time favorite Final Fantasy characters, moogles, also had a place in the game. This particular moogle explained the fighting system. The combat system is based on cards. One of my friends found it to be similar to Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I didn’t have much time to explore it yet, but it seems fun.

I have only played Chocobo Tales for a few hours so far, but it is very engaging. The mini-games seem to be very well-designed, systematically as well as artistically. The mini-games are in a 2D style that suits the game very well. The same style carries through into the battles, where characters jump off the cards into the battle. The rest of the game is 3D, in an anime style like the older Final Fantasies. I am really enjoying the game. It is very fast-paced, and I am looking forward to the hours ahead.  

I was crazy about Osu! Tatake! Ouendan! and tore my way through it like it was the wrapping paper over a Christmas present. I spent relatively few hours beating most of the levels, but when I got to the final level, I just had no motivation to beat it. I consider myself a methodical person, so what happened?

When I got to the final level, it was a step up in difficulty from the previous levels. I knew it would take me the better part of an hour to beat it, so I was avoiding what would seem like a chore. On top of that, there were no real incentives. There are 15 levels in Ouendan, as opposed to the 19 in Elite Beat Agents (EBA). This means there are no bonus levels to unlock. There are also no other rewards for completing the game or achieving certain ranks, other than unlocking the rest of the difficulty levels (and the female cheerleaders). There is no “bonus character” to unlock like Commander Khan in EBA.

With this lack of incentives, I now had two reasons to avoid playing: (1) it was likely to have to repeat the final level over and over, unable to skip half the introduction and (2) once the game was beaten, my little obsession would be over. As for the first reason, this was only partially true. The first time I sat down to beat it, I attempted the level about five times before my hands ached so badly that I physically couldn’t play anymore. I had spent relatively little time with the game, but it was so intense that it was almost entirely a twich level. The second half of the introduction couldn’t be skipped (which was changed for EBA), and it was longer than usual, meaning that I would sometimes spend more time watching the introduction than playing.

As for the second reason, there would be no real motivation for me to return to Ouendan. I had nothing more to unlock, and the levels were so easy for me at that point that I didn’t care about getting higher scores. The stories had less meaning for me because I couldn't understand them as well, so there was less of a personal connection to the game.

In the end, I did return to Ouendan a couple days after my first honest attempt to beat it. Once my hands had recovered, I managed to beat it on the third try, without warming up on an easier level. Once it was beaten, it felt so anticlimactic that I put the game down and haven’t touched it in days. I may still have a soft spot for EBA and Ouendan in my heart, but until the Ouendan sequel comes out, there won’t be a lot of iNiS games in my DS.  

My friend with a DS stuck around for a while after we played Elite Beat Agents. We had the chance to check out a few other DS games on multiplayer, including Super Mario Bros.

It should come as no surprise that I failed pretty miserably at this, especially considering that I’ve never made it far enough to save. My friend has been a Mario fan for quite some time, so he had an enormous advantage. The premise of the multiplayer is to get as many stars as possible (up to a certain number you set). You play as either Luigi or Mario and you can make the other character drop their stars in a number of ways, some of which are jumping on them, hitting them with fireballs, or smacking into them when you have a turtle shell power-up.

I spent most of the game trying to avoid losing my stars, as I was in no position to go on the offense. I ran around the tiny level with wild abandon and killed myself more times than I’d like to admit. However, I did accidentally stumble upon one surprising moment of offensiveness. This occurred when I got my first turtle power-up. I never thought much of power-ups at that point since seemed to get hit or die so quickly that I lost them in a matter of seconds. By this time, I had been playing for several minutes and managed to stay alive long enough to ask my friend how to turn into a turtle. I figured it out, and soon I was sliding back and forth in a lowered area.

My friend, playing as Mario, soon tried to pass through this area but I, as a turtle, was simply too fast for him. I was able to hold him off for a bit, sliding back and forth and hitting him over and over again. He dropped quite a few stars, but he was more agile that I was and so he got most of them back. Soon, he came back with his own turtle power-up and the game was over before long.

I really enjoyed playing Super Mario Bros. with my friend. It was one of those instances where you get really engrossed in a game, simply because you believe you must survive. Even if my Mario skills were lacking, I went on the defense and did my best to keep on going. My friend did go easy on me, certainly helping to stretch the game out, but I have to admit it certainly made the game more fun. I really love playing with someone else because you can create such original experiences. It was much more fun for me to tackle my friend when I was a turtle than to kill some mindless enemy, knowing that my friend had been beating me by quite a large margin for most of the game. Maybe the game does not matter. In this case, it was my fellow player who made it fun.  

I was really excited when I finally got together with a friend who had a DS. I’d heard about the wireless capabilities and how you could play games together, but I never was able to experience it until recently. I have to admit it was even more fun than I expected.

I was most eagerly anticipating the chance to test out the Elite Beat Agents multiplayer mode. I had tried playing in versus ghost mode, where you play against your saved replay of the same level. It was frustrating when you did worse than the replay, because your buttons would shrink and you screen would shake to make it more difficult. This concept seemed odd to me; the game didn’t seem to follow a “beat you when you’re down” philosophy in the story mode. While this feature was the same in the two-player versus mode, it was not nearly as fun as when I was playing with someone else.

Most of my gaming is an independent experience, so I’m sure that the rare opportunity to play a traditionally single-player game with someone else made me like it from the start. I had forgotten what it was like to be able to share my triumphs and defeats with someone. When you scream, “Oh crap! I missed one!” someone actually reacts to you. It’s no longer just about you; it’s a friendly competition where you have to pay attention to the other person.

While it was somewhat amusing to hear “Oh no! I keep missing a bunch in a row because my buttons keep getting small,” I do like my friend and felt bad that he had spent less time with the game. This meant that, while some competitions were close, he had more small button occurrences than I did. Instead of allowing us to have a fun, close match, it would keep him behind if he slipped back a bit. The same happened to me on a couple occasions and I remember feeling like a sore loser because the game seemed to hold me behind.

After both of us grew somewhat frustrated by this situation, we switched to co-op mode. The two players mostly take turns on the level, with a couple instances where you play simultaneously. It was so much more fun. We could laugh about our bright moments and not so bright moments at the end when the score screen showed each of our health graphs. I really enjoy co-op games in general because it brings both people together. You cheer for each other and focus on what they do right, rather than hoping they’ll do something wrong.

I was really satisfied with the Elite Beat Agents multiplayer mode. While it is not something that I could play for hours, it is certainly a fun new way to play the game. I especially enjoyed playing with a friend who was close to my skill level, making the co-op mode a more balanced experience. I hope I can play it more in the future.