Puzzle Quest - The Hidden Addiction

When Puzzle Quest came out on DS, PSP, PC, Wii, PS2, PSN, and XBLA, I picked it up for $20. Yeah, it looked to be basically a Bejeweled clone, but it was a Bejeweled clone in which you could level up and cast spells and slay goblins! Awesome. I would play it on the toilet, where nobody would bother me, and I would often sit there until my legs fell asleep. "Just one more game," I would say to myself, "I wouldn't be able to stand up right now anyway, my feet are numb." Within days, I had already reached the last boss. It is not a short game. I was addicted. To a puzzle game. To a DS game! No way! But when I completed it, I put it away. Because it had an end point to the storyline, there was a time when it was eventually over. This is unlike other Tetris, or Lumines, or other puzzlers you can play ad nauseum. Does that hurt it as a brilliant game? I don't know...

When the year was up and I was looking over various Game of the Year awards in magazines and on the Internet, Puzzle Quest kept popping up as a final contender. I had played it (a lot) and yet had never considered it one of the greatest games of the year. This was pretty weird, because I don't want to play a bad game, no one does. Yet even though I sunk more time into it than just about any other game that year besides Oblivion, I discounted it subconsciously because of its simplicity and "casual" nature. A simple puzzle game can't be Game of the Year! But what makes Game of the Year? Is it addictiveness, a willingness to play it over all other games of its time? Because Puzzle Quest ensnared me completely, even with a simple, cliched fantasy plot and colorful yet unimpressive graphics that did their job and little else. Also, the music was just awful, and the loop was far too short for the amount of time an average person could sink into it. But I loved it. And I am hereby declaring it one of my favorite games of all time. Maybe Puzzle Kingdoms is good too...?

We'll fix it later.

When Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was first released on PC, it was apparently a buggy, near-unplayable mess. Instead of thoroughly beta-testing, Bethesda released an unfinished product and then released patches throughout the months following its initial release, eventually forming it into the masterpiece it is today. PC gamers have been dealing with this for years. A game ships, there's a lot of problems with it, people complain to the developers, the developers release a downloadable patch to fix the bugs. Console games didn't have that luxury, until recently. When a game was released on any system before this current console generation, that was it. If there were bugs or glitches, they stayed in consumers' games and minds for eternity. You made sure you released a finished product, because there would never be another chance to restore the public's confidence in you. Now that every system is connected to the Internet (except the Wii... ha!), game companies can release patches even before a game hits retail shelves. I've bought games on release day and ran home and popped it in, only to be informed, "An update is available for this game from Xbox Live. If you decline the update, you will be signed out." What the crap is that? A game is broken before it even ships? In today's disposable society, nothing is immutable anymore. Now, it appears that games are called "software" because they are always susceptible to outside forces molding them into something other than their original form. I don't like it. I miss the days of good ol' fashioned game cartridges: sturdy and eternal. Now... sometimes it just seems that nobody tries as hard as they used to.