Cheap Thrills: The Maw (2009)

Lately I've been playing the debut game from Twisted Pixel, creators of 'Splosion Man and the upcoming Ms. 'Splosion Man.  The Maw, which is considerably less difficult than 'Splosion Man, came out in early 2009 on XBox Live Arcade, and arrived a few months later for the PC.  I've been playing it on the PC, via Steam, where the game plus three extra downloadable levels made for a cheap thrill on sale a few weeks back:

The Maw concerns the adventures of a young alien named Frank and a strange one-eyed, purple, ravenous creature known as the titular Maw.  It was one of the first games to integrate with Steam's downloadable content system back in 2009, and also features Steam achievements (which are the same as the XBLA achievements.)  I've played the XBLA version as well, though not all the way through, and the only visible differences I noticed turn up on this display, where the "Quit to Desktop" option lets us know we're in PC land:

The Maw is not a great game, but it's a pleasant way to spend five or six hours -- essentially it's a 3-D platformer with puzzle elements and a cartoonish sense of humor with a lot of personality in the character animation.  It's also very forgiving, as our heroes can't die -- even alien machine guns just knock them harmlessly backwards.  The player's goal is to use the Maw's appetite for the local fauna to give the creature new capabilities, such as breathing fire, floating, or zapping other creatures, to help Frank overcome the obstacles lying between each level's starting point and its end.

I should also mention that the ravenous Maw gets quite a bit larger as the game goes on -- most levels require him to eat a certain amount before the exit will open, and he gradually grows from a puppy-sized companion to a giant (friendly) monster as the game progresses:

The graphics use fairly low-polygon models, befitting this game's digital distribution target, but they're nicely colored and textured, brightly lit but with a pleasing, rounded dimensionality to them.  The score by Winifred Phillips is particularly nice -- it changes up often enough to avoid becoming repetitive, and has a bouncy, cartoonish Danny Elfman feel that suits the action well.

If The Maw has one major flaw, it's that the level designs suffer from a certain sameness after a while -- they're mostly made up of rocks, plants, cliffs and rivers, and when we get stuck on a puzzle, we too often find ourselves retreading well-traveled ground looking for one switch or critter or pathway we might have missed.  Fortunately, the finale, and the downloadable level pictured below, take a break from third-person 3-D platforming for some more traditional arcade action.  In these levels, the player can "die" -- in that the vehicle Frank is piloting can explode -- but we don't lose any progress and are allowed to pick up close to where we made our most recent last stand.

These bullets travel very slowly and are not difficult to avoid, but the "bullet hell" pattern is still a nice nod to classic arcade shoot-'em-ups:

It took me under 6 hours to play through the game, including an hour or so while I wandered around missing the obvious, and I spread that time out over a week or so.  That's not a bad length as far as I'm concerned -- if it had gone on for much longer, it might have worn out its welcome, and it's always better for a game to quit while it's ahead.

Twisted Pixel's later games are better, in my opinion, and certainly more challenging.  But this early effort has style and humor to spare, and is worth checking out on XBLA or the PC.

Cheap Thrills: Prince of Persia - The Sands of Time (2003)

After playing through the 2010 Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands recently, it only seemed proper to go back to an earlier entry in the series and play 2003's Prince of Persia - The Sands of Time on the PC.  Series creator Jordan Mechner was still involved at this time, contributing writing and story material to this Ubisoft title, and the agile-hero-and-spunky-heroine formula that continues to inform the series (and the 2010 movie) is in full bloom here.  I'm calling this one a cheap thrill because it's inexpensive these days -- at Amazon, or on Steam, or in its used console incarnations, it should be available for under $10.

I'm not going to spend much time discussing the gameplay -- suffice it to say that this one's a modern classic, doing a fine job of bringing the acrobatics and atmosphere of the original Prince of Persia into 3-D (after an earlier attempt with acceptable but mixed results.)  The plot is simply laid out -- an evil Vizier wants to control the sands of time for nefarious purposes, and our Prince must stop him with the help of a smart, mysterious and attractive princess.  (The Prince, like Nintendo's Link from the Legend of Zelda games, isn't necessarily the same person in each of the games -- they are tied together by style and environment, something fairly unique to video gaming as an art form.)  The climactic battle is not as difficult as some of the extended fights along the way -- most of the challenge involves getting to the final showdown, especially as the Prince (SPOILERS!)  is robbed of his time-rewinding dagger for the final leg of the game, heightening the stakes associated with each tricky jump.

What I want to talk about is the presentation of this game, from the perspective of someone playing it for the first time almost 8 years after its debut.  I tend to think of the 3-D era as having arrived with the Playstation in 1995, but comparing these later games, it's pretty clear that 3-D is still maturing as time goes on.  The technology changes aren't as obvious as they were in the 2-D era, when pixels were shrinking into ever-finer detail and color depth was improving with each hardware generation.  But there's a clear difference between the rough-hewn polygons and low-resolution textures of, say, the original Tomb Raider and Sands of Time -- its environment models are simply built but cleanly rendered and textured, and the Prince is fluidly animated and constructed intelligently, avoiding Lara Croft's retro boxiness.

The game still looks really nice today, running in higher resolution on modern PC's than would generally have been the case in 2003 -- this is clearly revealed by the Prince's pre-rendered "visions," shown as previews of the dangers ahead at save points.  The actual running game looks clean and sharp, while these bits of canned footage now look blocky and smeary and dull; it's a testament to the character and model designers that the game looks better at 1024x768 (the maximum supported resolution) than it did at 640x480 back in the day.

There's still a gap between the 2003 and 2010 Prince of Persia games, of course -- the newer title makes better use of shadows and lighting, dust and water, bump-mapping and comprehensive texturing, and the Prince's muscles and facial expressions are much more detailed.  The enemy sand soldiers are much more detailed and there are large monsters and environments, well beyond the capabilities of the 2003 engine and the hardware it was designed to run on. 

But there's a cleanliness to the vintage Sands of Time that makes a virtue of its relative spareness -- the levels are cleanly designed, with resource-intensive graphical effects applied only where they really count.  The Prince's outfit is simple and largely untextured, allowing for more polygons and a cleaner look that, again, has survived eight years of technology improvement quite nicely.

And yes, the game plays quite nicely too.  I spent a good 21 hours on it from beginning to end, over a month's time, and enjoyed every minute of it.  It's not a difficult game, but it's not easy either -- the learning curve derives its challenge from variety, not sheer rock-wall toughness, an approach conducive to the "one more try" school of video gaming, and one that appeals to my aging 43-year-old reflexes.  I only spent 15 hours on the more forgiving 2010 sequel, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, and I would chalk most of the time difference up to retries following the Prince's untimely death at my hands.  I should also note that the XBox 360 controller for Windows was a better tool than my old Logitech gamepad -- tricky sequential wall jumps proved much easier to pull off after I switched controllers about 33% of the way into the game.

Good stuff, this one, from an enduring series.

Cheap Thrills: Puzzle Agent

Telltale Games has been putting out a series of quality episodic adventures in recent years.  I haven't been covering their products as Adventures of the Week, because these games are relatively new, and I don't want to compromise anyone's fun with my usual spoiler-heavy analysis until some time has passed.

But I also write these occasional Cheap Thrills posts about games under $10, and last year Telltale came out with something that qualifies -- an inexpensive "pilot" called Puzzle Agent, based on Graham Annable's artwork as seen in the Grickle books and on his YouTube channel.  I acquired a copy as part of Telltale's 2010 charity bundle, and a couple of factors recently conspired to motivate a playthrough.  One, Puzzle Agent 2 has been announced, so clearly the pilot was successful and there's more good stuff where this one came from.  Two, the pseudo-2-D, limited-animation look of Puzzle Agent, and its faithful preservation of Annable's art style, might presage Telltale's upcoming Walking Dead and Fables games based on the popular comic books and graphic novels.

As an example, here's the title screen -- this is actually a 3-D image, as the camera pans around a bit while waiting for the player to do something, but it looks like a 2-D Graham Annable cartoon:

Puzzle Agent uses the Telltale Tool engine for presentation, but while there are a few dialogue trees, it isn't a traditional adventure game -- it's more akin to the Nintendo DS Professor Layton games, with a more-or-less linear story tied together primarily by creative and challenging puzzles.  The wonderfully loopy story sends FBI man Nelson Tethers of the agency's Puzzle Research division to Scoggins, Minnesota to investigate problems at the factory responsible for producing all the erasers used at the White House.  Tethers will encounter recalcitrant locals, Nordic traditions and otherworldly beings as he finds his way around town, solving puzzles at every turn.  The characterizations and voice acting are in the grand Telltale tradition, which is to say, nicely understated and funny, interesting to watch, and consistently well-written (though there are some typos remaining in the onscreen text that the actors and voice directors clearly corrected in the recording studio.)

The art style is expressive and cartoony, with nice rough pencil lines that capture Annable's style really well, with appropriately raw, chunky animation.  The world is rendered in 3-D, but generally presented in 2-D -- the camera is static and the cutout-style characters are presented facing the camera full-on; the 3-D only gives itself away when the camera moves or flat textures are seen at oblique angles.  It's a cost-effective approach to design that's completely effective visually.  The game's snowy Minnesota world is bleak with splashes of detail; it reminds me of Michigan's Upper Peninsula where I grew up, with a dash of Twin Peaks for flavor, and I enjoyed exploring the weird world of Scoggins.

The puzzles themselves vary in difficulty -- some are straightforward and unique, some repeat, starting simply and escalating in difficulty as the story develops.  In my playthrough, I occasionally relied on the built-in hint system -- hints are limited, but Nelson can increase his supply by snagging used chewing gum during his travels; the town has a seasonal gum shortage, and chewing gum helps our hero to think, you see.  Multiple, unlimited solution attempts are allowed, with scoring based on the player's number of tries and use (preferably non-use) of the hint system.  Most of these are classic logic and pattern puzzles in a variety of styles -- they are varied, well designed and implemented, and many of them even tie into the story in some way.  Here, we must arrange logs to deflect Nelson's snowmobile along the bumpy snowdrifts to reach his target destination, passing through both of the town's traffic lights:

Puzzle Agent is priced at US$4.99 for the PC or Mac download, and it's also available for the iPhone and iPad.  It's well worth the price at 3-4 hours' worth of story and gameplay (your mileage may vary), and the game's 30+ puzzles are made available in a free-play mode after the story is finished.  If that sounds appealing, check it out here or in Apple's iTunes store.

Cheap Thrills: DOOM II (XBLA)

My inexpensive downloadable gaming time has recently been dominated by the XBox Live Arcade release of id's classic first-person shooter, DOOM II, courtesy of Bethesda Softworks and Nerve.

I'm a big fan of id's early run-and-gun raycast 3-D shooters -- the fight-or-flight gameplay always gets my adrenaline going, and I still love the audiovisuals of the DOOM universe.  Nothing has been redone for this release, and everything still holds up remarkably well, thanks to fundamentally bold and thoughtful creature and sound design back in the lo-res 90's.  That said, while I've played the heck out of the original DOOM on a variety of platforms, I had only ever partially played through this sequel.  So a lot of this content was new to me, and the XBLA version includes a set of brand-new levels packaged as a supplementary No Rest for the Living "episode."  It's been a genuine treat sating my nostalgic FPS jones with some brand-new territory to explore (yes, I know there are WAD files galore available in the wild, but I have to draw the line somewhere.)

Part of the reason I'd never finished DOOM II was that it's considerably more difficult than the original -- if memory serves, my last set of saves found me in a difficult situation, loathe to die and lose my weapons, but so low on ammo and health I couldn't fight my way to a better position.  But I was still motivated to play at the Ultra-Violence difficulty level this time around, for the sake of an XBLA completion achievement. 

And let me tell you, it was NOT easy to get through it -- DOOM II is a more sophisticated design than the original DOOM, with heavier use of puzzles and traps than its predecessor, and at the Ultra-Violence level ammunition and med kits are relatively scarce.  This meant that I had to rely much more on dashing into a heavily-monstered area, stirring the pot with a few random shots, and running back out to let the demonic hordes battle it out amongst themselves for a while, while fending off any surprise attacks from the rear.  I also had to backtrack to earlier, healthier saves on several occasions, taking advantage of exploratory knowledge gained to survive the onslaught with a little more of my dignity, health and ammo intact.

DOOM II has some genuinely nasty setups -- Carmack, Romero and company are fond of placing tempting items on release switches, and following one wave of nasty creatures with an even nastier group.  Elevators and pits drop the player into ambushes, narrow platforms make navigation precarious, and keys are invariably guarded by platoons of imps and minotauresque Hell Knights.  Resurrected skeletons called Revenants deliver heavy blows up close and dangerous semi-homing missiles from a distance.  And another new creature, the Arch-Vile, has the unfortunate habit of resurrecting enemies we've already dispatched; I managed to end one level with more than a 200% kill ratio, because the population included several of these yellow magicians, and I had to put quite a few monsters down more than once.

Still, I fought through it all, and enjoyed every minute of it.  Perhaps more than my share of minutes, actually -- I also discovered that beyond a certain point, the game stopped counting play time precisely and simply displayed it as TIME: SUCKS when I finally reached the end of the level.  But I'm an adventure gamer at heart -- I generally dispatch any immediate threats, then explore as much as possible before deciding which batch of nasties to take on next, so I'm never going to beat id's designated PAR time on a regular basis.   

So I have finished the game once, but am still playing it for the sake of remaining achievements.  I managed to collect all the achievements for XBLA DOOM, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to pull that off with DOOM II.  I managed to earn one by completing the first level playing on Nightmare difficulty, mostly by dodging shots and fireballs and running to the exit as efficiently as possible.  I know I can get up to 100 kills in deathmatch mode if I play enough, despite my generally pathetic one-on-one fragging skills, and killing 20 enemies in berserker mode will be doable if I find the right situation.  Killing a cyberdemon with my fists proved less tricky than I expected... I thought I would have to whittle him down with missiles and the BFG, saving frequently, and then use invisibility to sneak up from behind to avoid his back-knocking missiles and deliver the final few blows mano a mano.  But my wife did a little research and tipped me off that the Tricks & Traps level has a perfect room for the purpose, with plenty of invulnerability icons and tight quarters that keep the Cyberdemon from launching many missiles.

So that's one tough one down, but I still have a couple to go before I will feel like I've finished DOOM II for now.  But I'm looking forward to the remaining challenges.  Hell is fun!

Cheap Thrills: Jungler (1981)

A downloadable game I've been playing recently is Konami's Jungler, available via Microsoft's Game Room retro arcade environment.  I have never seen this one in an actual arcade, but there was a licensed conversion released for the Emerson Arcadia 2001, a short-lived early-80's console that arrived just in time for the industry crash and was heavily discounted almost immediately.  I wish Konami had followed Atari's example and recreated the Jungler coin-op cabinet for the Game Room version, instead of putting it in a generic conversion cab, but Microsoft has opted not to impose any standards in this area.

Fortunately, Jungler is a pretty good game for three dollars.  It's an old-fashioned 2-D maze chase with elements borrowed from Pac-Man and Centipede.  The player is cast as a long, multi-segment white snake who must chase enemy red snakes through a maze and blast them away.  When the requisite number of snakes have been destroyed, the level ends and a new one begins.  There are complications, of course -- the player can only shoot enemies from behind while they are red; head-on collisions are fatal until the player has scored enough rear-action hits to turn them green.  Strawberries occasionally appear in the maze, which when eaten turn all of the enemy snakes yellow, making them less dangerous and easier to attack.

The maze layout changes as the levels progress, and the AI isn't bad for its time -- whether it's truly dynamic or pre-programmed, the enemy snakes become smarter and better at using the maze to their advantage as the levels progress, and there's some randomness to their movement, breaking the pattern strategies that worked so well in Pac-Man.  They also move just fast enough that the player really has to chase them -- it's not possible to launch a volley of shots and take out an entire snake from behind.  The enemy snakes are also armed, even when they're green, and are capable of taking the player out in the same fashion, whittling the player's snake away segment by segment.  A short snake is short-lived in the world of Jungler.

This was a fairly early Konami game, and Jungler's graphics are very simple even compared to games released a year or two earlier -- the maze is blue, the strawberries tiny masses of red, white and green pixels, and the snakes solid-colored aside from their eyes.  There are no attract mode hijinx, intermissions, or persistent scoreboards, though in this emulated incarnation, the Game Room leaderboards pick up the slack.  There are odd dead-end icons in the maze whose purpose I was never really able to understand -- they seem to be fatal to the enemy snakes that run into them, but not immediately; the snakes appear to nuzzle the cold fingers of Death for several seconds before exploding and vanishing, and can be attacked while they're so occupied.

The Game Room medal standards for Jungler aren't too hard to beat, but do require mastering the basic gameplay.  I had no problem with the survival medals, because I tend to run scared a lot of the time in maze games, so running up the clock is not a problem.  The score medal was more challenging, though I managed to beat the gold standard a couple of times while putting in the play time required to earn the associated Time Spender medal.

Jungler is no classic -- in that I can't see a remake getting much traction in today's market -- but it's a competent and playable game from the early 80's, and one I would probably never have encountered if not for Game Room.  It's a reasonable deal for three dollars if you're looking for a fresh vintage experience.

Cheap Thrills: Tutankham (1982)

I've recently been playing Konami's 1982 arcade game, Tutankham, courtesy of Microsoft's Game Room on XBox Live Arcade.  It cost me 240 points, US$3.00 in real money, and I'm happy with the deal.  If you've never played Tutankham, suffice it to say that it's a 2-D maze game, pitting a plucky explorer against on onslaught of monsters as he searches for treasure in an Egyptian tomb.  It was developed in Japan by Konami and distributed to US arcades by Stern in 1982.  The Game Room trivia notes mention that the original title was Tutankhamen, but when the screen orientation was changed from horizontal to vertical, the existing title graphics wouldn't fit and the name was summarily truncated.

I always liked Tutankham back in the arcade era, but never spent enough time with it to get good at it; I recall playing it once or twice at an RV/boat show in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and getting my pith helmet handed to me rather quickly.  The graphics and scrolling hardware were just far enough ahead of home systems that there was never an accurate port released -- the Atari 2600 version was so approximate as to not even feel like the same game, with vertical rather than horizontal scrolling and tiny indistinct sprites, and the -- ahem -- "inspired by" version I bought for the TRS-80 Color Computer was no touch on the original.

So when Game Room arrived on the downloadable scene, Tutankham was the first game I opted to invest in.  And it's a solid, old-fashioned game, balancing risk and reward carefully, giving the player just enough freedom and temptation to get into serious trouble.  It's not a difficult game, but it's not easy either -- even with some practice under my belt, and all the gold Game Room medals earned, I still play an embarrassingly short round on occasion.

Old-school videogames are all about limitations, and Tutankham's most devilish feature is that the player's adventurer is armed with a laser that can only shoot to the left and to the right, with only one beam active in each direction at a time.  This means that timing is critical -- if you plan to dart up the corridor, shoot around the corner, and retreat, you have to execute those moves quickly and precisely.  It's far too easy to run around the corner, miss, and run into the approaching monster as the laser beam shoots harmlessly beneath its feet, or find oneself being chased down a long vertical corridor with no means of defense.  The player has a "magic lamp" smart bomb available, but only one per life, and it's possible to launch the weapon just a hair too late, so that the screen starts flashing with the explosion but the adventurer still gets taken out by an approaching bat or viper.

The game also doesn't make it easy to STOP moving -- unless the character runs into a wall, he's always on the go, meaning that just keeping him in one place while waiting for an enemy to wander away or come into range can be a challenge.  And the long vertical corridors in later levels ramp up the difficulty quite a bit -- the adventurer is defenseless while moving through these channels, so if a fast-moving bat is on his tail as he enters one, he's not likely to make it to a defensible position in time.

The Game Room medal standards for Tutankham aren't outrageously difficult to meet.  Getting through the first two levels and partway into the third is sufficient to earn the 30,000 Point Buster gold medal, and most likely the four-minute Survivalist gold as well.  The online leaderboards are another matter -- I've gotten nowhere near the fourth and final level, after which the levels recycle at a higher difficulty, but it's clear that some people have.  But like a lot of XBox 360 achievements, the motivation to continue playing tends to fade after these goals are reached.

I've gotten plenty of pleasure out of Tutankham, and will continue to do so when the mood strikes.  For three bucks, I can highly recommend this one.

Cheap Thrills: Exile - Journey Through Darkness

I acquired a new cell phone last summer and haven't really done much with it gaming-wise -- while I appreciate the wide range of games available, phones aren't really designed for playing games.  The buttons are small and aren't configured for the purpose, and although displays have come a long way, it's still a very small screen.

But I had a little time to kill a few weeks back, and cellphone games are relatively inexpensive, so I purchased and downloaded Exile: Journey Through Darkness, an adventure game developed by Longtail Studios.  It's presented in an isometric perspective, with closeup character portraits during dialogue, and is constructed out of small rooms with limited exits and objects in each.  The story has to do with a man who washes up on shore and must try to find his lost daughter in a land where dark politics hold sway... which makes the game sound much more interesting than it actually is.

Now, my first mistake was browsing for a new game using the phone itself.  There are no screenshots or other details hidden behind the little (i) information icon, just a brief text description written for marketing purposes.  If I had planned my purchase and done a little research ahead of time, I might have been able to find something worthwhile.  But when you're buying in impulse, you spends your money and takes your chances, as they say.  And so it was that I found myself $5.99 poorer, and not particularly entertained.

It's not that Exile: Journey Through Darkness is a very bad game.  But it's not a very good one either.

I have myself to blame, of course, for hoping I was purchasing a sequel to, or even a remake of, the Exile videogame console RPGs of the early 1990's.  But Exile is not a trademarked name, it transpires, and if deception was the publisher's intent, I fell for the ruse.  All's fair in love and marketing.

What really bugs me about Exile is that it's so elementary that it comes off as condescending.  I've played a lot of adventure games, and this one is so linear it's not the least bit fun.  Most games allow the player to collect all the random items encountered, secure in the knowledge that many of the objects will prove useful eventually.  Exile's odd design only allows the player to inspect each item -- if the item is KNOWN to be useful for a puzzle already discovered, the game will transfer the item to inventory.  But if the specific situation hasn't arisen yet, there's a bit of description given, but the object stays in situ.  I was really annoyed when I found a board with nails in it; the description even says that someone swinging it around could do a lot of damage.  Being stuck in a strange land with no weapons or other means of defense, it seemed a very useful thing to take along.  But the game will not do so until our hero talks to someone else a few screens away, who mentions that a weapon might be needed.

This sort of scripted ignorance constantly gets in the way of anything spontaneous, or interesting, actually happening.  Want to identify the names on some gravestones?  Not until someone tells you you need to do that.  And not until you've looked again at the gravestones and been told that some sort of rubbing would be a useful technique.  And not until looking at the campsite again, and THIS time being allowed to take some ashes along.  And finally revisiting the gravestones, where the rubbing takes place automatically without so much as a verb being invoked.

The designers try to liven things up with a conversation mechanism for negotiating with other characters in the game.  One can Lie, Plead, Threaten, or Deal during each round of conversation, with each player's willpower gauge being whittled down by the interactions.  But the execution doesn't live up to the concept -- it's basically a game of rock-paper-scissors, with no way to tell what the other player's intent is, and no real way to influence the course of the conversation.  A solid dialogue system could have made the rest of the gameplay bearable, but the approach here is based completely on luck, and while the conversations vary a little bit based on the negotiation process, the player never really feels in control.

I'm not covering this one as an Adventure of the Week, because I really don't think I can bring myself to finish it, or to take the trouble to capture screenshots from my phone.  Exile: Journey Through Darkness is dark, yes; and it's a journey, all right.  It just isn't worth the trip.

Cheap Thrills: GhostSlayer (WiiWare, 2010)

I have a fondness for downloadable games, because they tend to be inexpensive and simple; they appeal to the retro fan in me while giving me something arguably new to experience.  So I'm inaugurating a new Cheap Thrills feature, in which I will present informal reviews of these kinds of under-$10 titles.  I picked up Gevo Entertainment's GhostSlayer for the Wii a few weeks back, a sword-fighting game pitting the player against a series of creepy ghost warriors in deserted villages, forests and canyons.  It's a quality effort, and with all the rising from the dead on view, it's a reasonable choice for this Good Friday post.

I'm not saying Ghostslayer is a GREAT game.  It's not a technological showpiece, even by Wii standards -- it's in fully-rendered 3-D, but the enemy models are repetitive and the generic, muddy background textures call too many early Playstation games to mind.  And it's hardly a deep experience -- it's on rails, with the player guided automatically through the game's eight levels, so it's more of a ride than a game as far as exploration goes.  There are some power-ups like new swords and additional hit points that can be earned by completing levels, but the gameplay is pretty much the same throughout.  And there's no real story -- just a series of threatening spirits to dispatch from whence they came, using a sword, in a series of varied but generally bland environments. 

Still, GhostSlayer costs 600 Wii points, approximately US$6.00, and provides three or four hours of entertainment.  That seems pretty reasonable to me, because it's the kind of game best played for twenty or thirty minutes at a time, then put away until the urge strikes again.

What particularly tickles me about GhostSlayer is that it's exactly the kind of game experience we were always being promised, but that the technology simply couldn't deliver, back in the 1980's.  Just like in those vintage ads, we're finally wielding what feels like an actual sword against 3-D ghost warriors who rise from the ground and emerge from the fog -- and we're doing it with Wii Motion-Plus controls, so the sword swinging and blocking of enemy blows feels pretty natural (aside from having to hold a "block button" to switch from offense to defense.)  The enemies react differently depending on where and how hard we hit them, and there's a palpable sense of tension as we hold our sword at the ready, preparing to take on the next foe. 

The game doesn't deliver much more than that, but it really doesn't need to -- it's simply fun to knock creepy ghosts down with a sword.  The Wii experience at its best is virtual reality on the cheap, and many would gladly have paid a dollar a go for this privilege in arcades of the past.  For six bucks, GhostSlayer delivers straightforward entertainment that's easy to pick up and play.