FUNNER fact: GameCola’s very own video walkthrough for Episode 2 of Back to the Future: The Game has been uploaded to our video channel! Come listen to Paul, Michael Gray, and myself offer commentary for the second episode. Watch as my mic cuts out and I try in vein to get Michael and Paul to stop talking about their favorite BttF ships!

…Well, actually, ignore that part. The rest is totally legit and awesome, though. I swear.

Check here, here, here, over here, here again, right here, here, here, and finally, HERE. The last one is in caps because I finally got my mic to work right in that one. AW YEAH.

Stay tuned for Episode 3: Marty Ruins Everything Again.

The only thing under those tentacles is despair. And another, smaller beard.

Luckily, now that I have met Telltale’s minimum punctuation quota, I am allowed to announce to everyone that Paul and I spent some time and added commentary to the first episode of Back to the Future: The Game, which was uploaded by Michael Gray and then left forsaken and alone, like so many of his illegitimate children.

And like so many of Michael’s illegitimate kids, Paul and I were able to give these videos the proper care they deserved. So come watch as Michael shows you what to do, and Paul and I talk about something completely random! You’ll learn about weddings! Episodic games! And sometimes we even have something interesting to say about the game itself!

For convenience, I’ve included the first video below. You can find the rest here, here, there, over here, behind this rock, underneath one of Michael’s kids, behind Paul’s beard, through the gumdrop forest, somewhere over the rainbow, and obscured by Paul’s incorrect pronunciation of the word “Mario.”

Stay tuned! More videos to follow. These will have less discussion about book series that Paul made up. I promise.

I checked the sizes of the games on my computer. This game takes up over four times as much memory as the first game does. Four times! Why does this game have so much more content than the other games? It’s like the developers suddenly realized, “Uh oh, we’ve only got one more game left in the series! That means we have to do something now!”

Yes, I just complained that this game has an overload of good material. That’s because they should have spread out the goodness over the entire series, instead of saving it all for the big finale.

Case in point? The subplot about how Young Emmett always fights with his father, Judge Brown. This subplot was brought up in Episode 1, ignored in Episodes 2 through 4, and concluded here. They really should have resolved that subplot back in Episode 1 while it was still relevant. You know? I liked the entire sequence, I liked seeing what Judge Brown looked like, and it was surprisingly emotional considering that the Judge is only onscreen for five minutes, but still. It was slightly out of place.

Another good thing about this game, which makes the others look bad in comparison, is the length of the game. It’s longer than the others, or at least, it feels much longer. The halfway point of the game—where the villain steals the DeLorean and seconds later, the town of Hill Valley completely disappears—is actually a halfway point for once. If this was an earlier episode in the series, they would have stopped the game there, on a cliffhanger ending. But instead, they decided to actually resolve the plotline, by following it up with three more sequences.

Three sequences that take place in new locations, even! “New locations” meaning “not the courthouse square for the fifth game in a row.” Oh man, that was fun! Brand new areas with brand new puzzles to solve is not a bad idea.

Other notes I have about this game are…

• It freaked me out how Marty and Young Emmett were able to do perfect imitations of Old Doc. Young Emmett makes sense, but Marty? When did he become a mimic?
• Speaking of voice acting, Doc does a pretty good French accent.
• Trixie does another song in this episode. They sure seem to enjoy her singing, don’t they?
• The sequence near the start of the game with Marty chasing the particle accelerator was absolutely pointless. To solve this puzzle, you just have to click on the item three times. That’s it.
• I liked the sliding doors puzzle, although I thought it was a bit too easy. I’m sure that most other reviewers will complain that it was too challenging and out of place.
• Why was the blacksmith sign an item you could pick up, when you never use it anywhere?
• I am disappointed at the direction they took with Edna Strickland. For a moment—and I mean, for three episodes—it felt like they were leading up to something big, something involving actual character development. But in the end, they shrugged it off and went for, “Oh, well, she’s just been evil all along, that’s all.” That’s a cop-out!
• It was fun to see Michael J. Fox in this game, although it sort of makes you wonder why they didn’t hire him from the get-go, because it appears he can still do a perfect Marty voice.

The ending scenes were pretty much fun and awesome. That’s all I have to say about them. And the “To be continued…” sign that appeared after the ending credits? Is this their way of unofficially telling us that a second series is on the way?

I sort of hope a second series is on the way. But next time? Make every game in the series good like this. Don’t make the final game disproportionally better than the others.

[Review reprinted from Michael Gray's blog.]

Now, call me a Back to the Future fanatic and make fun of me all you want for my desire to name my first kid Marty and my second kid Flux Capacitor, I actually liked the story in the first four episodes of this series. They were funny, and they managed to actually build off of the original plots, instead of just blowing the dust off of them, rolling them out, and going “eh, they won’t notice.” The fifth episode decides to take a different approach to things, opting to be boring just so it can stand out from the others. Following the events of the fourth episode, you now need to stop Doc from making a horrible decision, which is about as specific as I can get without completely spoiling everything up to this point. The premise is fine, although somewhat diluted by the fact that Doc Brown has made so many terrible decisions with the timeline by this point it would have been more of a plot twist if he didn’t screw everything up and spent the night staying at home and watching the news. The finale takes you to a variety of different time points for twenty to thirty minutes each, and while I think this is supposed to create a sense of urgency, it’s kind of hard to make anything seem urgent when you have a time machine, because you can just go back to when you need to as often as possible. The effect it actually has it that it makes the story feel all over the place, and the last episode just doesn’t feel as cohesive as past episodes.

Even a surprise guest appearance by Teddy Roosevelt can’t save it.

I don’t know how to describe it, but I’ve definitely seen something of a repeating pattern here, so for now I’ll just refer to it as Telltale Games syndrome. Have you ever been to a fireworks show that doesn’t understand how to pace things, and about halfway through the show they use all their most impressive fireworks? Then, when the finale comes around, it looks the same as the rest of the show, and after the last one goes off everyone just sits there for a couple of minutes, looking stupidly at the sky before being ushered away by the groundskeepers. That’s what Telltale Games syndrome is; all games start off well enough, but they never seem to know how to wrap things up and they just sort of cough and hope we get the hint to leave.

This time around, the letdown is certainly not as bad as what had happened at the end of Tales of Monkey Island, but in order for that abomination to be duplicated they would have had to include footage of them torturing Michael J. Fox. It is by far the most dull of the entire set, and while most games like to go out with a bang, Back to the Future opted instead to go out with a polite clap and a sensible dinner. The story in the last episode is passable, but I was getting genuinely bored about halfway through. There are still some funny lines here and there, but I got the distinct impression that the game was just sort of killing time because it felt like it needed to meet some minimum length. It seemed to run out of ideas about halfway through, but rather than just ending it, the game keeps checking its watch, cursing, and then sending me back to some other time period, hoping I’d waste enough time there to wrap things up. Sure, all the big mysteries and stuff get resolved, but the game is so bad at foreshadowing that I already had everything figured out like three episodes ago. I felt mildly insulted that they thought I was dumb enough to not have pieced together everything halfway through the first episode, and the big surprises had all the shocking twists of a game of peak-a-boo.

My thoughts exactly.

I suspect that part of the problem is a result of the fact that the game is episodic, and each episode needed to feel like its own complete story. While the locations are different (usually), there really is only one story through each of the five episodes: by trying to fix the timeline, you’ve only managed to mess it up worse. Just like in the movies, they never actually restore the real timeline, and Marty only putzes around with it until he finds one he likes. The effect of breaking the game down into smaller segments like this is that by the fifth episode, everything feels largely redundant. I’m running out of ways to say that Doc Brown really shouldn’t be allowed near a time machine because he has no idea what he’s doing, but the fact that the game doesn’t end with Marty swiping the keys from Doc and destroying his vehicle with the largest hammer he can find just shows that Marty is terrible at pattern recognition.

Further evidenced by the fact that he kept getting too close to this one’s Little Sister.

The puzzles in OUTATIME are also the worst in the series, and the most difficult aspect of the game is finding a surface uncomfortable enough to play it on so you don’t fall asleep. While a lot of the early episodes weren’t exactly what I would label as difficult, most of the puzzles were at least fairly fun or creative. There were always at least a couple that were really well thought out, and the episodes featured larger areas to explore. In the last episode, it feels more like the programmers went digging around in the bargain bin of rejected ideas, and most of the puzzles are no more complex than talking to one person or looking at the correct object. These end up being less tests of your logic and reasoning and more tests of whether or not your computer and mouse are properly working. There is one puzzle in OUTATIME where Marty offhandedly remarks “Gosh, I can’t believe that worked,” which is pretty much the programmers telling us “Yes, we too realize this was stupid and are hoping to disguise it with a witty comment.” The areas are also all very small, and the puzzles tend to sort of solve themselves. Good adventure games give you a sea of puzzles to explore, but OUTATIME seems afraid we’d get lost in an aquarium.

The preliminary results for my Marty aquarium.

The graphics and sound were both well done throughout the entire series. There are a couple of characters in the last game that sounded like they were doing a terrible Michael J. Fox impersonation, and after going to Google them so I could call them out, I found that they were actually Michael J. Fox. So, it turns out the voice actor they got for Marty actually does a better Michael J. Fox impersonation than Michael J. Fox, so I am petitioning the both of them to switch names just to make things easier for everyone. Beyond that, everything looks and sounds good, and the voice acting was actually very strong as a whole. Throughout the series, I did run into some problems with the game’s performance on my computer, where cutscenes and whatnot would take way too long to load and dialogue didn’t actually match up with the lips every once in a while. It wasn’t a huge deal, but it was kind of unnerving to hear tires squealing off but still have the camera focused on Doc talking.

The game ends with an indication that there will possibly be a second season of the Back to the Future games, and I suppose I’d purchase another one if it came out. The game as a whole was fairly entertaining, even if it did stumble at the final hurdle rather spectacularly, doing a sommersault that ended in a face plant. There’s a good assortment of puzzles throughout the entire series, although things kind of peak in the second and third episode, and by the final one the game has run out of tricks and is left to pull quarters from behind your ears while you pretend the solution isn’t right in front of your eyes out of pity. And while I’m sure my pleas will go on ignored, if there is a second season, I would prefer it if the game was released all at once. Episodic content pretty much guarantees that the last couple of episodes are the lowest in quality, as the further away they are from the original release, the less planning has likely gone into them and the more the programmers are required to get out almost everything in the month or so from the release of the previous episode. Just release the whole thing at once, Telltale! We’ll wait, I promise. And this way you can plan out everything at once, make the pacing seem like it isn’t all over the place, and ensure the ending doesn’t have the impact of a loud burp in the middle of an art museum. I’d be glad to go back to the Back to the Future future or past, but I’d prefer it if the entire road was paved before I started to drive so that I don’t have to worry as I approach the last couple of blocks if I’m going to run out of pavement and smash into a tree.

Since the last “Poor Player’s Paradise,” the sun has come out and the first day of summer is just a few weeks away. So, how best to celebrate this? Easy: stay the hell inside your house. It’s hot out—too hot to go screwing around outdoors like some kind of sweaty jackass. Your friends may laugh at you for “wasting” your summer sitting inside playing videogames while they lay out in the sun and get tans, but we’ll see who’s laughing when all of your friends die of skin cancer.

Actually, probably nobody would be laughing. That would just be sad. I mean, your friends would all be dead, and their families—man, their families would just be devast–

OK, fine; just forget I even brought it up. I’m trying to say that cheap videogames would be nice this summer, is all. Jeez.

Deal-Seekers (Over $20)

Unless that Professor Layton Meets Phoenix Wright game is released in English sometime this year, Portal 2 is a pretty solid contender to be GameCola’s 2011 Game of the Year. It’s a stellar sequel to what is, apparently, GameCola’s favorite game ever, and it’s already been reviewed here with a fine score.

It’s barely over a month old and already has dropped $20 from its release price. Granted, that price may be a bit high for a “Poor Player’s Paradise” game, but if you’re going to drop $40 on a game you might as well shoot for the moon and drop it on the best—an amazing AAA game with excellent single-player and co-op campaigns.

Cheapskates (Under $20)

It’s a well-known GameCola law that all writers have to publish one big gushy handjob of an article about Telltale Games per month, so, naturally, I was scooped on this one by our own Nathaniel “Hoover Dam” Hoover in his effort to meet this rigorously enforced quota.

Though we may talk about Telltale pretty often around here, this sale is really worth mentioning twice. Not only does Telltale put out the best adventure games around these days, these prices are incredibly bargain basement. Here’s a sampling of my recommendations:

Sam and Max Complete Collection – $12.50
Max and Crossbones T-Shirt – $4.75
Sam and Max: Freelance Police Complete Series DVD set –  $6.24
Tales of Monkey Island Deluxe Treasure Chest (pre-order) – $12.50
(includes Tales of Monkey Island full season and a TON of prizes)
Poker Night at the Inventory – $1.25
Back To The Future T-shirt – $4.74

There’s a whole lot of other cool stuff over at Telltale’s store, and the sale is on now until June 30. Don’t forget to consult with Nathaniel Hoover for more details.

Homeless (Absolutely Free)

Sony’s PlayStation Network is back up, and they’ve begun their Sorry-Your-Credit-Card-Information-Was-Stolen-and-Someone-in-Boseman-Montana-Used-it-To-Buy-a-Keurig-Coffee-Machine-and-Six-Hundred-Dollars-Worth-Of-iTunes-Downloads-So-Now-Your-Credit-is-Destroyed-and-You-Can-No-Longer-Get-Loans promotion (called the “Welcome Back” promotion for brevity). This entitles everybody who had an account before PSN got cyber-9/11′d to pick two free games out of a list of five. The games to choose from (in order of my personal preference) are:

LittleBigPlanet – If you have a PS3 and you don’t have this game, then you’ve already made your first decision and now must decide what your second game will be.
inFAMOUS – A ransom note of a game that seems to rip a bunch of elements from other games (Assassin’s Creed’s roof-jumping parkour, every Bioware game’s paragon/puppy kicker morality system, BioShock’s plasmids if you only ever got electric and a stoic, gravelly-voiced, personalityless main character which we’ve seen in EVERY FPS EVER), and it actually puts them all together into a game that seemed pretty fun in the small amount of time I’ve played it.
Wipeout HD – A futuristic racing game that plays like a combination of Mario Kart and F-Zero.
Super Stardust HD – It’s like Asteroids, but confined within the orbit of a planet. It’s a simple game and seems like just the thing if you just want to kill a few minutes with a quick pick-up-and-play game.
Dead Nation – It’s a…oh Christ, come on, let’s not lie to each other; we both know what this game is about. Zombies. It’s yet another top-down zombie shooter, but, thankfully, it’s well made and pretty fun.

You also get two PSP games from a selection of four (LittleBigPlanet, ModNation Racers, Pursuit Force, and Killzone Liberation). I haven’t played any of these so I can’t give a synopsis.

Now, earlier I said that this promotion applies to everyone who had an account before the big PSN outage. Just to clarify, I mean everyone. If your wife, roommate, boyfriend, cousin or pet iguana had an account all on the same PS3, you all get two games.

It doesn’t end at the free games, though. You also get 30 days of Playstation Plus for free, too. For those unaware, here’s some quick info on how Playstation Plus works.

Basically, you can access a whole list of deals that regular PSN members can’t. This includes free or discounted games, game add-ons, avatars, and themes. Free games can only be played for as long as you’re a PS Plus member. Discounted games or any add-ons, themes, or avatars (free or otherwise) will stay with you even if you drop PS Plus. At the time of writing, members can get Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Oddworld: Abe’s Exodus, Comet Crash and a slew of PS3 Minis games for free. Remember, since these go away in a month unless you renew PS Plus, it might be a good idea to play these and get your fill and play your other free games in a month. Also, download all add-on content for any game you so much as think you could possibly own and play in the future. The add-ons are free and they stay with you, so you might as well cash in. For those who had PS Plus before the outage, you’ll get a 60-day extension.

Ghostbusters? Yes, have some.

You also have access to 100 free PS Home items (nobody cares so I’m not going to list them all here), and you can rent Ghostbusters, Bad Boys or Final Fantasy: The Sprits Within. So, one classic everybody’s seen and two giant piles of stupid. Obviously Sony didn’t dig too deep into the Columbia Pictures vaults for these, but you can’t win them all I guess.

So, PSN users, I hope this has been helpful to you, and that, once you choose your games, 22 hours later when they’re done downloading, and 17 hours after that when they’re done installing, and 11 hours after that when they’re done updating, and about a half hour after when you agree to all the EULA screens, you have a delightful time with your pile of free games courtesy of Sony and their complete and utter ineptitude.

Because Rose Kennedy is a straight up fox.

Regardless of the objections of my editor, I still feel like my plan was a solid one  because this episode is essentially the same game as the two previous ones, with the only difference being minor changes in the plot.  If I’m eating a candy bar, I’m not going to post new reviews after each bite unless I find a finger somewhere in the middle.  Episode 3: Return of the Colon takes off right where Episode 2: The Punctuation Strikes Back left off, and I feel like I should warn you that there will be some spoilers for the previous episodes in my review.  I’m not sure how effective that warning will be, because if you are worried about spoilers and have the capacity to dress yourself, you probably have already realized that reading a review of the third episode of a game you haven’t played the first two episodes of isn’t the best idea.

Once again, Doc Brown has proven himself to be the last person you would want with a time machine, and when the timeline sees him coming, it should lock its doors and windows and ignore Doc Brown’s best efforts to woo it out and impregnate it.  Leaving Doc Brown alone with a time machine is like leaving an ice cream cake alone with Kristie Alley, and when you get back something will have gone terribly wrong and everything will be covered in frosting.

There were no survivors.

In the last episode, Marty and Doc had to go back in time to fix their last screw up and prevent the Tannen crime family from taking over Hill Valley, but they did so with all the tact and grace of a drunken hippo trying to make a pyramid out of playing cards.  Because of their meddling, Hill Valley has been transformed from a town run by the mob to a police state, run by the enigmatic Citizen Brown.  Or at least the game refers to him as enigmatic; I was able to figure out where this was going by reading the descriptions of the episodes after I downloaded the series.  Regardless, with Hill Valley now a terrible dystopia (again), you must find a way to fix everything, and if past history is any indication it’ll be done by going back in time and screwing up things even worse until they get a future they’re happy with.  You get the feeling that if Doc had to fix some peeling wallpaper, he’d do so by knocking the wall down with a bulldozer (and then doing unmentionable things to all the construction equipment).

Marty realized too late he was not specific enough when he asked Doc to seal the gap between the walls with his caulk.

While the essential premise here is pretty much the same one Back to the Future always seems to use, the story itself is perhaps the strongest of the series so far.  It is really the fist one that varies from the established formula of stopping some random Tannen from causing shenanigans, and the antagonist actually feels like something other than Biff wearing a funny wig and talking with a slightly different accent.  The villain is particular strong in this episode, and for once we aren’t forced to thwart the hi-jinks of someone related to Biff (that happens to look just like him).  Apparently the storywriters finally figured out that if they had one more Biff lookalike in the family that we would begin to suspect the most logical explanation for this would be that Biff had his own time machine all along and has just been screwing with Marty.

Previous villains in the Back to the Future franchise, and evidence that the Tannen family is either more inbred than most royal families or reproduces by budding.

The story is quite strong as a whole, and while this deals with similar themes and issues to the previous episodes, it manages to do it better and with a slight twist so it doesn’t feel so redundant.  The characters and writing are also well done, as the game continues to do a nice job capturing the style and humor of the movies.  All of the characters seems to have a bit more depth than previous episodes, and the new variations of the characters are fairly well developed, considering how short the episode is.  Again, I really wanted to see where the story was going the whole way through, and the only thing that stopped me was the dreaded “to be continued” screen.  But since I’ve already had my rant on episodic games, I’ll omit the part where I had an aneurysm and set my alarm clock for 31 days, which was the most realistic expectation of when I’d actually be able to continue with the plot.

The puzzles continue to be the weakest link, which is kind of a major issue for a game where the puzzles are the only thing keeping it from being as interactive as the main menu on a Blu-Ray.  To be fair, the puzzles aren’t bad and there are a handful of standouts including one where you must solve an argument by rocking out as hard as you can, which didn’t work as well for me last month when my cell phone bill was late and Verizon wouldn’t accept my rendition of Living La Vida Loca on the recorder as recompense.

“No, sir, we also do not accept She Bangs on the harmonica.  You have to pay your late fee.”

However, beyond a couple of interesting puzzles, the solutions to everything tend to be a bit too obvious.  Using a battery to power a piece of electrical equipment doesn’t really count as a puzzle unless the target demographic for this game was recently thawed cavemen.  There just aren’t too many puzzles that really give you a sense of satisfaction for completing them, and for the most part I was able to figure everything out within a couple of seconds of being presented with the problem.  The game also has somewhat of a bad habit of isolating you in a small area and having you figure your way out.  While this has worked well in the past, this time around everything is far too easy and a couple of puzzles seem to almost solve themselves.  One of the last ones in the game requires you to distract someone, but strangely nearly everything in the room seems to have nearly the same efficacy.  It was the first time I remember the “all of the above” option applying to anything other than poorly made scantron tests.  There is a fine line in these kind of games between “entertainingly challenging” and “frustratingly stupid,” and Citizen Brown deals with this problem by running away from the line and screaming until its mother catches up and reassures it that everything will be alright.

Unfortunately, that means the puzzle where you have to hide Doc’s diuretics in his applesauce was removed.

In a way, this feels like a bit of a pointless game to review.  And not just because my entire viewing audience is just me wearing slightly different hats.  The weird thing about this game is it is part three in a five part series where you have to purchase the entire set at once.  That means that you have either:

a) Have the game and don’t need to see what other people think of it

b) Don’t have the game yet, but plan on getting it and don’t want any of the middle portions spoiled

or c) Don’t have the game because the first two episodes didn’t appeal to you because you hate fun and humor and are too busy planning to steal all the toys from the village below you at Christmas time to spend time playing a video game

The way this was released sort of puts it out of the realm where it would be useful to review.  It would be like if you got a third of the way through a movie, then paused it to go and see what everyone though of the second third before you continued. Still, if you’ve played the first two games there isn’t a reason to stop now.  Everything is about the same, from the strong visuals and voice acting, to the entertaining story and characters, to the below average and somewhat simplistic puzzles.  If you have been sitting on the fence, the good news is that the quality has not dropped and it still comes recommended.  The bad news is that sitting on a fence is painful, and you most likely will now need to go to a doctor to have a fence post removed from your left buttock.

Good afternoon, Gozer the Gozerian Crimson Echoes Team. As a duly designated representative of the city, county, and state of New York, I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity Chrono Trigger ROM hacking and return forthwith to your place of origin or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension.

It hasn’t always been sunshine and double-rainbows for the Crimson Echoes team. (In fact, it pretty much never was.) Square Enix decided to stop these kind fellows from developing an unofficial sequel to the acclaimed SNES RPG Chrono Trigger with a Cease and Desist Order, forcing them to destroy all work on the project. (Somehow, they decided it was OK to post YouTube videos of the game, with nice commentary showing what could have been.) Later, in (I believe) late 2009, a version of the game was leaked, but that contained only 70% of the full build.

Now, finally, an approximately 95% complete build of the game has been released, which is probably the closest we’ll ever get to the full version. Technically, it’s considered a ROM hack, so you’d have to own the original SNES version of Chrono Trigger in order to legally play it; but assuming you do, you should be able to find the game through Google.

So what was the team’s goal with this game? To create a solid interquel between Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross that explains how the universe got to where it is in Cross, expanding upon the cutscenes from the PS1 and DS versions of Chrono Trigger. Guardia fell to Porre, but how? Who took the Masamune? What happened to Schala to get her in the state we see her in Chrono Cross ? What happened to the Cathedral from 600 A.D.? Did Gato ever run out of Silver Points? Is that pink sack lunch always going to be available at the Truce fairgrounds? Does anybody mind seeing a flying DeLorean time machine throughout various time periods? All of these questions and more would be answered in the next episode of Chrono Trigger. Of course, that was the plan, anyway.

Enter King Zeal. Who’s King Zeal? Well, he’s the King of Zeal, obviously. You know, that guy who was never mentioned in either game? Surely, if there was a Queen Zeal, there must have been a King…right? Riiiiight? Yes. Well, King Zeal is back from….wherever he was hiding, and he’s now a major contender for the title of most ruthless bad guy around. But don’t worry: Chrono and the rest of the crew, even Magus, are here. Yes, this game assumes that you took the path of destroying Lavos in 1999 by crashing the Epoch into him (or at least, there’s no mention or use of the original Epoch), and Magus is still kicking, whether you like it or not.

Despite my joking about this mysteriously new King, the game definitely has a great plot. It takes the consequences of time travel way beyond what Back to the Future did. It really puts the added content in Chrono Trigger DS to shame. (The few misshapen dungeons and an extra boss in that game were not enough to justify the port, or even really tie the original game and sequel together, which is one of the reasons I was very exicted to play Crimson Echoes.)

The game’s title sounds like the next sequel in the Twilight series, or some other emo drivel. Even the chapters when you save the game sound weird, with names like “…And the Darkness at Noon,” “Murmurs of Red,” and “The Gray Forgotten” (the CE team must miss Michael Gray, too!). But don’t let that fool you at all; the team did a lot of fine work recreating the worlds we’re familiar with (both on the outer world and individual location maps), even creating brand-new eras and parallel worlds. I’m really hesitant to give more of the plot away, but just know you’re in for one hell of a ride. You’ll learn the consequence of changing the timeline, both within this game and from the original Chrono Trigger. The lines of good and evil will be blurred, and you’ll have to make some ethical decisions. It’s definitely a refresher from most RPGs, where you can’t make any real plot-based decisions. It’s like Chrono Trigger, Sliders, and Back to the Future combined.

Playthrough Part 1 of 92.

My main gripe is that so much of the game’s dialogue is generic, rather than tailored to your specific party members. Regardless of who’s in your party, the same things will be said by your allies in slots 1, 2 and 3. Even Crono talks a lot in this game. Crono! The explanation here is that, since Crono is not the main character in this game, he no longer meets the requirements of “the silent protagonist.” It’s dissapointing to me, because each character in the original had a lot of unique dialogue (or no dialogue), and I used to enjoy switching out characters just to hear what they’d have to say when talking to Crono’s mom, or giving away that beef jerkey to that woman. Glenn, however, does go back to his roots of non-Medieval speak, such as in the original Japanese release, as well as the English Nintendo DS port. No one besides him in 600 A.D. ever spoke in that tongue, so it makes sense, though it still seemed different to me here. I didn’t have as much of an issue with this when playing the DS port, but the DS port also had different names for all the items and techniques, which was enough to create a unique experience.

The game feels unfinished…which I guess makes sense, since it is. Mainly, it seems that the team wanted to replace Ayla with Schala as a playable character. This never happened, and Ayla is only with the team for a short time. By the time you finally get her, you’re not interested in her abilities, as she has no magic and it would take so much time to get her techs up. Chrono Trigger was fairly unique in that it required hardly any grinding to get your team’s strength up. In Crimson Echoes, however, I had to do a lot of leveling. This is most likely because some final balancing had yet to be completed for the final release. The balancing unfortunately suffers in some areas, particularly the parts where you must engage in solo battles as Marle. Marle has no new or modified techniques, and she simply was not meant to be a soloist. You’ll fight hard to get through some areas with the standard ice magic, and it’s definitely a chore. Also, the game supposedly has alternate endings, and while there is a New Game+ feature you can use even without beating the game, it’s not clear when you can actually go and beat the game early. Chrono Trigger had the telepod as well as the bucket at the End of Time to go straight to Lavos—I couldn’t find anything like that here.

The team also added some new features, such as an area with random encounters, a casino, and a battle arena that puts Final Fantasy VI’s coliseum to shame. There’s really solid story and gameplay here, and while the game does suffer due to lack of professional polish, it does push the envelope in the Chrono series, something that an official sequel probably wouldn’t do. For that, we should be grateful. These guys weren’t in it for the money or the praise. They wanted to give the fans what they wanted, and they were shot down for it. Surely Square Enix recognizes that there are people wanting more from Chrono, and yet they can only deliver a DS port with some hackneyed additional levels for a $40 price tag.

If you enjoyed Chrono Trigger, you definitely need to play through this game. It’s difficult to supplement what I consider to be the greatest game of all time, and these guys did a fantastic job. There’s a whole new parallel world out there, so get to it!

I’m not sure what’s going on with Back to the Future: The Game – Episode 2: Get Tannen! And no, I’m not only talking about the game’s title, which is almost as long as the game itself.

The game was released last Thursday, with absolutely no warning whatsoever. I mean, it wasn’t even on the list of new videogame releases! That’s kind of odd, to say the least. Companies usually publicize their big-name titles, you know? Some people have suggested the game was accidentally released ahead of schedule, and I have to agree with them. Technical difficulties plague this game, to the point where you’ll want to give up and wait for them to release the PlayStation version instead.

Yes, this game has more bugs than a Looney Tunes marathon. Here are the ones I ran into:

1. The start-up screen doesn’t actually start up.
2. The screen turns blank during cutscenes.
3. There is horrendous lag during cutscenes.
4. Subtitles magically appear, even when the subtitles are set to “off.”
5. The mouse controls are awful, and it’s really hard to move anywhere, and–wait, that’s not a bug? They’re supposed to be like that?
6. Please reinstall the game. Five times.

I dunno. Maybe Telltale Games just really hates me because I gave Tales of Monkey Island a 3 out of 10, and they decided to get revenge by giving me the beta version of this game.

Here is a picture of the game. Stare at it for ten seconds while slowly moving your mouse an inch. You have just experienced what the in-game lag is like.

Technical difficulties aside, the game isn’t all that bad. It’s a good show, although I have no idea where the plotlines are going. Without giving any spoilers, let’s just say that the game unexpectedly creates a relationship for every single character. That’s right, everyone gets a girlfriend or boyfriend! It’s like Back to the Future: Romance Style. Could it be that this game was supposed to be released three days earlier, on Valentine’s Day?

I’m having a hard time writing about this game without talking about Back to the Future: The Game – Episode 1. Episode 2 really doesn’t work independently of Episode 1; you won’t be able to pick up this game without having played the first one. I’m kind of disappointed by this, to be honest. Why split up the game into multiple parts, if the parts aren’t independent wholes in themselves? That just seems like a bad idea, especially when everyone agrees these games are “too short.”

This game has a few improvements over the previous one. First off, the number of characters is doubled, which makes the game feel a lot more realistic. Second off, Marty has a mustache for most of the game. Sure, it’s a fake mustache, but it still looks good. Third, there are about five musical numbers, due to a song-based puzzle, which increases the production value.

Even though the number of characters is doubled, in reality, there are only two new characters that get some real screentime: Officer Danny Parker and Trixie Trotter. I get the sense that they put a lot of work into Officer Parker; his character design is far more detailed than, say, Doc Brown’s. Trixie seemed kind of generic, though. She didn’t bother me, but it didn’t feel like she was worth basing a third of the game around.

Also, if I’m going to complain about characters, I might as well say that the scene of Kid Tannen making jokes to Marty was completely out-of-place. Having Kid Tannen laugh throughout the entire scene totally ruined the seriousness of the situation. That really threw me off.

The best part of the game was probably alternate 1985, where they took ten or so minutes to mess around with a fake timeline. I thought that was a lot of fun, because they just played around with the idea, coming up with all sorts of amusing bad things to happen to the McFlys.

The worst part of the game is the beginning, where Marty tries to sneak around without being seen (like in Back to the Future Part II). This part would be more fun, if the game’s controls weren’t so awful. The new “sneak mode” makes the already-bad controls even worse, because you still suffer from the same problems, only now they occur in slow motion.

Overall, I’d say that this is absolutely a better episode than the first Back to the Future episode. However, I enjoyed the first episode more than I enjoyed this one. I guess that means they sort of balance each other out. I’ll definitely check out the third episode when it’s released in March, especially because it looks like it takes place in yet another alternate 1985 timeline.

I’m giving this game a low score, because of all the technical difficulties, which made it a struggle to play the game. If they work out the bugs, my score will immediately go up two points, to a six out of ten (above average).

Well, anyway. Back to the Future: The Game - Episode 2: Get Tannen! is out now, though right now it’s only available for the PC. You can check it out here if you’re too impatient to wait for the good (read: console) version; and you can also check out a trailer for the game here, though you probably shouldn’t if you’re as scared to death of spoilers as I am. I mean, I didn’t watch it. I didn’t even click the link. For all I know it’s actually just a cat video.

Discussion topic: Does this mean Telltale doesn’t love us anymore?

FINALLY! After what feels like years but has actually been, literally, maybe a month, Telltale Games has announced the PS3 release date for their first episodic Back to the Future adventure game: February 15th.

It’s about time.

No, it actually is; I mean, that’s the name of the episode. It’s About Time. It works on so many levels. You’ll be able to pre-order the whole series up-front for $20 (which is $5 less than the PC version, as if we needed the extra incentive), and if you want to learn more about this episode in particular, you can check out GameCola’s reviews of it here and here.

Me, I’m going to go pee myself with joy.