I had heard bits and pieces about this game when it first came out. About how Level 5 (developer of the fantastic Dragon Quest VIII) was behind it and about how it was attempting to mix up the puzzle genre a bit by adding a main story and characters with drive and purpose to the game. I also remember being particularly drawn to the distinct Sylvian Chomet-like European artwork in the game which I found absolutely lovely and compelling the second I laid my eyes upon them. Yet when the game was first released, I was feeling completely apathetic about the DS as a gaming device and just couldn’t be bothered to give it a chance. A couple of weeks ago, I managed to play the game for about five minutes. The end result? Professor Layton and the Curious Village has effectively reacquainted me with a DS I hadn’t touched in over nine months and with an interest in light puzzle solving that I had long forgotten.

The premise in the game is simple: You’re Professor Layton, famous puzzle solver, and you, along with your faithful apprentice Luke, are invited to St. Mystere to help find its hidden treasure, the Golden Apple. Many puzzles ensue. The game is split into two different game modes, puzzle solving and exploration, and in both you use the stylus exclusively. Exploration is largely in first person and it works like in most point and click adventure games, i.e. you walk around, and use your stylus to tap on who you want to talk and where you want to go. In puzzle solving, you use the stylus to tap on answers, drag things around, draw lines or figures, write in answers (with the game’s really solid writing recognition software) among other things. The controls never got in the way of the game itself and that’s all one can ask from a game like this.

The game is structured so that you’ll usually have to explore your admittedly tiny world map until you come across somebody that needs you to solve a puzzle for them before they let you proceed along other areas of the map and/or advance the story. The puzzles themselves range from easy to devilish, logic-based to math-based, visual to text-driven and everything in between. It’s a nice mix of puzzles even if some of them are taken straight from grammar school (measure X amount of water by using 3 difference sized pitchers). There is also a relatively high number of “trick question” puzzles that’ll no doubt aggravate you from time to time although, after failing at a few of those, you start to learn to think just how the game wants you to think.

It’s really amazing how just adding a little bit of context and character to the perhaps tired puzzle game genre on the DS you get a game that’s as captivating as this one. The story is nothing amazing (though it’s easily better than a large percentage of games out there) but it’s well done and the characters are very endearing. As you progress through the game, you’ll come across a few mysteries surrounding the village and it was extremely satisfying and rewarding when, in the climax of the game, the Professor starts to pull these various pieces of evidence together to reveal the secret behind St. Mystere. The music, though perhaps repetitive, fits the ominous vibe of St. Mystere perfectly and the art style, as I touched upon earlier, is just superb. The modest use of animated cutscenes and sporadic voice overs certainly add to the experience as well. It’s so strange to see a complete action cutscene in a video game, from set-up to resolution, when we’re so used to cutscenes being nothing more than an appetizer before you get back control of your character and start to break some teeth.

But alas, this is a puzzle game and a damn good one at that.

I’m buying the sequel on day one.

Final Score: 9/10

I was in Borders over the weekend looking for books on Tesla without much success (which surprised me, you’d think one of the most famous scientists of the early 20th century would have plenty of material.  Plenty on Edison though, that fat son of a bitch.)  Bored trying to find real books – something Borders doesnt seem to carry anymore – I headed over to the comic books to see what kind of hardbacks they had.  Again, not finding anything worth looking at I was turning to leave when two guys around my age came up and started talking about Uncanny X-Men.  Only he pronounced it with a long U.  You-ncany X-men.  How does someone not know how to pronounce that word?  I mean its used in movies and on TV and stuff, so they must have heard it spoken before.  How did they get this far in life mispronouncing such common words?

(Thats an open ended question, but Im going to go ahead and blame the comic books.)

They’re doing it.

They’re actually doing it.

They’re bringing Barry Allen back from the dead.

I always thought there were two characters in superhero comics, aside from origin related deaths like Bruce Wayne’s parents, uncle Ben or the entire planet Krypton (and God help whoever even thinks about bringing them back), that shouldn’t be brought back to life. The first character is Gwen Stacy, who taught us that the hero doesn’t always win and that death can be very real in these fictional worlds, and the second is Barry Allen. I sighed in relief when I read in an interview that people talked Joe Quesada, current Marvel Editor-in-Chief, out of bringing Gwen back after the events in his One More Day story arc. I felt we dodged a bullet but, soon afterwards, I started to hear rumors about DC wanting to bring Barry back and now here we are.

My initial reaction upon hearing the news was opposition. How couldn’t I? Barry Allen died a heroic death, more so than any other hero out there. He saved the universe. He is, for all intents and purposes, the first DC Universe saint. He made a few more appearances postmortem via time travel and each one of those instances was highlighted and pronounced by the fact that they were but mere sprinkles of the heroic, Silver Age Flash. Barry Allen is a more powerful character in death than he was when alive. Isn’t he? Or did I just convince myself about this?

Two of the main arguments against bringing characters back from the dead in superhero comics are that it negates the effect of that character’s death and that it’s always pointless because superhero comics somehow always manage to go back to their original status quo. The first argument is a little hard to talk about at this point because we don’t know the circumstances or events that’ll lead to Barry Allen’s return. The second point made me think for a while though. Crisis on Infinite Earths was released in 1985. I was no more than a year old when Barry died. For me, a dead Barry Allen is the status quo. Am I being a hypocrite for wanting superhero characters to move forward while insisting that big, sweeping changes to the status quo should not happen? Because bringing Barry Allen back will shake the status quo of the Flash books pretty roughly. How much change is too much change?

I let these thoughts swirl in my head for a while and then I actually went out and got DC Universe 0, the issue where Barry Allen’s death is teased. Needless to say, my fears where put to rest after reading the issue. It was but a small tease of things to come but the way it was delivered was nothing short of brilliant and has me completely psyched about the potential of this storyline. I don’t know why I doubted Geoff Johns considering the mastery with which he handled Hal Jordan’s own return from the dead and subsequent Green Lantern issues. I do have a couple of things I’m worried about, primarily regarding the fate of Barry’s successor, Wally West, but I’m sure Johns has something planned for him. Killing him off to make room for Barry would be a mistake and three Flashes running around is perhaps a bit of overkill so I’m curious as to how that’ll be handled.

Whatever happens, I’ve grown to accept that American superhero comics are a malleable medium, always changing yet always staying the same.

These characters are bigger than us and we’re just along for the ride.

Bring on Barry Allen.