Kyle Orland

August is usually a slow month in the gaming press, with journalists easing down from E3 and gearing up for the impending holiday season. That hasn’t seemed true this year, with Leipzig’s Games Convention, a slew of high-profile Xbox Live Arcade titles and the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo keeping gaming newsrooms humming. The introspective month of August has also been a busy time for game journalists talking about game journalism itself. Some highlights and commentary from around the Web:

• Why game critics aren’t elitist snobs (and why this is a bad thing)
• Behind the Scenes at EGM and 1UP
• New guitar gaming mag shows signs of life in the print industry
• Movers and Shakers: Geoff Keighley promoted

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A little over 20 years ago, Nintendo sent a free, glossy, full-color, magazine-sized Nintendo advertisement to the 3.6 million members of its Nintendo Fun Club. In the years that followed, legions of Nintendo fans made Nintendo Power one of the most popular magazines in the United States, despite the fact that its content resembled propaganda more than journalism. The magazine’s popularity has fallen off somewhat since those heady days, but the content has become much more respectable under the new management of Future Publishing and veteran game journalist Chris Slate. I talked with Slate about the magazine’s history, its current challenges and its future.

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Remember back when mixing karaoke and videogames together was enough to rank as truly revolutionary all by itself? It may seem hard to believe now, but it was just five years ago that Konami’s Karaoke Revolution proved that a game could be successful just by scrolling some song lyrics and measuring how well the players were singing the notes behind them. Sony’s SingStar series reinforced this proof, gussying up the basic concept of Karaoke Revolution with music videos and a wide mix of songs spread out over a dozen European expansion discs since its initial 2004 release.

Of course, the rhythm game genre hasn’t remained static since then. Games like Rock Band and the upcoming Guitar Hero 4 have enhanced that basic, karaoke-based gameplay with drumming and guitar playing, providing a relatively varied four-player party experience in the process. Suddenly, a game that merely lets one or two players sing along with their favorite songs seems more tired than inspired. Suddenly, the SingStar series and its karaoke game ilk are on the brink of obsolescence.

Thus the scene is set for the PlayStation 3 version of SingStar, Sony’s last-ditch effort to save the series, and indeed the entire genre, from becoming a minor footnote in the history of the rhythm game. The game largely succeeds in this mission, not by revolutionizing the karaoke gameplay itself, but by expanding it into a new frontier of online features that will hopefully give some legs to the ailing concept.

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For over two decades now, the R-Type series has been synonymous with a specific brand of mindless space shooter. In these games, strategy and planning aren’t as important as twitch reflexes and simply shooting everything that moves. It’s a formula that’s given the series a moderate amount of success in its niche through a half-dozen or so sequels. So it’s a bit surprising that R-Type Command throws out that formula and instead tries to build a typical turn-based strategy game on top of the R-Type universe. The result, less surprisingly, is a largely broken game that is almost entirely forgettable.

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Another Nintendo system, another Mario Kart game. This one — the appropriately if obviously titled Mario Kart Wii — is being pushed by Nintendo as a “bridge game” to move casual Wii owners past Wii Sports and into the hardcore gaming scene, so to speak. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s ever played a Mario Kart game. The series has always acted as a sort of neutral ground for gamers — a pick-up-and-play racer with hidden depth; a competitive game that lets even newcomers stay competitive; a sometimes punishing game with a bright, friendly exterior. Mario Kart Wii fits so squarely into this mold that it skirts by some potentially game-crushing pitfalls with relative panache.

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When Square first announced they were returning to Nintendo consoles with the GameCube’s Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, FF fan boys everywhere were ecstatic. When it was revealed the game would focus on real-time battles and multiplayer teamwork, fans were perplexed. When gamers were told that the multiplayer mode would require four Game Boy Advances (with GameCube link cables), many were irate.

If you could get past the odd requirements and changes to the Final Fantasy formula, however, there was a lot to like about the original Crystal Chronicles. The game did a good job of establishing a sense of camaraderie, with a division of labor that practically forced players to open their mouths and coordinate strategies. It’s a formula that seems tailor-made for the near-ubiquitous DS, which has made portable multiplayer relatively easy. Unfortunately, the newest game in the Crystal Chronicles series, Rings of Fate for the DS, is depressingly standard and loses a lot of what made the original special.

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The Sonic the Hedgehog series has lost its way a bit in the decades since its start on the Sega Genesis. The blazing, split-second decision-making of the original 2-D adventures gave way to unnecessary RPG elements and slow, hard-to-control gameplay in the more recent 3-D incarnations. Luckily, Sonic Rush Adventure discards most of the detritus that has accumulated on the series over the years and brings back the focus on frenetic speed and thrill-ride atmosphere.

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A subtitle like ‘Size Matters’ seems to beg the question of whether size really does matter to the Ratchet & Clank series. That is, does the Ratchet & Clank experience made famous on the PlayStation 2 suffer at all on the much smaller PSP? The answer is yes, but not enough to totally remove the game’s appeal.

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How much training does your brain really need?

That’s the question seemingly begged by the subtitle to Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day! Like its predecessor, Brain Age 2 asks players to complete basic, grade-school-level mental tasks as quickly as possible to ‘activate the prefrontal cortex’ and keep the brain sharp and alert. And as with its predecessor, these training games eschew complexity in favor of accessibility, and depth in favor of quick play.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this design — as the title implies, this is a game meant to be played for minutes a day, not to engage for hours through a long plane flight. But the fact that this sequel needs to exist at all speaks to the greatest flaw of the Brain Age concept — even playing for mere minutes a day, these simple puzzles just don’t hold up very well over the long haul.

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