Nintendo Download Wrap-Up for March 1st, 2010

Sometimes, being a Nintendo fan gives that person something to cheer about, especially if they’re dealing with fans of the other two consoles. From innocuous things like “We have Mario and Zelda!” to obscure musings like “Hey, nice of your entertainment divisions to finally be seeing a profit!” to low blows like “We didn’t just have to spend two days not playing our consoles because your engineers are too stupid to know that 2010 isn’t a leap year!”, people that actually engage in console fanboyism sometimes have reasons to cheer.

Seeing Mega Man 10 weeks before the other consoles is as good a reason as any.

But before we get to the big weight sitting on the rest of the update like a log, we have a Virtual Console game to look at first. Best of all, it doesn’t suck!

Fatal Fury Special
Developer: SNK
Publisher: SNK
Original System: Neo Geo CD/Arcade
Original Release Date: September 16th, 1993
Price: 900 Wii Points/$9

Mark B: Fatal Fury Special is essentially Fatal Fury 2: Turbo, and I mean that in the most flattering way possible. A larger character roster than either of its predecessors, a mild speed increase and a general overall improvement to the flow of combat makes Fatal Fury Special the point in the franchise where it actually became, at the risk of pissing off some SNK fans, playable. Fatal Fury prior to this game was something of a stiff mess, and while there were some neat ideas in the series, it took Fatal Fury Special to really bring them together with a game that was enjoyable and well designed, especially when compared to something like Street Fighter II and the eight million version of that on the market.

As a 900 point/$9 download, so long as you don’t own the Fatal Fury compilation for PS2 or this game specifically for XBLA, this is a worthwhile buy if you like fighting games in general. You’ll want to have a Classic Controller or Gamecube controller do to anything with it, mind you, but if you like fighting games I imagine you’d have one already. Fatal Fury Special is one of the better games in the series, and fighting fans have every reason to buy this, both because it’s a classic and because it’s still pretty solid, all in all.

___

Christopher Bowen: I usually don’t tell people to buy these types of games because they’re available elsewhere, and not for an outlandish fee. For PS2 owners, that’s exactly what I’m doing; as Mark stated, it’s on the Fatal Fury compilation. However, for those that don’t already own it, this is a solid purchase, even at $9. The game is well balanced and controls great, and due to the fact that this is a direct Neo Geo port, and not like the crummy console ports I grew up with, there’s no worries about it not being Arcade Perfect™

Fatal Fury Special is worth $9 for fighting fans, and especially worth it for Neo Geo fans.

___

Now, let’s address the big issue this week. There are three games for the WiiWare, but due to the other two being extremely casual in nature, Mega Man 10 – at $10, plus another $8 for all of the DLC – is really the only one that matters. I don’t think I need to describe this for most people here – if I do, get one of the earlier Mega Man games on Virtual Console, imagine one of those made in 2010, and there you go – but I do have something to say on this subject. For those of you who don’t want to hear me rant for a few paragraphs, just go past the cut, but for everyone else, allow me a bit of soapbox time.

===

Back in 2008, when Capcom made Mega Man 9, I loved it. For me, and a lot of other people, it was a return to roots for a series of games that had strayed from those roots to pander to the type of people that get their anime fix from 4Kids. I hated most of the new Mega Man games, which were being spit out by Capcom at a record pace while they spent the rest of their spare time closing down studios that were making games worth playing. To me, Mega Man 9 was worth it; even if you have to go back twenty years to make something worth playing, just make something worth playing.

In one of our first Ask the Kliq articles, Mark B. did something that was almost unheard of at the time: he criticized Mega Man 9. Let me state that at the time, this was almost heretical:

First off, while I imagine I’m going to be branded a heathen by the staff for this, it needs to be said: unless Mega Man 9 is coming to WiiWare, XBLA and PSN for five dollars (which, by all indications, it is not), I’m not at all excited about it. Bionic Commando Re-Armed and Mega Man Powered Up are perfectly fine examples of “retro” gaming, in that they mostly retain the old, 8-bit play mechanics of the games they’re based on, while also featuring updated visuals and audio, and as such, they’re pretty neat. Releasing a four megabyte NES game as a grand celebration of all things old-school and charging me ten dollars for it is highway robbery, and while I’m absolutely certain that most people don’t agree with me, I don’t care. If you think that paying ten dollars for an NES game when Nintendo is charging five for almost all of the other NES games is fine and dandy, be my guest, and when you’re sitting around complaining about how no one makes original games anymore I’ll be certain to stop off and spit in your eye.

In my staff commentaries that year, I had Mega Man 9 on my list of games at #3. I addressed this criticism thusly:

I remember our own Mark B. telling us that we were idiots for actually buying Mega Man 9, because once developers see that they can make easy money resurrecting 20 year old technology at 2008 prices, that’s all we’ll get. Though I can see his point, when it comes to things being done on occasion, it doesn’t get better than what Capcom gave us this year. So long as it doesn’t get back to NES-era levels of ridiculous, I’m happy. Besides, would we all rather have a game as awesome as Mega Man 9, or Mega Man Advent: ZX? I’ll have more of the former, thank you.

Looking back, I wonder if Mark was onto something, as we might be going back to just that: NES-era levels of ridiculousness.

It’s been a whole sixteen months since Mega Man 9 was initially released on WiiWare. There’s already talk about Mega Man 11. Yet, even now, the high-water marks for the series are either Mega Man 2 or 3, depending on who you ask. This isn’t because Mega Man 4-8 were bad games; they were very good. It’s because once Mega Man 4 hit, the market started to become saturated, and 5 + 6 didn’t do anything to help that. The market was becoming so inundated to the series that Capcom decided to spin it off with Mega Man X, in an effort to mature the series. It worked, so naturally, we’re up to Mega Man X8 now. Now, in 2010, Capcom’s seen that retro works… so we’re up to two “new” retro games in sixteen months.

Capcom is the Starbucks of videogame franchisers, more so than even Activision. If something works, they will drive it into the ground, and keep driving until there’s nothing left. I was so excited in 2008 because even if it was a case of “been there, done that”, it was better than all of the other stuff Capcom was driving into the ground at that time. Now that I see we’re returning to our roots in more ways than one, I am not as excited. I just wish I had Mark’s initial foresight on this matter.

Will I buy it? Just like I bought the first six Mega Man games and both the Mega Man Anniversary Collection and the Mega Man X Collection, I probably will, eventually. So maybe I’m part of the problem.

===

Yeah… so we have other games, too! Happy Hammerin’ is a $5 game of Whack-a-Mole. You read that right; a $5 game of Whack-a-Mole, with admittedly some novel ideas regarding incorporating play mechanics from a carnival into a videogame. In all actuality, I think it’s interesting; not as interesting as a new Mega Man, but I can definitely see this being worth $5, especially for people with kids. Also, we have Rage Darts for $6. Didn’t I just chronicle another dart game on this system recently? Do we really need another one?

We have four games on the DSiWare, one of which I’m actually familiar with. Let’s Golf is a golf game very similar to other meter-based golf games like Hot Shots Golf and Pangya: Fantasy Golf, with four courses overall to play, and decent responsiveness for being on a touch screen. I own the iPhone version, which I bought at $2. The DSiWare game, on the other hand, it a mystifyingly high EIGHT DOLLARS. This is unbelievable, especially when considering that the text for the DSi version specifies three courses and forty-five holes. That’s one course and twenty-seven holes LESS than the iPhone’s version, with the same graphics and gameplay, for $6 MORE. Why? I’m tempted to call Gameloft and seriously ask them this. I’m sure I won’t get an answer – a company like Gameloft can’t afford to piss Nintendo or Apple off – but needless to say, you should buy this game ONLY for the iPhone. For DSi owners, ignore this, unless you like being fleeced. If I was a DSi owner, I’d be livid.

We also have VT Tennis, a $5 alternative to Virtua Tennis. I won’t hazard a guess as to how this one is; tennis games all look the same, and I’d have to play a bit of this first, but oh look at that, Nintendo doesn’t give out “Lite” or demo versions of their games. Gobulous Party is a $5 collection of minigames. And Flips: Terror in Cubicle Four is an “interactive book” from Electronic Arts. I remember they used to have toys that did things similar to what this does; meaning, you hit an image and see a closer look, or hit something and hear a sound. I forget what they were called, but the idea was great. This is a 397 page book with large font and pictures, so there’s a lot to look at, and this looks very interesting for young readers – I’m thinking ages nine through twelve – with a $5 price tag.

Overall, we have a pretty decent week. A good VC game, a good VC game regardless of my opinions on Capcom, and a couple of other worthy purchases. Until next time, this is Christopher Bowen, who just remembered they put an “Easy Mode” into the newest Mega Man. He is sighing at the state of modern gamers, and will now go back to telling kids to get off his doggone lawn.
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/virtualconsole.jpg
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/virtualconsolebig.jpg

Review: Data East Arcade Classics (WII)

Data East Arcade Classics
Genre: Compilation
Developer: G-Mode, G1M1
Publisher: Majesco
Release Date: 02/19/10

Back in the eighties, arcade games were a whole lot more prolific than they are now, and often a lot more creative to boot. Granted, the games all fit into the genres of the time, be they sports, shooters, beat-em-ups and so on, but the concepts were often a good bit more imaginative and bizarre than arcade games are today. Data East has made their fair share of weird arcade classics, and while the company has unfortunately ceased to exist, Majesco has seen fit to collect thirteen of their most notable arcade releases into one package, dubbed Data East Arcade Classics. The collection contains fifteen Data East arcade titles, from the obvious (Burger Time, Bad Dudes) to the obscure (Super Real Darwin, Peter Pepper’s Ice Cream Factory) and several in between, and fans of Data East arcade games will have a lot of fun with the games in this collection. Further, the budget price is enticing, especially for fans of classic gaming, as twenty dollars for fifteen games is a good bit more reasonable than downloading the same amount of games from the Virtual Console service. That said, while some of these games are classics in every sense of the word, not all of them have aged particularly well or weren’t that great to start with, and there are some mild interface issues, making this something that may not be great for everyone.

Data East Arcade Classics is, as noted, a compilation of fifteen Data East games spanning the eighties and nineties, including both classics and unknowns from a variety of genres. Each game supports single or multiplayer gaming, either simultaneously or alternating, though multiplayer is limited to local play only. As you play each game, you can earn various achievements that unlock cabinet art, music tracks, and “special” modes of play for the games, and you can save high scores to a particular Mii if you want to track your scoring abilities. The games look and sound like their arcade counterparts, which means that the games from the early 80’s look like NES games and sound like Midi nightmares while the more modern games look and sound pretty good. Purists will like that the games are essentially perfect, while gamers who aren’t into nostalgia might turn up their nose at some of the pixelated sprites and such. The collection allows you to play with the Wiimote, the Wiimote and Nunchuck, the Classic Controller or the Gamecube controller, though only one of the games in the collection NEEDS more than one button, frankly, so any of the modes will work well. Overall, the Wiimote and Nunchuck combo felt awkward for these games, but every other control scheme felt just fine all in all.

Of course, this being a compilation of older games, it’s only as good as the games on the disc, and the roster is pretty diverse. In alphabetical order:

Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja – “President Ronnie has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue Ronnie?” This is your entire mission. Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja put you in the role of a random martial artist in workout pants and a tank top taking on a massive army of ninjas, magical warriors and fire-breathing fat men to save the President, and it was awesome. As beat-em-ups go, it’s generally amusing and holds up reasonably well now, though as you go further into the game, it becomes more and more obvious the game was designed to swallow your quarters, as it’s very easy to end up dying a whole lot in a stage, but with infinite continues Bad Dudes is mindless cheesy fun that’s worth playing, if only because I’M BAD!

Burger Time – This is a classic puzzle game in the same vein as Pac Man, where you, as Peter Pepper, have to try and make burgers while dodging hostile edibles. Each burger is made of multiple pieces, running over those pieces drops them to the lower level, and when you’ve dropped all four pieces from all four burgers you win the level. You can crush said hostile condiments under the burger pieces or throw pepper to stun them, but if they touch you, you lose a life. On one hand, Burger Time is an iconic arcade classic that many older gamers will remember fondly and eagerly jump into, but on the other, it’s a good bit harder to work with than something like Pac Man, as the enemies start off openly belligerent and the layout of the stages can make it harder to avoid the enemies than you’ll be expecting at first. Burger Time is still a lot of fun, but expect to die a lot at first or you’re going to get frustrated.

Burnin’ Rubber – This is better known as Bump ‘n Jump in the US. Burnin’ Rubber is a goofy driving game where the objective is, as its US name would imply, to bump enemies into walls to kill them, jump on enemies to kill them, and jump obstacles to avoid death. The gameplay is incredibly simple, but surprisingly addicting, and the game overall is cute and fun in small doses, though it’s not as engaging as some of the other games on the disc. Burnin’ Rubber is solid and fun to play, but you won’t spend a lot of time with it unless you’re a fan of old arcade games.

Caveman Ninja – 16-bit console owners will know this better as Joe and Mac, but this is essentially the same game either way. Caveman Ninja is a side-scrolling platform shooter, and can basically be described as a more linear Adventure Island clone of sorts. You control one of two cavemen (Joe and Mac, presumably) as they fight off evil cavemen and dinosaurs in a quest to save their tribe’s women. The gameplay is solid and lots of fun, and you have a few different types of weapons at your disposal. The game also allows you to heal by eating food dropped by enemies at the cost of having your life bar degrade when you’re not eating, which can allow skilled players to keep going for a while without losing a life. The game also offers some branching paths for those who like replay value in their arcade games, and with two-player simultaneous play, Caveman Ninja is overall one of the best games on the disc.

Crude Buster – 16-bit console owners will know this better as Two Crude Dudes, though the arcade version of the game is a good bit better, as it allows for two-player simultaneous play instead of alternating play. Crude Buster is something of a spiritual successor to Bad Dudes which takes place in the in the far-flung future, in a world where New York has turned into a wasteland after a nuclear attack in… 2010. Oops. Anyway, you play as one of two muscular mohawk-sporting bounty hunters on a quest to wreck the forces of an organization known as “Big Valley”, which involves beating the crap out of lots of mutants. This might sound entertaining, but Crude Buster is awkward to play for a lot of reasons. It’s one of the few games that uses three buttons to play, meaning that if you’re using the Wii-mote only you’ll have to use the plus button to pick up and use items, which is annoying. Also, picking up and using environmental objects as weapons is this game’s gimmick, which comes at the cost of any sort of combat depth. Bad Dudes has some interesting attacks that can be performed in addition to normal punches and kicks, but Crude Buster has none of that, and aside from picking up environmental objects and enemies, your attack choices are limited. This game is also one of the more offensive quarter-munchers of the lot, as you’ll face large, powerful enemies that can kill you in two hits a decent amount of the time and fighting them off becomes a hassle in a hurry, as you constantly hear “What a day!” over and over until you want to break your speakers. Even with infinite continues, Crude Buster is unlikely to become one of your favorites on this disc, if only because its theme is really the only thing it has going for it.

Express Raider – Another gimmicky beat-em-up, Express Raider features both side-scrolling fighting levels and shooting gallery levels as you try to rob a train of its money. The side-scrolling stages feel like a cross between Bad Dudes and Urban Champion, as you essentially fight one opponent, beat them, then move on to the next as the stage scrolls forward, and there isn’t a life bar as much as a bar indicating who’s in control of the fight. Filling the bar means you win, you lose when the bar is empty, and the bar fluctuates based on who is dealing damage in the fight. These sections are surprisingly fun and work well enough, and if the whole game was these sections the game would be a fun diversion overall. The shooting gallery sections, on the other hand, are a lot less entertaining. You’re tasked with shooting at a bunch of people as they shoot at you, with the intention being to shoot a set amount of people to move onto the next train section. The problem here is that moving the targeting reticule also moves your character, and not only is the movement slow enough to make these sections frustrating by itself, but you can only take one hit before losing a life, moving around to aim can put you in the way of a bullet if you’re not careful, and the sections in general are rather tedious even with infinite continues. If you can ignore the shooting sections, Express Raider is fun enough when you’re jumping from train car to train car lumping people up, but overall the game is average at best.

Heavy Barrel – This is another iconic Data East title, mostly because it’s a fast-paced and fun shooter with a neat gimmick and two-player simultaneous support. The game is an overhead shooter where you play one of two soldiers blasting their way into some evil warlord’s facility for some reason or another that, ultimately, isn’t important. The game borrows a few basic concepts from other, similar games, such as Contra with its constantly changing weaponry types and such, but the big gimmick of the game is the Heavy Barrel, an experimental gun that fills the screen with massive pain for a limited time once you collect all of its components. Heavy Barrel is a fun shooter, though it also shows its need to suck down your quarters like crazy in the later levels, as with other games on the disc. The infinite continues option makes this a fun and furious game to play around with if you can accept that you’ll probably only have a special weapon for about five seconds at a time, though easily frustrated players might find that their nostalgia doesn’t quite hold out.

Lock ‘n Chase – This is Pac Man without power pellets and with closing gates, more or less. You drive your car around, collecting dots as other vehicles try to crash into you, which does exactly what you would expect. Random power-ups spawn on the map that, if collected, can stun the enemy vehicles for a few seconds, and there are gates around the maze that periodically open and close, which can either allow you a quick getaway if you get through with an enemy following you or can end you if you bump into a closed gate with someone on your tail. As Pac Man clones go, Lock ‘n Chase isn’t a particularly good one, as it does very little to make it different from Pac Man, and what it does differently is frankly worse than what Pac Man does. As a historical curiosity it’s cute to play once or twice, but overall this is another weak entry on the disc.

Magical Drop III – This is easily one of the best games on the disc. Magical Drop is a puzzle game series where you control a little guy at the bottom of the screen as he re-arranges colored gems into groups. Gems descend from the top of the screen, which your avatar can collect, though he can only collect one color at a time. You can then drop those gems together in a new location on the board, and groups of three or more are eliminated when they all come together on-screen, either by you dropping them together or by them falling into place after you eliminate other gems. The concept is easy enough that you should be able to figure it out in a few minutes, and Magical Drop III allows you to play through a few different game modes, including Survival and Versus, so there’s plenty of reason to spend time with the game. Frankly, Magical Drop III is a game you’ll have a lot of fun with, and while some of the games here are worthwhile because of nostalgia or the lack of quarter eating, this is worth playing because it’s just an overall good game.

Peter Pepper’s Ice Cream Factory – This is the sequel to Burger Time, though it never quite got the recognition of its predecessor, largely because it’s not as interesting a game. Like Burger Time, you run around a maze trying to knock stuff into other stuff, but this time you’re knocking giant ice cream blobs into giant cones. Also like Burger Time, you’re doing this while dodging hostile foes, who can be flattened with the foodstuffs you’re trying to position in place. Unlike Burger Time, however, you’re kicking the ice cream blobs horizontally instead of dropping them downward, which changes the dynamics of play a bit, and the enemies are a good bit more hostile than they were in the last game. Also, Peter can jump this time around, and he can also lob ice cream balls into the air to land them in the cones or knock out enemies, which is interesting in theory but hard to make use of in practice. It’s not that Peter Pepper’s Ice Cream Factory is bad, so much as it is that it’s not as good as its predecessor, as it’s a good bit more frustrating than the prior game. Someone looking for a more challenging Burger Time will probably have a lot of fun with the game, but most players won’t spend a lot of time with this.

Secret Agent – This is essentially a side-scrolling shooter with beat-em-up elements built in, and feels like a cross between Bad Dudes and Rolling Thunder with a Heavy Barrel gimmick thrown in for good measure. You play as a numbered secret agent who’s attempting to stop a nuclear strike on the US by obliterating every terrorist in between him and the warhead. The pacing of Secret Agent is its biggest positive, as it breaks up the gameplay at various points by throwing in different ways to play. You start out parachuting out of a plane, follow that up with a regular Rolling Thunder combat section, then jump onto a side-scrolling shooting section in the very next stage. Two additional stages are based around underwater shooting segments, and even in the regular walk-and-shoot sections the game gives you other weapons and items to play with in addition to your pistol or, when that runs out of bullets, your fists and feet. Like Heavy Barrel, you can also collect components of a “Golden Gun”, which, like the Heavy Barrel, rips apart anything it shoots, but only for a limited time. Secret Agent is, in a lot of respects, an evolved version of Data East’s beat-em-up formula games, and it’s actually a lot of fun for a game that isn’t as notable as its predecessors. Secret Agent ends up being one of the better games on the disc simply because it does what it does very well, and it’s a fun and well designed side-scrolling shooter/beat-em-up hybrid.

Side Pocket – As you might infer, this is an arcade pool game, and as you might expect, it’s not very good. The game works exactly as you’d expect: you use your stick to hit the cue ball at other colored balls with the intention of sinking one or more colored balls at one shot. Side Pocket tries to mix this up a bit by offering bonus stages where you can try to sink tricky shots, as well as placing stars in pockets to encourage you to shoot for them, and in a good game these sorts of bonuses would be great fun. Side Pocket, however, is not even remotely a good game, and one must wonder if anyone on the staff in charge of the compilation actually played this before green lighting it for this compilation. For one thing, any shot that doesn’t sink a ball counts as a lost life, and a scratch also costs a life, meaning that a scratch with no ball sunk loses TWO LIVES. If that doesn’t make your virtual wallet cry a little, I don’t know what will. Further, the controls for turning the stick are stiff and it can take forever to position a shot, the balls don’t move nearly far enough when struck, and the game is, quite frankly, boring. Video pool can be fun when done properly, but Side Pocket is a quarter-obliterating mess that won’t entertain you for any more than a few minutes at best.

Street Hoop – This is arcade-style three-on-three basketball with a weird urban theme that was probably “edgy” at the time. Now, it’s just kind of silly. On the plus side, the game is actually still fairly amusing. You play three-on-three basketball, and stealing, blocking, shooting and dunking are all very easy to do. Each team is ranked by their abilities on the court, and the teams are varied and interesting enough that you can have some fun with the game more than once. As a single player game the CPU is a bit rough as you progress, and the game kind of feels like a less exciting NBA Jam, but with two players it’s pretty amusing and overall Street Hoop is an acceptable addition to this compilation.

Super Real Darwin – Wow, okay, this game is bad. Super Real Darwin is your typical overhead shooter with an evolution gimmick: as you collect power-ups, your ship “evolves” into more powerful forms with more powerful weaponry. While the concept is fantastic, however, the gameplay is unfortunately not, as the controls are stiff, evolving leaves you open to death, and the game uses a checkpoint system when you die, meaning that you’ll probably be stuck on the same section for hours until you can adjust. The game isn’t terribly aesthetically pleasant, either, and the game is bland outside of its gimmick, leaving you with little motivation to force yourself head first through the brick wall that is its learning curve. Super Real Darwin might not be the worst game on this disc, but it’s incredibly close.

Wizard Fire – This is an overhead action game with mild RPG elements that feels like an amalgam of Dungeon Magic, Arcus Odyssey and the Capcom Dungeons and Dragons games. You can choose from one of five characters, each of whom has a distinct positive over the others, and plow through waves of enemies, picking up ability-boosting items as you go. Each character attacks in different ways, and each has different bonus-damage attacks they can perform. Each character can also cast magic, which charges up as you waste enemies, allowing you to unleash powerful spells for heavy damage or to transform into powerful beings capable of ruining enemies with ease. Once again, this is a game that makes it apparent it’s trying to eat your quarters later in the game, but that aside, it’s a great time with two players, and it’s also one of the best games on the disc overall.

There’s a decent amount of games on the disc, as you can see, and several are quite good and worth playing more than once. Each game offers five achievements to earn, which can be as simple as making it to the end of a stage or as complex as performing some sort of tricky in-game action or some challenging task, and unlocking them unlocks all sorts of music tracks and archive images for your perusal. Unlocking all five achievements on any game unlocks a “Special” mode, which is generally a remixed, more challenging version of the game for those who love the original and want a bit more of a challenge. You can save your game any time from the options menu of each game in case you want to come back to the point you’re at later, and while most games won’t take any more than an hour to complete if they actually have an ending, this is a nice feature to have in case you have to step away for a bit. You can also assign a Mii to yourself when you start the game, which allows you to tie your high scores to said Mii in case you want to show off how awesome you are.

That said, there are some distinct issues with Data East Arcade Classics, with the biggest one of the lot being that a whole lot of these games aren’t very good. I understand that, with Data East defunct, while G-Mode has acquired the rights to many of Data East’s back catalog, they might not own ALL of it. This is reasonable. Further, it makes perfect sense that the licensed games Data East has released over the years wouldn’t be eligible for release in such a collection, so it’s understandable that Captain America and the Avengers or Robocop won’t be seeing daylight on a compilation any time soon. That said, maybe half of the games on this compilation are “good” and several are outright awful, and Data East has a fantastic collection of games that G-Mode could mine from for such compilations. Bloody Wolf, Night Slashers, either of the sequels to Caveman Ninja/Joe and Mac, ROAD AVENGER (which I would easily buy twice, I swear), Spinmaster, Midnight Resistance, Dark Legend, and/or Karate Champ could have easily been subbed into this compilation instead of some of the less enjoyable games on here now, and the disc would have been far better for it. G-mode DOES own all of these games, according to their Data East website, so there’s no reason some of these games couldn’t have found their way onto this disc, and while individual tastes are certainly going to differ, the fact is that about a third of the games on this disc are not notable, not entertaining, and not going to be played by many people more than twice.

Beyond that, the usual suspects that plague most compilations rear their ugly heads. These games are all rather old, over two decades in some cases and over one decade in all cases, and some gamers simply are not going to get into the nostalgia experience. Several of the games on the disc are good enough to stand on their own, nostalgia or no, but several are games that are only going to appeal to diehard gamers, if anyone, and even as a budget release that might be a hard sell. On a larger compilation like Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection you can take the risk because there are a whole lot of games on the disc to play and there are bound to be SOME you like, but with a fifteen game disc where most of the games are either an hour long or are “earn points until you die” games, this is a lot riskier. There’s also a lack of online play and leaderboards, so you can’t play with friends online and can’t upload your boast-worthy scores for the world to see, making this a local experience only. Data East Arcade Classics also contains one of the lowest game counts in a compilation disc yet, excluding the various PS1 era Namco compilations. SNK Arcade Classics comes close, with only sixteen games, but most other compilations start at twenty and go up from there, and many such compilations were released at a twenty dollar asking price, making this seem a bit over-priced in comparison. Granted, if all fifteen games were GREAT this wouldn’t be a concern, but frankly, this isn’t the case.

The bottom line is that Data East Arcade Classics is a game that’s only going to appeal to fans of Data East or diehard retro gamers, as there’s too many flops and too little content on the disc to make it worthwhile for most players. To be fair, there are some good to great games on the disc, like Bad Dudes, Secret Agent, Wizard Fire, Heavy Barrel, Caveman Ninja and Magical Drop, and hey, Burger Time will always be a classic. The ability to play every game with two players is nice, as is the option to save your game at any time and unlock “special” modes of the games. However, Street Hoop is really only above average and most of the rest of the games are noticeably flawed to the point where most players won’t spend much time with them, rendering about half of the disc a novelty at best and worthless at worst. Further, as a compilation of old games, this isn’t going to appeal to many players who don’t get the nostalgia factor, there aren’t enough games on the disc to make it worthwhile in comparison to most other compilations, and the lack of any sort of online functionality hurts a bit. If you’re a fan of Data East or just miss the old arcade experience, Data East Arcade Classics has enough games and enough of the right games to be worth a look, but younger gamers won’t get much from this and folks looking for a more definitive Data East collection will walk away from this disappointed.

The Scores:
Game Modes: ABOVE AVERAGE
Graphics: GOOD
Sound: GOOD
Control/Gameplay: MEDIOCRE
Replayability: MEDIOCRE
Balance: MEDIOCRE
Originality: DREADFUL
Addictiveness: MEDIOCRE
Appeal: MEDIOCRE
Miscellaneous: ABOVE AVERAGE

FINAL SCORE: DECENT GAME.

Short Attention Span Summary:
Data East Arcade Classics is pretty much only going to appeal to fans of Data East or diehard arcade game fans, as it has a few worthwhile classics for those who must have them, but also has a lot of games you’ll not touch more than once. The games look and sound arcade perfect, and the presentation of the compilation is solid and inoffensive. The disc has some great classic games, like Bad Dudes, Heavy Barrel and Burger Time, along with some genuinely great titles like Secret Agent, Wizard Fire, Caveman Ninja and Magical Drop, so anyone looking for a Data East Collection with some worthwhile content will be pleased. That said, the rest of the games are adequate at best and abysmal at worst, which is doubly depressing considering both that Data East has some far better titles in their arcade library and that there are so few games on the disc to begin with that each stinker hurts a lot. The lack of any sort of online component, be it for online play or score comparisons, only helps to make the collection more of a niche product, and anyone who doesn’t have any nostalgic feelings about these games isn’t going to find enough quality gaming here to make the disc worth it. Data East Arcade Classics will be a fine purchase for diehard old-school arcade gaming fans or anyone who loves the company, but casual arcade fans or younger gamers won’t find much to do with this collection after a few hours, making it hard to recommend overall.
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/DEAC500.jpg
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/DEAC120.jpg

Review: Endless Ocean: Blue World (Wii)

Endless Ocean: Blue World
Developer: Arika
Publisher: Nintendo of America
Genre: Simulation
Release Date: 02/23/2010

The first Endless Ocean is one of my favorite games of this console generation. I raved about it in January of 2008, and at the end of the year, Endless Ocean would go on to win our “Nintendo Wii Game of the Year” and “All-Ages Game of the Year” awards in our 2008 Gaming Awards. It was also my #3 game of 2008, (Behind Valkyria Chronicles and The Lost Crown).

Here we are, two years later, with the second game in the series. It’s been released at a budget price of $29.99, and some come bundled with a free copy of Wii Speak, which will allow you to talk to other gamers playing this title as long as you both have a Wii Speak. This is a great way to move both products since you’re getting a fantastic deal. At least on the surface. After all, there are only five other games besides this one that are Wii Speak compatible (Uno, The Conduit, NBA 2K10, NHL: 2K10 and Animal Crossing: City Folk). I have neither owned, nor even played any of those games, which makes Wii Speak a nice bargain to be thrown in with EO:BW, but ultimately an object that will just take up space.

It’s rare you see a Nintendo title with budget pricing. After all, many of their games are actually slightly above the average price for a game on one of their systems. We see this most often on the DS where Nintendo first party games go for $34.99 while third party titles tend to go for $29.99. Is this a subtle warning from Nintendo, an obvious fear that it won’t move many copies due to an overt lack of violence, or is it an unexpected gift, giving gamers a title that is superior to 95% of the titles we’ve received this console generation regardless of system, yet at half the price?

Let’s Review

1. Story/Modes

There’s more of a story to Blue World than we had in the previous Endless Ocean. Here you’ll be a college student getting their degree in folklore. You take a leave of absence from college to join up with the L&L Diving Service so you can pursue the legend of “the Song of the Dragons” which turns out to involve a 19th century castle that sank to the bottom of the ocean. As you attempt to solve this mystery by diving for clues and relics, you’ll make new friends of both human and aquatic nature.

The core aspects of Endless Ocean remain the same though. You’ll be teaching tricks to dolphins, swimming to serene music and playing an otherwise relaxing and almost Zen-like game. The game has numerous subquests to play through, ranging from cleaning up fish to teaming up with a certain marine life form to clear boulders. Most of all though, the game is an open ended blissful underwater adventure where you swim around and identify over 100 types of marine life in all their shapes, variety, and glory.

I can’t emphasize enough how much I love the sheer amount of knowledge you get from this game. The more you interact with a species, the more real life information about it will be unlocked. The game is as educational as it is beautiful, and I can’t stress how much that aspect means to me. I loved seeing a strange new creature or learning the habits of a Cormorant or Mahi-Mahi. You can also take pictures of things underwater and store them to an SD card and even buy items to customize your own personal island paradise.

There are a few things from the original that I strongly miss. First is the fish petting. As silly as it sounded, man was popping in the first Endless Ocean and petting some fish for an hour soothing and oh so relaxing. Here you don’t have that option. You swim with the fish and sometimes feed them or shoot them with a healing beam that can also be used to drive off various predatory animals like sharks. I also miss the dive requests from tourists. Here you’ll be doing salvage missions instead, which just aren’t as fun.

I enjoyed this game and found the characters and new story line to be interesting, but so much of the game was exactly like the original – just not as good. There is some new stuff added and the game is larger than most RPG’s, but I actually preferred the stuff they took out to the new options, so it’s slightly disappointing. Endless Ocean: Blue World is still one of the two best games I’ve played in 2010 so far (along with Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom), but it is about a half step below the original title.

Story/Modes Rating: Great

2. Graphics

My god is this game beautiful. All of the animals are extremely detailed and have such lifelike animation, one would swear they were real if they didn’t know better. At times the footage can look like something right out of a nature documentary. It’s not quite Afrika beautiful, but it’s damn close. The animals, the water, the backgrounds, the lush scenery. Everything is amazing and you’ll have trouble believing that this isn’t a high definition game. It’s that good looking.

The one and only downfall to the visuals are the human models. They are a little out of place with the rest of the visual quality and at times, they can even be pretty hard on the eyes when compared to the rest of the game. Nancy and GG are the worst, and they look like early PS2 models rather than mid-gen Wii graphics. They’re not bad mind you. In some other game they’d be enjoyable for what they are. Compared to the high quality of the rest of the graphics though, it just pull things down. Thankfully 90-95% of the game is underwater so you’ll spend your time looking as stunning visuals rather than creepy people.

Graphics Rating: Great

3. Sound

When one thinks of the first Endless Ocean, they can’t help but gravitate towards Hayley Westenra’s “Prayer.” That song was so majestic and sublime it charmed nearly everyone. The rest of the soundtrack was equally amazing and it was one of the best auditory experiences I’ve ever had with a video game. It would send chills down my spine. It was THAT GOOD.

Unfortunately, the soundtrack in Blue World isn’t as powerful. It’s wonderful, but gone are the straight pure Celtic tracks that exuded relaxation and bliss. I miss them terribly and Blue World’s soundtrack is a bit of a disappointment compared to the original. Still, taken on its own, the music is serene and beautifully done. The tracks fit the calming atmosphere of the game nicely and it really is a wonderful soundtrack; it’s just that the original was as close to perfect as it gets, that anything else would be a letdown by comparison. If you haven’t played the original, you’ll find a compelling and almost haunting set of songs to guide you on your journey through the otherwise silent abyss.

There is no voice acting in Blue World, at least for human characters. It’s silent scrolling text here. However the animals do make noises and they are recordings ripped straight from the animals themselves. Birds tweet, whales sing, dolphins make their weird but charming noises and everything sounds as if they are truly alive. It’s small things like this that just scream quality and Arika has done another masterful job here.

So yes, diehard fans of the original Endless Ocean will find the new soundtrack a bit lacking in regards to both power and passion, but it’s wonderful in its own right and something I’d happily have a CD or MP3’s of for when I am working out or on a long car trip.

Sound Rating: Great

4. Control and Gameplay

So far I’ve stated that the original game has been superior to Blue World in all aspects so far. Well here is one area where the new game actually outdoes the original. In my review of the original game, I did say that the control scheme was the Achilles Heel of the game due to some strange mapping on the Wiimote. Well, that’s more or less true here as we have even more controls but the same amount of buttons on the Wiimote. This can make things a bit unwieldy, especially when you are trying to go from feeding a sea horse to needing to fend off a Tiger Shark. Every single button on the Wiimote has one or more uses and it can get a bit unwieldy.

So, with this in mind, you may be wondering why I actually prefer this game’s controls. Well, it’s because you finally have a second option instead of the all-Wiimote controls with the Classic Controller scheme. Oh my god, is it like night and day. It’s so much easier to make tight turns, change direction and even get the cursor to home in on a specific fish or creature when there are dozens on your screen. Quick turn is finally its own button rather than being a double click of the B button of the Wiimote, which is also your swimming button, so you no longer have to stop moving for a second to spin around. In fact, the only thing missing from the Classic Controller option is the ability to roll. How they made this oversight is beyond me, but at least the Wiimote is still connected to the Classic Controller when you play. Overall though, the Classic Controller gives you a superior gameplay experience and makes it easier to scan, feed, heal and swim throughout the game.

The overall gameplay flows like this: You pick a location for diving, you jump into the briny blue and then you swim around to complete your objective. Perhaps it’s to find a specific object or fish, or maybe it’s to complete a map of the dive spot so you can make some money. You can stay underwater as long as you have air, and while underwater, you can scan fish to add them (and their zoological information) to your collection. You can also find coins, relics, and more in the water.

You have many options besides the basic gameplay. You can feed fish, use a pulsar gun to heal them, use an electromagnetic sensor to find treasure buried beneath the sands, take pictures with an underwater camera, and use a sea whistle to call one of your animal partners to you so you can swim together. It’s all very simple, and although the basic controls of the game are quite simple and will be used in each section, the goals and locations will differ wildly.

So Endless Ocean: Blue World might lack the music and more fun aspects of the original Endless Ocean, but the Classic Controller makes the game a lot easier, and thus more fun, to play. It still has some issues and the Wiimote controls are a bit clunkier than ever, but the overall experience has taken a step in the right direction.

Control and Gameplay Rating: Enjoyable

5. Replayability

Blue World is a very large open ended game. You’ll have to go through each area of the game multiple times to see every fish, collect every object and finish every subquest. As I said earlier, this game is longer than most RPG’s and with the ability to gain diving and salvage levels, it can sometimes feel like one rather than a simulation. You can spend hours just training a dolphin and it will feel like mere minutes. I spent an entire day just exploring the first two areas in the game because I wanted to see the differences between day and night and make sure I collected all that I could. It’s very hard to see all that there is to see in Blue World, and much like the original game, I know I’ll be playing this title for some time to come, even long after this review has gone live.

You also have the bonus ability of playing with your friends over the Wi-Fi connection. It doesn’t really add anything to the game but it is a nice little thing to do now and then. It’s a bone thrown to you from Arika, although it’s not something most people who pick up this title will get much use out of.

It’s still amazing that you can get more replay value out of a budget title than nearly every full priced game on the Wii as well as most 360 and PS3 games. There’s always one more coin to collect or one more fish to feed.

Replayability Rating: Unparalleled

6. Balance

This is another area where Blue World exceeds the original. Instead of having to pet some fish for literally minutes to identify them, now you just lock onto them with the A button and you get your information. If you want more details about the creature, you can feed them and/or take their picture to get some trivia. This is nicely done and lets one get the knowledge about the animal in an easier fashion.

The game has also added a punishment if you run out of air on your dive. In the original, you just went back to the surface and that was that. Now you have to surface before your oxygen is depleted or you get a mark against you in your records. It’s a wrist slap to be sure, but at least there is some acknowledgment that you would have died horribly if you did something like that in real life. You can also be attacked by predatory animals. I accidentally walked into a great white shark feeding frenzy, and though I had my pulsar to repel them, I couldn’t take out a half dozen sharks and, well, they got me. You don’t die when this happens or get any real punishment save for your pride being damaged. It’s like in Afrika where you can be attacked by a hippo or zebra, but you’ll be pulled out of harm’s way at the last second. Still, it’s a bit scary to see a pack of sharks bearing down on you, even in a video game.

It’ll be tricky to complete everything in the game and some quests are definitely harder than others, but as long as you explore everything, you’ll be able to finish them, even if it is later rather than sooner.

Balance Rating: Good

7. Originality

Between the Everblue games (the series Arika made before they moved on to Endless Ocean) and the Aquanaut’s Holiday series, I’m surprised how crowded the “underwater simulator” genre has gotten over the last few years. I can’t really say that Blue World brings anything new to the table, as there is nothing here, save for some collection aspects and a new control scheme, that truly separates it from the original. It’s basically the same game with a fresh coat of paint. At least the original was a vastly improved version of Everblue.

So if there is one real pratfall for Blue World, it is that you are getting essentially the same game but with different locations, a new soundtrack and some very small new options to play with in exchange for the gutting of others.

Originality Rating: Below Average

8. Addictiveness

Like the original Endless Ocean, Blue World was very hard to put down. It has an almost meditative quality about it that I adore. The music, the water, the fish and the entire package never fails to sooth me. I spent days with this game where I would play it for hours at a time. In fact most of my “breaks” were because the batteries in my wireless sensor bar or wiimote died and I had to recharge them. Blue World is so serene, it’s rather hard to put down. It mellows me out, puts a smile on my face, and I get to think about my Cancun vacation coming up at the end of April where I’ll get to do this sort of thing for real rather than virtually.

Blue World is a slow paced game where the goal is simply to look and experience rather than kill anything or save a princess. Gamers with short attention spans or ADHD might not be able to deal with the laid back atmosphere of the game, but for most gamers, once you get into Blue World, it’ll be hard to stop playing.

Addictiveness Rating: Good

9. Appeal Factor

Although some would-be gaming publications poo-poo’d the original Endless Ocean and refused to even call it a game (How long did you stay in business after that, EGM?), it sold extremely well, proved to be popular with actual gamers and ended up winning several awards when 2008 was done, including the two from us mentioned in the preamble of this review. Much like the original, Blue World is a game that can be appreciated by nearly everyone, be they casual gamer, small child, or diehard consumer of electronic entertainment. The game is a work of beauty, speaking to the artist within each of us, and if this game somehow fails to touch your soul, then you probably don’t have one. Even if an underwater sea life simulation is outside your usual genre preferences, you’ll find yourself captivated by this game and scouring columns of coral to see if there is a small life form of secret coin embedded in there somewhere. It’s a game that transcends genres, and although it admittedly isn’t for everyone, it is a game that even people without patience or calm should experience just to see that high quality games that don’t involve slaughtering a digital opponent do exist.

Appeal Factor: Good

10. Miscellaneous

So for $29.99, you are getting a budget game that is far superior than the majority of fifty or sixty dollar priced titles that are out there. If you’re lucky you’ll also be getting a copy of Wii Speak for free, which generally runs the same cost as this game. This just might be the best release deal of all of 2010. I can’t see any other game getting such a costly pack-in for free.

If you missed out on the original Endless Ocean, then hang your head in deep shame. Worry not though, as the sequel is as cheap as it is awesome, and although my favourite aspects of the original have been replaced and the soundtrack isn’t as awe-inspiring, what’s here is still one of the best games released for the Wii. Blue World is definitely going to be a nominee for several awards at the end of the year. This is a game that needs to be experienced, so by all means, go out and pick it up if you haven’t already.

Miscellaneous Rating: Unparalleled

The Scores
Story/Modes: Great
Graphics: Great
Sound: Great
Control and Gameplay: Enjoyable
Replayability: Unparalleled
Balance: Good
Originality: Below Average
Addictiveness: Good
Appeal Factor: Good
Miscellaneous: Unparalleled
FINAL SCORE: VERY GOOD GAME!

Short Attention Span Summary
In a day and age where most gamers tend to be shocked and appalled at seeing a fifty or sixty dollar price tag on a game that is essentially garbage, Endless Ocean: Blue World is a refreshing breath of air. At only $29.99, you are getting a game that is more open ended and longer than the average RPG and boasts visuals that are on par with a high resolution title. Lucky gamers will get a free Wii Speak thrown in with their copy, increasing the value of this game all the more. Although Blue World is a half step down from the original Endless Ocean, due to the replacement of the best (or more soothing) aspects of the game in favour of a gun for calming or healing animals and the loss of the epic soundtrack of the original, this is still one of the best games available for the Wii and one that truly needs to be experienced in order to understand how truly sublime and awe-inspiring it can be. If you have a Wii, you need this game – it’s that simple.
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/EObox-120×120.jpg
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/endless1214.jpg

Nintendo Download Wrap-Up for February 15th, 2010

In the two plus years that we’ve been doing these wrap-ups, whether just for the Virtual Console or for the entire service, just about every article has had a lot of comments about whatever the Virtual Console has put out. When we started profiling the other downloadable titles on the WiiWare and DSiWare, most of them only got as many comments as the article’s writer gave; most of the attention went to the VC game, as that’s what we know.

This week sets a precedent: despite a big-name VC release, it’s the first time we’ve had many more responses to a WiiWare title than we have for a Virtual Console title. In fact, we had one response for the VC game, and that one comes from me only because I’m writing the piece and don’t want to screw up my formatting.

Again, that might be surprising considering the name of the game, but then again, maybe we’re all just fatigued by the franchise…

Sonic & Knuckles
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Original System: Sega Genesis
Original Release Date: October 17th, 1994 (NA)
Price: 800 Wii Points/$8

Christopher Bowen: Well, when it comes to milking and whoring out their old franchises, Sega can’t be accused of half-assing it. They’re completionists!

Sonic & Knuckles itself was an OK game. It played very similar to Sonic 3, only with the addition of Knuckles as a good guy, in the start of the unfortunate trend of bringing the focus of Sonic games away from Sonic himself. But what made it stand out was that it supported lock-on technology that made Knuckles a playable character in Sonic 2 + 3. The best part of the VC port is that it supports the lock-on technology for anyone that owns the other versions of Sonic already, meaning you can play the VC Sonic 2 with Knuckles if you want.

That sounds like a great deal, but anyone who knows me know can sense the gigantic “BUT” coming, and here it is. For one, this isn’t new technology. The first emulation of the lock-on technology was put into Sonic Jam, which was released only fourteen years ago. While I realize that most people cannot play Sonic Jam anymore, anyone with a Wii can play the Sonic Mega Collection, which is available right now on eBay for literally under $10. If you own a PS2, Sonic Mega Collection + is also available for about the same price, and comes with extra games as well. In short, it’s laughably easy to find a compilation that has more than what the Virtual Console is offering in terms of what works with Sonic & Knuckles – three games – at under half the price.

In short, if you bought Sonic 2 + 3 for the Virtual Console for a combined $16, you already got taken for a ride, so what’s another $8, if only to justify a dumb purchase?

___

Of course, no one really cares about yet another Sonic title, and our staff was no different. Due to the high volume of feedback we received about our premier WiiWare title, I’m going to give it it’s own section in the write-up.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney : JUSTICE FOR ALL
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Original Systems: Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS
Original Release Date: October 22, 2002 (JP GBA), January 16, 2007 (NA DS)
Price: 1000 Wii Points/$10

Mohamed Al-Saadoon: If you’ve ever played the game on the DS, there really is no reason to buy it again on the Wii, seeing as they’re the exact same game.

As for the game itself: If you loved the first game, you’ll love the second one. I’d venture to say that Justice for All is more of an expansion of the first game than a true sequel (this being Capcom after all) and the only real “feature” is the addition of “Psyche-locks” which are mostly lazy efforts to artificially extend game time and keep you from the best part of the game: The Courtroom (now with extra whips!).

All in all, the weakest entry in the original trilogy but still worth 10$ in my opinion.

___

Aileen Coe: Justice For All is a good continuation of where the first game left off, and introduces the Psyche-Lock feature, though if you own the DS version, it’s not really worth it to get this version as well since both versions are identical. However, if you picked up the Wii version of the first game, this is pretty much a necessity. While it’s not the strongest entry in the series (my vote would go to the third game) and is the shortest of the trilogy (unless for some kooky reason you want to pretend Rise From the Ashes doesn’t exist), it’s still well worth playing.

___

Aaron Sirois: I can say without any problems that Justice For All is the reason I bought a DS. A couple of hours spent playing my friend’s copy and I knew I had to play the whole series.

Nonetheless, it is the weakest game of the original trilogy. With only four cases, it is also the shortest. There are still plenty of great moments, and the end case has some really great characters. It just isn’t as strong as the first game and can’t compare with the sheer brilliance that was Trials and Tribulations

If you’ve played the first game but not this one, you should get your hands on it. Whether that means searching for a DS copy or just buying it off of the WiiWare service, it doesn’t matter. This game is worth your time.

Of course, fans of the series are probably just going to spend their time on the new game.

___

There are two other WiiWare releases. The first is WarMen Tactics, what appears to be a shooter with some confusing gameplay and a LAUGHABLY bad trailer video. The story is that, in the near future, the world can no longer be controlled by normal means, so all the governments of the world decide to ally with the UN to create a singular Department of Control to police all countries of the world. You are a member of a resistance of former conventional police and military members, resisting the “new world order”, as the narrator of the video puts it. In other words, it’s basically old-fashioned police (who I hate) vs. a new, modern police force of what appear to be mechs and RoboCop wannabes (who I also hate). Can I root for a meteor shower? It appears that hiding, moving and shooting are all done via the Wiimote, though I’m not quite sure how it’s supposed to be intuitive with that control scheme. At $8, I would say wait for reviews before deciding to plunk down any money on what appears to be a clunker at first glance. Also out is Art of Balance, which surprisingly isn’t a game that requires the Balance Board, but is instead a puzzle game involving placing various objects on a pedestal so that they stay balanced, and don’t fall off into the water. It seems a bit costly at $8, though to be fair, there are a fair amount of options thrown in such as competitive and cooperative play modes. I can honestly say this title has me intrigued.

On DSiWare, we have no less than five new titles. The big name of the lot is Prehistorik Man. If this name sounds familiar to gamers who were around for the 16 bit era, it should be; it was a DOS game that was ported to the Super Nintendo and later the Game Boy Advance. Having played the Super Nintendo version, I can confirm that it is a paint-by-numbers, era-specific platformer that will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s played any remotely similar title, ever. Needless to say, I’m not too enamoured with it, especially at $8, but anyone desperate for a new game, or who liked the previous iterations (especially old PC gamers) could stand to check it out. Another big name is out, in the form of Scrabble Classic, what appears to be a functional form of the classic board game for $8. This sounds like a safer purchase, especially for people who want something to do on a long trip. Real Soccer 2010 is a football game from Gameloft that uses the touchscreen for trick moves and the like. Anyone desperate for a football game might give it a passing glance, but for $8, I want a little more than a gimmick for my football fix. Spaceball: Revolution is a puzzle game that involves copying on the bottom screen what appears on the top screen, and though I can’t get any gameplay videos to check out what the gameplay actually is, looking at screenshots is giving me Super Glove Ball flashbacks. At least we finally found a game that costs less than $8 ($5). Finally, we have Spotto!, a game about a duck trying to save his friends from ghosts by using bombs. I have absolutely no clue how it plays, as there are no videos, screenshots are inconclusive and Google is no help, but Nintendo’s description makes it sound like Yoshi’s Island for kids. At least it’s cheap, at $2.

Overall, we have an overpriced game that requires two other overpriced games to make it worthwhile, but we also have a huge release with the second Phoenix Wright game making it onto WiiWare. At $10, that one’s definitely a steal. Everything else is buyer beware, but PW will get anyone that buys it a lot of gameplay.

Until next time, this is Christopher Bowen, who is currently getting the stink-eye from his fiancée because he never got into the Phoenix Wright games.
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/virtualconsole.jpg
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/virtualconsolebig.jpg

Review: No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle (Wii)

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle
Genre: Beat ‘Em Up
Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture
Publisher: Ubisoft
Release Date: 01/26/2010

I’m a fan of over the top style action, whether it is infused into the games I play or the movies I watch, so it should come as no surprise that I enjoyed the original No More Heroes game on the Wii. At the time, as a Wii owner, I was starving for lightsaber action that seemed destined to appear on the system yet never seemed to be released. Along comes this crazy game where a guy named Travis Touchdown, an Otaku obsessed with Japanese culture, mail orders a beam katana (aka lightsaber) and tries to work his way up the ranks of an organization for assassins.

It was a crazy game that destroyed the fourth wall, was filled with all sorts of absurd characters and required doing side jobs like mowing lawns in order to progress through the game. Plus, when I got the game it was fairly cheap, so it was easy to ignore some of the shortcomings of the game as intentional parody of other games. That and when you play enough mini-game collections you just start appreciating a game that seeks only to deliver a bloody good time on the Wii.

At least those are the excuses I tell myself as I’m trying to figure out, after beating No More Heroes 2, exactly what it was that I enjoyed about the series in the first place.

No More Heroes 2 starts with the protagonist of the last game, Travis Touchdown, returning to seek revenge for the murder of his friend. Three years have passed since the end of the last game, and during that time, Travis has retired from the rankings and the UAA organization that runs the rankings has grown in popularity based on Travis’s previous exploits. The town of Santa Destroy has grown with the wealth that the UAA has brought in and has expanded its borders. The first game ended ambiguously with Travis and his brother seconds away from killing each other while Travis questions whether or not he was even the protagonist of the game. At the beginning of NMH2 none of what happened at the end of the first game is addressed. In fact, the game breaks the fourth wall right away with the characters looking straight at the camera and saying that the explanation is long and the player would skip it anyway.

This is the first point that I realized the game developers were giving the player a virtual middle finger.

I get it. Suda51 is a guy who likes to present crazy game design ideas in weird ways. In some ways he reminds me of Quentin Tarantino, as he’s not afraid to completely break the rules of the media he works with in order to make a point. In the original game there was a boss battle that was completely non-interactive, not to mention the relationship between the last boss and the main character, as well as the whole crazy part after the credits. However, making a point by sacrificing game design for delivering that message does not make for an enjoyable experience. Ignoring how the first game ended in the sequel and claiming the player would be bored with the explanation is just lazy. I can skip cut scenes by pressing the plus button if I so choose.

If that was the worst of it, then I would just laugh it off as a satire for sequels in general and move on. Unfortunately, No More Heroes 2 is a mess of bad game design decisions that make it feel less like the development team is mocking video game cliches and Otaku culture and more like it’s actively insulting the very audience that is buying the game.

Let me explain.

No More Heroes 2 starts well enough. The game begins with a familiar rooftop scene against what appears to be Cloud Strife. That battle is interrupted by a narrator, a scantily dressed nurse looking person on the other side of a peep show booth, who is explaining the events of the game in a past tense. Then the action continues and the plot comes together to explain why Travis Touchdown is back in Santa Destroy: he is after the murderer of his friend. Coincidentally, that happens to be the current number one ranked assassin in the expanded UAA. Since Travis has been gone for years he has to start again from the bottom of the rankings and move his way back up the ladder again in order to challenge the current king of the mountain. Except that ladder is 50 assassins long.

Well, sort of. Apparently they have Travis start as rank 51 in order to pay homage to NMH creator Suda51. I call it false advertising. The back of the box states that he starts at rank 51 and fights through more epic battles. While it is true there are more boss battles, the final number is closer to 15 than 51. The game manages this by having one assassin and his cheerleaders count as 24 of the fifty. Then there’s a Battle Royal between twelve assassins and Travis. Before you get excited, there is no large scale battle with twelve different assassins. By the time Travis gets involved it is down to just one. At least six other assassins in the top ten are killed by people other than Travis, three of which are never even part of the game.

That doesn’t even begin to address the problems with the bosses themselves. They don’t even make sense for the rankings. At least one of them hasn’t even been on Earth for several years, so how he became one of the top ranked assassins is beyond me and doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Maybe I’m expecting too much consistency from a game where you can turn into a tiger, but the ranking system in NMH2 is bullshit. You can advance rank by other people fighting the battles for you? What the hell?

Then there is the matter of the bosses. In the first game these were over the top caricatures of different archetypes with some well done development before and after the fights. In fact, it is easy to say that the boss battles were the main attraction of the first game. In the sequel, these characters do not have the same flair. The introductory scenes are generally the character talking about how great Travis is. There are no scenes after the battle with the bosses, as these have been replaced with timed motion events. Because of this, the bosses lack the character that made them stand out in the original. Instead, they are boring, tepid affairs in which I didn’t even know the name of the character until after they were dead. There is one boss that is imprisoned and spits acid, and I still have no idea who she is or why I should give a damn about her character. You can say the boss is there to show Travis’s fear of intimacy, except the whole battle is forgettable. Compared to some of the battles in the first game, this is extremely disappointing.

While we are talking about changes, let’s go over what has been removed from the game. All of the Lakinov ball abilities? Gone. The free roam mode around Santa Destroy? Nope. Upgrading the beam katanas? Gone. Assassination missions? Not in the game. Side jobs? Changed.

Instead of the mini-games that the first one required in order to earn money to continue in the rankings, the sequel removes all of that. There is no monetary requirement to continue the game. Instead, nearly all of the side jobs have been reduced to 8-bit games. Overall, this is one of the best parts of the game, as the 8-bit mini games are more enjoyable than everything else the game has to offer. They’re simple affairs that look exactly like they’d fit in with 8-bit games of the past. The music is extremely well done for these games, which include a sound effect at the beginning of Travis blowing into a cartridge.

The only problem is that each of them only have a couple of levels and are over pretty quickly. There is no longer a monetary requirement to advance to the next ranking fight, so the only motivation to play these games is to train, buy clothes and buy more Beam Katanas. There are only two Beam Katanas to buy from Naomi and no upgrades for them. None of the clothes really stand out, and all of them just make Travis look like a douche anyway, so unless you are a completionist then you will not need to play these mini-games more than a couple of times. Then there are the training games. Most of the job side missions that were changed to 8-bit games made them more enjoyable. The 8-bit training games are less so. Much less so. Both of the 8-bit games are extremely frustrating at higher levels to the point where the only exercise that’s going on is an exercise in frustration.

Speaking of frustrating, in another effort to flip off critics of the first game, the only job side mission that carried over from the original title to the sequel intact was the scorpion catching game. The one no one liked because it was so terrible. The mini-game still is terrible. I guess it was included as a joke, but I’m not sure I understand how including the worst part of the first game in the sequel is supposed to be funny.

By the middle portion of the game I had already played the side job games enough that I had enough cash to cover everything I wanted to purchase, and I’d already played through the side jobs enough to the point that I’d beaten all their levels multiple times. From that point on, there was no need to play them anymore, so I could focus on going through the ranking matches. While doing so, I came to realize exactly why there had been a monetary requirement in the first game to proceed. By roaming around and doing these side jobs it put a buffer between one ranking mission and the next. By the time you finished doing the tedious side jobs you wanted to get back into the action. With no monetary requirement to keep you from doing the ranking missions in No More Heroes 2 back to back, the game becomes much more repetitive and the flaws of the combat stand out much more.

Another game sequel came out recently, Mass Effect 2, that stripped out certain game mechanics that weren’t fully realized in the first game. However, since that caused the game to focus much more on the combat, they made sure that this portion of the game was better developed than it was in the first game. No More Heroes 2 stripped out some of the things people complained about in a similar fashion, except the combat is just as bad or even worse than ever. No More Heroes 2 can’t be compared to brawling games or action titles as even the worst games in both of those genres hold more depth in their combat systems. Every minor enemy in the game can be beaten by just mashing the A button. The bosses are about the same, except with boss battles you dodge until they finish their attack animation and then mash the A button. Repeat ad nauseum.

I am not kidding whatsoever when I say that the combat mechanics of the game Kung Fu Panda are much better than those of No More Heroes 2. Hell, the combat in Dynasty Warriors is superior.

There are other combat moves in the game than just mashing A over and over again. Travis can punch and kick with the B button until the enemy is dizzy, then using the same button Travis will grab an enemy and a motion direction will appear on the screen. Moving the nunchuck and remote in the directions indicated results in Travis pulling off a wrestling move. Mashing the A button until an enemy is weak also ends a similar way, except the motion will only require the remote as you cut the enemy in half, which is referred to as a Death Blow. The game isn’t really particular about whether you follow the on screen movements or not. You can swing your arms in the air like you just don’t care when the screen pops up and that’ll work just as well.

The Z button is used for locking onto a target and to block, and dodging is mapped to the D-pad. While the game doesn’t ever really cover this move in the game, the Dark Stepping move is back. While locked onto an enemy and holding still, once they attack if you move the joystick left or right just as they attack Travis will slide around them. In the first game this move was extremely powerful and most of the enemies and bosses were a piece of cake with it. In No More Heroes 2 the power of the move has been scaled back so that time simply slows down and gives the player an advantage of getting a few quick shots in. The Lakinov abilities, as mentioned, are gone, as are some of the wrestling moves. Both the wrestling moves and Death Blows are just finishing animations, and as there isn’t a large variety of either, it gets pretty boring to watch the same animations over and over again.

Most of the game progresses like this:

Lock onto enemy. Approach enemy. Mash the A button or B button. Follow on screen motion when prompted. Move onto next enemy. If it’s a boss or a larger enemy with a chainsaw, use the same attack method until they obviously telegraph their attack, then dodge, and go back to mashing.

Seriously, that’s the whole game outside of the 8-bit side jobs. Even when you get the chance to control other characters, the combat is still essentially the same as with Travis. There’s the Dark Stepping move, but the AI in the game is so terrible there were times I waited in front of an enemy to attack while it seemed to be waiting for me to attack for far too long. That brings up another huge issue, the AI. Enemies with guns are generally the biggest threat, as they can do long range damage, though in my playthrough on Mild (the normal difficulty) the enemies with guns wouldn’t shoot at Travis if he was standing a few feet away. The enemies with weapons would circle… then wait. The larger enemies would telegraph an attack, then wait to be attacked. The bosses would cycle through a few different attack patterns, and I mean like three different attack patterns, and once you learned those then the fight was a breeze. If there was concern over the boss fight, the game generally left a box with health laying around. The only other notable ability is one where, if you can string together combos without getting, hit a tiger in the lower right hand corner of the screen will turn from yellow to red and start breathing fire. At this point, Death Blows will cause a slot machine reel to appear, and matching up different slots results in different random abilities. When the tiger turns red and glows, you can also press the minus button to trigger the ability to have Travis move extremely fast. This ability is a godsend, if only because while the amount of button mashing is the same, it goes by faster.

There are a few times that the game tries to add variety to the levels, and nearly every single attempt is an utter failure of epic proportions. There’s a Metal Gear Solid like stealth level, except there aren’t really any stealth mechanics in the game so it doesn’t work out so well. There’s a part where you can finally drive the motorcycle again, only it’s down an empty highway for a few minutes and is completely pointless. There’s a motorcycle sumo fight, only the motorcycle controls so poorly that I had to restart that fight several times because I kept inadvertently driving off of the cliff when merely trying to turn around. Plus there’s a really useful move on the bike that the game fails to mention as part of the control tutorial. A returning character is playable and has some platforming aspects to her levels that are so badly designed that whoever was in charge of those levels should just be ashamed of themselves. Another playable character has a level that is so short that I wonder why they even bothered including it.

There are multiple difficulty levels in the game, Sweet, Mild and Spicy. The hardest difficulty is unlocked after beating the game once, as well as a boss rush mode. The harder difficulty isn’t much harder than the default difficulty, except that enemies do more damage while Travis seems like he deals less damage. Enemies are quicker, as well so the window for dodging attacks or Dark Stepping is shorter. The hardest difficulty really exemplifies the poor combat, as there is no need to adjust strategy between Mild and Spicy. There’s no need to fight smarter, you only need to dodge faster and mash the A button more than usual.

To top it all off, the final boss has a one hit kill move. It mostly happens during the later part of the battle, though it can also happen really at anytime during the fight. The move is unblockable, and can only be avoided by dodging, though it happens so fast, and up to three times in a row, that it is extremely difficult to do so. The last boss is perhaps one of the worst final boss battles of any video game. I’ve seen several glowing reviews for the game, and I refuse to believe a single one of those reviewers have actually played through the final boss battle.

Some will argue that these shortcomings are intentional and are meant to parody the same shortfallings of the video game industry or game design in general. You know what? I couldn’t care less if that is true. What I do know is that these problems exist in No More Heroes 2, and it makes the entire experience less enjoyable. If the developers can’t make the same point while providing solid gameplay mechanics, then they aren’t doing their job very well.

The best thing I can say about the game is that No More Heroes 2 is still an extremely stylish action game. The art style from the first one is back and looks sharper than ever. The 8-bit games are fun for awhile. The music is excellent and fits the game perfectly. The voice acting is cheesy though that suits the game more than it hurts it. The voice actor for Travis Touchdown also really adds a strong element to the character and turned in a performance none of the other voice actors for the game come close to matching.

The style is great, and the message of the game is interesting. How the message is delivered is just a complete mess. Considering that every game with a focus on combat that Suda51 has been a part of (No More Heroes 1 and 2, Blood+ One Night Kiss, and Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked) have all been poor button mashing affairs that have relied more on style than engaging gameplay mechanics, maybe he should just turn in his video game controller and go make movies, or work with a better team of developers that can actually do something engaging with his vision. I was willing to overlook some of the issues with the first game because the style distracted from the poor design, and the game was a one of a kind experience. Well, it is no longer a one of a kind experience, and the flaws are more obvious than ever before. There is only so long a person/company can hide poor technical ability behind style, and I think Grasshopper Manufacture has reached their limit. There’s a lot of subtle messages in the game that can be analyzed and allow Suda51 to be portrayed as genius. However, much like a sculpture made of road kill by an animal rights activist could be discussed at length about the artistic merits of such a thing, at the end of the day, both the sculpture and this game stink.

Nothing against the publisher Ubisoft. In fact, if you own a PS3 or 360 I highly would recommend you purchase Assassin’s Creed 2 by the publisher instead. Currently, that game is actually cheaper, and it is by far a better interactive experience than No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle. Or save your money for Red Steel 2.

The Scores

Story: Poor
Graphics: Very Good
Audio: Great
Gameplay: Bad
Replayability: Bad
Balance: Awful
Originality: Awful
Addictiveness: Awful
Appeal Factor: Mediocre
Miscellaneous: Worthless

Final Score: Very Poor Game

Short Attention Span Summary:

No More Heroes 2 is a technical disaster of poor gameplay concepts and bad design. Grasshopper Manufacture decided to sacrifice solid game mechanics and cohesive storytelling in favor of style and a message about video game characters, creators and the people who play them being stuck in a cycle of violence. Maybe in the hands of of a good developer this message could be delivered and backed up by an enjoyable experience instead of button mashing and a series of “WTF” moments. The only Desperate Struggle I had while playing the game was a desperate struggle to stave off boredom.
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/nmh_120.jpg
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/nmh_500.jpg

Review: 5-in-1 Solitaire (WiiWare)

5-in-1 Solitaire
Publisher: Digital Leisure
Developer: Digital Leisure
Genre: Card Game
Release Date: 02/01/2010

This is interesting. 5-in-1 Solitaire was released for DSiWare the same day as the WiiWare version. The DSi version was only 200 Nintendo points ($2), while the Wii version if 500 ($5). You would think the portable one would be more expensive, since you can take it anywhere, while this version is tethered to your TV, which is probably in reach of your computer which generally has at least one version of Solitaire on it for free (Mine has three of the five modes in this game.) So it’s more than a little odd that someone would want to pay for more versions of Solitaire. However, I suppose maybe you don’t want your child getting their grubby mitts all over your computer, especially since it is tax time. With that in mind, let’s see if Digital Leisure has given us a reason to actually pay money for Solitaire.

Let’s Review

1. Modes

As the name implies, 5-in-1 Solitaire gives you five versions of the card game Solitaire. You have Klondike, which is your standard Vegas Solitaire game and the one you generally find just called “Solitaire.” You have seven stacks and you’re trying to get all the cards in reverse order into four banks, one of each suit. You can turn over either one or three cards at a time depending on the rules you are using.

Freecell is another game that come standard on your computer, and again, your goal is to move all of the cards in reverse order into one of four piles. Here, however, you can only move one card at a time from one of the eight stacks to another, unless they are in order, in which case you can move up to four. There is also a bank where you can store up to four cards to keep them out of your way until they are actually helpful.

Spider is the third game that usually comes on your computer for free. Here you have only one suit of cards, but ten different sets. You’ll be attempting to stack cards in order and when you do, they can be removed from the playing field. The goal is to remove them all, or at least as many as you can.

Golf is one of two versions of Solitaire in this game that I’ve never encountered before. Here you start with seven piles of cards five cards deep. You have the remaining twenty cards in the deck and you turn them over one by one. You can then remove cards from the pile if they are one number (or face) higher or lower than the card you just turned over. So if it is a five, you can remove a six or a four if you have it. If you removed a six, then you can play a seven or five, and so on. Once you can’t make a move, you flip over a new card. You keep going until your twenty cards are done.

Finally there is Gaps which someone had to have been on massive amounts of crack to make up and/or understand. You have four rows of cards, each of which has thirteen cards. There are four gaps based on where the aces would be in the rows and your job is to align all the suits from 2 to K in order. It’s a very convoluted game and I can’t imagine why anyone would play this.

So you have five cards games, three of which can be found for free on any computer. One of the two new card games is really fun (Golf) while the other (Gaps) is horrible. At least you’re getting a card game for a dollar each, but it’s disappointing the DS got all five games for less than half the price.

Modes Rating: Mediocre

2. Graphics

Well, there’s not much to talk about here. Like with all virtual card games, you have a green backdrop signifying a gambling table, a deck of cards and designs for the cards. I will say that the game gives you a choice of four different deck designs for the back of your cards, but none of them are all that interesting. As well, the card graphics are rather blocky and unattractive. It’s almost as if the developers took the DSi graphics and then resized the graphics to fit a TV screen, complete with blurring and runny edges. It’s very similar to taking a low resolution image and then trying to make it work in a print article.

This isn’t a very visually appealing game, and things could have looked a lot nicer than what we have here. When my free Solitaire games on my laptop are prettier, you know there’s a problem.

Graphics Rating: Poor

3. Sound

There’s not a lot here for sound either. You have a generic background track that is neither annoying nor memorable. It just kind of sits there and it fades into the background while you play the game. I forgot it was even playing most of the time.

Then there are the sound effects. These can be really annoying, whether they are positive or negative noises. It’s just really bad squawking or MIDI blips. The game is actually better when you mute it. I’m not sure why they added sound effects to a card game, but there you go.

Sound Rating: Poor

4. Control and Gameplay

Your controls are pretty cut and dry. You move to a card you want to pick up and move and hold down the A button. Then you move your Wiimote to your desired location and let go. Repeat until game is won or lost. The end. You would think this would be pretty simple to do, but surprisingly the gameplay isn’t flawless. There will be quite a few times when you click on a card and it doesn’t move, or when you move it to the new spot, it doesn’t take and it moves back to its original place. This can be pretty annoying and it appears Digital Leisure knew that this was an issue with the game as there is an autoplay feature. This will move cards for you to keep you from missing points or matches. Of course, this makes me wonder what’s the point of playing this as it takes a lot of the actual PLAYING THE GAME out of the title, but it’ll probably be a lot of help to younger gamers or people that somehow have never played Solitaire before.

All and all, it’s simple and easy to play. Just like any other Solitaire title.

Control and Gameplay Rating: Good

5. Replayability

Although Solitaire games are simple, you can get a lot of replay out of them. Just ask all those people that play it on their computer at work instead of doing their jobs! With five different versions of Solitaire in this game, you have five times the lack of productivity. Of course, you actually have to turn your Wii on and then load the WiiWare title in order to play it, so it won’t distract you from that report or spreadsheet you need to finish.

Each game plays quite differently, each time you play it’s a different experience, and there’s a reason tens of millions of people playing this game on a regular basis.

Replayability Rating: Classic

6. Balance

Solitaire, no matter the version, is a game of chance. You can’t really control how the cards fall and sometimes, no matter how clever you are, this is what leads to your defeat rather than a mis-move on your part. It’s like Mahjong in that often you are trying to see how close you can get to winning rather than winning itself.

There’s not a lot you can do to truly improve at these types of games save for card counting, and with versions like Spider Solitaire, even that can’t help you. No, these are games of chance that rely on your wits and eyes more than any true degree of skill, and that’s half the fun. The game does give you a few scoring and playing options, such as one or three card draw for Klondike or a timed version of each game. Hey, at least it’s something, right?

Balance Rating: Good

7. Originality

There’s already a ton of card game titles for the Wii, and for game consoles in general. Everyone with a computer or a video game system has a Solitaire game already, if not other versions like FreeCell or Spider. More people have probably played electronic Solitaire than Super Mario Bros., and there’s nothing this game does that stands out form the many versions already out there. It’s simply a carbon copy you are paying for rather than getting for free.

Originality Rating: Worthless

8. Addictiveness

I made a joke earlier about how electronic Solitaire eats away at work productivity, but there are as many studies that show that this kills workplace productivity as there are ones that show it actually helps. Regardless which study you choose to believe in, it has long been proven that this is one of the most, if not THE most, addictive video game ever. Part of it may be that every computer has it and so it’s easy to get a hold of it, but the fact remains it’s hard to play just a single game of Solitaire, no matter the version. The same holds true here. I sunk more time than I expected to into Golf, playing thirty some round of it before taking a break. I’d never experienced this version of Solitaire and I actually had a lot of fun with it.

It just goes to show simple games are often the best.

Addictiveness Rating: Unparalleled

9. Appeal Factor

Solitaire is the most popular video game in the world and the most used computer application to boot. Everyone enjoys Solitaire, albeit to varying degrees. The question is not whether or not people will enjoy 5-in-1 Solitaire, but if they will pay for it, especially when every computer user has one to three of the variants already on their computer. Personally, I could see paying for the DSiWare version, as maybe you have a desktop computer and not a laptop and you’d like to play when traveling. The Wii version? Not so much. It just doesn’t make sense to me to have this on my Wii when I can get the DSi version for only two dollars or play Solitaire on my computer for free. I can’t see a lot of people paying for this one, even if it is only five bucks.

Appeal Factor: Mediocre

10. Miscellaneous

I’m not sure why Digital Leisure thought they could make money off Solitaire. I mean, in order to download 5-in-1 you need an internet connection. If you have an internet connection, you have a computer. If you have a computer, you have Solitaire. It’s pretty simple. Then the Wii version is $5 compared to the DSi’s $2 version? It just hurts my brain to see so many poor business decisions in one package. As fun as Solitaire can be, it’s almost always free. Why pay for something you can get for free? For the same price, you can get Digital Leisure’s Fast Draw Showdown which is a fun and highly original title you a) can’t get for free and b) can’t get on a computer. Support Digital Leisure in that way rather than paying for something you can already get for nothing.

Miscellaneous Rating: Worthless

The Scores
Modes: Mediocre
Graphics: Poor
Sound: Poor
Control and Gameplay: Good
Replayability: Classic
Balance: Good
Originality: Worthless
Addictiveness: Unparalleled
Appeal Factor: Mediocre
Miscellaneous: Worthless
FINAL SCORE: DECENT GAME!

Short Attention Span Summary
5-in-1 Solitaire is a fun game to be sure, but it suffers from two big problems. The first is that you can generally get this game for free on any standard computer. The second is that you can get the exact same game for your DSi for only $2 instead of paying $5 for the WiiWare version. Both of these issues should keep anyone with the slightest degree of rational thinking from buying this. However, if you absolutely love Solitaire there are two versions of the game you usually can’t find on a computer, which are Golf and Gaps. Golf is a lot of fun, while Gaps is just stupid. If you want to pay a dollar per Solitaire mode, it’s not an awful deal – just an illogical ones for the reasons stated earlier.
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sol_screenshot_001-120×120.jpg
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sol_screenshot_0071.jpg

Review: Muscle March (WII)

Muscle March
Genre: Mini-Game
Developer: Namco Bandai
Publisher: Namco Bandai
Release Date: 01/18/2010

As the gaming industry expands and more games are released, we’re beginning to see more and more bizarre games filter their way into the regular expected release lists. Third person shooters and RPG’s with pretty male leads only attract so much attention anymore. So if you can’t make the BEST game on the market, making the WEIRDEST might get you some press too. Muscle March takes that concept and, literally, runs with it, as the game itself is like a crossbreed of the musclebound oddity that is the Cho Aniki series and the bizarre and upbeat presentation of the Katamari Damacy franchise. Everything about the game is completely insane, from the speedo-wearing polar bear to the multi-cultural dancing musclemen (and woman) to the super-happy presentation and beyond. The resulting game is a spectacle of epic proportions. That said, no matter how strange and bizarre a game’s CONCEPT is, the game itself is nothing if the EXECUTION is flawed. No one wants to play a bad game (except me), no matter how ridiculous and over the top it might be, and even as a budget priced WiiWare download, Muscle March wouldn’t be worth the price if the gameplay sucks. On the plus side, it’s safe to say that Muscle March makes a compelling case for you to drop your five bucks on it, as it’s entertaining and plays well enough to be amusing. On the minus side, however, Muscle March doesn’t make an airtight case, and while the cracks in the product aren’t completely horrible, they hurt the game enough to make you second guess the point investment.

The story of Muscle March is simultaneously very straightforward and incredibly confusing. You pick one of a crew of multicultural bodybuilders who all hang out together and lift weights. Yup. One day, a thief comes and steals your protein powder, and instead of just running out to the local GNC and buying more, you have to chase the thief down and bring him/her/it to muscular justice. The thieves after your protein are a good bit hardier than they seem, however, and will plow through walls to avoid your wrath, leaving you to match the pattern they leave behind if you ever hope to get your protein powder back.

I… I got nothing. The story is simple, and you can grasp the concept, but it’s more absurd than a soccer racket. As far as gameplay modes are concerned, there are two: a single player mode where you go through multiple stages to retrieve your protein powder, and a multiplayer mode where players take turns trying to make it as far as possible before losing. To be fair, I really can’t think of any other mode the game could have offered, and as this is a five dollar game that’s not a bad amount of variety. That said, the gameplay modes ARE limited, and unless you have a lot of friends around to play with you’re limited to the single player mode, as the game doesn’t support online play. As well the single player mode isn’t incredibly in-depth, so if you’re looking for something a little more robust, Muscle March might not be what you want.

Muscle March is aesthetically eclectic in a manner that is as pleasing as it is bizarre, and the whole thing feels like one massive acid trip. The visuals are bright and absurd, and the game is quite colorful in both its visual palette and design. The graphics aren’t pushing the technical capabilities of the Wii to any great degree, but between the oddball backgrounds, the ridiculous cast of overly muscled characters and the pure Japanese feel of the visual design, they’re full of personality. The animations are generally fluid and the game keeps up a consistent frame rate, but it’s apparent that most of the characters are reusing the same set of animations. The game music is almost entirely super-happy dance techno with a few other Japanese-styled tracks here and there, and it works fine to keep the bizarre aesthetic going. There’s no notable voice acting in the game, sadly, so if you were hoping for some over-the-top voices to go along with the over-the-top everything else, you’re out of luck. The sound effects more than make up for this, as those that aren’t played straight (crashing into walls) are played purely for laughs (the elephant noise accompanying each time your protein powder is stolen), keeping the game from being anything other than insane.

Muscle March is incredibly simple to play, as it requires only the Wiimote and Nunchuck, and asks for no button presses of any sort. Each thief you have to chase will crash through a wall in one of four patterns (both arms up, both arms down, left arm up right arm down, and right arm up left arm down) and all you have to do is hold the Wiimote and Nunchuck to match these patterns so you fit through the wall. That’s the majority of the game right there, so as long as you have full arm mobility, you’re good. In single player mode, after your teammates are eliminated you’ll also have to rapidly move the Wiimote and Nunchuck up and down to chase down the thief at various points until you tackle them, at which point everyone dogpiles on the thief and you start the next stage. The game can be learned in seconds, but the pace speeds up as you play, lest you think that it’s going to be a walk in the park, and you’ll have to be on your toes to keep from failing out. The game is decently paced in both single player and multiplayer modes, so you won’t be overwhelmed all at once and new players will be able to learn the ropes with no problems if you want to make this into a party game.

You’re given five chances to fail before you fail the game in single player mode, though you can continue from whatever stage you failed on to keep things going. Multiplayer mode only offers you three chances to fail, but allows you to rank your performance against the other players, and speeds up the pace consistently (every five poses) to keep the challenge going constantly. There are several stages to go through in single player mode (I counted five before I simply couldn’t go any further forward), and multiplayer mode supports up to four players taking turns at a time. For the price, the game is plenty fun and entertaining, and while it’s not the most in-depth product available, it’s damn fun. Pretty much anyone can play it, and the game is absurd and amusing enough to keep you and your friends coming back for a while, if only because the experience is hilarious the first few times you jump into it.

The biggest knock against Muscle March is that the motion controls aren’t as responsive as they could be. You’ll have to find the right position to hold your arms to get the system to register your “poses”, or you’ll be plowing into walls because the Wii didn’t realize you moved your arm down in time to pass through the wall. The game doesn’t offer an option to pause that I could find either. This means that if you need to take a break (which happens after the eight time of flailing quickly to catch a thief), you’ll have to bring up the Wii menu or wait for the end of the stage. There’s simply not enough to the game to recommend it to someone who doesn’t care about the weird Japanese concept, either. That Muscle March is a five dollar game mitigates this somewhat, but the lack of online multiplayer hurts the game, as does the inability to customize any of the multiplayer options. You can’t choose a character, or impose stamina or starting speed handicaps on better players, or change anything about the mode at all, honestly. This removes a lot of the competitive interest the mode might have offered. When one player can consistently score twenty points over everyone else and there’s no way to adjust for this, what’s the point of playing against them aside from playing? For a player who likes the bizarreness of the game, this might not matter, but competitive players will be annoyed.

Also, the game is about muscular freaks posing to run through walls as they chase space aliens, robots and other assorted oddball creatures to retrieve their protein powder. A friend of mine described watching the game as an experience that made him fear for his sexuality, so if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t get the joke… well, you should probably think twice before downloading this. Just saying.

Muscle March is wacky and weird fun from Japan that more than justifies its five dollar price point if you can revel in the bizarre concept, but anyone looking for more meat (hur hur) in their games or who doesn’t get what the game is doing might want to look elsewhere. The concept is absurd, to be polite, and the colorful, insane visuals and super happy, eclectic audio only reinforce this fact. The game is exceptionally simple to play and anyone with full arm mobility can pick the game up and play it in seconds. There’s a decent amount of depth to the single player mode, and the single and multiplayer modes offer up a solid, balanced challenge for one to four players, making this a fun solo or party game. The controls aren’t as responsive as they could be, however, and you might have to fiddle with your arm positioning before you hit the sweet spot where the game recognizes your movements and responds correctly every time. Further, there’s a distinct lack of depth to the multiplayer modes, the single player mode can become tiring and offers few ways to take a break, and if the bizarre concept does nothing for you you’re going to put the game down inside of an hour. Muscle March is an outlandish and fun game if you can get into the concept, and its flaws shouldn’t be off-putting if you find the idea of the game hilarious, but anyone not impressed by the concept can safely pass it by.

The Scores:
Story/Game Modes: ABOVE AVERAGE
Graphics: GOOD
Sound: GOOD
Control/Gameplay: ABOVE AVERAGE
Replayability: MEDIOCRE
Balance: GREAT
Originality: GOOD
Addictiveness: MEDIOCRE
Appeal: MEDIOCRE
Miscellaneous: GOOD

FINAL SCORE: ENJOYABLE GAME!

Short Attention Span Summary:
Muscle March is a simple to play single and multiplayer game featuring muscular dudes flexing to dance techno while chasing down aliens who stole their protein powder. Your reaction to that sentence should pretty much tell you whether or not the game is worth your five bucks. The game is absurd in its presentation, from the bizarre story to the vibrant and wacky graphics to the upbeat and weird audio and beyond. The game amounts to moving your arms up and down to pass through walls, and anyone with working arms can learn to play it in no time, making it great for casual gamers. The game is well balanced, fun for everyone and generally amusing if you can accept or embrace the bizarre presentation, and it makes a strong argument for your five bucks. The controls can take some fiddling to really get a handle on, as you’ll have to find the right position to keep your arms in to make the system register your poses properly. The multiplayer is somewhat limited, also, as there is no online play and you can’t pick characters or handicap players at all. Finally, if the first statement in the summary made you cringe or shrug in apathy the game isn’t going to entertain you for any longer than an hour or so. For five dollars Muscle March is laugh out loud fun for everyone, so long as you can accept its flaws and the concept amuses you, but if either of those elements makes you think twice you might want to save your cash.
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/MuscleMarch500.jpg
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/MuscleMarch120.jpg

Review: The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces (WII)

The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces
Developer: Namco Bandai / Project Aces
Publisher: XSEED
Genre: Flight Simulation
Release Date: 01/12/2010

When I first heard about Namco-Bandai’s Wii bound flight sim, The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces, I was at that time unfortunately not familiar with Hiroshi Mori’s novel series, or the recent Mamoru Oshii (of Ghost in The Shell fame) animated film that the game was derived from. I was very interested however, as the game was developed by Namco’s Project Aces, the team behind the successful and acclaimed Ace Combat series. I’ve been a fan of the series for years, and I was hoping that this game would carry on the tradition of quality Project Aces is known for. So does it?

Story:

The events of The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces take place in an alternative history that one could assume, based on the characters’ garb and the propeller operated planes, is set during what would be the second World War. In this alternative Japan, the world is seemingly at peace, but in attempts to excite and stimulate the bored country, two weapons corporations stage elaborate aerial battles with adolescent genetically engineered pilots known as “Kildren”, who never grow old, and are expendable in favor of the “game”. Your character, identified as call sign “Lynx” (and later, call sign “Cheetah”), and the other adult squad members are caught in the expected drama and lack of morality of the Kildren’s situation.

During story sequences, the plot is presented by way of fully animated cutscenes created especially by the studio that handled the film, which develop the characters and appropriately set the stage for the next mission. The storyline in The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces is tailored after the recent animated film in regards to plot and pacing, and both Mori and Oshii were involved with the writing and overall plot of the game. The heavy concept and story elements don’t weigh too heavily on the actual gaming experience, and the plot gives you just enough exposition with its twenty or so minutes of animation to potentially get you interested in seeing the film or reading the book. Regardless, it’s an interesting concept, even if the plot presented here is only a sample serving of the main course, and it does a terrific job of keeping you interested and caring about the eighteen missions you’ll be flying through.

Graphics:

As I mentioned previously, the animated cutscenes in The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces are created by the studio who worked on the associated film. The cutscenes are passionately animated and look terrific. The interesting character designs appear as static images during mission briefings and radio transmissions during the actual missions, which, though only a small addition, helps integrate the gameplay with the animation. However, regarding the actual 3D graphics, admittedly, The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces would probably have been better suited for the Xbox 360 or PS3. It’s not that the visuals in the game are bad, but a more immersive visual presentation goes a long way in a flight simulation game, and the game simply doesn’t quite pull it off. Ace Combat 6 for example, is a considerably more effective experience overall, as the level of graphic detail and other various effects push the aspects of aerial dogfighting to the next level. The same could be said about pretty much any game, but a flight sim is one of a few types of games that really needs a good amount of detail to make it shine, and The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces can’t quite manage to pull this off as often as it should.

While the graphics are certainly not terrible, and they do the job well enough, those who have played Ace Combat 6 prior to playing through The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces will most likely think of how the experience could have been all the more vivid if on a console with more punch in the graphics department. If the Wii was the only choice available, perhaps a more stylized approach to the graphics would have been a good choice. I could easily imagine a light cel shading filter applied to the existing unimpressive Wii 3D graphics would have worked well for the game. This would have given it an element of visual flair that could differentiate it from similar games in the genre, and would have helped tie the game closer to the animation on which it’s based on. That, of course, might just be my opinion. The point is that, while the visuals aren’t bad, they’re not impressive either, and they’re not the best quality in the genre or on the system.

Sound:

Much like Project Aces’ Ace Combat series, The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces features an epic soundtrack that always paces itself well with the aerial dogfighting action. In addition, the game is fully voice acted and the almost constant stream of radio chatter during missions is well acted, and very effective. The sound effects are spot on as well, with various explosions, machine gun fire, and whooshing engine noises complimenting the in-game action at every point. The game sounds great overall, and this adds a lot to the experience.

Gameplay:

Ace Combat fans will feel right at home with The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces and its particular flight simulation mechanics. Things will feel familiar, but some interesting and very cool innovations have been added to Project Aces’ tried and true formula to makes things new and exciting in the gameplay department here on the Wii. Generally, The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces is an Ace Combat game. You’ll tackle missions in various aircrafts, which can be customized and upgraded with new and better parts and weapons as you progress. Radar indicators similar to those seen in just about any Ace Combat or flight sim game will identify enemy aircraft types, ground units, and so on, and each mission usually will have a specific objective to accomplish. Along with your computer controlled squad mates, you’ll evade and attack the enemy across eighteen story missions, which can be played in a free mode upon their completion. Though a little more character and story driven than the Ace Combat games of the past, The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces can essentially be compared to those games with little difficulty, as most of the mechanics from those games are used here.

The innovative feature that Project Aces put into play here would be the very intuitive and useful Tactical Maneuver Commands, or TMCs for short. If you can keep on an enemy aircraft’s tail long enough, a meter will begin to fill to a maximum of three levels. Pressing the TMC button during this time will execute a dramatic maneuver that will see you maneuver to the enemies’ rear, and give you an almost foolproof opportunity to fill them with hot machine gun lead. Activating the TMC at a higher level will put you at an even greater advantage. You’ll need to stay on the enemy to achieve a level three TMC rating, but they’re usually as good as toast if you can manage that. This feature adds a new dynamic to the traditional dog fighting formula in place in the Ace Combat games, and though simple in concept, it puts a considerably different spin on things. The TMC actually removes some of the more hardened simulator aspects one would expect from a typical Ace Combat title and replaces them with a simple function that guarantees the player sees more action and feels even more like a master pilot. As the innovative cover system found in Gears of War added to the standard third person action format, the TMC system in The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces achieves a similar effect for the flight simulator genre.

The other cool feature follows the lead of the TMC attack function. The player is given access to a great number of preset Top Gun quality aerial evasions with the flick of the Nunchuk stick. By pointing the stick in a direction you can select and activate everything from a reverse barrel roll to an awesomely badass triple diving dip on the fly. Again, this takes some of the simulator aspects out of the game, but in return offers a much more accessible and action oriented air combat experience. The accessible flight command innovations found in The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces make it easy to recommend this game to those who might not be into flight simulation games, as the gameplay is balanced quite effectively with both the elements of satisfying action and traditional simulation in mind.

Replayability:

Unfortunately, the eighteen missions in The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces don’t take to long to get through, and by the game’s end you’ll have access to all of the various plane models and upgrades. Unless you want to challenge yourself by playing at a higher difficulty, you’ll see nothing new in consecutive playthroughs. The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces does feature a free mission mode, which basically lets you play any of the individual missions you’ve cleared in the story mode, if you want to play around with specific missions without having to go through the story again. In addition, there is a co-op component that allows a second player work as a secondary gunner in your aircraft. By using another Wii Remote, the secondary gunner can fire at enemies with a machine gun while the first player zips around. The co-op concept is novel, and a fun way to get a friend involved who would simply be watching you play the game anyway, but as I discovered alongside fellow staffer Mark B., for two players looking to really take the highway to the danger zone together, it’s ultimately uninspiring.

Balance:

The TMC system in The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces naturally makes the game somewhat easier that its Ace Combat counterparts, but as mentioned in the gameplay portion of the review, this introduces its own form of challenge by tasking the player with properly managing and activating the TMC. This can become especially difficult in heated dogfights with multiple enemy aircraft, thus simply relocating the escalating challenge of the game instead of removing it entirely. Even simple maneuvers that would have to be manually executed in Ace Combat and other similar flight sims can be performed here with no effort, which also changes the general formula of the gameplay. Ace Combat veterans might consider the modifications in The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces stifling to the experience, but later missions, though not at an Ace Combat caliber of difficulty, will still put your flight skills to the test, especially on higher difficulties.

Originality:

Though The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces is structured just like any typical Ace Combat game, the addition of the innovative TMC system and a more accessible and easy to understand interface set it apart from other flight sims considerably. Points are definitely to be awarded to Project Aces for implementing gameplay mechanics into a genre that usually is very difficult to make work outside of its mold. The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces has the weight and technicality of previous Ace Combat games, but plays ball in such a way that the experience is not just for pilot pros exclusively. The source material on which the game is based is handled very nicely, and unlike so many other games based on other properties, a few missions into The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces will confirm that both attention to detail and fine craftsmanship were applied when trying to maintain the integrity of the film on which the game is based.

Addictiveness:

Flight sim fans might find The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces to be over a bit to quickly, but are most likely to be glued to the entire product all the way through. For me, utilizing the TMC functionality never once got old at any point during the eighteen mission run, and the detailed and well executed story narrative made it easy to go from one mission to the next. While the game might not give you great reasons to come back to it once it’s completed, it gives you plenty of reasons to come back to it the first time through, as it’s an intense and action-packed ride the whole way through.

Appeal Factor:

I’m sure Wii owning flight sim enthusiasts will be all over The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces, but given its very reasonable thirty dollar retail value, I hope that others will be willing to give the game a try. Specifically, those players who might not think of themselves as enjoying a traditional Ace Combat style flight sim will find a pleasant surprise in The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces. The film the game is based on is available on DVD, and thought I don’t own it yet, I’m sure an advertisement for the tie-in Wii game is inside, much like an ad promoting the film is on the back of the enclosed instruction manual for the game. Those who did purchase and enjoy the film will find the game to be a worthwhile acquisition, as it presents an interesting and, hopefully, faithful expansion of the film in interactive form.

Miscellaneous:

Much like many of the games publisher XSEED puts out, The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces can be played with the recommended Wiimote and Nunchuck combination, or the Wii Classic controller. I very much approve of being able to use a regular controller with my Wii games if that’s what I wish to do, and it seems XSEED is one of the few who can appreciate the fact that maybe we don’t want to flail our arms around at the TV anytime we want to play a game on the Wii. Both control schemes work well enough, so if you lack the Classic Controller you needn’t be scared away, but it’s nice to see a developer who understands that sometimes, you just want to hold a controller. Bravo, I say.

The Scores:
Story: GREAT
Graphics: ABOVE AVERAGE
Sound: CLASSIC
Gameplay: CLASSIC
Replayability: MEDIOCRE
Balance: GOOD
Originality: GOOD
Addictiveness: GREAT
Appeal Factor: GOOD
Miscellaneous: GREAT
FINAL SCORE: VERY GOOD GAME!

Short Attention Span Summary:
The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces makes great use of its passionate source material, and incorporates the dramatic story into a great flight simulation game. Outstanding gameplay innovations really make The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces stand apart from similar flight sims while still feeling familiar to fans of the Ace Combat series. The mechanics are designed in a way such that even those who don’t typically enjoy flight sims may very well find themselves into the over the top action found in the game’s eighteen missions. These gameplay alterations only slightly dilute the technicality of the genre’s typical structure, but Ace Combat fans will still be more than pleased, and less experienced flight sim players will find The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces to be a fun and accessible game that’s well worth its asking price.
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/SkyCrawlers120.jpg
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/SkyCrawlers500.jpg

Review: Walk It Out (Wii)

Walk It Out
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Konami
Genre: Exercise/Bemani
Release Date: 01/12/2010

Long-time readers know that I’m the go-to guy for exercise or Bemani games on the Wii. Walk it Out is Konami’s attempt to cross the two over. With Rhythm games, Konami has generally done a really good job with DDR Hottest Party 1, HP2, and HP3, which came out a few months ago. There are also god awful rhythm based games like Just Dance.

Then there are the exercise games. Exercise games for the Wii have either been excellent or awful. Your Shape and Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout are the best of the bunch while EA Active and Wii Fit turned out to be little more than snake oil giving the illusion of exercise while actually provided improper techniques and worst of all, exercises that are actually bad for you, especially your hips, joints, knees and ankles. One of the worst that both those high profile but crappy games feature is walking/running in place. It’s bad for your knees. Now treadmills have impact boards built in to counteract this, but just running in place on your floor or in your basement will put undue stress and pressure on your joints. Bottom line is you shouldn’t do it.

Now Walk It Out appears to have taken all that into consideration by providing you a game where you can use a DDR pad or balance board instead of using the default walking in place option. However, it’s also a game where all you do is walk. So how does it hold up?

Let’s Review

1. Modes

So, here’s the game. You customize an avatar with extremely limited options while a “coach” voiced by what sounds like a cross between a six year old girl and Fran Dresher talks to you. After you make your character, you are let loose on a track to practice walking. After you pass the practice track, which involves listening to Katrina & the Waves’, “Walking on Sunshine” three times in a row, you are allowed to leave and then begins the actual game…

…which is just walking around an island with really bad 3-D graphics that look like they are early PSX/Saturn level in quality. That’s it. You just keep walking. While you are walking you can use the Wiimote to pick up little tokens that help unlock more places to walk or actual scenery so you’re not in a desolate wasteland. “Oh look, I got enough tokens to put a bench on the island! Now I have a fire hydrant! I guess I’ll walk some more, I’m so hooked.” You can also collecting things like Rainbow Spheres or pieces of CD’s to unlock more music, which I strongly suggest you do, because you are stuck with only a few tracks at the beginning and all of them are ear-bleedingly awful. I guess that’s one way to motivate you to play longer.

That’s it though. You just walk around the island looking at bad renders of people and places. There are three mini games that are available from the start as well, the only good one of which can only be played with the DDR pad, so if you are a balance board user, you are screwed. The hilarious part is that some games can’t be backed out of unless you hit the home button and go back to the Wii menu, losing all your progress. This game is full of so many design flaws it’s laughable.

So all you do is walk in a badly rendered island listening to (potentially) 120 tracks of music, most of which are pretty awful. There is absolutely nothing fun about this boring, repetitive game and I jog five miles every day. You would think I, who likes to get up and move my legs rather than being a sedentary couch surfer, would be able to find some redeeming value in this title. THERE IS NONE.

Modes Rating: Worthless

2. Graphics

Every time I think the Wii has hit a new low with visuals for this generation, I get something that proves to be even worse. Walk It Out makes things like Valhalla Knights or M&M’s Beach party look like visual masterpieces. This game looks like something made in an early 1990’s “Introduction to Programming” course. Honestly, if the game is just walking repeatedly, you need to have some sort of decent scenery. It’s not like the game will let you run, so you can focus on speed and pacing. Nope, it’s just walking, and you’re forced to do it in front of some of the worst graphics to ever grace your screen.

Your avatar looks like Charlie Brown with a bad post-chemo wig. The colours are dull, things are poorly rendered. Visuals are basic and look like they were from a decade ago. Honestly, if you’re going to do a walking course, who the hell thought unlocking benches or shrubs would make the game interesting or exciting. Where’s a path along a bubbling brook or hiking through the mountains where the reward is a glorious view of a valley below. None of that is in Walk it Out. This thing is ugly. Damn ugly. I get a better view using my treadmill where I stare at a wall for thirty minutes.

Graphics Rating: Worthless

3. Sound

On one hand, this game boasts the largest soundtrack for a Bemani game ever. With over 120 songs, it dwarfs the collection you can find in an actually fun game like Dance Dance Revolution. On the other, the music is all god awful. Let me give you an example of where bad game design and the horrible choice of music can drive one mad as if this game was a Lovecraftian Horror…

There is a horribly designed mini game called slide whose controls barely work and for which you only use the Wiimote. The walking is just put in so you have to walk while playing. The song I was stuck with was The Pussycat Dolls, “When I Grow Up.” Now, you can’t back out of this game, or even pause it once you start. Your only options are to play or do a hard reset of the game. I had to listen to that damn song for ten solid minutes, looping over and over, while I tried to get the controls to even remotely respond. This, my friends, is no doubt what a sample of Hell is like.

It’s also extremely convoluted to change your song lists. First you have to go to the menu screen, which you have to reach with your wiimote while still walking. Then you have to go to the songs area. Then you have to choose from one of many preset playlists that cannot be edited save for turning a song on or off in them. Then you have to go into that list and decide what you want to listen to, many of which only have a single song for the beginning of the game which means you have to listen to the same awful track over and over again. Would it have been that hard to add a song fast forward, shuffle option, or skip button to the Wiimote controls? NO IT WOULD NOT.

So you have a large soundtrack but with tracks only the mentally infirmed can enjoy. Why Konami? Why do you hate your audience so? I’m also peeved you can put this many songs into a crap game like this and not into a DDR title…

Sound effects are pretty lame too. It’s basically 8 or 16-bit MIDI quality and it’s like blurp or squwark noises when you grab an item or unlock something. It’s all pretty annoying. Worst of all are the voice actors for your trainers. I want to know who cast these people so I can berate them (I’d say pummel, but that’s assault). They are some of the most obnoxious voice actors I’ve heard to date. They also say nothing of importance. It’s just awful all around.

I’ll be kind and give this game points for having such a large soundtrack, but when your big reward is unlocking more awful songs, there’s something insidious with your game.

Sound Rating: Mediocre

4. Control and Gameplay

Now here’s the crux. All you do is walk. Remember what I said in the opening about how you should never walk in place and how it is bad for your hips, joints, and knees? Well unfortunately, that’s all this game is. Basically you are paying $29.99 to do eventual damage to your legs. HURRAH!

The Wiimote and Nunchuk control scheme is right out because honestly, it’s bad for you, no matter what surface you are on. The game also expects you to walk in place for a mile+ every day, which is just ludicrous. Again, I run or jog every day and I can feel things not moving/clicking right in my ankles and hips after ten minutes with this game.

The DDR pad scheme is about as bad. After all, you’re still walking in place and at a very awkward pace. It’s doing it on quarter beats (although you can slow things down) but I walk a little bit faster than that so I am basically punished for having a faster gait. Thus the game becomes a very slow version of DDR for me and it’s awful. The one good thing about the pad is that you can walk around on it or use any of the face buttons. This means you do have to stand bowlegged on the left and right arrows, slowing stretching your groin muscles in a way you’re not meant to. You can even walk around on the pad, as long as it’s a direction arrow or button key. This prevents the straight up walking in pace wear and tear, but it’s not much better for you in the scheme of things.

Finally there is the balance board which, if you use it as a step that you go back up and down repeatedly, provides you with the closest approximation to actual exercise you will get from this title. However, there is a reason Wii Fit doesn’t have you use the balance board like this or this often and that’s because it’s simply not designed for that much wear and tear. Using this method means you’ll need a new balance board, which means you’ll have to buy a new Wii Fit, and honestly, if you already have Wii Fit or DDR, why would you lower yourself to owning this in the first place.

The other bit of control is holding down the B button and using the wiimote to look around. Sadly, the axis is inverted on this, and the game never tells you this, so expect to be confused as the motions aren’t natural or fluid. Younger gamers will be especially confused as to why up is now down and vice versa. All you can do while looking around is grab more crappy items anyway and using this often obscures your walker from your view as well as any potential arrows and trails you can go down.

Simply put, this is one of the worst games I have ever played. It functions, but just barely. Even worse, it does so in a way that is REALLY BAD FOR YOUR LOWER BODY. What the hell, Konami?

Control and Gameplay Rating: Worthless

5. Replayability

There’s a lot to unlock in Walk it Out, be it scenery, music, or new places to walk. However, this doesn’t make up for the fact that it is both the worst game I have ever played, as well as the most boring. Honestly, in order to play it you need to already own DDR or Wii Fit and either of those is a better alternative to this. Also, considering the game has you walk in place in such ackward ways, why not just GO OUTSIDE FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES AND WALK AROUND. You’ll get a better view, better exercise and you’ll get some sunlight and possibly even make eye contact with another person. These are all things you can’t do with Walk It Out.

There is absolutely no reason to buy this game, much less play it. There are superior exercise options available for the Wii, and you can have more money going up and down stairs in your own home while listening to an iPod. You’ll get a better workout too.

Replayability Rating: Worthless

6. Balance

Balance doesn’t really enter into this game at all. It’s just walking around in place. Worst of all the game forces you to confirm to one of two rhythms, neither of which is a natural walking pace for the majority of people. This means you’re not so much as walking in place as hopping or shifting your mass in time with the beat. Again, this is not good for you and you have to wonder who thought this was a good idea, or even a fun one.

If one wanted to make a quality walking game it would need

A) to let one move at their own proper rhythm instead of forcing one on a person

B) feature extremely nice graphics to even remotely make this an alternative to going outside and actually walking

C) not featuring walking in place which again IS BAD FOR YOU.

In all, this is a badly designed game that does the opposite of what it is meant to be. Shame on you Konami.

Balance Rating: Worthless

7. Originality

There are lots of games that have you use the balance board. This is the first game outside the DDR games I’ve gotten to use my DDR pad with though. As well, although there are other games that contain walking in place horrors, this is the only game that has treated it as a SINGLE game. So yes, you’re getting the game for half of Ea Active or Wii Fit, but you’re only getting a single exercise, and easily the worst one any of these faux exercise games offers (Although crazy jumping is just as bad). If you want a cheap exercise game that actually works, plop down twenty dollars and go buy My Fitness Coach or Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout which is still in my top ten Wii games of all time because it is crazy fun as well as good exercise.

The game is definitely original in its ostentatiousness and Konami certainly has brass balls to sell a game this limited and shallow. It’s definitely a dip into the water to see what people will pay money for, that’s for sure. Walk It Out is certainly innovative in its own ways, but none of them are flattering.

Originality Rating: Poor

8. Addictiveness

Are you kidding? Ten minutes into this game I wanted to stop. Why? Because I knew I was doing something that was bad for my legs. I knew it was ten minutes I could actually have been moving at a normal pace that wasn’t doing harm to me and getting fresh air and/or sunlight. I could walk through my quaint little village of Shirlington onto a path that a river runs by for miles. Even though we had a Winter Storm Advisory and it was coming down in huge white flakes, it still would have been better than sitting through this horrible game.

You’re paying thirty dollars to do something you can do better without anything other than your own flesh and blood! Why would anyone pay for that or willingly get this? More importantly, why would anyone willingly sit through this unless they had to review the game for a gaming website and they were the only staffer with both a balance board and DDR pad? Here’s a hint: THEY WOULDN’T.

Addictiveness Rating: Worthless

9. Appeal Factor

No one should buy this game. No one should play this game. If you willingly paid money for it, please still have your receipt. If you actually found something to like about this game, check yourself into the nearest mental asylum posthaste. There is nothing enjoyable, fun or stimulating about this game. In order to play it, you already have to have Wii Fit or a DDR Hottest party game, and those are far better exercise for you, not to mention more fun than this horrible disc of suck and evil.

NO ONE SHOULD EXPERIENCE THIS. NO ONE.

Appeal Factor: Worthless

10. Miscellaneous

This is the worst “game” I have ever played. Honestly, the only way a game could get worse is if you paid 100 dollars for a game that was nothing but footage of your friends, family, and pets being sexually violated and you used the Wiimote to control the camera angle. This game is bad for your body and you’re paying $30 to walk in place to a horrible video game instead of actually walking and seeing the world or going a few blocks and getting some fresh air. This, my friends, is insanity made digital “entertainment.”

Miscellaneous Rating: Worthless

The Scores
Modes: Worthless
Graphics: Worthless
Sound: Mediocre
Control and Gameplay: Worthless
Replayability: Worthless
Balance: Worthless
Originality: Poor
Addictiveness: Worthless
Appeal Factor: Worthless
Miscellaneous: Worthless
FINAL SCORE: AWFUL GAME!

Short Attention Span Summary
Walk It Out is the worst game I have ever had to sit through. This is easily the top contender for “2010’s Worst Game of the Year.” There is no redeeming value in it whatsoever. You’re paying thirty dollars to WALK IN PLACE which is horrible for your hips, knees, ankles, and joints to begin with. You are better off just going outside and walking a few blocks. It’s cheaper, prettier, and if you had some sort of music player, it’ll sound better too. If you know anyone that has willingly purchased this game, call your local religious official and have them perform an exorcism on them STAT, as they are no doubt possessed if not an agent of Dread Cthulhu itself. Ia! Ia!
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Box-120×120.jpg
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/walk41.jpg

Review: Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom (Wii)

Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Eighting
Genre: 2-D Fighting
Release Date: 1/26/2010

2009 was a bit of a disappointment for fighting games here in North America. Street Fighter IV was good, but nowhere up to the level of previous Capcom titles, a point made abundantly clear with the re-release of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, which in itself was a bare-bones release compared to the original Dreamcast version, lacking all the thrill of unlocking things for oneself. BlazBlue was good for what it was, but it didn’t impress me. King of Fighters XII was so craptastic I refused to review it and I’m a dyed in the wool SNK fan. Chuck Platt and Mark B. both hated it though. What does it say about 2009 when the two best fighters released were King of Fighters ‘98 Ultimate Match and Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves, both of which were RE-RELEASES from a decade (or more) ago? The other good fighting games of 2009 were either PC exclusives like Zeno Clash or never made it stateside like the latest Melty Blood game. Still, although there was no truly GREAT new fighters released in 2009 here in North America, we did see the return to prominence for a genre I’ve been enchanted with since the beginning of the genre itself, although this was mainly done through the re-release of three of the best games in the history of the genre.

As you may imagine, I was ecstatic to hear about Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom when it was first mentioned in Japan, but like many people, I thought this had about as much chance of making it to the US as Dream Mix TV: World Fighters did – none. So I was shocked and full of boundless optimism when I heard Capcom was taking the chance and bringing it stateside. I was a little hesitant when I heard it was Wii exclusive, but then I’ve enjoyed my time with fighting games on the Wii, be it new titles like Castlevania: Judgment or VC releases like The King of Fighters ‘94 or Eternal Champions thanks to my Neo Geo Stick 2 and/or my Hori made Wii fighting stick, so I know a fighting game can work (and work well) on the Wii. The only question left was, would Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom be one of them?

Let’s Review

1. Story/Modes

There really isn’t a lot of story here. It’s Capcom characters versus Tatsunoko characters. Tatsunoko is a pretty big anime company now owned by Takara TOMY and although its most famous character in America (Speed Racer) isn’t in the game, there are some pretty well known characters in this game, albeit in Americanized form. You might recognize the three Gatchaman characters from G-Force or Battle of the Planets. Gatchaman became Eagle Riders and Tekkaman Blade became Technoman here in the late 1990’s. Karas is pretty much the only Tatsunoko property in the video game that wasn’t drastically changed in name or tone for US audiences.

There are other anime series Tatsunoko was involved in which Westerners will probably recognize easier such as Samurai Pizza Cats, Neon Genesis Evangelion , Serial Experiments Lain, Beyblade and provided financial backing for Macross/Robotech, but unfortunately, none of those characters appear in the game, as it probably would have helped to have one Tatsunoko character that was recognizable to the under 30 crowd in North America. But I digress. Basically the reality of the two universes have merged somehow and everyone is fighting for survival until you get to the End Boss and we learn a Bakugan is behind it all. The plot is pretty non-existent, but each character has their own individual ending and each one is pretty awesome. For my money, Morrigan has the best (and funniest) ending, although I am pretty biased towards Darkstalkers.

The various play modes give you a nice variety of experiences. There’s the standard Arcade Mode, which is eight stages of fighting goodness. Versus mode is a two player local battle. Training is self-explanatory and a great way to test out various control schemes to see what works best for each character. Survival is where your team of two characters keeps fighting until you finally die. Time Attack is trying to beat the game in the quickest time you can. Shop is where you can spend Zenny Points on unlockable movies, artwork, and extra costumes, but oddly, no clips of any of the Tatsunoko animes. Gallery is where you can view your unlocked items, and then there is the on-line play component. This is a pretty standard list for any fighting game these days, but wait – there’s more.

When you beat the game, press one of the number buttons immediately. This starts a simple platformer game featuring Doronjo and her two sidekicks on a bicycle. You press the number buttons to jump up and collect letters from the credits. Each of these letters is worth Zenny and playing this game through the credits can double or even triple your Zenny output. This goes a long way in terms of unlocking things. As well, if you catch the gold letters than eventually spell out “Thank You For Playing,” you’ll unlock yet another mode known as “Extra Game” which is an awesome four player co-op traditional Shoot ‘Em Up game. Holy hell, is this awesome.

Needless to say, I was pretty impressed with everything Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom had to offer. The game features some of the best (and most lucid) endings in a non-Darkstalkers Capcom made fighter and I loved the two hidden modes and all of the options TvC contained. Simply put, Capcom put a lot of passion and love into this game, and it shows.

Story/Modes Rating: Great

2. Graphics

I have to admit the visuals are an acquired taste, but after a while I really grew to enjoy them save Morrigan’s finishing pose as there is some blurring and the model just looks deformed. Insert your joke about a new Darkstalker sprite still not being as good as the other characters here. Shades of Capcom vs. SNK. I do love all the background visuals. These are some really nice stages and they add a lot of character to the game.

The ending graphics were by far the best in the game, even though they were static illustrated images by UDON. It doesn’t matter though as the art is so awesome, you’ll wish Capcom would find away to animate these into a game. I also really liked the character portraits. The art is very reminiscent of the styles used in the Capcom Vs. SNK portraits and I really liked seeing that make a comeback. I’m pretty sure it’s the same Ryu and Chun-Li, albeit touched up though.

There’s no slowdown in this game at all, which is key for a fighter, especially a tag-based one. Everything is so fluid and precise with movements. My only complaint is that sometimes, the animation for a Hyper Combo is so jarring from what was actually on the screen a second ago, it throws you for a loop. This really only applies to the Hyper Combos that require three bars of the HC gauge though.

Overall, the visuals for the game are quite nice once you get used to them. They aren’t amazing, and it’s by no means the best looking game on the Wii, but Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom has a style all its own and an enjoyable one at that.

Graphics Rating: Good

3. Sound

I really enjoy the score for every stage in the game. Each track fits the location nicely and I’ll occasionally get one stuck in my head. The voice acting is awesome, although Zero sounds like Demitri from Darkstalkers , but that’s probably a plus. Frank West might be my favourite character in terms of speech, but that’s only because his lines are so out of place it’s nearly Engrish. It’s just some strange Dead Rising choices that I love for the cheesiness of it all. Especially, “What the hell?” when he wins. The rest of the voice acting is just as good and although almost all of it is in Japanese, I can’t imagine any of these characters in English besides Frank West and POSSIBLY Tekkaman Blade since I own the Teknoman anime.

Sound effects are also well done and it’s almost as much fun to listen to the game as it is to play it. I’m rather surprised that Capcom didn’t consider doing a soundtrack with this game, but I guess they were taking enough of a chance releasing it in the US in the first place. Top notch audio all around.

Sound Rating: Great

4. Control and Gameplay

I’ll be doing a feature next week on all seven different controllers I used with this game, but for now I’ll sum it up like this: You don’t need to purchase the $80 Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom official fight stick from MadCatz as it’s the most expensive. I picked it up because I was able to get it for $27, but there are many other ways to play the game and all are cheaper. Hell, the MadCatz fight stick is $30 more expensive than the HORI stick and HORI is pretty much the gold standard for fight sticks. So there you go.

The Wiimote only control scheme actually works really well and can actually be quite fun, even for those of us who insist on a proper fight stick with eight-point digital inputs instead of analog ones, or the other intricacies that can make or break a fighting game experience. For those of you who aren’t that anal retentive with fighting games, it’s akin to why swimmers shave their heads before sectionals or state. Those few seconds saved by removing the drag of hair can win (or cost if you don’t) the race. So too can be said about a normal joystick (especially the default pieces of crap that come with your Xbox and Playstation systems). The Wiimote scheme is almost akin to SNK Vs. Capcom for the Neo*Geo Pocket Colour, but with some updates. It’s a great way to learn fighting games or for people who love them but can’t manually pull off Super Combos or find themselves doing a Dragon Punch instead of a Hadoken. The downside is that you can’t choose between light, medium, and fierce attacks, so in a PvP setting, some able to use all three attacks individually will have an advantage, especially if they know what they are doing. The Wiimote only way is actually a pretty fresh and fun way to play and although you end up losing the ability to do some moves, the ones you can do can be pulled off easily and flawlessly. Again, this will really help newcomers to the genre.

The Wiimote-Nunchuk mode is god awful, if only because you are stuck using the nunchuk’s control stick for inputting commands and doing moves. AVOID AT ALL COSTS.

The Classic Controller and GameCube controls are both pretty tight; just remember to use the D-Pad instead of the sticks and you’ll have a better chance of pulling off the moves seamlessly. I find the Classic Controller to be the better of the two just due to the shape of the GameCube controller and the default button choice. As you can change things around, the button layouts don’t matter much though.

The sticks are great. Out of the three sticks, I do feel the official stick for the game is the weakest of the three due to the internal parts. Madcatz has improved a lot over the past year or two, but it’s still not as good as either the Neo*Geo or the Hori controller, both of which are cheaper. Control-wise it’s all minor things having to do with interior parts and stuff I won’t bored the majority of you with. Basically just remember you can get a better stick for about $30 bucks less than the official stick, so obviously that’s the better choice.

Regardless which controller scheme you go for (save the Wiimote-Nunchuk choice), everything works exceptionally well and inputting commands are both solid and tight. I never had a mix-up entering manual commands or any delay between the command and my character doing it. Even with the Wiimote only controls I could enter manual commands as I would with a normal fighting control scheme and the game took them just fine.

Like most fighters you have a super gauge in the corner of your side of the screen. This fills by doing and/or taking damage. Once you have at least one ball you can do Hyper Combos which are powered-up versions of your special moves. There are also extremely powerful Hyper Combos that require three bars of the gauge to be filled before they can be executed. You can have up to five bars at a time.

The other usual aspect of TvC is actually pretty common for Capcom Vs. style games, which involves tag team commands. You’ll play as one fighter at a time, but you can tag out to the back-up player or call them in for a double team move. You can also use your partner for a counter, an air combo, and two different variations of a team Hyper Combo.

There are two unique things to TvC. The first is the Mega Crash. This move uses two bars from your gauge and a little bit of life. The return is a barrier that hurtles your opponent back if they touch it. There is also something called a “Baroque Combo” which involves sacrificing the red part of your life bar in exchange for new and extended combos and extra damage.

Overall I was pretty impressed with the controls and how solid they were. I actually found the game to be a better overall experience than SFIV and I really enjoyed the creativity with the different schemes.

Tastunoko Vs. Capcom is one of the best fighters Capcom has put out in years. Different controllers give you a very different experience and it’s fun to try out all the different ways one can play this game.

Control and Gameplay Rating: Great

5. Replayability

With five characters to unlock, along with the shooter mini-game and a ton of extras to buy in the TvC store, you can spend a lot of time trying to get everything in this game. Sure, there’s not as much as we could find in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 or Capcom Vs. SNK, but there is still a lot to do here. When you factor in online play, the multiple control schemes and the fact this is easily the best fighting game on the Wii, you have a game that you can easily come back to countless times and always have a different experience. Online play can be a little off if you’re playing Wired vs. Wireless, but there’s no real way to tell which your opponent has until you’re into a match. Just a head’s up.

Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom is packed to the brim with enough to keep even the most ardent fighting gamer busy for some time. The extra games like the platformer and shooter are just gravy on top of that.

Replayability Rating: Great

6. Balance

There are two ways to talk about balance in this game: Computer AI and Character Tiers. In terms of Computer AI, you have five difficulty settings as well as time options, damage levels, and how many Hyper Combo bars you start off with in your gauge. All of these are quite adjustable and guarantees any gamer will be able to set TvC’s AI to a challenge that is tough but not unbeatable for their skill level. The lowest setting is pretty easy, with the first round team just letting you “perfect” them. The three stage end boss can still kill you with certain combos pretty easily though, so you’ll still have to remember to block. The highest end difficulty is just that and I had to beat it with characters I knew by heart like Ryu, Morrigan, and Chun-Li before I went to the other characters. Overall balance here is amazing and I was really impressed by how noticeably different each level was.

Then there are the tiers. The game has been drastically overhauled from the original Japanese version (Both arcade and console). Character infinites are gone and everyone’s been tweaked so that the game is far more balanced that what Japan has. This really impressed me and it was interesting to see which characters. I ended up going 40-0 in PVP matches before stopping. My main character? Morrigan. My secondary switched between Ryu, Chun-Li, Tekkaman Blade, Zero, Frank West, Karas, and Alex. Ryu, Batsu. and Zero are the most common characters I played against. Tatsunoko really isn’t getting a lot of play online, but then most Americans have no idea who most of these characters are.

I mainly use Morrigan because a lot of gamers don’t know her unless you’re a big fighting game fan. I love Darkstalkers (although I’d rather have Donovan, Talbain, or Lord Raptor) and her Valkyrie Turn Hyper Combo is insanely powerful against the end boss and the two giant characters. Plus she’s nicely balanced. I definitely wouldn’t have put Morrigan in top tier with the Arcade or Japanese TvC, but she’s improved rather nicely here. This is just one example of how characters have been balanced quite nicely. There are definitely characters that are weaker than others. I find Mega Man and Doronjo to be pretty inferior to the rest of the cast for example (MM’s Hyper Combos can be nasty though). Still, this is one of the most balanced Capcom fighters I’ve ever played, which is pretty impressive.

The important thing to note is that there are no joke characters – merely funny ones. The game is laugh out loud amusing at times, but every character is quite good, as long as you spend time with them. I could make a case for Roll being a top tier character as easily as I could Chun-Li or Tekkaman. Besides Mega Man and Doronjo (who I could just be BAD with), the giants have a bit of handicap due to their size, lack of speed, and inability to have a tag partner. That just means it requires some thought and skill to make them works.

To sum it up. Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom is one of the most balanced fighting games I’ve ever played and I’ve loving every minute of it. THIS is what SFIV should have been like in terms of balance and engine quality (Save for the online lag). This is what KoF XII should have been like. This, my friends, is a fighting game done right and I love this thing so very, very much.

Balance Rating: Great

7. Originality

For all intents and purposes this is Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 but with Tatsunoko characters instead of Captain America and Doctor Doom. I like the new additions to the tag style gameplay and I’ve very happy with the balance and character list, even though I could think of half a dozen characters to add to each side of the game (Racer X and the Lich from Dungeons and Dragons: The Arcade Game for example would make me happy). The end boss is similar in style to the MvC2 boss as well, with its three stages, but it’s also a lot easier.

I loved the Platformer during the credits but the Super Smash Bros. series did something similar in Melee but as a shooter. The four player co-op shoot ‘em up is pretty original and highly enjoyable and might be the most creative aspect of the game.

Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom definitely has the trappings of Capcom’s Vs. series that has been going strong for over a decade now, but it also managed to stand out from the back thanks to a distinctive art style, a new franchise to couple with, new gameplay strategies and some extra modes of play. It’s not going to win any games for originality, but compared to a lot of fighters over the past few years, TvC feels like a breath of fresh air.

Originality Rating: Decent

8. Addictiveness

I unlocked everything in the game my very first day with the title. That doesn’t mean the game is short – it means I couldn’t put my controller down. I went through two sets of rechargeable batteries in my wireless sensor bar because I played so much. I beat the game with Morrigan, then Ryu, then Alex, than Roll, then Mega Man Volnutt, then Frank West, and then Zero before I went to get some liquids in me and then went for the same pattern with seven Tatsunoko characters so I could unlock the three characters from their side. Then I spent several hours slaughtering competition online, and then I went back to unlocking everyone else that I could. Then once I had finally beat the arcade mode with all 26 characters, I called it a night. I was obsessed and I could barely take a break. I wanted to see all the endings, the hyper combos, and see what my eventual highest scoring team would be. Oddly enough it was with Mega Man and Roll, even though I don’t think Mega Man (or myself playing as) is very good. Surprise!

Tatsunoko is a hard game to put down. I loved it whether I was playing Wiimote only, or honking around with one of my stick against friends I know that are tournament level players as well. It was fun like I haven’t had with a fighter, or on the Wii, for quite some time. This is a definite permanent addition to my collection and the great thing is, no matter what your skill level is, you’ll be able to embrace this game with equal fervor.

Addictiveness Rating: Unparalleled

9. Appeal Factor

A couple of years ago I would have said fighting games had fallen from the biggest genre we had in the early 1990’s to a small niche genre populated mainly by longtime SNK zealots. However, with games like SFIV, Tekken 6, Mortal Kombat Vs. DCU, and several other games all having very public releases, along with strong critical and consumer reactions, we may be seeing the fighting game genre’s return to a new golden age. Of course, I’m probably being optimistic, but with games like TvC, it’s hard not to be. Pretty much every long time fighting game fan, regardless of whether their favourite title is Aggressors of Dark Kombat or Clay Fighter, they will like, if not outright love Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom.

For people that generally don’t like fighting games, or simply aren’t very good at them, the different control schemes will really help one out here. You can even further simplify controls in the Options menu, which allows games of varying skills play together with at least SOME degree of challenge. I love this. None of my face-to-face friends play fighting games unless they are desperately pressing buttons and it’s no fun for me or them to play a game where I perfect them in ten seconds. That won’t happen with TvC because they’ll finally be able to do all the cool moves they used to see people to in the arcade with a single button and/or D-pad press instead of trying to figuring out exactly how I’m wiggling that fight stick. This my friends is the game to get people of all ages, genders, skill levels and genre preferences into fighting games. It may not be the GREATEST fighting game ever made, but it’s one that anyone can play and fall in love with and that just might be more important. Not just for enjoyment’s sake, but for keeping the genre alive.

Appeal Factor: Good

10. Miscellaneous

As you can no doubt tell after 4,000 words and eight full pages of my praising this game, I think Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is pretty hunky dory. I love the cast, although I’d have loved a few more characters, but I suppose that’s what DLC is for if the rumours are true. I love the different control schemes and how easy this game is for newcomers or people that tend to suck as fighters. I can’t stress enough how excited people are when they can finally pull off a Shoryuken for the first time. Even longtime fighting vets like myself will be able to enjoy the Wiimote only controls as a change of pace from using a fight stick. There are a ton of unlockables and best of all, the game opens up people to experience Tosunoko anime characters for the first time, which may in turn lead to them purchased (or Netflix’ing) the series that are available here in the US. I know it made me want to dust off Teknoman or put the Karas films in my Netflix queue. Best of all this game reminds me why I fell in love with fighters and why my Sega Saturn and Dreamcast collections are packed with fighters ranging from X-Men Vs. Street Fighter to umm…Battle Monsters.. What? I said I like the genre, didn’t I?

Basically Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom is everything I wished either Street Fighter IV or KoFXII had been. It’s fun, frantic, well balanced, eats up a ton of my time, and never fails to bring a smile to my face. 2010 is shaping up to be an amazing year for gaming and Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom is going to be remembered as one of the best titles to hit US shores when the year is said and done.

Miscellaneous Rating: Unparalleled

The Scores
Story/Modes: Great
Graphics: Good
Sound: Great
Control and Gameplay: Great
Replayability: Great
Balance: Great
Originality: Decent
Addictiveness: Unparalleled
Appeal Factor: Good
Miscellaneous: Unparalleled
FINAL SCORE: GREAT GAME!

Short Attention Span Summary
Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom is easily the best fighting game Capcom has released in years. It’s exceptionally well balanced, has a diverse cast list that doesn’t suffer from “fireball bros. syndrome”, and is both visually and aurally enjoyable. The game also boasts five different controller set-ups for a gamer to use, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Although I’ll probably stick to my Hori or Neo*Geo sticks, the Wiimote only control scheme is so different from anything I’ve played before (save SNK Vs. Capcom on the NGPC) that I find it charming and a nice change of pace. This is one of those rare games that does everything exceptionally well (except maybe the online lag that can sometimes occur) and it’s accessible to all gamers, whether they’re an SNK frame counter or their fighting game skills only extend to Super Smash Bros. I’m still a bit shocked Tatsunoko vs. Capcom made it stateside, but I’m overjoyed that it has. This is amazing game that deserves to be experienced by everyone. If you have a Wii, you owe it to yourself to pick this up, not only for the sheer amount of fun awaiting you, but to help convince Capcom and Eighting that we need a sequel!
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Box-120×120.jpg
http://diehardgamefan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/tatsunoko-vs-capcom-ultimate-all-stars-wii-189.jpg

Next Page »

• Categories

  • Wii News

• Pages

  • About

• Archives

  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
• 

• Recent Posts

  • Valve Teasing Steam Client for Mac?
  • Run with Busy Scissors on DS and Wii
  • Silicon Sleeve for Wii Remote with Motion Plus - Clear (Accessory) newly tagged wii
  • Valve Teasing Steam Client for Mac?
  • SanDisk Ultra II SDHC 32GB Card (Electronics) newly tagged wii

• Top 10 Best Selling Games

  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 

• Tags

  action activision adventure Archive business capcom dlc dsi dsiware e3-2009 ea europe FEATURE fighting Guitar Hero harmonix home hudson japan joystiqfeatures konami mario mtv-games music namco-bandai News Nintendo nintendo-dsi Nintendo Wii PREVIEW puzzle REVIEW Reviews rhythm rock-band rock-band-2 rpg sales sega square-enix Top Story ubisoft uk Virtual Console WiiWare

• Blogroll

  • Age of Conan
  • Apple News
  • Asia Travel
  • Body jewelry
  • Eat near you
  • Game pet
  • Game pig
  • gift shop
  • learn chinese
  • MMORPG News
  • Mobile News
  • Pc Gaming
  • PSP news
  • Web Design
  • Wii News
  • wow gold
  • WOW GOLD
  • wow gold de
  • wow gold fr
  • Xbox 360

• Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org