A Green Mushroom

I've really been working through my backlog this year and I've finally made it to a few visual novels that I've been meaning to play.  Namely: Phoenix Wright Dual Destinies Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright Danganronpa I utterly failed to get into Dual Destinies.  The pacing was so unbelievably slow.  I was led to believe that these games had a lot of gameplay mixed into their narratives, but it turns out that Dual Destinies is mostly narrative.  It's much more like reading a book than playing a game. I moved on to Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright.  I've enjoyed a bunch of the Layton game in the past.  Typically they have a bit of narrative followed by a puzzle followed by a bit of narrative.  And this one is structured similarly.  When I'm in the Layton sections of the game I have a lot of fun and make a lot of progress.  Unfortunately, the Phoenix Wright sections suffer from the same slow pacing as Dual Destinie...

Yesterday, I tried to play Singularity.  I gave it my best attempt but I just couldn't do it.  The game is supposedly about getting a glove that can manipulate time but I wouldn't know, because I never made it that far.  I was looking forward to making new things old and old things new, turning enemies into babies, restoring structures to their former glory, and making people crumble to ash before my eyes.  Unfortunately, the first 20 minutes of the game were so bad that I waved the white flag and gave up.  The game played like the world's most generic shooter and a lot of the design decisions (like not being able to open doors on my own) pissed me off.  I dropped Singularity in the mailbox and it's headed back to Gamefly as we speak. I've talked before about jumping into the action of a game but it's also important for the game to throw the player into the fun right from the start.  If your game happens to be about an awesome time manipulation de...