Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask: repetition

The fifth game in the Layton series, and it feels like it.  It's a little over-familiar, except the side puzzles aren't as good (the robot and rabbit are annoying, though the shop is a neat puzzle), the controls are more annoying (since you no longer directly touch the background, you instead have to guide a magnifying glass on the 3D screen while touching on the lower screen), and the story is all over the place.  Randall died many years ago, and Layton may or may not have had something to do with it.  Angela was Randall's girlfriend but is now married to Henry who's a bit of an oddball.  Dalston is a bit of an outsider.  A masked man is pulling off "miracles" which are blatantly faked. You jump back and forward in time to see Layton when he was young, and see what happened when they found the mask of chaos.  I don't really care much.

I think some of my ennui is caused by the appalling battery life of the 3DS when this is running.  Normally the system would last a few days in sleep mode, but with this I need to charge it every other day or it runs out of power and loses all my progress.  I've had to redo quite a few puzzles now - including the dull rabbit stuff - just because I forgot to plug the console in.

Still, I think I'm over half way through the game, and most puzzles have fallen at the first attempt (in fact, I think all but two), so I should be able to complete this before getting completely bored of it.

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