Bad Rats -
Not a fan. Played through a bit over 20 levels; don't believe I will bother continuing.
Every level that I played required you to knock a ball into a particular object, even when that doesn't make sense (such as into the side of a horizontally-oriented pair of scissors, or pushing things which ought to be far too heavy for it to push... especially since this is supposed to be physics-based). This gets old fairly fast but it is not strictly a major problem.
I go to put a rat on an incline, and the game will automatically rotate it to match the angle of the incline. Following this a good deal of the time despite the game having rotated it to match the incline, and the game snapping the rat to the incline when you're close enough, you aren't allowed to put it there because it's snapped to such that it clips into the incline. Assuming that I do get it on the incline or just leave it in midair just out of reach of the snapping, I want to turn it around because it's facing the wrong direction. The game proceeds to flip the rat horizontally ignoring the angle that it's been rotated to, so if it was facing left-downwards after flipping it it will be facing right-downwards instead of right-upwards. This is tremendously unhelpful, especially since the manual rotation controls are kind of annoying to use. Not to mention that they're worthless a good deal of the time - rotating a cannon rat will rotate the cannon on its base, but rotating an archer rat will rotate the entire rat, and aiming particularly high or low will just result in the rat falling over when you start things up.
At least the game can autorotate rats correctly even if the snapper can't perceive the effect this has on their clipping. With autorotation of boards it isn't so great. Numerous times I was trying to position a board over a gap and the autorotator decided for god-knows-whatever reason that I wanted one end of the board to sit across a platform that was above the gap in question, rotating it ludicrously out of position and through the upper platform. Did mention that you can only use the manual rotation controls if the item is placed somewhere? So you have to hope that you have enough room somewhere to put the board and unrotate it yourself, or move it to other locations and hope that the autorotator will shift it back in the direction you wanted it originally.
Puzzles are 2-dimensional only, and it would follow that the pieces were locked into a two dimensional plane. They aren't. While it is somewhat amusing to see a Balloon + Rat randomly spiral out of the puzzle towards the screen the first couple of times, this shouldn't be possible, especially since you have limited time and attempts (ludicrous amount of attempts to be fair, but the time limit isn't so). Furthermore, running out gives you a full-blown game over. In this style of game. What.
Randomness is even apparently a factor in general, which is very very wrong. I looked at the dev solution to a map I didn't think I had even begun to approach the right way, and the dev solution -failed-. It's possible that it was just a problem with the dev solution, but I saw people speaking about it randomly happening to the dev solutions on other maps.
So one time I beat a map, and on going to the next map I found that it was the same as the previous map. Except the solution plan provided didn't match the map layout at all. I ran with my previous solution and the next map was also the same as before with another new solution layout which didn't match it. I went back to the main menu and loaded this map up with the password and it changed the difficulty level on me. This was about the point I decided it was not worth continuing.
Did I mention that the game required me to disable DEP on it before it would run.
Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent -
First off I will just state that TTG apparently still haven't fixed the problems they have been having with multiple monitor support since this game also died and had trouble coming back up if I touched the resolution. There go my hopes that it was a problem limited to S&M3. At least I found out that altering my second monitor to be a duplicate instead of an extension resets enough of whatever to allow the game to even start back up, so I don't need to restart the computer for it any more, but it still should be highly unnecessary.
I don't mind the graphical style in general. There are a couple of points where it grates, mostly when characters cross the screen on snowmobiles at around 3 frames per second, but in general it is nice and different.
Much shorter than I was expecting. In case you weren't aware yet, the game is similar in gameplay to Professor Layton, so to compare to that... Professor Layton 1 has, according to an FAQ, around 120 puzzles in the maingame, and half of those are optional. Puzzle Agent has 37 puzzles in the main game, 10 or so of which are optional. Yeah. I get that it's not only episodic in a manner of speaking, but it's also a pilot/test episode and as such may be smaller than a regular episode, but still. Also sort of ends on a cliffhanger when as I understand it it isn't guaranteed to get any sequels. Tsk.
Ended up getting one 4 and several 7s, with the rest 10s. The game is sneaky and provides, as far as I can ascertain, no facility for manual saving so you cannot get a perfect score through saving. Sadness.
Disgaea DS -
Starting episode 7.
I was not expecting there to be an unwinnable map (duplication dragon) in this style of game and ended up looking up a 'solution' for it as I was sure there was some trick to it I wasn't grasping ._.
