Half-cocked and Ready to Go.

From a "value" perspective, Wet doesn't have all that much to offer. It's a pretty straightforward, 5-hour shooter with some challenge modes, collectibles, and extras to keep you busy. Of course, not every game has to have to the Wal-mart seal of approval.

Even if it's short, if a game can provide the player with a quality experience, then there's not much of a need for the game to validate itself as a "value". Unfortunately, while Wet might offer the occasional thrill, the game manages to make its initially flamboyant action into something tedious. It's certainly stylish, but its influences don't elevate it above its problems.

Its most obvious inspiration are 70's grindhouse movies, an influence the game wears on its sleeve. The heroine, Rubi Malone, is a no-nonsense bad-ass who's never shy about turning a phrase. The plot is equally contrived, with missing suitcases, ham-handed pacing, outlandish scenarios, and cheesy one-liners. Your death is signaled by movie reels, there's lots of film grain, and there are even occasional retro commercials.

But while it manages to capture the feel of those low-budget B movies, it does so only superficially. It's so straightforward in execution that it leaves little room for interpretation. While most grindhouse movies were violent displays of blood and exploitation flicks, some of them held deeper symbolism and meaning. Wet's ending does little to provoke discussion, whether it be a reaction or speculation.

An homage with no heart can be forgiven, however, especially in an interactive medium, if the game plays well. For the first couple of hours, Wet's gameplay feels fresh and crazy enough to be really enjoyable. You're jumping, swinging, sliding in slow-motion, shooting dudes with dual-revolvers, and ripping them apart with your sword. All of these things feel good enough, with some small caveats (slides are just a tad too long, it sometimes feels like you're not hitting enemies when you're aiming right at them). The arenas are basically playgrounds to be creative in the ways you kill. You're graded and given points, which provides you with an incentive do all of these things well.

The problem comes when you're 5 hours in and that's all you've been doing. Doing the same thing over and over again isn't the problem, it's that what you're doing just isn't engaging enough to keep you interested for as long as you're playing it. You also begin to see how restricted you are; jumping, swinging, and sliding while shooting in slow motion is about all you'll be rewarded for. Exploring the areas between arenas shows that you really don't have anything else to do, and it's disappointing to know that you don't have many options, whether in shootouts or overall.

The game tries its hand at variety with some Quick-time events, time-trials, and "Rage" stages in which everything is red and the point is to get as big a kill streak as possible before reaching the end. In all honesty, the time trials were, for me, the times at which I felt the game was living up to its full potential. Aiming for the gold medal requires that you do everything in a given course just right, and the levels were designed in such a way that I felt that I could do just that if I tried it enough times. Most everything else felt thrown in. Aside from an increase in strength, there isn't much to the Rage sequences aside from high-contrast colors, and the Quick-Time events felt forced. The short platforming sections also feel forced and pointless.

Even as you're making your way through the story mode, there just isn't much there. You'll watch a cutscene, make your way through a linear path, enter an arena (which is where most of the firefights take place). Aside from looking for some clanging monkey toys (which I'll admit are charming) for achievements or trophies, you won't revisit areas you've cleared of enemies.

Games don't have to be values to be good, but if they're not values what they do provide does have to be good. Wet is interesting at the outset, but its novelty wears thin early on. Just like the movies that inspire it, Wet doesn't justify paying full price; it's better off rented or discounted.

Pure, Gorgeous Action

Games often try to be an encompassing medium. So many titles attempt to have as much for the player to do as possible, with vehicle sequences, dialogue trees and time-wasting fetch quests. Variety can be wonderful thing, but when the whole is only connected parts, it dilutes whatever product was there to begin with. In this sense, Muramasa: The Demon Blade is the most "pure" game I have played in a long while.

To say the game is cohesive isn't entirely true; It's just simple. Its feature set is one thing that does multiple things. Combat is the center of the game, and everything else is built around it. Everything that is not fighting is there to help you fight better or to offer a better fighting experience.

The combat itself feels like a cross between a 3D action game (think Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry) and a 2D fighting game (specifically Capcom's VS. Series). You come across encounters while running through a map to get your next destination, and then, well, it's on. The controls are relatively simple, but the one thing I thought was odd at first was jumping with up on the analog stick instead of with a button. Two hours in, however, it felt completely natural, and I understood Vanillaware's decisicion: when the combat in a game is this fast, pressing an extra button is far too slow.

Combat is very much button-mashy. There were very few times were pressing the A button was to my disadvantage. What gives the combat its feel, and its depth, is the immediate amount of control you have over your character. If the enemy you have caught in an air combo dies, you can immediately point the control stick down mid-combo and stab the enemy below you. If you're surrounded, you can switch directions effectively enough to keep both sides of enemies at bay.

The part where it starts to feel like a fighting game is in the impact of hits. Striking enemies produces the same sort of slow-down that you'd get from landing a hit in a fighting game, and to someone who's played their share of them, it feels good. Blocking and attacking are assigned to the same button, which at first sounds confusing, but what makes this simple is that they're both the same exact action; if an enemy throws a projectile at you during a combo, you'll automatically block it with that attack.

This may sound like it makes the game too easy, but there are many things that make add a certain amount of strategy to the button mashing: Every time you block an attack you're sword's health meter decreases, and when that runs out, the sword breaks (which means it does half damage and you can't block with it). To counteract this, you must constantly switch between the three swords you can equip, which vary in special attacks and in weight (long swords usually do more damage but are slower, etc.).

Also, if you find the game too easy, you can always change the difficulty whenever you're not in combat, but be aware that Shura (Hard) is akin to going from Medium to Expert in Guitar Hero, with Shigurui (Perfect) mode unlocked if you can manage to beat hard mode. In Shura, you'll have step your strategic game up a couple of notches to survive, to say nothing of Shigurui.

When you're not fighting regular enemies, you'll engage a Metroid-style back-and-forth trek across beautifully drawn landscapes. You'll begin to see some of the cracks in animations (especially in story sequences) that begin to key you in as to how Vanillaware was able to do something like this on the Wii, but it doesn't change the fact that the game is constant eye-candy. The characters, snow-capped mountains, rainy forests, and Japanese battlefields are all gorgeous enough to stop and take a look at on the way to the next boss.

You can wander through these areas as much as you like, but the game keeps you on the straight-and-narrow if you're easily lost. You'll have a point on the map you'll need to get to (there's a flag to point you in the right direction), you'll fight a boss, get a barrier-breaking sword, then break that barrier and move on the next boss. You're free to find secret items (and bosses), but you won't have much to do otherwise.

As to what else you could be doing, there are some RPG-lite elements to make use of. Shops are strewn about the maps, and you can purchase healing items, food, and items that heal a sword's health and teleport you to save points. You level up as you fight enemies, but I found that there wasn't that much of a need to grind. Levels come quickly, and I reached level 60 with both characters in just 18 hours, which is about as long as it took me to play through the game the first time through.

You'll be fine if you just play through the game once, but the game does reward multiple play-throughs. Both of your characters have interesting enough stories that you'll want to back through them to unlock their second and third endings. The story sequences are disjointed and sterile, but the plot is nonetheless intriguing. You'll also have access to more swords after you beat the game, as well as the ability to fight one character's bosses with the other. If most of this seems pointless to you, though, I woudn't bother with the end-game extras.

Muramasa doesn't need any of the "It's on the Wii" qualifiers. The game would look great on any platform, it's able to keep the one thing it tries to do (combat) entertaining for as long as it needs to, and it doesn't wear out its welcome with extra padding or features.The Wii may not as many "AAA" titles as the competition, but this is definitely one of them.

Professor Layton and the Improved Sequel.

The Professor Layton series often reminds me of the educational TV shows that are the current bread-and-butter of morning television; They're both thinly veiled attempts to string together puzzles with a story. But where the early morning cartoons are aimed at children, the Layton series is aimed at everyone.

What's impressive about the series, though, and especially in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, is that while the aspects of game and story are almost completely separate, it manages to tie both of them together into an at least somewhat cohesive whole. It's both a collection of brainteasers and a point-and-click adventure game without being bad at either one.

There isn't a lot to say about the "game" part of Diabolical Box, but there's something to be said about its meta-game . Whenever anything needs solving, the game has you solve one of 138 puzzles (with 15 more puzzles outside the main adventure mode), which are as varied in both style and difficulty as you'd expect. Everything from riddles to sliding puzzles to math questions is rated in Picarats (the higher the number the harder the puzzle), which serves as both point system (you unlock extras by having X number of Picarats), and as a way to guide your thinking.

It's subtle, but in both a puzzle's Picarat score and in the wording of the puzzle itself lie potential tricks themselves. This is obvious in riddles, of course, but there are those times when I've over thought a puzzle simply because of its high Picarat score. I'd already come up with the right answer, but I dismissed it because I thought it was too simple for a puzzle that was supposed to be hard.

On the other hand, because there are so many times in which the simplest answer is the right one, you can find yourself thinking simple on the puzzles that actually do require you to think your answer through. It's a dynamic that presents itself the entire game, and it encourages you to make sure have the right answer before tapping submit (wrong answers cause you to lose Picarats, which can only be regained by turning off the DS).

Another facet of the game I found myself thinking about often was the game's potential for multiplayer. My pride took a hit every time I asked someone for help, sure, but having an entire room of people attempting to solve a riddle turned out to be much more fun than struggling through it on my own. If you'd rather like to solve all the puzzles yourself, though, know that you can replay any puzzle, which means you can have a group try to solve it while you dangle the answer over their head.

And with the puzzles being the entire point of the game, you wouldn't expect there to much in the way of story, but it's arguably half the game. The sections between puzzles skillfully emulate old adventure games, albeit with more clear borders (want to get information? Solve this riddle). The surprising thing is that the story provides motivation for solving puzzles as well as a context.

The plot's simplicity is reminiscent of a children's movie, though it's more evocative of Miyazaki than Disney. It also provides more variation than last year's Curious Village. In Diabolical Box, you're traveling to different cities by train rather than explore one town.

The pacing is faster as well, which lead to some 4-5 hour sessions on my end. It does a good enough job at getting you through frustrating puzzles. There's also a higher attention to production values, with more cutscenes and spoken dialogue than in Curious Village. When all was said and done, I felt adequately satisfied during the last cutscene, even if it didn't mean I was done with the game yet.

The puzzles live up to expectations of the series, the story has as much mysticism and deducing as you'd expect, and it's a great multiplayer experience (albeit "Local"). If you're a fan of teasing your brain (as well as teasing the brains of others), occasional frustration, and British accents, this is the best the DS has to offer you, and the best alternative parents have to watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse again.

Narratives, "Narratives", and Playing to our Strengths.

Games are not novels, and the ways in which they harbor novelistic aspirations are invariably the least interesting thing about them. You can judge games by the criteria designed to evaluate novels: Are the characters believable? Is the dialogue complex? But inevitably, the games will come up wanting. Games are good at novelistic storytelling the way Michael Jordan was good at playing baseball. Both could probably make a living at it, but their world-class talents lie elsewhere.

- Steven Johnson

While Steven Johnson champions the cognitive merits of video games in his book Everything Bad Is Good For You, he makes clear his assertion of their storytelling abilities: they suck. He doesn't say that a lack of narrative capabilities impedes them, though; He simply asserts that telling stories just isn't their thing.

Now, I don't know if Steven Johnson is aware of the "Games as art" crowd, but most of them would disagree. To them, games have the largest potential for storytelling of any medium, in no small part because of their interactive nature. You aren't an observer of the events on-screen; you're their catalyst.

And because of the player's ability to influence the events and environments and in turn determine the outcome of the story (theoretically speaking, of course, because anyone who's played games for a while will know that most of the time, the player is simply triggering a series of linear events), the sense of immersion this can create is unmatched by the other "passive" mediums.

As I see it, this view is somewhat skewed. While those sentiments are most certainly true, we tend to re-hash our most convincing arguments (Braid, Bioshock, Portal, etc.) as the pinnacle of our medium as an art form. Whether it be the writing, the layered narrative, or the atmosphere that these games so plentifully provide, those games always seem to be at the head of the discussion whenever someone dares to deny that our favorite pastime isn't culturally relevant. We as the advocates of games use these games because they're the ones that are the most likely to convince naysayers to our side.

And I believe this isn't doing us any favors.

Or rather, that this strand of argument is counter intuitive to what our cause is (or should be). By pushing the games that we believe are art because of their narrative capabilities, we're in effect arguing that storytelling is the only qualifier of art. Because games like Braid, Portal, and Bioshock all have a focus on storytelling, when we push them as the pinnacle of our medium, we're doing a disservice to the games that don't focus on story aspects. And if the point of games as an art form is supposed be to tell a story, we're sending the message that games are just trying to be a new form of novels or movies; a vehicle to drive emotion through story. If this is the point of games, we're certainly not doing all that well.

Games certainly do have that potential to tell stories in thoughtful and meaningful ways, but a game doesn't have to pull us in with its awe-inspiring narrative to be "culturally relevant", and for the most part, history has proven this to be true; The games that break through to the mainstream are usually the ones that the most people play (obviously), and the games that the most people play just happen to be the ones that are the most fun.

Halo, Call of Duty 4, Gears of War, and Madden are all popular with the "Hardcore" players because of their replay value and because their intense multiplayer. Likewise, The Wii (game) brand and its ilk are popular because of their ease of use, lasting value, and family-centric/self-betterment focus.

And that isn't to say that games should just abandon narrative aspirations; I've definitely had my share of games that I've completed simply to see the story through. The fact of the matter is, though, that games are narratively deficient by nature. Most of the time, the story in a game serves as backdrop for your actions, context that allows the player to more easily suspend their disbelief.

This is because the focus of most games is are the actions themselves. This is where games, to me, are an art form; this what Johnson would refer to as their "basketball". What captivates the player is the thought process they engage in while playing the game, as well as the feeling of tangible reward and progress for actions and the feeling of immersion.

In a game like Call of Duty, for example, the player can have any number of concepts to juggle, from direct actions (looking for and aiming at enemies) to more strategic and abstract decisions (when and where they should launch their air-strike). These thought processes are complemented by the reward of getting a 7 kill streak, and that they feel like they're a skilled soldier while doing it.

This is why most companies only bother with story in a game to the extent of it providing a convincing framework for what the player is doing in-game. The ones that are attempting to tell meaningful stories through this interactivity are laudable because better frameworks provide a greater sense of connection to a player's actions, but the reason that that can hard to do is because the interactive format doesn't leave much room for thought out exposition or the intricacies of various characters.

Metal Gear Solid 4 had mixed reactions to its elements of cinematic storytelling. The long, explanatory cutscenes that it used to get across much of the game's story seemed at odds with its revamped and improved gameplay. And for the most part, times when game attempt to be movies can detach the player from the game because what they're looking to do in a game is interact, not observe. The characters become more intricate, and the plot can diverge into areas where certain aspects can be expanded on, but it can be easy to bore those who are disinterested.

When games intertwine the cinematic aspects of their games with the gameplay (Bioshock, Half-Life), they have the potential to more effectively immerse the player while allowing them to interact, but do so at the expense of the depth that multiple perspectives and angles can provide.

Writers for games also have to deal with being second string players. If a particular section of a game has to be cut or changed, the story must follow. Starcraft 2 lead designer Dustin Browder mentions that Blizzard is not shy about changing the lore to fit the needs of the balance of gameplay.

In Movies and Books, sections are cut only when they don't fit in with the rest of the story or if they're found unnecessary; in games, important parts of the story can be cut because they're not fit for interactivity (perhaps why there are so many novels based on games these days), or because that part of the game was just left out. This is a big part of what hinders games' ability to tell the powerful stories that Movies and Books can tell.

So when we present games that have compelling stories in arguments about the artistic value of games, it's not surprising that naysayers scoff at our attempts to compel emotionally. It is indeed possible for a game to illicit strong emotional reactions from the player, as anyone who's played Passage will point out, but presenting that example seems to concede to their point: Games must become less like games and more "interactive art" to be culturally relevant.

Instead, I suggest that we fearlessly flaunt the games with the most captivating gameplay rather than the most compelling story. Sure, the writing in Gears of War will never win any sort of awards (unless they're dubious), but it has received awards for its refined and strategic gameplay. This is how games will makes themselves relevant; by mastering their own domains, not by mimicking the traits of others.