Professor Layton and the Last Specter

London Life

Fans of the first three Professor Layton games may be disappointed by the fourth.

The new game is a prequel.

The voice acting is "off" -- Layton is not the original.

The story is linear.

The artwork varies from clever to amateurish.

There is a "London Life" mini game embedded on the same chip as the game proper, which suggests not enough space to develop either game fully.

So... At first blush, "Last Specter" earns a B- for tedium and lack of effort.  Buy the new Terry Pratchett book instead.

The Hidden Doors of Professor Layton

Now that the election's over, it's time to get back to the minutiae of the low arts... videogames! The Professor Layton games for Nintendo DS consoles get really high marks from me. At my age, the foreboding threat of memory loss and problem-solving skills begins to wear on the nerves, and we start grasping at straws to keep Alzheimer's at bay.

The strategies we employ, such as haranguing offspring with our years of accumulated wisdom (such as how to clean black, rotary dial telephones using Q-tips dipped in isopropyl alcohol) normally leave our families mounting interventions against causing 17-year-olds to weep and gnash their teeth in the captivity of boredom. I think thrusting Professor Layton and the Unwound Future into our hands and solitary hours of retirement is a brilliant move, as may be suggested by the puzzle illustrated.

That's a sliding block puzzle, and the idea is to slowly move the gem around until you eventually slide it out the north edge. This particular one, found behind the Hidden Door of the third game in the series, may be the hardest yet revealed, and a really nasty personal rejoinder to those of us who've been moaning about how easy these puzzles have gotten of late.

Almost... There is a worse... Kids who encounter it too early return their games to the Used Videogames shelves, where we oldtimers pick them gleefully up for a song.

The top secret Hidden Door is a feature of all three games in the Professor Layton series. Getting them open is a puzzle in itself, because the passwords and keys are buried in the next game of the series. Or possibly in the prequels as well as the sequels, I'm not sure.

At any rate, as long as you've got all three of the games released so far in the U.S. (and these are not the same in details as the U.K. versions!), you can unlock the Hidden Doors in all three games, whether or not you've played the the main storylines to conclusions. Fascinating.

For example, the "Hidden Door of St. Mystere" password on my DS Lite is 4B7F8F1B. That gibberish is keyed to my unique DS console (possibly as a function of its serial number), and unlocks the Hidden Door in Professor Layton and the Curious Village, but you find it in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, the sequel to the first game. The number will unlock "passwords" that go with other games in the series, a rigamarole best described here.

If you can get through that you're safe from the ravages of dementia, at least for the time being. (ADHD is your problem, dudes. Where's my Pratchett book?)

Curiouser & curiouser...

Professor Layton & The Curious Village is not a kid's game. It should be rated M for Mature, because it requires a certain masochistic tolerance for intense frustration caused by small cute mysteries, which probably explains why 64% of players who admit to owning this thing are women. Obviously, one can crack the case, which is only plastic, with a ball peen hammer, but the game (and we) should have expected more adult behavior — concentration, critical thought, sense of whimsy, twisty deviousness of mind... Well, you get the idea. It's a puzzle palace.

Most of the really good roleplaying games have a puzzle here and there that you have to solve — "How do I get out of this maze?" and the like. This is not like that. Professor Layton's oddball adventure with his trusty sidekick "kid" (I can't remember the little thug's name) is composed ENTIRELY of puzzles, bunches of puzzles, MORE puzzles than any normal person should want — and not only the puzzle obstacles that advance the plot (what?), but OPTIONAL puzzles that infest every corner of the game. HARD puzzles. Some easy puzzles, sure, but most of them are unfair to four year olds, and some of them are downright breezy about insulting the cognitive armament of braindamaged old coots like me.

You've SEEN some of these puzzles, like in old issues of Scientific American and the like. They're OLD, for the most part. Most of them are older than the hills. To wit:

"A river. On the left bank, three wolves and three sheep. A boat that can only hold two animals at once. If wolves outnumber the sheep, the sheep are lunch. How do you get all the wolves and all the sheep across the river? These are magical animals, apparently, that know how to row a boat, which won't move by itself. Cunning beasts, sure — but the sheep haven't mastered the art of gunsmithing, and the wolves haven't mastered the art of smiling diplomacy."

Nintendo forestalls wrong answers by animating this unpleasant scene for you. In their version, it's wolves and baby chickens, and it's a raft, but same idea. I read it in Weekly Reader over half a century ago, so that's the way I told the story, with sheep.

I gave up playing CASTLEVANIA for Lent? The Oxonian-toned Professor Whatsisname is far crueler and should be dealt with summarily.