Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon (3DS)
There really aren’t any games that exude more polish than Nintendo’s own. The amount of care they put into every single facet of every single game is mind boggling. Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon was unable to escape this same attention to detail, and the result is a whole lot of personality and charm. Awesome game.
Nintendo has this unique ability to create unorthodox gameplay styles, evidenced especially this year by Dark Moon and Pikmin 3. There simply aren’t any other games that involve vacuum cleaners in this manner. And while its uniqueness is not the sole redeeming quality of Luigi’s Mansion, it certainly doesn’t hurt.
Luigi’s Mansion is the kind of excellent puzzle game wherein you know the limits of your tools and must use them in interesting new ways around every corner. Pulling up rugs, starting fans, putting out fire, shooting hockey pucks- if it involves sucking or blowing, odds are your vacuum can do it.
…Don’t be sick, dude.
I enjoyed Luigi’s Mansion, though the highlight was definitely all of Luigi’s idiosyncrasies- his humming of the theme even as he’s quivering in his boots, the weird ways in which he displayed his fear, even after a mission was finished (watching him talk to E. Gadd was definitely memorable).
The one moment I won’t soon forget, however, was against the spider boss, when I was convinced my solution to the puzzle was the correct solution to the puzzle, and my solution had made me marvel at the puzzle’s design, and the ability it took to accomplish the proper results. Of course, forty minutes later, I wasn’t just sure I didn’t have the ability, I was convinced I was doing it wrong. Turns out the actual solution was a thousand times simpler than what I was attempting, rendering the puzzle a little less smart by design but a lot more possible. Despite my over-thinking the puzzle, I thoroughly enjoyed wasting my time attempting to solve it in unorthodox ways.
Divekick (PS3)
This two dimensional fighter is fun, funny, and entertaining- it’s a parody of fighting games and the fighting game scene all at once. It’s played with only two buttons, Dive and Kick, and breaks the intricacies of fighting games into careful application of button mashing and praying. Ten matches in, I was convinced the developers had stumbled upon some genius be-all, end-all algorithm of the genre. Twenty matches after that, and I was bored, done, and ready to return to Soul Caliber V. So I did, never to touch Divekick again.
Most of my enjoyment of the title came from its presentation- the pokes and jokes against the genre it distilled. But, while I like the idea of a single hit meaning death, I think it would have been better represented in a more intense and agile fighter, one with double jumps, flips, dodges, shields- why, something like Smash Brothers, for example.
Maybe it’s my fault I refused to play in any way but the YOLO way. I enjoyed Divekick when I played it, enough to agree to play it more than once, but as I did, everything slowly boiled down to what was essentially a flash game- a unique idea, sure, but as much a joke to technical fighters as it tried to be, if in the wrong ways.
That sounds more scathing than I ever meant to be, but that’s because my views of Divekick are polarized with my other views of Divekick. I think I like it some days, but others I roll my eyes and ask my friends if we can play something else for a change. I can only take the stress of YOLO so many times.