Fortunately, Metal Dead did not elicit any of these responses. Somewhere out there, Vangie is right now breathing a sigh of relief.

Created by Walk Thru Walls Studios and for sale on Indievania for $5, Metal Dead is an adventure game starring two metal-heads, Malcolm and Ronnie, as they attempt to solve the mystery of a zombie infestation plaguing their city. Their search leads them to the offices of the MediGeniTech company, where they encounter a number of other, mostly sane, survivors and proceed to solve a number of puzzles in order to escape the building and (hopefully) unravel the riddle of the undead plague. The narrative combines horror and comedy elements to provide a story that is both entertaining and surprisingly poignant at times.

OK, now that we’re through the obligatory funny introduction and background information, let’s get down to brass tacks: this is the first game from a small indie studio, and it’s not half bad! Walk Thru Walls manages to capture a lot of the feel of past adventure games (e.g., Monkey Island) while creating its own distinct style; I think they’ve done a great job, especially considering it’s their first attempt. The graphics are simple hand-drawn pictures animated with Flash. While the drawings are a little crude, they serve to enhance the indie feel of the game and give it a unique look. The sound design is equally simple, consisting of little more than a MIDI soundtrack and sfx, which does a lot of work at times to simulate heavy metal. If I have one gripe with the game, it’d be that the soundtrack wasn’t a little more extensive (what can I say, I’m a sucker for good soundtracks).

The game is short; I beat it in about five hours, but those five hours were pretty enjoyable. The puzzles are taxing without being frustrating, and the game provides a rather humorous system for giving hints. Jokes ranging from corny to crude to dark fill the game, and while Metal Dead is not up to Monkey Island levels in terms of zaniness, it manages to come close (also Malcolm accidentally steps in poop at one point, heh). Most of the game’s supporting characters seem to be drawn from the stock selection of “quirky” characters you see in a lot adventure/zombie games (e.g. the crazy gun guy, the gruff cop, the stoner, etc.), but there were a few that were actually pretty inspired, including the main antagonist (although I’ll leave the details as a surprise!). Additionally, the creators of the game went the extra mile of adding humorous achievements into the game, and I had a good time searching for them and chuckling at their referential nature once I found them.

Metal Dead is not without its flaws; but when the game is considered as a whole, these flaws tend to fall away, leaving a very solid adventure gaming experience. Considering its length and price, I highly recommend trying it some afternoon when you’re looking for something laid back and fun to do. Die-hard metal and/or zombie fans should also definitely give it a look. According to Walk Thru Walls, Metal Dead is only the first in a series of metal-inspired adventure games, and after playing their initial offering I’m rather excited to see what they come up with next.

Within minutes of starting this game it became disappointingly clear that, aside from a passing mention of alcohol poisoning, this game was aimed at the much younger teenager and wouldn’t be dealing with anything more scandalous than “how to know if a boy likes you.” The game ultimately wants to know “what kind of friend are you really?”, but once I got over the fact that there was going to be a little less debauchery than initially anticipated, I gave the game the benefit of the doubt and began my high school journey.

The main character, who you can name yourself, is the nomadic daughter of sensory healers whose job it is to help her friends overcome the social struggles and life-or-death dramas so prevalent in the land of high school. In order to do this, you are presented with an array of predicaments and a series of options on how to deal with them. You will have two main jobs: to make people like each other. and to help your friends get a band together in time to perform at the summer festival. On your journey, you’ll encounter slightly stereotypical gay relationships (Lucas Blackburne is a gay “heartthrob who likes mowing the lawn with his shirt off” and “hates carbs”), straight relationships, a geek, a total bitch, a goth, an annoying little sister, an airhead and a fat drummer.

Most of the game is played through dialogue. You’re presented with some information from one of your friends, and you have the choice of nine expressions with which to respond, which range from deliriously happy to seriously angry. When the situations become slightly more dramatic—if two of your friends are arguing, for example—you can use your tarot cards to help them sort out their problems. The tarot card minigames consist of matching the numbered cards or trying to get the highest/lowest score.

All in all, this game is pretty straightforward and easy to play. If you spill a secret to the wrong person, you don’t get penalised, and if you lose at one of the tarot minigames, you simply play it again until you win. The expressions you choose for dealing with the numerous scenarios in the game also do not really affect the outcome; they only affect your “friendship” rating. It turns out that I am a “space cadet,” but I knew that already. The dialogue can be a bit long-winded in places, and the constant arguing between Andrea and Lucas will get on your nerves, but the animation is well-done and the option of buying the theme song from iTunes is a brilliant touch.

School 26: Summer of Secrets is basically a giant teenage magazine quiz where mostly B’s means that you are the best friend a girl could have and mostly C’s means you are the best friend a girl could have. Although this game is on more rails than an actual train, at the end of the day it has a good message. I’m a lost cause, so this game did little to help me, but it teaches empathy, an emotion that not a lot of us have nowadays, so it’s definitely a game I would recommend to young girls.

Not all gaming has to be electronic. Over the last year or so, I’ve been making my first forays into tabletop gaming, which is another way of saying that, yes, I now know how to play Dungeons & Dragons. Well, kinda. It’s a steep learning curve. When I think of “game rules,” I think of the stapled 4-6 page pamphlets that come with most board games. The D&D rulebook, on the other hand, is a hardbound, 200+ page tome. And that’s only the latest edition.

That said, I’ve actually been having a lot of fun with D&D. Recently, my group finished up our latest campaign, which took the better part of 6-8 months to complete. For me, it was the first time I had ever played a story all the way through, and I ended up really getting into it. I wanted to use one of my “Gamer Girlfriend” columns to cover my D&D experiences, but I’m already finding that I have way too much material for a single article. As such, I think I am going to make this a 2-3 part series (a “Gamer Girlfriend” first!). 

Part I: Meet the Players

To begin, I need to explain what it’s like to play as part of a D&D group. A lot of people think that D&D players are just a uniform bunch of nerdy guys sitting around a table, but in reality, they aren’t uniform at all! As we progressed through the game, I noticed that the members of our group tended to drift toward specific roles that determined how they played. Each player brought something different to the table, and in doing so, helped to shape the dynamics that defined our game over the course of its 8-month run.

The members of our team were:

The Storyteller: Also known as the DM, or Dungeon Master, Jeff was basically the man in charge of the game. Now in theory, the role of the DM is to control all non-player characters, stage random encounters, and generally move the plot forward. However, I have begun to entertain a sneaking suspicion that the real job of the DM is to take every available tool, monster, and cursed item in the book, and use them in successively elaborate attempts to exterminate all of the player characters. Every time he fails to do so, you get experience points in celebration of your continued survival. Many player characters have died along the road to XP, but believe me when I say that leveling up is totally worth the trouble.

Unlike many Dungeon Masters who use pre-fabricated modules, Jeff preferred to write his own original content for the campaign. This gave him a lot of freedom to create his own world (complete with all of the trappings) and to weave a story that was adapted to the characters that the rest of our group had chosen. For me, this was actually pretty cool, since it meant that my character was actually an integral part of the plot from the very beginning. More on that in a bit…

The Meta-gamer: In D&D, there is always a fine line between “in character” and “out of character.” What you know may not be the same as what your character knows. How you decide to act during the 5-10 minutes it takes to do a round of combat probably isn’t the same as what your character would do in the equivalent 6 seconds of in-game time. Sometimes it can be difficult to balance the dueling impulses of Player and Character. The meta-gamer is the group member who tends to err a little too much on the side of Player.

In our game, Mike was the meta-gamer. His love for creating colorful-yet-freakishly-powerful characters from obscure prestige classes had earned him the nickname “Mr. Cheesy” in our group. True to form, and much to the chagrin of our DM, Mike had decided to be a Brass-type Dragon Disciple for our campaign. Between the free stat increases and the constant prattling (Brass Dragon Disciples are notoriously chatty), I’m pretty sure Jeff was ready to kill him by the third game.

At one point, though, our beloved DM did get the chance for some payback. After a series of random encounters and a couple of major battles, we ended up spending about 3-4 successive games in the city of Esgard, where the locals didn’t believe in arcane magic. As a result, while the rest of the party went merrily about its usual business, Mike’s character was stuck without his arcane magical powers for the real-time equivalent of about a month. I’m sure it was frustrating for him, but I have to admit: the constant pouting was pretty damn funny to watch. Who says DMs don’t have a sense of humor?

The Role-player: For every meta-gamer, there must be a role-player to maintain balance. Instead of fussing over stats and abilities, role-players focus on character. Not just, “What would my character do when faced with this situation,” but “What does my character do during his time off? … Who does my character enjoy spending time with? … What kind of beer does my character like?…,” and so on.

Dan was our role-player. By complete coincidence, it so happened that his character was cast as a sergeant who was ordered to go on a mission into the desert. This wouldn’t have meant much, were it not for the fact that Dan is actually a sergeant who was on his way to the desert (as in, Iraq) and left shortly after the campaign finished. You’d think that when you get cast in a game as essentially yourself, it wouldn’t require you to do much role playing. Somehow, though, he still seemed to manage it better than anyone else in the group.

Personally, I think it was his fondness for details that made the difference. Once, when faced with the question of what to do on the night before departing on a dangerous mission, Dan opted against any of the normal preparatory actions (e.g. buying supplies, packing gear, getting a good night’s sleep, etc.) and decided to spend the night with an unspecified “lady friend” that he had picked up in the tavern. Amused, the DM had him roll a “Diplomacy” check to ascertain how attractive the lady friend would be, and a subsequent “Performance” check to determine how big his “spear” would be. Ever the romantic, Dan even thought to leave a rose for his Lady Love before heading out in the morning. I cannot think of many other players who would have done the same.

Mr. Dependable (aka The Veteran): Somewhere between the extremes of the meta-gamer and the role-player lies the guy I like to refer to as Mr. Dependable. Mr. Dependable doesn’t obsess over stats, but knows how to use them to his advantage. He does role-play, but his primary focus is always on getting the job done.

Whitman was our Mr. Dependable. He played a half-orc fighter who spoke broken English with a Russian accent, sported a funny hat, and had an Intimidation score that was through the roof. He didn’t hesitate to use it, either. In fact, it proved quite useful in a surprising number of situations. Facing down a band of thugs? Intimidate. Have to kidnap another player character on the orders of a secret society boss? Intimidate. In charge of pulling the shell-shocked daughter of a dying duke away from her father’s broken corpse so you can escape? Damn straight, he’s going to Intimidate!

Whit was also the guy you could rely on to take action whenever action needed taking. Faced with an undead ice giantess bathed in dragon blood who could only be killed by a cursed sword currently in the possession of a party member who appeared to be having a seizure, Whit simply plucked up the sword, stabbed the giant, and ended up losing an arm for his trouble. But hey, he got the job done.

The Chick/The Newbie: I do not mean to imply that the chick must always be the newbie, nor must the newbie always be a chick; but in this case, they were the same person, and that person was me. The newbie is the one who is always asking questions: “What is my AC? How many bonus spells do I get? How do I figure out my hit points?”… etc. Now, I have found that if you must be the newbie, there are advantages to also being the chick. One advantage is that people don’t seem to get quite so annoyed when you pester them with questions. Another is the pity factor. At one point in the game, my character acquired a wolf companion, which made me ecstatic, because I had been waiting for four levels to get it, and it was totally badass. Much later, I found out that I had calculated the wolf’s hit points incorrectly, and that it was actually not supposed to be nearly as powerful as it had been. However, the DM never said anything about it until after the campaign was over. As he explained to Mike afterwards, “she was just so excited about getting the wolf, I could never bring myself to seriously try and kill it. So I figured it might as well just keep the extra HP.”

Finally, the chick has unique access to the ultimate out-of-game persuasion factor, also known as “crying.” I never used this tactic during the campaign, but I did come close a few times toward the end. My character was the daughter of a duke who had led and fought with us throughout much of the campaign. During the last couple of games, he was terribly wounded, and insisted that we leave him behind in order to escape. I was pretty traumatized, and I mentioned to Mike  that if the duke ended up dying, I was probably going to start crying during the final game. “Oh dear sweet Jesus, that would be the nuclear option!” he exclaimed. “They would do anything you wanted to get you to stop. Guys can’t handle crying. Duke Raymond would be dead on the floor and then all of a sudden, ‘Hey, he’s alive again and everything’s fine. You all go home and have a party.’”

Like I said, I didn’t actually use it during the campaign, but still…good to know. Good to know.

The “Cleric”: Under normal circumstances, the cleric is an extremely valuable member of the party. He is good at assisting in fights by using buff spells, as well as cleaning up after fights by healing the wounded. He may not be the toughest fighter, but the group would be lost without him.

Tom was our party’s “cleric” for the campaign. I say “cleric” because he was really only a cleric in the most nominal sense. He liked having the spells and bonuses that came with the class, but his character didn’t believe in any god, wasn’t particularly interested in converting or ministering unto the heathen masses, and—worst of all—didn’t consider himself to be a “healing cleric.” Admittedly, if you yelled at him enough, you could get him to cast Cure Light Wounds on occasion, but he was generally much more focused on casting Invisibility and/or Body Double than keeping his party members healthy. This was kind of a problem, since he was the only character in the whole goddamn party who could cast healing spells. Seriously. The fact that all of our party members actually survived the campaign was nothing short of a miracle. I am still not entirely sure how we managed it.

The Clown: It doesn’t matter whether you’re playing D&D, working on a group project, or serving in the actual Armed Forces, every group has a dud. This is the guy who is perpetually a) annoying, b) useless, or c) both. They can’t ever seem to do anything right, and they always end up as the butt of every joke. Now, if they are smart, they will play this up to the max and just laugh along with everyone else each time they fail, because it’s always better to be the fool than the idiot.

In our group, the role of the clown was filled by Ralph, who seemed to take a particular delight in making things more difficult for everyone else through periodic acts of brazen stupidity. Actually, I found him to be a pretty spectacular source of in-game comedy, and there are many D&D-related “Ralph” stories of which I am quite fond, such as “The Time Ralph Almost Drowned the Party by Casting Entangle While Underwater,” “The Time Ralph Burned Down a Village and Killed Everyone in It By Casting Grease on a Fire,” “The Time Ralph Soiled Himself to Avoid Being Eaten by a Bear,” and my personal favorite, “The Time Ralph Jumped off the Boat and Failed to Gain Experience Because He Did Not Help to Slay the Kraken.” A summary version of this story is provided below for your amusement:

Scene: The party is sailing on a boat that is attacked by pirates. While the rest of the party dispatches of the pirates, commandeers the boat, and fights a kraken, Ralph decides to take an alternate route…

(As the rest of the party battles the pirates)

Ralph: I jump off the boat!

DM: Ralph, don’t jump off the boat.

Ralph: I’m going to jump off the boat and swim to shore!

DM: OK, fine. You swim to shore. Then what do you do?

Ralph: Is there anything around me?

DM: No.

Ralph: Hmm…well, I guess I just start running. I have the Run feat, so I can go for a while.

DM: OK. You’re running, and some guys on horses come up behind you.

Ralph: I keep running.

DM: They’re going to catch you.

Ralph: But I have the Run feat!

DM: Ralph, they have horses.

Ralph: Well, I keep running anyway.

DM: OK…they catch up to you and club you over the head, knocking you unconscious. You wake up in a jail cell.

Ralph: Crap.

DM: Yeah.

Ralph: Is there anything around me that I could use for a spell or a tool?

DM: No.

Ralph: Do I have any of my gear?

DM: No.

Ralph: Not even my clothes?

DM: You have a pair of pants on. That’s it.

Ralph: Is there anyone around me?

DM: No.

Ralph: Any animals? Anything?

DM: There’s a frog in the corner.

Ralph: I talk to the frog!

And so he did. It didn’t really get him anywhere, though. I think the party eventually rescued him. Or maybe he died and made up a new character. I can’t remember which.

The Guy Who Always Ends Up Playing Neutral Evil (No Matter What His Character Alignment Actually Is): Every time a player creates a new character, they must give that character a moral and ethical alignment that encompasses the character’s views toward Good and Evil, as well as toward Lawfulness and Chaos. Certain races and classes tend in one direction or another, but it is generally up to the player to decide how they want to act in character. Some players favor one alignment, while others like to experiment and change from game to game.

Of course, there are other players whose moral relativism dictates that all alignments are really just “guidelines” that are open to a wide amount of interpretation. I have only played one full campaign with Allan, but I have it on good authority that his characters—irrespective of their actual alignments—always somehow end up being Neutral Evil. Mostly, it probably has to do with the fact that all his characters are a) first and foremost self-preservationists, and b) very good at rationalizing their actions. Kill a couple innocent bystanders, ignore some starving orphans, swear a secret blood oath of vengeance against a party member, execute a hostage behind the back of the party paladin despite explicit instructions not to do so…all in a day’s work in service to the “greater good.”

Now, other than that, the Neutral Evil guy is not necessarily a bad party member to have around. He often proves quite useful, especially when you find yourself in life-or-death situations where things like morals just get in the way of having to make the hard calls. All I’m saying is, if you ever play D&D with him, you might want to watch your back. There’s always a chance you might get stabbed in it.

Next month: Part II – Getting into the Game!

In a recent conversation with ‘Cola Editor-in-Chief Paul Franzen on a popular social networking site, Paul told me about a game he thought I might like. It went something like this:

Paul: Hey, I know you like FMV games, so I thought you’d be interested in this game Darkstar for the PC.

Me: Never heard of it. Hold on… ::does some quick Google research:: Oh man, you’re right! I love FMV games, and it stars the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I’m a huge MST3K fan! I’ll have to check eBay to see if I can find an old copy of the game for sale; hope it isn’t too rare and expensive.

Paul: Old copy? No, the game is brand new—it was just released last month.

Me: Hahahaha, good one, because they still sell Quicktime VR adventure games in 2010—oh wait, you’re serious? Oh.

Note: This conversation is largely a figment of my imagination. Paul doesn’t really exist.

Yes, it turns out that Paul was deadly serious—Darkstar: The Interactive Movie was released November 5th, 2010. It is a point-and-click-style adventure game for the PC that requires Quicktime VR technology, which was used for a handful of games in the mid-to-late 90s but has since become known as the technology that allows you to look around somebody’s kitchen before you buy their home, like this one (requires Quicktime, naturally).

Because it is a PC game, my first challenge was to get the goddamn thing running. So, I installed it along with Quicktime (ugh) and was immediately greeted with “iShell has stopped working.” Great. So I consult the company’s website, and their advice is to reinstall Quicktime. I do that and get the same error. Their advice from there is to ”try another computer,” because everybody in the world is Richie McTenComputers. After trying a few more things to no avail I give up on installing this on my media center, dismiss it as yet another problem with Vista and another reason I need to upgrade the stupid thing, and install it on my Win7 laptop.

Same error message again. “Nooo, damn it!! I want to play Darkstar! I WANT TO PRETEND I AM A CREWMEMBER ON THE SATELLITE OF LOVE AND DIE HAPPY!” Thankfully, I was able to get things up and running after screwing around a little more, right after Quicktime asked me six times if I would like to update it and, while I’m at it, install iTunes. No thanks, Quicktime.

The first thing I noticed upon booting up the game is that Darkstar is terrified of the edges of your monitor and does everything it can to keep from touching them. Observe:

C’mon, little guy, don’t be scared. Feel free to sprawl out; the monitor is all yours.

15 years ago there was an excuse for this: graphical limitations. It’s 2010 (or it was at the time of release), and even the worst computers can handle displaying this game fullscreen—there’s no rendered-on-the-fly 3D effects and the videos don’t even appear to be HD.

Now we start the game and—oh wait, Quicktime wants to know if I want to update and install iTunes and Safari. Go away, Quicktime. 

Beards that look like ant pincers = cool.

So, the game starts up and I’m looking for these stunning movie-quality graphics the game boasts. None to be found. In fact, the game seems completely ignorant of the fact that everything about it has been out of date since 1996, yet it struts around with complete confidence in itself. Wait a second…humorously outdated and brimming with undeserved confidence? This is the Guy Fieri of videogames!

There’s some graphical weirdness throughout the game, even outside of the overall obsolescence. For example, every time you see the main character (Clive Anderson), it looks like he was ripped out of a muddy VHS recording and pasted over the 3D rendered backgrounds (you can even see it a bit in the top banner for this article). The 3D models also tend to be very blocky and oddly colored. For example, the first room you start in has bright red banisters lit by purple overhead lights. I wasn’t sure if I was in a spaceship or if I was playing a glow bowling sim.

Now, as much as I enjoy cheap jabs, I want to be fair here. The 3D modeling, graphic art, and pretty much the whole damn game were created from the ground up by one guy, so comparing it to huge blockbuster games may not be reasonable. If you consider that the game is, at the end of the day, just a very ambitious indie game, then you become a lot more willing to look past its graphical flaws and judge it more based on its gameplay.

It’s also got some interface problems, presumably due to the limitations of the Quicktime VR interface. Clicking things doesn’t always do what you’d think it would, and your cursor only really has two states: a circle, which denotes that there is nothing to click on, and an arrow, which means something will happen if you click. What will happen? Who knows! You might take a closer look at something, use an object, or do something that results in your untimely death. Interface problems can be overlooked in some game genres, but in adventures like this, the interface IS the game, and it’s a hard flaw to overlook. When you aren’t struggling with the interface though, the gameplay isn’t bad.

It starts up, and after listening to Peter Graves spout off what sounds like a particularly heavy bit of William Shatner-style beat poetry, you find yourself waking from a several-hundred-year suspended animation session in a spaceship called the Westwick. Initially, we don’t know anything more than this because—get this—the main character has amnesia, a concept used only slightly less than Xbox Live Arcade games with zombies and Reginald Veljohnson films in which he plays a cop. Click on just about anything, and your screen becomes a whirling dervish of dizzying angles and prog rock until you get to your destination about two feet away. Sometimes you’ll even watch a cutscene of your character walking around the ship, depending on where you go. If you miss it the first time, don’t worry; you’ll see it again next time you go to that area of the ship. In fact, you’ll see it any time you go to that area of the ship for any reason, and a few other parts of the ship, too. Oh, and did I mention it’s unskippable? It is.

Since this is an “interactive movie,” the focus is much less on puzzles and more on advancing the plotline. You’ll run into a few anagrams and jigsaw-style puzzles, but don’t expect anything that’s going to tax your brain. Thankfully, as it’s such a central part of the game, the story isn’t bad, either. It’s no Blade Runner or even Mass Effect, but it’s an entertaining piece of sci-fi no less. Watching the story unfold as you start with no knowledge and explore the ship for bits and pieces that reveal new information about what the hell is going on is a rewarding motivator. A problem that occasionally comes up though is that it’s easy to get lost sometimes, with the ship being so large. (This could just be my own poor sense of direction at work.) Backstory videos can be unlocked every time you open a handprint-scanning lock in the game called a BioLok: a disappointment, because I would rather play through a story in a videogame than watch it. However, I can overlook it in this game, since it does state right in the title that it’s not purely a videogame anyway.

The acting in Darkstar is a mixed bag. Some actors give a very convincing performance; for others, it seems like watching all the campy B-movies from their MST3K days rubbed off on their acting styles. Some performances you don’t know if they’re trying to be funny or serious, and others are so deadpan you don’t know what they’re trying to convey at all.

Since I’m the only person in the world who for the past 10 years has been saying “Man, I wish they still made FMV adventure games,” I feel like I made a wish on a monkey’s paw. I got my wish, but not quite as I had intended or hoped.

At the end of the day, I can’t give the game a cut-and-dry recommendation. If an FMV adventure game with goofy acting, a poor, out-of-date interface, and sub-par graphics doesn’t appeal to you, then you’re simply not going to be into this, and I can’t say I blame you. But you’re a GameCola reader, so graphics probably don’t matter to you, and it’s entirely possible that you happen to like the idea of working to allow a B-movie space opera to unfold before you, despite simple and few puzzles. Or, you could just be a die-hard MST3K or Cinematic Titanic fan (no, Mike Nelson and the guys from Rifftrax aren’t in this one). If either of those are the case, this game is worth a shot.

There, this review is done. Now I can uninstall Quicktime. No, I said “uninstall,” not “associate Quicktime with all movies and music on my computer.” DAMN IT, QUICKTIME!

1. Horror: The plot revolves around a serial killer, evil clowns and demons.
2. Adventure: You solve puzzles by picking up items and using them on other items.
3. Hidden objects: You have to go through hidden object scenes in order to find half of the adventure game items.

As a horror game, it’s pretty good. As an adventure game, it works. As a hidden object games, it’s OK.

I think the game’s main draw is the fact that it’s a horror-based adventure game. You don’t see too many of those, especially from the casual game industry (which usually just makes “Match Three” games). The problem is that, as an adventure game, it’s merely passable. All of the adventure game puzzles are really straightforward, such as “use the hammer on the nails” or “use the door handle on the door.” There’s almost no challenge at all, especially since the hero practically tells you the solution to every puzzle by saying things like, “I bet some water would put out this fire!” The hint button is pretty much unnecessary.

Why do adventure game heroes tend to use items once, then throw them away? Danielle, our heroine, has to use a crowbar three times in this game, and each time, she uses a different crowbar. Why didn’t she just keep the same crowbar the whole time? Crazy Danielle.

The hidden object sections of the game are OK. This is one of those games where you can click on the hint bar to have them show you where an item is, but to cut down on hint bar abuse, you have to wait a minute in-between uses. The problem is that the game’s background music is about forty seconds, tops. You’re going to hear it repeat over and over again when you’re looking for hidden objects. The good news is that the hidden object parts get progressively easier as the game goes on.

The graphics of the game are pretty good, although some reviewers have accused the graphics of being secretly bad, only they get flashed on the screen so quickly that you don’t notice it (which is an old horror movie trick). I myself was impressed with some of the 3D animation, which put the subsequent 2D animation to shame. There is no voice acting.

The game is two hours long, which I’m guessing is the standard length for casual games today. The trial version of the game is one hour long, which strikes me as kind of odd. You can get through half of the game in the trial version? That’s pretty generous, to say the least.

What’s also generous is the cost of the game: $20. That’s for the recently-released Collector’s Edition, which contains new DLC, such as concept art and a bonus prequel chapter. The prequel chapter is pretty good; they obviously put some real work into making it. Every single location is different, the plot is somewhat intriguing, and it was my favorite part of the game. Sadly, they artificially lengthened the DLC to 30 minutes by forcing you to replay every single hidden objects scene in the game, so it’s a give-or-take in my book.

This is literally all you see of Sam before he gets kidnapped, thus beginning the “save the princess” plotline.

All in all, it’s a decent-enough game with a somewhat creative concept. The horror material is excellent for a PG-rated game, the adventure game sections are not very challenging but they’re still enjoyable, and the hidden object sections are…well, hidden object sections. I think I’ll repeat the message that I said to the last game made by this company: this isn’t going to win Game of the Year, but it’s good enough, and I encourage Alawar to keep on trying.

…Erm, Metroid, not Netroid. Darn, and I thought my acronym was airtight, too.

Michael Gray’s got another video walkthrough up his sleeve, this time of the Game Boy Advance hit Metroid Fusion. Apparently, no one knows how to make a sequel to this game—between Metroid: Zero Mission, the Metroid Prime trilogy, Metroid Prime Hunters, Metroid Prime Pinball, and Metroid: Other M, we’re getting closer and closer to a full decade without an actual sequel to Metroid Fusion, unless by chance we finally get Metroid Dread in early 2012.

Fingers crossed; I just hope that it doesn’t coincide with the impending release of Duke Nukem Forever, or else I’ll really be out of cash.

Oh, right. Michael’s videos. Collected here are the first two videos to get you started; your orders are to watch the rest of this run of Metroid Fusion on the GameCola YouTube channel. Any objections, lady?