all games are not created equal

I'm comparing these two games because I started AW after I finished Professor Layton.

Even though Prof Layton was just a bunch of puzzles, it was fun to randomly pick up and run through a handful of puzzles.  AW though is really testing my patience.  Maybe I'm not very good at this type of game, but it might just be a little too slow paced for me.  AW is all turn-based strategy, so you have all the time in the world to think about your next move.  What that also means is that if you lose, you have to go through all the slow stuff again to get back to where you were.  And that includes dialogue.

I just have to talk about the dialogue in AW.  It's terrible!  Phrases similar to "wicked sick" make constant appearances and it pains me to even see it on the screen for that split second.  The dialogue of Professor Layton was charming and full of, well, Britishness.  AW could definitely use some Britishness; a little touch of charm for the dialogue.

AW is still a good game though, but for my morning commuting, Professor Layton was a much better fit.

Even though Prof. Layton is a simple puzzle game, I enjoyed it a whole lot more than I am currently enjoying Pokemon Diamond, and it's because of one thing: pacing of gameplay. 

Pokemon Diamond is deep down a fun game where you can adventure around and do a ton of things.  But what really kills it is the battles and how long it takes.  In a battle, sometimes it just takes one move to kill off an enemy, but because of all the random wasted seconds here and there, it can take something like 30 seconds from battle start to end to hit an enemy once and kill them, and this is with all of the extra effects turned off.

This would normally be ok.  Only problem is that in the game, you are always fighting.  Wanna go from one place to another, well, you might have to go through some tall grass and oh no, some crappy wild pokemon is there to waste your time.  I really do want to enjoy the game, but when I have 25 minutes on the train to work to play, I want to be able to play the game and not sit there waiting for the battles to finish.

Prof. Layton was for the most part great for short trips.  You could pull up a puzzle and work on it for what time you had.  The only times where it just felt like you were wasting time was when you had to search around for puzzles.  Even then, it wasn't nearly as aggravating as all the wasted time in Pokemon Diamond.

If I could breeze through a one-hit battle in 5-10 seconds, Pokemon Diamond would be a great game.  But since I can't, I'm having a really hard time making myself finish the game.

Huge win for Scribblenauts for replayability.  Because there are so many items that you can spawn in the game, there are a near infinite number of ways to use them together to solve puzzles or to just goof around with.  Curious Village clearly loses this one because the puzzles in that game have only one solution, so replaying any puzzle just means doing the same exact thing you did before.