It goes without saying that at GPD, I’m pretty much the jRPG guy. If a review is being done by me, it has at least a 75% chance of being Japanese and featuring turn-based battles. Meanwhile, Mirai gets to go from Halo ODST to Muramasa and then to Batman: Arkham Asylum. He gets to enjoy a wider variety of game times, and part of the reason is that jRPGs are so long that I frequently don’t have time for anything else, and am rushing as fast as I can to get the game completed so I can write a halfway decent review. Well, I’ve decided enough of this. Until after I have beaten and reviewed Final Fantasy XIII, you will not see another jRPG review from me. There is one exception, and that is Final Fantasy X, which I have already finished playing and want reviewed and out of the way before I start to forget important details. I am committed to this.

NonCon wants to broaden his review horizons, so where would be a good place to start? Point and click adventures seemed as good a genre to toy with as any other. Only one problem, even were I to go off on pointless tangents about how I really need a new pair of glasses, or that Mountain Dew is an incredible boon to a reviewer, there is no way in hell I could get three pages of review out of a point and click. Two point and clicks, though? That’s another matter entirely.

In the same day I got my hands on two such games. That very day I also completed both. They had been competing for my time already, so I thought, “Why not make them compete for a score?” And that is just what we shall do.

The first of the two I got my hands on was Trace Memory, a story about a girl, Ashley, looking for her father on a mysterious island, all that while trying to help a ghost named D recover his memories. There’s this nice balance of realism, as you try to find out who killed Ashley’s mother and solve puzzles on the way to reach your father, and fantasy, while a ghost that only you can see talks to you and helps you solve puzzles.

Both stories, that of Ashley and D, are really well done, and the pacing is excellent. None of it feels rushed, but it doesn’t drag its feet either. Your idea of who is the villain in a particular instance can change in another, yet the ending isn’t an irritating, unpredictable mindscrew, which is something too many writers seem to rely on when writing twists. The game gives you just enough information to puzzle things out on your own, but not so much that it makes the answers obvious. I honestly have no complaints about the story. It is delivered well, and while it won’t exactly blow your mind, you’ll walk away from the experience satisfied. If I had to nitpick, and this is GPD so I do, I’d say that the story could have stood to be a bit longer, because as much as I liked it, I didn’t have enough time to really get as attached to the characters as I would have liked.

However, that “should have been longer” complaint is something that only applies to the story. From a gameplay perspective, I’m not sure I could have stood it if the game had been longer. It’s a traditional point and click in almost every sense of the word. Collect items, rub items on other items, repeat until door opens. There is a reason we don’t have traditional point and click games anymore. From a gameplay perspective, they’re pretty terrible.

Now, I’m certain you all know by now that I’m not the sort of gamer who thinks that, to be good, a game has to have BAD GUYS for you to beat up. I enjoy games just as much as a storytelling medium. Here’s the thing though. Traditional point and click games are clunky and unintuitive. Hell, most of them are comedy oriented so that when you try to rub the chicken on the clock because fuck it you’re out of ideas, it can make a funny comment about how inappropriate that is.

Other game genres have evolved. Compare DOOM to Modern Warfare 2 or Halo. Look at Final Fantasy I and then FFXII. Evolution is the lifeblood of the industry. I can enjoy a retro game like Megaman 9 because it’s so old school it’s new school, but point and click adventures just don’t work on a fundamental level. Even Phoenix Wright, a game that I really love, suffers from the same problems that plague other point and clicks. There is no middle ground for a point and click. It’s always easier than getting wet in the ocean or harder to penetrate than a chastity belt.

There are two games I’m looking forward to on the basis that they might bring some innovation to the point and click. The first is Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. I know it’s already out but fuck you guys I’m already swamped with games. Shattered Memories looks to replace item grinding with self-contained puzzles and exploration of environments for clues. It sounds like a Scooby Doo FPS, and while the “being chased by monsters” bits might be more frustrating than fun, I’m willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt.

The other “might possibly be a point and click but with fresh gameplay” is Heavy Rain. It’s stuffed with quicktime events, but they don’t appear to cause a game over if you fail, and instead send the story down a different path. Additionally, you look for clues in the environment instead of items to glue together, and there are dialogue trees. This may actually be a pretty great game. It probably won’t be, but I’m going to be optimistic in the hope that this will inspire the point and click genre to get an overhaul.

Returning to the subject of Trace Memory, the game does actually try to move beyond the standard experience of its genre using the Dual Trace System and some gimmicks involving the DS itself. The DTS is pretty much a DSi, a fact I found particularly funny given that the game came out a couple years before the DSi was announced. The DTS allows you to take pictures, and then overlay them on a single screen. Although it doesn’t use this mechanic as much as it should, it’s an interesting and well done way to use the hardware beyond “Tap the screen!” or “Blow in the microphone… you whore.”

You do have to do both those things, and, as always, blowing the microphone takes long enough to make me feel awkward doing it and then just a bit longer, but it’s hardly a game ruining experience. My only problem with how it used the touch screen was a little game of basketball, and, just like in real life, I was terrible at it. It makes you do it twice, once near the beginning and again near the end, and both times the controls for it are just terrible and it drags on and on and on because aiming with the stylus is about as intuitive as steering a golf cart with your ass. To make up for this, the game does have one Kojima-esque solution to a puzzle using the hardware that’s really quite brilliant, so any complaints I might have about the other DS gimmicks are taken care of by this good one.

My biggest complaint with the gameplay, other than that it hasn’t grown up with the rest of the games, is that there is an order of operations to everything you must do. You can’t just pick up every dang old thang like a normal point and click protagonist. No, you have to find what you need the item for, and then go pick it up… most of the time. I’d buy this as the game trying to be more realistic about how my character acts if she didn’t randomly go from not picking up the books she needs to to solve a puzzle to picking up matches and a hammer because “they might prove useful later.” It serves no purpose. It forces irritating backtracking upon the player, and doesn’t even make the character seem more believable, which I assume was the reasoning.

Worth pointing out is the difference in opinion that I have between this and the Phoenix Wright games, which are, without question, also point and clicks. The thing that makes Phoenix Wright better than a standard point and click, though I gave it a bit too much credit when I reviewed it, is that it makes you think. Beyond just the standard stick item into hole gameplay, the court scenes force you to look at what a person says, and look for how it contradicts with the evidence you have. You aren’t just thinking, “Do I use this item here?” You have to think about the logic of the situation, even in a world with as screwy logic as Phoenix Wright. It’s a step above Use Dildo on Self, even if just a small one.

I get the impression that Trace Memory wanted to ape this aspect of the Phoenix Wright games, because at the end of every chapter you have to do a quiz. The only problem is that it’s a recite from memory game instead of a test of your logic. “This statement directly contradicts the evidence I have here!” is far more fun and challenging than “Do you remember when we put the books on the shelf? What color were the books?” It feels less Sherlock Holmes and more Dora the Explorer.

So, here’s the question: Is Trace Memory good? It’s about as good as a point and click game without Phoenix Wright in the title can be expect to be. It isn’t bad, but it reminds me why I don’t play more point and clicks.

Two Styluses Out of Five

In the other corner, we have Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, otherwise known as SBCG4AP. While Trace Memory relies on excellent storytelling and three or four gimmicks to sell itself, this game sells itself on one thing. It is funny. Now, I’m only reviewing the Trogdor episode of the game, titled “8-Bit Is Enough”. It was free for a day, can you blame me?

I hope you’ve all watched Strong Bad Emails, because I’m probably going to be referencing it a lot, and really don’t feel like linking every single episode. They’re all up over at Homestarrunner.com, so get to watching! From the moment you hear the line “Where am I gonna find fan service around here?” followed by the Trogdor theme in glorious 8-bit music, you know this is an episode that will be built entirely upon references to your favorite Strong Bad games and emails.

I think the biggest problem with this episode is that the actual games that show up aren’t playable in the same way they are on the Homestar Runner website. Playing the actual Stinkoman game, Megaman ripoff and all, would have been loads more rewarding than doing the same old point and click routine, but in a Stinkoman level. Peasant’s Quest would have been funnier if I had had to type in what I wanted Strong Bad to do and move him along with the same clunky controls as found in the game. The game had the perfect excuse to break up the generic point and click mediocrity with some actual fun gameplay from time to time, but it always, without fail, passed that opportunity by.

Okay, so it’s just a point and click. Does it do being a point and click well? Yes. It’s easy enough that you don’t bang your head against the wall until you can puzzle out exactly what the developers wanted you to do, and the humor is great. I love a good chance to laugh, and this game did it all the time. Well… most of the time. One thing that Strong Bad Emails have over SBCG4AP is that you don’t watch Strong Bad walk from place to place. It’s just a constant stream of joke-joke-joke fired in rapid succession. Having to wait while Strong Bad does his short-legged run is a bit of a letdown compared with the shorter, funnier cartoons. It’s sort of a “Well… duh” thing to point out, but the wait to get to the next joke hurts the experience. Still, the humor is solid, and I’d say that justified the time spent to play the game, especially with the staggering amount of hilarious references to popular games.

I have one nitpick I’d like to lodge against the game’s dialogue. There aren’t enough lines. Perhaps it’s just that rosy tint of nostalgia, but I seem to recall there being alternate lines of dialogue for when you asked a question again or examined the same thing a second time in older point and clicks. Hell, I’m quite certain an earlier SBCG4AP episode did just that with a conversation with Marzipan, so now I know it isn’t nostalgia. Maybe I just missed them, but the only time I found something like this was when talking to the drive-thru whale at Blubbo’s. Every other time it was just the same joke I’d already heard, and they weren’t quite good enough for repetition to do anything but make them boring.

There really isn’t much else I can say about SBCG4AP. It’s a Strong Bad Email crammed awkwardly into the confines of a point and click adventure, and while it is longer and has more jokes, it misses a lot of opportunities to be better than it ended up, and you’d probably be better off watching the cartoons online for free rather than paying for this game.

Two Stinkomans Out of Five

We reach the inevitable conclusion. Which game will leave the arena a champion, and which will leave dead? Which of the two is the best average game? SBCG4AP makes me ever so inclined to declare it victor, because its humor held my interest better than Trace Memory. However, SBCG4AP has the most wasted potential. Trace Memory had a limited amount of potential, and tried to take advantage of as much of it as it could, and the plot, while not as attention grabbing as the constant humor in SBCG4AP, is well written, and something worth experiencing once. For better or for worse, Trace Memory is the better game, but only barely. I’m almost tempted to give it an extra point for winning, but no. Two out of five is what it deserves.