An infrared transceiver at the back of the device uses science and magic to silently detect the connection, which the 3DS makes no mention of until Resident Evil: Revelations loads and acknowledges the situation by offering to enable control style-D. As expected, this control option allows players to tackle Revelations as if they were using the dual analog controls offered by the PS3 and/or Xbox 360.

Guiding Jill through the derelict cruise ship with the Circle Pad Pro offered two observations.

The first is that the Circle Pad Pro makes the first-person option of moving with the gun drawn within Revelations more noticeable. While that mode can be used in the standard controls with style-C, it would be easy to miss it entirely if you just started the game without digging into the matter more. With the Circle Pad Pro, pressing the left trigger throws you into FPS mode, making the option much more pronounced. Style-D also places the weapons at the ready, with the right trigger firing guns, and the right shoulder button activating the secondary weapon.

This really can’t be called a better way to play, simply a different way. But while bouncing around more in FPS mode as a result, my second observation was that the added heft of the circle pad offers my hands a better means of grasping the 3DS for long periods without feeling my hands cramp. However, I’m not going to tell you that using the 3DS has been morphing my hands into claws, which I might often say about the PSP. The Circle Pad simply offers a more comfortable means for me to hold the device during lengthier gaming sessions.

Whether or not you need the Circle Pad Pro is one of those personal questions I can’t answer for you – it’s a bit like recommending a pair of pants, one size isn’t going to fit all here. I can only say that handling one made it unlikely that I’d go without one, which I’d also have said about the Classic Controller Pro for the Wii. So if you don’t want to buy one, make sure your hands never come into contact with it.

If you’ve been longing for dual-analog controls, and are aware that only games made to support the device will work with it, the Circle Pad Pro will be exclusively sold through EB Games / GameStop beginning on February 7th for $19.99.

Nintendo’s booklet says the battery you insert into the Circle Pad Pro is good for 480 hours – I’m going to have to take their word on that at the moment.

Today the game hit Xbox LIVE Arcade for 800 Microsoft Points, and will appear on the PlayStation Network next week for $9.99 – or free to PlayStation Plus subscribers on that platform. Like last year’s release of X-Men Arcade, The Simpsons Arcade game was what I often longed for on home consoles, rather than the infuriating adventure games we got instead.

The Simpsons allows up to four players to join the game locally or online, as well as offering both the North American and Japanese versions of the ROM. This port of the arcade classic also lightly stirs the play-mode options, offering a setting that challenges players to complete the game with a single life – and I salute anyone who can accomplish such a feat.

The Simpsons is as mercilessly brutal at devouring your lunch money as any of Konami’s old arcade creations, perhaps the most hungry of them all. However, since the game provides a free-play mode that ensures anyone can see the ending, we don’t really need to get hung up on the difficulty here.

What deserves a few more words is how visually interesting the game is, proving equally important historically, along with providing a delightful nostalgia trip that has me thinking back to the first time I saw the four-player cabinet back in an era when arcades still existed in abundance.

Much like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, unique attacks, subtle character animations, and background action brings a richer sense of life to the title. But the level of detail within The Simpsons represents a real peak in creating a game as animated as the source material.

Supporting characters continually appear with health regenerating food and temporary weapons, and the game exploits any chance to squeeze out references to the show while traveling from the streets of Springfield to the Nuclear Plant, including an appearance by Matt Groening’s signature rabbit. But the game also takes interesting liberties, creating a dream sequence where players fight curious donut enemies or a graveyard full of zombies, neither of which feel out of place within the eight stage trip.

There’s also an immense spirit of curiosity, providing players with a myriad of objects that can be picked-up and hurled at enemies – from soda cans to the family dog. The end of two different stages even feature a mini-game where players compete for points by mashing the buttons repeatedly to either fill a balloon with air or slap their own character’s face to wake them up.

It’s an expectedly short trip that asks you to bash on bosses like all Konami beat ‘em-ups of course, but as much as I prefer the X-Men and TMNT licenses, this just might be the more interesting dose of nostalgia from that era for all the extra trouble the game goes to in creating curious bits of interaction in both the background and foreground – whether you’re shaking a tree for apples or getting hit by a swinging door from a storefront.

If you have no memories of the arcades and/or have never found other means to sample the title, it would be easy to imagine that the game simply pasted The Simpsons franchise over an existing framework, and that isn’t entirely a false assumption. But that framework provides the foundation for a game that devours the source material and emerges with an experience still worth revisiting, even after all these years. And despite what the screenshots suggest, you can play the game without tacky borders.

Within the videogame medium, ghosts have an equally dickish reputation, from the boards of Pac-Man to the haunted houses of Super Mario Bros. But this weekend I had a chance to catch up with perhaps the worst yet via The Hidden, which released for the 3DS back in November.

The augmented reality game asks players to walk around areas in the real world while the 3DS camera is used to layer blob-like phantoms on the screen – the game seems hesitant to call these creatures ghosts, but they fit the ghostly bill. The player’s task is to scan and destroy these creatures, which will have you spinning around as if grabbed by a seizure as these ghosts quickly twitch out of your field of vision while throwing some form of ectoplasm excrement at you. The player must somehow meet the challenge of calmly readjusting their perspective to keep these critters on screen without throwing the 3DS into the nearest ditch.

The game is hilariously terrible, perhaps the champion of such pursuits on the handheld to date – one of those interesting ideas that has no room to evolve beyond the “hey isn’t this neat for five minutes” factor.

The real long-term humor stems from the game stressing players be mindful of their surroundings, but at the same time making it necessary to visit new Wi-Fi areas to discover more ghosts and progress the game. The Hidden absolutely encourages players to find new destinations in which to play, and thereby look like a complete ass in public, which is just a little bit wonderful despite the awful act of playing the game.

If you still owe any of your frenemy’s an xmas gift, this might just be the ticket.

Clutching the 3DS and lurching forward through the ship is a very intimate experience, bringing back unnerving sensations and a slower pace of traditional horror the mainline series has largely moved away from in the pursuit of high-grade action. Entering a dining hall where food is rotting on tables and a strange vapor hugs the floor finds me several shades hesitant about the prospect of moving forward any further, and it’s rather terrific being gripped by that feeling of apprehension again.

The demo offers a very short taste, allowing space for players to dispatch a few monstrous biohazards of varying size and stamina before reuniting Jill with her partner and triggering the ending cinematic cliffhanger that leaves us all waiting for the game’s release on February 7th. For some reason that escapes me, Capcom has limited the number of times you can load the demo to thirty. Dying doesn’t count toward that count if you don’t exit back to the home screen, which is good, because despite the low enemy count I died quite a few times along the way.

Thankfully, my repeated deaths owed no blame to the controls, which work rather spectacularly with a single analog pad – we’ll have to wait a little longer to see what difference two can make. But in the meantime, Capcom’s solution should serve you well – pushing forward or backward on the analog pad to move through the ship and pressing the same pad on an angle to readjust your perspective.

On the chance you haven’t previously read about the game, Revelations still abides by the stop and aim approach to weapon use the series is known for. Aside from some initial hesitation, I found the single analog movement very functional, and didn’t catch myself moaning the absence of a second pad just yet.

Revelations offers quick and convenient access through the controls, using the d-pad to switch weapons and face buttons to use secondary weapons like the knife or grenades as well as life saving herbs. The touchpad allows access to inventory management, as well as the supply scanner picked up along the way, which allows players to search the area for hidden supplies.

The difficulty came purely from claustrophobic rooms, where three enemies within a tight space required quick thinking, in so much as you need to toss a grenade and lay down some shotgun shells before said biohazards get the jump on you – and even then you can rapidly tap Y to try for a second chance at survival should one of them pin Jill down.

If you’ve ever been a fan of the earlier entries in the series, it’s definitely worth booking some passage with Revelation’s demo. The atmosphere alone justifies checking it out while we wait to see how the full release comes together in February.

The demo sets up the premise of the sequel and offers little else in the way of narrative—it provides a capable teaser, and then moves directly along to the matter of vicious tentacle murder.

As expected, the quick, punchy shooting is several steps above the strange, floaty aiming of Starbreeze’s original, and the addition of a couple of more modern FPS features (such as sprinting and aiming down the sights) makes the proceedings a little more comfortable and combat more flexible.

The real question, though, was always with regards to the Darkness powers and their implementation—and I can say that what’s found here works.

Though quad-wielding, in theory, originates with The Darkness, “quad” didn’t really factor into it. There were four arms, but they weren’t particularly controllable; two were merely an expression for one of four selectable powers at a time, and though Jackie could carry two guns at once, it was always two of a kind.

The Darkness II takes a more evolved approach; though the powers available in the demo are limited, Jackie possesses his mainstay abilities—a demon arm for grabbing, a demon arm for slashing, and the option to mix and match dual wielded firearms for a total of four core killing options that are available at the touch of a button. The control scheme is surprisingly intuitive and the four powers are easy to coordinate, such that within moments I was already slashing enemies into the air and impaling them with hurled metal piping before they hit the ground.

Needless to say, between using car doors as shields and snatching enemies directly out of the air to toss at other enemies, the demo alone already provides more involved, engaging murder methods than the original title—and that’s before even touching the elaborate skill tree.

Meanwhile, the shift in visual style has resulted in a bright, colourful world that manages the comic book aesthetic with greater success than some of its contemporaries, though I immediately missed the blackened environments that would illuminate with the pulsing gold of the Darkness’ night vision, and the permeating noir that characterized the original game.

The light and dark mechanic loses some of its appeal as punching out lights no longer truly darkens the environment, subtracting notably from the atmosphere. It was always grimly satisfying to move through a hall, smashing lights, making the world ominously darker along the way, and I wonder about the loss of such fine touches in the final product.

I need no longer fear that The Darkness II will fail on the merits of its gameplay; indeed, it may be on track to succeed the original in that regard. With respect to what truly made The Darkness special, though, I cannot say. I don’t know if that sense of humanity, of dark intimacy and hopelessness is something that Digital Extremes has captured—though I am now fully primed to rip, tear, and slash my way toward finally answering that question.

*The Darkness 2 demo is currently available for Xbox LIVE Gold members. Xbox LIVE Silver members, PlayStation Network users and Steam enthusiasts will have access to the demo on January 24th.

While I’m not alone in losing a long-running connection to the franchise in recent years, the desire to renew a bond with a series that dominates so many of my earliest gaming memories has been boiling, peaked by the release of a demo for the upcoming sequel to Final Fantasy XIII that is now available on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Unfortunately, my best attempts have been dashed this week, because after playing through the demo twice now, I’ve never felt so completely lost, as if that short taste of XIII-2 somehow verifies that I actually have no idea how to play a videogame and have deceived you all for years somehow. Or perhaps that Square-Enix is pioneering some future for the RPG that leaves me in the backwoods talking to myself about how things used to be.

The demo drops you into a very dry town filled with dreary characters dealing with a very large nuisance, offering a chance to jog around fighting smaller monsters and even stumbling across a side-quest opportunity. There’s a shortage of narrative justification and an emphasis on simply jumping into the fray, gaining defeated monsters as allies that can be added to your party, opening up further possibilities of fusing monsters together like a mad Shin Megami scientist.

The battle system itself still creates a chaotic space where Paradigm Shifts switch between auto-battle inclined strategies, all while I pine for something I can take more measured time with like the RPG luddite I seem to be.

And I could go on chewing on that bone, or I could put the call out to you fine Sugarfiends to go forth and play this demo, and then return and tell me something about it and why it may or may not be the most important creation since sliced Moogle-bread – which is delicious with strawberry jam by the way. Since that seems like the better option, I’ll add that I’d really appreciate it if you would check it out over the weekend, assuming you haven’t already, and offer some opinions of your own in the comments.

Not only can you potentially help me understand Final Fantasy again, but you can also save this post from appearing rather lame should no one chime in.

Ostensibly, Asura’s Wrath is a beat ‘em up—except, I think I maybe beat up three guys in the course of the demo, for a total of perhaps ninety seconds of gameplay.

The demo chiefly consists of cut-scenes and quick-time events; it plays like an interactive episode of Dragonball Z, where following the prompts progresses the story, chiefly by causing Asura to get angry and hit things harder.

Interspersed were a few brief gameplay interludes, where I actually had some limited freedom to move Asura and do what I would typically describe as “playing the game.”

These sequences involved A) running and blasting things, or B) running and punching things. In the latter section, I fought what would, in any other game, be called a boss battle—but strangely, even this brawl felt suspiciously as if it were on rails. Not that it was, not truly, but there was a pattern, there were prompts—and eventually, I understood that the game was trying to make me play out a cinematic with my own two hands. If the boss knocked me back, I could tap quickly and recover—if I advanced perfectly through his assault, I could attack. If I was exactly skilled enough, I would use all the right moves and the battle would simply look like a cut-scene.

It would look like a good one, too. The aesthetic of Asura’s Wrath is, in a word, brilliant. I’ve never seen a videogame look like this—like a painting come to life. What’s accomplished here is what so many games struggle endlessly with and never achieve; a true visual dynamism where the nature of the image can change, like a brush stroke, becoming smooth and calming or stressed and furious. The visuals alone demand attention, insisting the game be played.

If there is a game, that is. At the end of the demo, a title screen thanked me for playing, and I sat there, wondering: had I played? I had mashed some buttons, sure—but whether there’s a game here? Whether this is a videogame? I really don’t know.

I do want to find out.

If you don’t find some mix of humor and awe in that bold new label, stepping into Asura’s heavy shoes may require checking a certain amount of reason at the door – this demo provides access to two separate chapters that are both heavy on chaos and light on narrative explanation. And as much as I favor firm narrative ground, there’s an abstract sense of sense to appreciate all the same here in addition to the ludicrous lengths the game goes to in order to tickle your “hey ain’t that cool” bone.

Both sample chapters also present breaks with title cards, as if I were actually watching an anime series on television – color me intrigued as to how that might play out further in the presentation.

As for the mix of gameplay offered – and it is mixed – there’s a definite sense of two streams converging into one enthusiastic hyper-thread attempting to build on existing real estate. That’s my way of suggesting that whilst playing, one certainly feels the Platinum Games’ philosophy of ever increasing moments of insanely impossible but irrefutably amazing feats, such as flinging a God into space only to have him return larger than the planet you just tossed his ass off of, or being stabbed by an extending sword that pushes you off one planet and into space only to then push you through the core of an entirely new planet. These things happen in Asura’s Wrath, presenting a new benchmark for ridiculous over-the-top action that I want to lamely label anime-approved-cool or some such nonsense.

But there’s also a bit of Ninja Blade’s determination to make something more useful of those pesky quick-time button prompts, which Asura’s Wrath also has plenty of – many of them attempting to draw a connection between cinematic styled sequences and your existence as a player versus a spectator, adding some ground by having you push the analog sticks to make Asura literally stand his ground during an attack for instance. There are also moments where you attempt to press buttons at the right time, mash buttons, and curse while rotating an analog stick in a fashion that seems to fly in the face of how normal humanoids hold controllers.

There are times when the experience is more traditional, dodging bullets from an overhead ship and getting in front of missiles for a chance to throw them back comes to mind. Boss encounters also present familiar patterns for dodging, with a bit of button mashing attached at the confrontation mark. But the rhythm is constantly shifting here, always looking for the next new plateau to separate the current action from a previous one.

The much shorter appraisal is that Asura is a God who spends a great deal of time being pummeled by other Gods until reaching his Hulk factor and filling the screen with explosive rage. How could you not want to break from listening to me and go check that out for yourself?

Oh hey and if you do, be sure to swing back around and let me know what you think.

Returning to Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Kinect-enabled title did offer me the chance to once again glide along a rail through a cosmic ocean though, cleansing red points of infection from particle whales moving along the same tide before eventually vanishing on the horizon that gives birth to a fiery phoenix. My right hand grabbed multiple targets before a flip of the wrist fired locked-on shots. The left hand fired a repeating laser stream into the wings of the bird, producing a sound that left me feeling as if I were running my hands across a harp.

Perhaps this is the point where touch, vision, and sound come together in a harmony that exposes an experience of subtle discovery – you could miss it entirely in the action of firing lasers and target tracking. The sensory experience provides a clean palette for sights and sounds to emerge, so many tiny pieces weaving together in response to the actions of your hands.

Child of Eden also makes an existing genre more accessible, and that open-invitation encourages the desire to perfect the play of the performance the Kinect allows me to conduct.

Playing the game with a standard controller offers a striking difference – not necessarily lesser, but more linear, and something I want to often compare to traveling along the trench of the Death Star. The Kinect alternative never feels like anything less than the absolute emphasis, offering players a chance to feel quite a bit like Johnny Mnemonic – minus the burden of having to be Keanu Reeves, of course.

Eden is a space and place where abstract concepts take physical shape, and symbolic logic builds a complex world awaiting agile hands. Perhaps the accomplishment was doomed to always be undermined by the want for an expensive peripheral to fully appreciate the offering, but the experience left a significant mark on me this year all the same.

Cloaked in horror camp, Shadows of the Damned pushes plenty on the tongue-and-cheek train, but alongside the circus of comedic horrors, the perils of Paula serves as the centerpiece – the emphasis for Garcia’s demon stomping rampage. The game was certainly not content in presenting the iconic Princess in a gilded cage as the obligatory motivation.

Paula’s time within the game was split between playing the damsel in distress calling out to Garcia for help, being used as the white lace rabbit meant to lure him deeper down the demonic rabbit hole, and becoming the instrument of his destruction during chase sequences where a single possessed kiss from her lips ends his life.

What the player is often left with is a woman who falls into your arms while brandishing a knife, torn between whispering sweet nothings and cursing you for her suffering – and perhaps the familiar feeling that relationships are always a tad more complicated where Suda51 is involved.

While the comparison isn’t easy for the surface differences and thematic shift, I can’t help thinking about Travis Touchdown’s appraisal of Sylvia Christel from No More Heroes 2 -

TRAVIS:
Sylvia, I can’t figure you out.
SYLVIA:
You don’t like me?
TRAVIS:
I didn’t say that. But there’s a lot of things about you I don’t get: you lie, you’re greedy, you’re a fucking contradiction in heels.
SYLVIA:
You hate me?
TRAVIS:
Well, your personality kind of sucks.
SYLVIA:
So you -do- hate me.
TRAVIS:
…I’m fucking crazy about you.

Garcia uses the word crazy to paint a different picture of Paula, whom he is equally infatuated with while unable to question or comprehend the reasoning. Love is a many splendid things of course, none of which seem easy to explain.

I suppose a great deal can be written off given the agenda of infantile offence Shadows of the Damned pushes on the player. But it certainly sticks in my teeth while looking back over a year’s worth of releases.