I should have known from the box cover, a hand-drawn picture of two G.I.’s in action, blasting away in different directions.  It has the classic muted colors of a ‘50s comic or propaganda poster.  This was not the reality I was looking for.

I’m no simulationist—I don’t think video games should hew too closely to reality, but come on, killing 50 Germans with an M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle while barreling down the bombed out streets of Carentan, France is ludicrous.  Given what little I know of the reality of war, especially World War II, this sort of action is so beyond the pale of reality that it could only be classified as a tall tale.  In fact, it calls into question the narrative context being presented.  Is Call of Duty: Roads to Victory couched in the World War II of acrid gunsmoke, burnt flesh, jammed guns, cold rations and death?  Is it presenting the heroic, folk World War II where the Axis brazenly awake the sleeping giant of America and its cornfed supersoldiers who leap across the Channel to kick some Kraut ass?  Or does it simply offer a ride through a well-defined media space, the first-person shooter, lightly themed, but hewing closer to the reality of “first-person shooting” than “World War II”?  Whatever the context, apparently even “The Greatest Generation” needs high kill counts to be exciting.

For many obvious reasons, Call of Duty cannot and should not attempt to simulate the reality of World War II.  In fact, I’m generally of the opinion that close simulation is a bad thing in games.  Games are abstractions of reality.  That’s why they’re fun.  I don’t want to deal with jammed guns or eat cold rations.  And I really, really don’t want to die.  But still, a game that ostensibly takes on a narrative context needs to offer some semblance to that context.  And when I say semblance, I suppose what I mean is faithfulness to the narrative promised.  These games needn’t be faithful to reality, but they do need to be faithful to the experience they promise.  If they aren’t faithful to this, they risk falling into complete incoherence.

So to be fair, Call of Duty: Roads to Victory for the PSP basically fulfills the promise it makes.  Following some propaganda-lite newsreel footage to open the game, you are dropped into exactly the milieu that the Call of Duty series promises: barreling down the streets of a bombed out French town, shooting Germans.  The narrative content flits between the folk heroic World War II and the more abstract content of the shooting gallery on rails.  After all there are no “roads to victory” in Call of Duty.  There is only one road, winding into one alleyway, winding into one stairway leading to another road which you must follow and in which you must kill as many Germans as possible along the way.

The game faces the tension between historical accuracy and the dissatisfaction that would come from firing a rusty, battered M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle.  And the designers chose to side with you, the player.  They don’t want you to be dissatisfied.  Your gun may look like an M1, but it’s really a laser-accurate cannon from the future.

And while this “shooting gallery on rails” hardly seems like a narrative theme—it’s more of a game mechanic, really—I would have preferred the game to fully adopt this abstract mechanic as its focus, rather than reminding me that I was a soldier in World War II, reminding me that this was a real war.  While I understand that this is the folk-heroic World War II, I keep wishing it weren’t.  I wish I weren’t playing as some superhuman soldier killing everyone in sight and conveniently picking up bazookas whenever they are needed.  Despite how nicely the folk-heroic feel would seem to dovetail with the shooting gallery, I found it deeply disappointing.

I wanted to have the chance to shoot, but I wanted that chance to be couched in fear and dread.  I wanted that chance to be stolen between ducking for cover, cowering for my life.  I wanted to be bossed around.  I wanted to be required by military chain of command to closely follow a set of orders instead of having to simply follow the shooting gallery’s predetermined path.  Then, that action of shooting might feel like it had a meaning on par with the narrative of war that I am somewhat masochistically seeking, the one filled with death.  I didn’t want this game to be fun; I wanted it to make me feel the awful hopelessness of war.

I suppose this is no fault of Call of Duty‘s. I should have known from the box.  And in fact, the gameplay is fairly well done.  The shooting gallery mechanic works well with the limitations of the PSP controls.  Clever level designers have placed ammo and the aforementioned bazookas wherever you will need them.  In general, it plays well.  The aiming reticule snaps satisfyingly to targets allowing you to make quick work of any Germans you encounter.  The guns are well balanced and inflict just the right amount of damage a gun in a first-person shooter should.  It only takes a shot or two to kill people.  It’s fun.  I genuinely have fun playing Call of Duty: Roads to Victory.  And all of this was somehow my problem.  It was too easy to kill, and too fun. 

This is where my critique of Call of Duty will turn from the general to the personal.  But first, let me tell you a couple more things that I am not.  As I said, I’m no simulationist.  And I’m also not opposed to violence or killing in games.  In fact, I really enjoy shooters.  I’m also not opposed to war games.  But of late I’ve felt twinge of unease playing games that place war in even the most marginally realistic of settings, while the more fantastic ones remain somehow more palatable.

I know Call of Duty has nothing to do with the reality of World War II.  It is a heroic version of an idea that we hold about being in a war that most us of don’t remember, but only understand through movies and books.  And in this way, Call of Duty does glorify war—not real war, but our heroic vision of it.  How can I play a game that glorifies war in a time when our country is actually at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, where real people are being shot and killed?

This may seem a ridiculously naïve question.  So let me outline my own internal narrative in response:

“Games are not reality.  This game clearly has nothing to do with war. It’s as much about war as, say, Chess (well, okay, a bit more than Chess).”

“Not true—it is clearly about war, albeit in a purely representational way—you play as a G.I.; you’re in the army; it’s about World War II.”

“If in fact Call of Duty is anything like war, better for me to glean some small understanding of what war is like from a game than from reality.”

“It does not offer that because the game is more faithful to the mechanics of first-person shooters than it is to the reality of World War II.  What we are to glean is an understanding of first-person shooters, not World War II.”

“It’s just a game.  Games are for escaping reality.”

“True, it is just a game.  But games and media shape how we view reality and the choices we make, tying them intimately together.”

Now my discomfort with Call of Duty is not particularly noble, because every time I put down war games, I end up picking them up again.  Why?  Well, shooting games are ultimately satisfying to me in a way few other games are.  All that shooting and falling and dying have a very real concrete feeling.  It’s a style of action which the news and movies have made me understand as reality.  It is not abstract in the way popping Chuzzles or matching gems will always be.  There is no case in human history when lining up three like objects made them disappear.  Humans do, however, shoot, kill, and die.  It is the feeling of satisfaction with the world of Call of Duty that makes me feel bad.

It plays to my ambivalent feelings about war in general, especially the start of the war in Iraq.  It’s easy to say you’re against the war now—things have gone so spectacularly wrong that hindsight is far greater than 20/20.  There were no weapons of mass destruction as Powell promised.  Democracy has not risen from the shattered state of Iraq as Wolfowitz held out.  Quite shamefully for me, I fell more for the neo-con ideology than the more popular, reasonable “imminent threat” argument.  I never bought it wholeheartedly, but I did believe with a proper multi-nation coalition and the backing of the U.N., overthrowing Saddam Hussein would be a good thing.  In a world of ideologies, the logical argument for disposing Hussein and transforming the Middle East through nation-building seemed like the right course of action.  I should have known that wasn’t the reality I was going to get.  That picture was painted in colors only a shade more complex than that of two G.I.’s firing in opposite directions.

Both this game and my initial support for the war in Iraq make me worry that I’m bloodthirsty.  That somehow, I bought into the picture Robert Kagan created in his neoconservative treatise, Of Paradise and Power, that America should act because it can act.  Though worlds apart in terms of production, seriousness and even intent, Of Paradise and Power and Call of Duty share a vision of the world.  The complete ease of Call of Duty paints a similar picture, that war is easy and winnable.  That action wins out.

In the end my critique of the game is one of context exterior to the reality within the game.  This may not seem particularly fair to Call of Duty or any work of art, but it is one I feel I need to make.  Call of Duty falls into a myth of ease.  At this particular moment, with the reality of the war in Iraq and our inability to fix that which we have broken, anything perpetuating that myth of ease is unacceptable.  War just isn’t this easy.

Read the review on PopMatters

Deep into March and I’m well soaked in basketball. All seems right. I’ve recently made it my business to drag my raggedy butt over to Brooklyn’s Dodge YMCA Saturday mornings to hoop for at least an hour, something I haven’t done so regularly since, well, college. It shows in the jumpshot (and wheezing). And need I mention we are well into March Madness? It hasn’t been a particularly exciting tournament so far, but if you love basketball, several teams have put on some fine displays. Tennessee was looking silky smooth in the first round—a joy to watch, they converted fast breaks and sank jumper after jumper (and here I always thought Tennessee basketball was a girl’s sport). So in the midst of this surging love of a sport I’ve held dear for so many years, I thought I would pick up Mario Hoops 3-on-3. After all, 3-on-3 is my favorite variant of basketball. I’m not the best ballplayer, and keeping track of nine other players running around the court is a lot to ask of my little brain—five I can track. I fingered the DS packaging and thought, “Hmm, this little Mario character and his little game would seem to combine my two current obsessions, basketball and video games. Iconic game, iconic plumber.”

Read the full review on PopMatters

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Warren Buckleitner, the editor of the invaluable Children’s Technology Review. He gave a talk on toys and software and the process they go through at CTR to evaluate new products. He recommended that when you’re going to review something just lay out your own prejudices. We all have beliefs that shape the way we see the world. Those beliefs are important. He was speaking as someone with a Ph.D. in educational psychology, someone bound to have strong beliefs about the way children learn, construct mental models of the world around them, and the delicate relationship of educational software to that process. Excellent advice I thought. It’s important — you don’t want people to accuse you of hidden bias. I don’t want people saying, “Whoa there! It seems you have some hidden agenda biasing you against this wonderful piece of software that we all enjoy and exalt.” No, I want my readers to say, “Greg, young man, you are quite clearly prejudiced against this game, but you told us upfront. Well played, chap. Well played. As usual, you’re right. What would we do without you?” So I’ve decided to start this review by just laying out a core belief of mine, one that shapes the way I view the world, education, and interactive software: I believe in my heart of hearts that my brain age should be around 30 and not 64 as Brain Age currently claims.

Yes, I am upset because I suck at the game. Now, perhaps I should be mad at myself. Perhaps I should blame myself for taking over three minutes to run through 20 simple math problems. It might be possible that my ire would be more appropriately directed at myself when I can’t count the number of people entering and leaving a house. Perhaps the fact that I can only ever remember 10 words from a list of 30 after being given two minutes to commit them to memory is my bad and not Nintendo’s. Maybe if I kept at it I might be able to improve my ability to count syllables. It’s conceivable that if I had a bit more gumption, a bit more pick-myself-up-by-my-own-bootstrap dedication I might be able to train my brain to quickly recognize that the word “blue” shaded red is in fact still the word “blue”. But why would I? Because it’s a game, right? The goal of a game is to win. That would make the goal of Brain Age to whittle my age down to 20, the optimal age for your brain (according to the game, of course). And I suppose I would be okay with that. But here’s my beef: Brain Age bills itself less as a game and more as a mental exercise machine, a Stairmaster for the mind. But I’m just not convinced that I’m getting a very good workout.

Brain Age is inspired by the work of the Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima. His research studied the impact of performing simple arithmetic and reading exercises on activity in different areas of the brain. Through advanced imaging techniques he found that an activity like answering a series of simple multiplication problems stimulated activity and could even help the cognitive rehabilitation of patients suffering from dementia. Intrigued, the designers at Nintendo actively pursued Dr. Kawashima, seeing the potential for a game to simulate the cognitive exercises. And in fact it’s a pretty good fit.

Each day the game allows you to measure your brain age by quickly working through a series of exercises. These range from simple arithmetic to reading aloud. Then your performance is judged based on speed and accuracy, and — voilà! — you’ve got your brain age. Like any good “scientific” tool, Brain Age keeps track of your score over time, plotting the ups and downs on a series of charts. (Beware when and in what state you play the game. Playing after a night of heavy drinking during a bored subway ride can vault you right back into your 70s.)

Interestingly, the game actually limits your ability to play. The idea is that your brain, like the muscles in your body, needs a constant workout to keep it in shape. But after those exercises are done, Brain Age cuts you off, refusing to track your score. You can do Quick Play, but, really, Brian Age is telling you that your workout is over. Now, I’m no neuroscientist (surprise!), but it’s not at all a bad premise. The theme is accessible and makes a lot of sense. Many people have argued the importance of regular mental exercise, especially for aging adults. And like all exercise, it should not be overdone. By limiting the amount of time you play, the folks from Nintendo are looking out for your best interest — and theirs. Controlling your progress through scores and forcing you to come back the next day increases the longevity of what is actually a very thin game. With Nintendogs, Animal Crossing, and now Brain Age Nintendo has pursued domination over not only your gaming time, but over real time as well. All three games incorporate real world time into their gameplay mechanics, tying the notion of progress in the game to progress through your life. Each involves simple, mundane daily routines. In a quite brilliant inversion they are making the boring exciting. Who would ever have thought people would buy games where they pick up virtual dog poop and provide the answer to 8 x 7 over and over — and like it?

With an extremely clean interface and clearly laid out info-style graphics, Brain Age is sparse but visually appealing. With excellent handwriting recognition, the game allows you to quickly scribble numbers as you blaze through math problems. And a wonderful interface for playing Sudoku puzzles actually makes what I previously found to be an inscrutably boring exercise appealing. The game requires you to hold the DS vertically, like a book, further dissipating the feeling that you are playing a game and strengthening the formal appeal.

And it seems to be working. The game is already in its third iteration in Japan where it has been massively popular, selling millions of copies. The pseudo-scientific thematic wrapper seems to make the game very appealing to an older audience outside of the traditional gamers. A full-page ad in this month’s Wired magazine solemnly asks, “Can you use a video game to rewire your brain?” It seems to be working here in the States too. My own exhaustive and very scientific survey has found Brain Age to be spreading like wildfire: it’s the only DS game I’ve actually encountered multiple strangers playing on the subway.

And yet, there’s something about Brain Age which I find not just unsatisfying, but kind of creepy. And it’s not just that I apparently suck as bad at reciting multiplication tables now as I did in middle school. It’s that I’m being asked to simply recite multiplication tables. It seems to me the game requires activity, not engagement. It rewards memory over cognition. When you ask someone to read three pages of The Scarlet Letter and time how fast they can read it, you are rewarding speed over understanding. The reader doesn’t have to stop to consider the moral and social plight of Hester Prynne; I suppose you have increased the flow of blood to a particular area of your frontal cortex, but you haven’t actually done any heavy lifting or learned anything.

Slips like these make you realize the severe limitations and narrow focus of Brain Age. The activities are relatively amusing. I actually find much more fun in hurtling through math problems than I thought possible. But the game never progresses; it never seems to encourage me to learn and progress. If the game wanted me to learn it would tell me the answer to the math problems when I get them wrong. Instead it just flashes a big X and moves on. If the program told me the answer I would know it, I would remember it, and my score would improve. But instead, Brain Age seems to assume that I will go look up the answer somewhere else in a multiplication table. It just encourages me to get faster without caring how I do that. I guess it sees any activity as good activity.

Brain Age is certainly clever. And for being the equivalent of skill and drill exercises, it’s actually quite fun. But there’s something wrong in the idea of how this piece of software is modeling brain activity and encouraging you to work your muscles. It’s not enough to simply work out in the gym, occasionally you have to find an application for your new strength. Otherwise the whole endeavor feels pointless. Without any sense of learning or understanding, chasing that brain age of 20 seems a bit narcissistic — like lifting weights just so you get really big muscles which you can cover in oil while you pose in a Speedo for an amateur Mr. Danbury, Connecticut contest. Or at least that’s how this 64-year-old feels about you young whippersnappers.

Originally published on PopMatters

I got there early. It was March 16, 2006 and the games didn’t start until 12:15 PM, so I figured that sauntering up to my computer at 12:05 would be plenty early to get a good connection. After all, this was the middle of the workday and people really should have been, well, working. I figured the average American employee would show up at 12:10 with five minutes to spare. After all, when I surf the web at work I try to break it down into three-minute chunks. That’s about enough time to read an Op-Ed piece in the Times or peruse through several music reviews. Dally longer and I can feel the eyes around the office collectively settling on the back of my head as people wonder why I am such a slacker. I click to load a David Brooks column on the nytimes.com then quickly Ctrl-Tab away to e-mail where I stare not at my e-mail, but at the little loading circle in my Firefox browser which tells me when a tab is done downloading. I turn my head quickly from side to side; I have to make sure no one is staring at me. Then I Ctrl-Tab back to Mr. Brooks’ column and read. Then to throw off the scent of laziness, I do a little work for half-an-hour. Rinse, lather, repeat. Five hours later, I’m done reading the New York Times Op-Ed page. And I’ve probably gotten some work done in-between. Granted, I’m a tad paranoid.

But work be damned that wonderful day, March 16, 2006. That day marked the opening round of the annual NCAA Basketball Tournament. On that day each year, from noon until midnight, 16 games of basketball collectively suck the productivity out of the American workplace. It is a hallowed time; a moment of collective anxiety and cheer; two afternoons of socially acceptable web-surfing; two days when the simple ticking up of numbers and ticking down of clocks can be massively entertaining. But this last March 16 was special. This year CBS decided to take March Madness to the level of the real. No longer would those of us stuck in offices have to watch scoreboards and glance through play-by-play descriptions, now we would actually be able to watch the games live with CBS’ new March Madness on Demand web console. The site, powered by CBS Sportsline, provided live video and audio coverage of all of the NCAA games. You could chose to watch any game you wanted, with the exception of the one being played on CBS in your local television market.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one excited. When I clicked on the link at 12:05 I found myself standing, in the virtual of sense, behind 25,654 other people to get inside the arena. Damn faulty assumptions about the priorities of American workers! Now being the last person in a line of 25,654 people is pretty disheartening. In the corner of the pop-up screen a multicolored line scaling ever-upwards indicated my position. Next to the line was a small clock that counted down the seconds until the next admittance. I figured I was done for. That there was no way I would get into this virtual arena. After all, Madison Square Garden only holds 19,763 for basketball games. Ah, but you dear reader, are most likely much smarter than I. Despite the metaphor being employed, this was no brick-and-mortar arena, this was a virtual arena. Admitting in groups of around 1,000, I found myself nearing the beginning of the line after a titillating 25 minutes.

You would think the wait would have scared me off. But it didn’t. The metaphor of the line and the arena was an excellent choice. It bred excitement. You see, I work at a small video game company where the excitement for the NCAA tournament was embodied solely in me. After arriving at work and proclaiming like a kid on Christmas Day, “Oh, who’s excited for March Madness?” and then clapping giddily, I was met with quiet bemusement and blank stares. Only minutes before the games started, I began to question my own enthusiasm. After all, what’s March Madness without group frenzy? How can you be excited about your brackets when you have no one to compare with? But when I looked at that line and the number designating me 25,654th in line, the excitement came rushing back. The simple abstraction of the concept of a mob was enough to restore my frothing excitement. It bound me as part of a community in much the way entering a tournament pool does (don’t worry, I did that too). After all, sports are as much about the feeling of belonging as they are about the game. Quite amazingly from the simple graphic and a slowly ticking counter I was able to extrapolate that sense of belonging.

Finally I reached the front of the line and I was ushered inside. CBS’ web console opened with possibility. Any game was mine for watching. With ESPN open in another window, I quickly scanned the scores to find a close game. A few seconds of buffering and the Alabama-Marquette match came flickering to life. As I settled in to watch, I quickly forgot my three-minute web-surfing rule. I found myself simply watching the game. I also found myself strangely disinterested. I was just watching a basketball game — something I’d done just the weekend before, at home, on a TV, with beer. It turns out that once the video rolled, something was lost. The video made real something that worked better as an abstraction. Normally, during the first two days of past NCAA tournaments, I and my friends would simply watch numbers tick up on a screen. Logging into ESPN, you would watch the seconds count haltingly down while the score slowly, so frustratingly slowly, counted up. And, you know what? I think this was actually more fun. You checked in on the games occasionally to see the score and imagined the action in your head. The excitement of the NCAA tournament was background filler for your mind while you worked for two days. You’d go to a meeting; come back; check the scores. Crap Alabama’s losing and I have them going to the Sweet Sixteen. Write some e-mail. Oops, still losing. Go to another meeting. It gelled perfectly with the point-in-time nature of surfing the Internet at work. You look for a moment, absorb a fact, and then go back to work. But video is too linear for web-surfing. Video demands to be watched. It is resolutely not point-in-time. I quickly found myself unable to do anything. I watched the game in one window while trying to do work in another.

Soon the whole fiction of the crowd had melted away and I was painfully aware that this wasn’t an arena, but straight up television. The announcers would praise a play, and I would find myself staring frantically at the game window hoping to catch a glimpse of “a monstrous jam!” But inevitably the game had moved on. It turns out that regular sports announcing does not work with the partial attention of web-surfing. Announcers must fill airtime, so they must continuously banter and describe each play. This constant stream of video and talk disserves what is so exciting about March Madness. What’s so exciting is that you don’t actually have to watch the whole game. You only watch the exciting parts. It’s a matter of probability really. If you put 16 games on in the space of eight hours; and if you pre-select those games so that only the best teams in the country play; and if you then seed them so a number of the games are evenly matched; well then, some of them are bound to be close. And if you show four games at a time, then it’s likely that at least one of those games will be decided in the last two minutes. Then all you have to do is broadcast whichever game is the closest in the last two minutes. This means that you, as the viewer, get to watch the most exciting part of the most exciting game. So given these odds, it’s a pretty good chance that there will be something interesting on at any given time. You are statistically bound to see some last-second, game-changing shots. This is why I only watch the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament. After that, you have to start watching the whole game. And that’s just boring. I can’t remember the last time I watched the actual NCAA final.

Now this minute-to-minute excitement would seem to work wonderfully well as video on the Internet. But it doesn’t. The console allowed you to pick one game. It would show you this game until you decided to watch a different one. But frankly, I don’t want to do all that work. I’m not that interested in any one game. I only care about the good parts and the scores. If there is a last-second shot to win the game, I want to see that. I don’t want to see the beginning of the second half. Beyond that I just want to see scores that tell me how close my picks are to making it to the next round. This is a case of classic point-in-time web-surfing attention versus continuous linear TV watching attention.

What CBS needs to do before next year is find a way to integrate video into point-in-time attention. I thought I wanted to watch every game, but it turns out what I wanted was a list of scores that occasionally open up and show me when there is an interesting play. They shouldn’t bother with broadcasting every game and letting you pick them. If someone cares that much, let them go to a sports bar. What CBS should do instead is keep that concept of the crowd, constantly reminding me how many people are logged on and enjoying this experience. Then they should simply list the scores and push at me highlights of the last two minutes of every game. That way I can check the scores, but only have to watch something every forty minutes, as games are ending. That sounds like something that would fit into my workday. It would dovetail perfectly between the afternoon production meeting and the three o’clock brainstorming session.

When I accidentally closed the March Madness on Demand window, I found myself actually a bit relieved. I didn’t have to watch a game anymore. A yoke was lifted and I felt liberated. I once again felt free to tune in when I desired to find out exactly the information I was interested in, which it turns out is simply the score. I realized I wasn’t missing anything. After all, last-second shots only exist for two reasons: changing the score and highlight reels.

Originally published on PopMatters.com.

In 1979, author Kit Williams buried a golden hare encrusted with jewels somewhere in the British Isles. Six weeks later he released the book Masquerade which contained fifteen beautiful and elaborately detailed paintings loosely relating the story of Jack Hare. In the book, Jack attempts to carry a treasure from the Moon to the object of her affection, the Sun. Somewhere along the way Jack Hare loses the treasure, leaving the reader to decipher the paintings and find the location of the lost treasure. Upon release of the book, Williams announced that whoever could solve the string of absurdly difficult puzzles in the book would glean the location of the bejeweled hare. This tipped off a fury of treasure hunters, scouring England, attacking public and private property with shovels. Unfortunately named locales like Haresfield Beacon fell victim to so many misguided searchers that eventually officials had to post signs stating that the golden hare was not buried on the premises. It wasn’t until several years later in 1982 that someone came forward to claim the hare with the correct answer (and it turns out he cheated — the victor came to the answer by way of Ken Williams’ ex-girlfriend). Ah the good old days of individual effort. It must have been hard work playing games and discovering Easter Eggs before the Internet made us all individual neurons connected into one gigantic, pulsing, puzzle-solving brain. In the days of the Internet forum, I imagine the three-year Masquerade quest would have lasted all of two days. No manmade puzzle seems too hard or dense to crack when you have thousands of people all taking whacks at it and sharing their theories in a threaded forum.

The forum and walkthrough must seem both a boon and a curse to game developers. It allows level designers to fall into slapdash, sloppy habits — the answer to a puzzle/level needn’t be built into the logic of a level because once it hits market enough obsessive youngsters will bang away at every possibility until they smack down on the right pixel and rush to the Internet to reveal the answer. But at the same time no puzzle will be hard enough to truly slow down a player. Personally, I give a puzzle two or three cracks and then head straight to Google. My flight to answer is only mitigated with portable titles where I have to wait until I get home to “solve” a level. Sometimes it seems developers have come to count on the forums as a part of the actual game playing process. Tecmo’s new title for the PSP, Tokobot, exhibits this tension by offering genuinely interesting play and some rather inscrutable moments which seem to beg for use of that ultimate power-up, Google.

Read the full review of Tokobot on PopMatters.com

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