It should be noted that the SNES version is available on virtual console (Wii) for about a third of the price. Yes, you miss out on the bonus content, but that's a pretty big price differential.Lago PARANOIA wrote:If you've never played Kirby's Super Star for the SNES I strenuously recommend you pick it up for the DS. It's seriously one of the best platformer/variety games ever. It's as good as Super Mario 64, that's how good it is. The DS re-release assumes that you played the SNES version to 100% completion so there's about, oh, 30% new content. It's also several degrees more difficult than the regular quest, but the regular quest is easy enough to be beaten by even beginners to platformers.
I rented this title and returned it after about two hours of play. In my not-so-humble opinion, the puzzles are really, amazingly terrible.Lago PARANOIA wrote:Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a nice little edutainment/mystery game, more emphasis on the edutainment part. How important are matchstick and gallon jug problems? Very important, as you'll find out. I have the second one, haven't played it and don't plan to until I beat the first game.
You've got a bunch that are just simple reading comprehension and spatial reasoning. "Look at this map and tell me which road only connects to one town." "If I put a dot on this paper, flip it over, rotate it this amount, and flip it back, where will the dot be?" "I walk out my front door and turn left once, and right twice, and end up facing east. Which way does my house face?" No tricks, no analytical thought, pretty much just following simple directions.
Then you've got some that look like the former category, except they're trick questions, and there's some subtlety in the wording that changes the answer. It would be obvious that there must be a trick from the inane simplicity, except that a bunch of the puzzles are inanely simple. And they're really vague and sloppy with the wording; in many cases, the puzzle could seriously be read either straight or as a trick, and you just have to guess which they want. In one puzzle I did, they gave me a bunch of abstract, idealized rules, and then wanted me to give them a trick answer based on real-world biology, even though it actually contradicted the problem statement.
Then there's some classic puzzles from around the world. They're good puzzles, but they're also older than dirt and you've seen them a hundred times before.
Out of over 30 puzzles I did before I lost all hope for the game, there were maybe 1 or 2 that were moderately good and new to me. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that those were actually classic puzzles that I just happened to not be familiar with.
A couple of particularly loathsome examples:
"Which of these hats has a brim whose length is equal to the hat's height?"
You're seriously supposed to look at the graphics and measure. There's no clue in the puzzle, no trick of wording, you're actually supposed to get out a measuring tape.
"Here's matchsticks in the shape of a dog. Move 2 to show the dog after he's run over."
IMO, it doesn't look like a dog in the first place, and this is a stupid "puzzle" (at least for a video game) on general principle because it's based entirely on subjective appearance (not to mention the fact that a dead dog probably looks exactly like a live one to the degree of detail being portrayed). But after pondering for some time all the available moves, I decide my best bet at guessing the "correct" solution is to move two legs from the bottom to the top to give a top-down view of a cartoon-like flattened dog. The game tells me I'm wrong--no explanation, just "wrong."
With no particular idea what else they might be looking for, I spend a clue coin for some help. Their idea of a "clue" is apparently a re-wording of the problem. Second clue is also a rewording of the problem. The third "clue" is step-by-step instructions on exactly how to solve it. The answer? Move two legs to the top. But I moved the wrong two legs, apparently.