Individually released on Xbox Live Indie Games, Arkedo Series is a new PSN digital bundle of three separate releases, 01 Jump!, 02 Swap! and 03 Pixel!, each with a distinct vintage art style and a focused game mechanic. Arkedo Studio has earned more recent fame for developing Hell Yeah! Wraith of the Dead Rabbit (a fantastic game by the way), and after playing through the Arkedo Series I can see where they started their quest to create the perfect jump mechanic.  

The first of the series, 01 Jump!, is a retro darling. Jumping around a richly colored 8-bit style level, the object is to collect bombs before they blow up, all the while avoiding various enemies like crabs, bats, snakes and, in my opinion the worst, skeletons that throw up bones.  Timing is everything in this game.  Spiked floors as well as ones that drop from the ceiling are tough enough to contend with, but then the challenge only ramps up another notch once floor pieces begin to fall away after walking over them.  If that wasn’t challenge enough, the game offers only one play through per session.  By that I mean no matter how far you get into the game, once you have lost all lives, the game starts you back at the beginning.  Retro to the max!  

For those times when death is unavoidable, hearts which add additional lives to your pool can often be found right before a particularly nasty sequence of environmental harm.  The game is fun and each level is fairly quick to complete, but the longer I play I do find myself wishing that there was a way to skip past the first five or ten levels (after they’ve already been completed of course) in order to make further progression toward the end feel less like a grind.

The second of the compiled games is 02 Swap! which puts a spin on match four games by adding a Tetris-like timer to the game board.  Rows of colored gems are added from the bottom over time, eventually raising and filling the playing field. If a column of gems reaches the top, the game is over. Swapping gems to match four makes those disappear, either vertically or horizontally.  What adds to the strategy of the game is the fact that colors can be swapped (one gem at a time) from one side of the playing field to the other.  A roadmap of sorts is displayed on the right of the gem board which shows the progression of a round.  Each time four are matched, progression to the end of the round is made.  

Along the way there are checkpoints which increase the speed at which new rows of gems are added from the bottom.  In later rounds more colored gems are added as well as bombs and clocks.  Bombs explode and destroy large sections of gems and clocks stop upward movement of gems for a short period of time, allowing for gems close to the top to hopefully get swapped out to keep the round alive.  During the early stages of the game where time is slow, 02 Swap! feels almost zen-like and delivers wonderful reward feedback for each set of gems destroyed.  In later levels where the timer is truly the enemy, the game offers a frantic urgency while continuing to give a satisfying sense of reward for destroying matched gems.

03 Pixel!, the Arkedo trilogy closer, returns to pixelated 2D jumping, starring a playful cat in a world of increasingly challenging platform levels. Like other traditional platformers, 03 Pixel! has few controls to master: walk, jump, run, and a running jump are the basics. Pix the cat, however, does have the unique ability of filling a meow meter by stomping on five enemies in a row and then uncorking a meow roar to take out a line of baddies. Some objects in the world, when jumped on while holding the run button, will also shoot Pix high into the air.

The stages are fairly straightforward, but offer some hidden collectibles by way of zooming in on subtly different blocks that make up each level.  The collectibles either recharge health or are, as the game cheekily calls them, “pointless collectibles” that offer nothing more than a reason to replay a level. As progress is made through each of the six levels, the difficulty increases. Perfect timing is a must, as well as quick reflexes in order to bounce over certain enemies while simultaneously avoiding spikes and landing on small ledges.  

My only complaint about 03 Pixel! is that the buttons cannot be re-mapped. Running is mapped to the square button and jump is mapped to the cross button.  In the later levels, run jumping is pretty much the only way to reach any of the higher platforms and I found myself missing a jump because I couldn’t find a comfortable way to hold the controller while holding down the run button AND successfully tapping the jump button at the same time.  Maybe it’s just me, but I would’ve liked having the option to re-map the run button to one of the triggers.

With three fun, bright games for just $6, Arkedo Series is a retro indie collection that can’t be beat. Even with a mostly blocky 8-bit art style, the games are visually stunning, provide great old-school challenge, and overall–despite the somewhat awkward button mapping in 03 Pixel!–have tight, responsive controls. Anyone who missed the chance to play these three gems on XBLIG should jump at the chance to download the whole set on their PS3.

Pros:
+ 3 unique games for cheap
+ Vibrant retro art
+ Tight, responsive controls
+ 02 Swap! offers fun zen-like gameplay

Cons:
– Difficulty ramps up considerably in later stages for all three games
– No custom control mapping in 03 Pixel!
– Making progress in 01 Jump! becomes a grind without a continue option

Game Info:
Platform: PS3 via PSN (previously released on Xbox Live Indie Games)
Publisher: Sanuk Games
Developer: Arkedo Studio
Release Date: 10/16/2012
Genre: Platform/Puzzle
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Players: 1
Source: Review code provided by publisher

Let’s take a look at what Minis Sanuk Games has to offer.

Spot the Differences!:

Anyone grow up playing spot the difference puzzles on the back of cereal boxes and in activity books like Highlights? I did, and I loved them – and the generically titled Spot the Differences! PlayStation Mini solidly recreates the timeless pen-and-paper game.

Games do not get any more straightforward than Spot the Differences!. A pair of duplicate images is displayed side by side; only the two like images contain five subtle differences that you have to find. You scroll back and forth across the screen and pick out the five differences before the timer runs out, and then you move on to a new set of pictures…and then another, and then another, and then another.

There is no option to zoom in for a closer look, but thankfully the images are clear and distinguished enough that even the subtlest of alterations are identifiable with a keen eye. At $2.99, the game comes with four unlockable difficulty levels, arcade and time attack modes, and the ability to play a custom game from your choice of the 240 different scenes, which include themes like sports, nature, pets and food.

Spot the Differences! isn’t the type of game you’ll sit there and play for hours at a time, but it is the perfect time-waster for road trips, plane flights or the bus ride home. It’s also the sixth best selling title in Minis history thus far, so it must be doing something right.

Hysteria Project:

Hysteria Project is by far the weakest of Sanuk’s Minis offerings. What I thought was going to be a light survival horror game actually turned out to be a brief “interactive” slasher flick, where you are the helpless victim fleeing the hooded, axe-wielding psycho.

The “game” places you in the first-person perspective of a man who must escape death at the hands of a murderous horror villain, with the events playing out in short FMV clips interspersed with occasional QTEs (Quick Time Events) and intermission periods during which you are presented with multiple choices of how to proceed and must make a selection within a time limit.

This would have been cool if the events played out like a “choose your own adventure” plot. However, there are right and wrong choices, and if you choose the wrong one you die and restart from the beginning of the scene. Needless to say, a lot of trial and error is required to survive until the end…which takes no more than an hour to do even with multiple retries, and is hardly worth even that much of your time given the unsatisfying cliffhanger ending which sets the stage for a second episode.

I really appreciate the concept behind Hysteria Project and think it may be good for a cheap thrill at only $2. But overall it’s short, boring, and really just not that scary, so I say don’t bother.

Telegraph Crosswords:

Of the Minis I have, none keep me coming back more than Telegraph Crosswords – it truly has become an essential, can’t-live-without-it Mini in my PSP library. At a mere $3, it provides 500 crossword puzzles in three types: Quick, Cryptic and General Knowledge. Quick represents standard crossword puzzles, while Cryptic and General Knowledge ramp up the challenge with word clues so ambiguous that only true crossword whizzes need apply.

Beyond the three clue types, Telegraph Crosswords is a no-frills video game adaptation of the word-based, pen-and-paper puzzle game. The game is presented with a touch of color rather than standard black and white, but other than that the visuals are pretty plain and the music is elevator quality all the way.

The controls are overly convoluted at first – up and down on the D-pad and the analog nub cycle through the puzzle, left and right on the D-pad switch between horizontal and vertical lines, and pressing the X button pulls up a soft keyboard used for text entry – but once you learn the button layout the game plays just fine.

The beef I do have, though, is with the translation. For some reason the US release wasn’t translated into American English, so for certain clues the spelling is based on British English (color vs. colour, for example). Spelling variations like this, as slight and infrequent as they may be, can really throw off your thought process.

I do, however, appreciate the small touches Sanuk squeezed into the game, such as optional error spotting, letter hints, a completion time ranking system, and the ability to save progress for each individual puzzle.

These features plus the sheer volume of puzzles make Telegraph Crosswords an absolute must for crossword aficionados. I mean, for less than it costs to buy a crossword puzzle book you can enjoy a puzzle a day for well over a year!

Telegraph Sudoku & Kakuro:

Built on the same template as Telegraph Crosswords, Telegraph Sudoku & Kakuro brings the two number-based puzzle games to the PSP with little flair but loads of content and value — $3 for 500 puzzles, just like Crosswords.

Included are the standard versions of Sudoku and Kakuro, in addition to three Sudoku variants: Sudoku X, Mini Sudoku and Jigsaw Sudoku. If you haven’t played either of these puzzle game types before, here’s a brief overview.

In Sudoku, the objective is to complete a 9×9 grid by inserting digits so that each column, row, and 3×3 region of the grid as a whole contain the numbers 1-9 without any of the columns, rows or regions containing multiple instances of the same number. The aforementioned variants simply change the size and shape of the grids.

As for Kakuro, it too has you filling out a grid with the numbers 1-9, except that the format is even closer to that of a crossword puzzle. Numbered clues are placed next to each column and row, and you have to insert numbers that add up to that total without using any duplicates. It’s actually even tougher than Sudoku if you ask me – and I think Sudoku is already pretty damn challenging!

Telegraph Sudoku & Kakuro shares many of the same features of its crossword counterpart, and on top of that its controls are smoother and easier to grasp. In place of the soft keyboard, number entry is tied to a simple radial menu. Select the box you wish to place a number in, hold down the X button and then tilt the analog nub around the dial (or cycle through with the D-pad arrows) to the desired number – that’s all there is to it.

In all honesty, I’m not much into Sudoku. But if you are, this Mini is loaded with value and will surely satisfy your appetite for number crunching.