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Archive of "Wii" Category
What game should I play next…
Have you ever posted a forum thread like this? Do you have trouble deciding which socks to wear or when to blink? Penny Arcade’s Decide-o-tron is on its way – and will help you with at least one of those things.
The gist: build a library of games “you like and own” and then it tells you what you should play next. You may never have to assume responsibility for anything ever again.
Here’s hoping it works better than those Amazon suggestions, which seem to work like, “You just bought underpants? You, sir, are a connoisseur of underpants! You must want to buy MORE UNDERPANTS! Here is a virtual blizzard of underpants for you to choose from!!”*
*Note from my Sense of Feminine Pride: I borrowed this example from my husband. I have never bought underpants on Amazon.
Quick & Dirty at E3: Epic Mickey
Slightly less epic than previously announced.
An action adventure title, Epic Mickey is a painting ethics class. You can choose to paint or thin the environment and obstacles, and the former requires more creativity, while the latter is like punching the “Easy” button. What you choose to do will affect the game’s story, and the road your Mickey takes.
This is a Disney game on Wii, the appeal to a younger audience is prefab at this point. What holds some draw for the older crowd is the heavily nostalgic story, which focuses on Disney rejects from forgettable characters and abandoned theme park sets like the Swiss Family Robinson home.
Nunchuck moves an the Wiimote aims and fires paint or thinner. Painting will create things like platforms while thinner removes previously created elements or uncovers hidden items. Painting enemies makes them friendly, and thinning makes them non-existent. It’s just a bit of a pain, really – the Wii controls are unfun. A touch of waggle gets Mickey to spin so you can find e-Tickets hidden in jars (the game’s currency) or break objects.
Playing in Adventureland I was tasked with tracking down some items in order to progress to Skull Island. These are essentially fetch quests that have you interacting with characters to get them what they need, or collecting things to pay them off. Travelling to Skull Island uses the travel sequence seen at the press conference, Steamboat Willie. It really is a clever addition in a place that could be empty.
Skull Island features a sea of thinner and Sweepers from Fantasia that use thinner at range. On the offensive you can use props you find, in this case a TV sketch. Additional sketches come with more environments, and this one deposits a TV into the environment that hypnotizes enemies.
The game’s morality system and the play with restoring things to former glory is the most interesting aspect of the game. Thinning the world around you sends you down a “dark Mickey” path, and will affect the Guardian that joins Mickey on his travels. In the hero Mickey scenario, this Guardian is a “Tint” that befriends baddies, while naughty Mickey gets a “Turp” (think turpentine) that thins out the oncoming nasties. Very little else is a revealed, and I appreciate them keeping so much of the compelling aspect of the game under wraps.
It’s a very different game from those early concept arts, and so long as you adjust your expectations accordingly you can avoid needless disappointment. As it is, the game structure and story are more appealing than the control system, which I still consider to be a hindrance.
Quick & Dirty at E3: The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest
The Lord of the Rings is serious business, so it’s about time it took itself a little less seriously – we do enough of that. That the game looks more like a Saturday morning cartoon than anything Peter Jackson made is a small shock to the system, but not unwelcome, and it’s appropriate that these rose colored glasses are worn by Sam Gamgee. The game follows Aragorn through the three books in flashbacks narrated by Sam, and is even voiced by Sean Astin of the Jackson films. The game is geared towards a young audience, and so the narration is constructed like Sam is telling his kids the story.
The Aragorn’s Quest aesthetic has more style than the rather literal dark movie to dark game creations pumped out by EA. It fits well with the game narrative, unfolding like a storybook across the decidedly less gruesome battles. War may not be pretty, but Aragorn’s Quest doesn’t shy away from dressing up the ugly with soft focus, vibrant colors and a lot less innards. Despite the cozy bedtime story telling there are baddies, they’re just without gore and extraneous snarling. After all, evil exists, we just fight it with a smile and a flourish.
The demo highlighted a couple of different areas to include Pelennor Fields and Mines of Moria. Each level has objectives, but also what are essentially side quests – like fighting off siege engines from the walls. The side quests can net you special items, though failing to complete them doesn’t cause you to fail the level. Helpful for the young gamer is the sparkly breadcrumb trail that guides you to your objectives; Aragorn just says “no” to stopping to ask for directions.
Your party includes the regulars like Frodo, Legolas and Gimli – and Gandalf can pop in/pop out for some co-op. You only play as Aragorn in single player, and when Gandalf joins the game he is tethered to Aragorn. Gandalf can alternately fight (with fireballs) or heal, and is a useful contribution. However, the co-op camera is tricky and made it difficult for me (playing as Aragorn) to target enemies.
Controls use the Wiimote and Nunchuck. The latter controls the shield, bow and a torch and allows for moves like shield bash. The sword has special moves and combos, and your weapons, tools and moves even help with some puzzle solving.
There’s a small RPG element to the game that has you snagging items that level up members of your party and even lore that you can collect and read about. LOTR enthusiasts will find something here in the lore and items, but this game is for the children through and through. It’s a refreshing addition to a series that has, frankly, blundered down the same path for too long. While I’m not clamoring for a kiddie game myself, it’s good to remember that we don’t have to keep hitting the same note. Due out this Fall for Wii, PS3 (with Move), PS2, PSP and DS this is shaping up as a good Christmas buy for the family
Quick and Dirty Hands-On at E3: Rock Band 3
Rock Band 2 was a fun game. It found a place in my home for a week or so, and I may have even played all of the songs – but that was it for me and the sequel that had little of the magic of the first game. My bandmates and I weren’t showing up to work on Monday hoarse from singing all weekend, tapping out drum beats on our keyboards, and so it was with that same ambivalence that I went to my Rock Band 3 appointment at E3.
The nitty gritty: you can import your songs from Rock Band, Rock Band 2, Green Day, downloads and track packs. Keyboard and vocal harmonies will be limited to the disc tracks and future DLC pending any possible, but unconfirmed, future updates. Where previously there wasn’t a clear-cut way to “win” at Rock Band, this edition includes over 700 challenges and positions your band at the bottom of the musical cesspool with the task of rising to the top.
Another new feature is the ability to filter – extensively – by anything from song length to rating to genre, even attaching labels to songs you don’t want to hear during a party or creating track lists at work for when you get home. Also helping eliminate party fouls is the ability to choose a band leader. This member is in charge of things like picking tracks, which means that when a friend gets overly enthusiastic on the drums while you’re getting ready to rock the bass you won’t be bounced back through the menus. Also party-friendly is the ability to drop-in and out of a song, but since you still have to pause for this to happen it’s not quite seamless.
Those are all nice additions, and certainly improve the Rock Band experience, but none of them is revolutionary enough to really transform those feelings of music peripheral apathy. No, that is where Pro Mode comes in. Honestly, it wasn’t until after the presentation when we got to talk to the guys behind the hardware that my icy feelings were globally warmed. The instruments are there, some work in the same way, but now they are something new and entirely game-changing.
For starters a keyboard, with keys – though you can use the five colored sections for a simpler approach. In Pro Mode however, users will have to play the keys as the instrument is a MIDI controller. What that also means is that if you have a MIDI-capable keyboard you can buy an adapter and hook that up. Just like in traditional Rock Band, the easy mode is a pared down version of a song with Expert getting you to play the songs note-for-note. On keys, the difficulty increases as you use more of the peripheral/instrument, even moving across the note scale in-game. The keyboard is available on its own for $79.99 or bundled for $129.99. Pro-Mode is also compatible with drums, which always seemed brutally true to life to me, only now they incorporate cymbals.
Squire in the foreground, Mustang in red
The guitars, oh the guitars! Stay with me, because this gets really good: On the Mustang Pro guitar from MadCatz (sold separately for $149.99) every string of 17 frets is a button, with six strings over the strum bar. The notes coming at you onscreen will have a color as well as a number to tell you which string and which fret. Later on, like when you aren’t rubbish, there will be chords. It is connected directly to the console as a wireless controller, and is some sort of mutant hybrid between the Rock Band controller and the Fender Squier.
Originally I assumed the Squier (pricing still unannounced) was merely a MIDI and, therefore, lame. How wrong I was. The Squier does use a MIDI translator to connect to the console, but each fret is divided across the six strings so that the strings complete circuits, allowing the game to know the notes and chords you are playing. The game software does not require direct tuning, and a perfectly tuned guitar is not needed for success – but since the Squier can be plugged into an amp and be used as a real electric guitar, you’ll probably want to give some attention to the tuning.
Previous MIDI instruments have used pitch detection, which doesn’t track quickly enough for the purposes of playing Rock Band (which needs to be very precise). Neither the Mustang nor the Squier uses pitch detection, which theoretically means that you don’t have to be playing the right notes, just the right strings on the right frets. Thanks to Todd Baker, Director of Hardware Development at Harmonix, for this concise explanation:
Success in the game requires that you fret the correct fret and strum the correct string (as communicated thru the game interface). Because of the technology we use in the Mustang and the Squier, we detect your fret hand and your strum string independently. This allows us to give more effective real time information about your fret hand positions as you change fret positions up and down the string.
Oh, think of the children! If you don’t believe that having a game to learn an instrument will get more kids playing music, then you’re crazy.
Guitarists may find it interesting, or they might wonder why they aren’t just playing the real thing, but for someone like me (with novice musical skill at best) this is a game-changing opportunity. Now I can play, with the potential to truly rock. Think of it: the next time someone obnoxiously asks you why you don’t just play real guitar you can now retort, “I fracking am!”
Notes from the Nintendo Conference
Upside? I saw Bowser flame Reggie’s face off.
Fils-aime: Technology is only a tool, the end product, the thing that does matter is the experience. And the best experience only come when technology and game design are perfectly matched.
Happily, the first title revealed was The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, which allows you to use the Wiimote and Nunchuck as the sword and shield. Shaking your hand will pull out the sword, and you are able to swing at “any angle”. You can use the Z button to target, and defeat enemies by slashing their weak points.
Until I get hands-on time of my own, the effectiveness of the control scheme is dubious. Miyamoto came onstage to show Bill Trinen how it’s done, but the controls were jumpy and a number of the attacks and defensive moves – like using your shield to fling a projectile back toward an enemy – failed. The guys on stage attributed the spotty performance to “wireless interference”, and I honestly couldn’t tell you if they were joking or not.
Sword is still your weapon of choice, however, and in addition to cutting grass it now fells trees and even serves to confuse those pesky eyes guarding locked doors. Holding the sword aloft charges it with power from the heavens and allows you unleash special attacks. To access the rest of your arsenal, stored in your pocket, hold B. Some quirky items are the beetle, which you steer through the air to pick up items, and the whip, which cuts grass and antagonizes enemies.
Graphically, it looks like a Zelda title for Wii – unimpressive. At least you have until 2011 to muster more enthusiasm, development is set to continue through the remainder of the year.
On sports titles, Fils-Aime juxtaposed realism and fun, as though the two are mutually exclusive. Since they then announced Mario Sports Mix (2011), I’m guessing they went with realism.
Getting around that Pierce Brosnan problem, the recently leaked and now officially announced Goldeneye game will feature Daniel Craig as James Bond. The Activision title is set to release this holiday season.
Epic Mickey looks different from those beautiful concept art shots we saw so long ago, but it also looks like fun. Warren Spector and Adam Creighton showed us two distinct parts of the game, which takes place in Wasteland. We began in Ventureland, a quest zone where you can talk to characters and pick up quests as well as tools and other items. Kicking off with Mickey having a chat with Smee, from Peter Pan, it’s clear the game full of old characters and places, including one of my childhood favorites: the Swiss Family Robinson House. Also shown was a Travel Zone, which are side scrolling platformers you use to get from one area to another based on old cartoons – like Steamboat Willie – and classic platforming. You are equipped with paint and paint thinner, which means you can opt to remove obstacles or restore them, with the latter effort requiring a bit more creativity. The game’s producer said that how you choose to play will not only affect how the world looks and how character’s respond to you, but how the game ends for the characters with choices between completing smaller quests or those the target the “greater good”.
Officially revealed today was the 3DS, with improved graphics capability and, oh yeah, 3D. The new 3DS adds a slide pad to the controls, a motion sensor and gyro sensor. Additionally, it’s possible to watch 3D movies, and two camera lenses on the outside of the DS are for taking and viewing pics in 3D.
It was then explained that Project Sora was established to create a game designed specifically for Nintendo 3DS. Satoru Iwata teased, “We felt that such a game deserved to feature a character that is already familiar to you”. The game is Kid Icarus Uprising, and the release date is unannounced.
Also likely to have a release date along way off? The 3DS. While we were allowed brief hands-on time with the handheld (each of which was tethered to a model), what I saw was interesting, but not really impressive. It reminds me of what is being done with 3D for the iPhone, a fixed image around which you can rotate. How it will work with a game and in game camera is unclear. If during the course of play you tilt the device, the image is no longer 3D and flickers in and out.
Partial list of games that will be developed for 3DS: Kingdom Hearts, Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition, Saints Row, Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracle, Resident Evil Revelations,Madden NFL, Batman, Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed Lost Legacy, Dead or Alive 3D, Samurai Warriors, Ninja Gaiden, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, FIFA Soccer, Metal Gear Solid and Ridge Racer.
Some “also announced/shown” titles:
Kirby’s Epic Yarn, Fall 2010Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies, DS: Arrives in US in 26 days
Metroid: Other M, August 31, 2010
Fils-Aime: “What hasn’t been lost is a sense of isolation and exploration that has always been the hallmark of the franchise.”
Donkey Kong Country Returns, Holiday 2010Wii Party, Holiday 2010
Just Dance 2, Fall 2010
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, DS, Holiday 2010
Nintendo Press Conference, Nokia Theater, Los Angeles, June 15th
Rage of the Gladiator Review
As much as I hate to play the “If you like game x, then game y” game, it’s a pretty sure bet that if you like Punch-Out!! then you’re going to really enjoy Rage of the Gladiator. Especially if you think the best possible improvement to boxing would be the addition of magic.
Weekly Gaming Review Wrap-Up Episode 14
I play catch up with the slow season in full effect, and break down our latest reviews including Mass Effect 2, Emberwind and Tatsunoko vs. Capcom.
Trauma Team Preview: Forensics Mode
Earlier this week Atlus treated me to a look at Trauma Team’s new forensics mode. One of six disciplines featured in the Wii title, Forensics lets the player out of the lab. Playing as Dr. Naomi Kimishima you examine the body, search the crime scene for evidence, interview witnesses and ultimately piece together the clues to reveal how the crime was committed. It’s a lot of fun, particularly for any CSI, Bones or other forensic types. (more…)
ZTGD Review Wrap-Up 13
This week I return after a long winter’s nap with the latest video review wrap-up including recently released games such as Bayonetta, Darksiders and Sky Crawlers.
ZTGD Weekly Review Wrap-Up Episode 12
This week I deliver a holiday shopping guide of gaming reviews including Torchlight, MX vs. ATV Reflex and the final chapter of Tales of Monkey Island.
Squeeballs Party Review
Before the game arrived on my doorstep I was unacquainted with the cute squishies known as Squeeballs. The animal-like little guys are apparently tailor made for destruction, and it’s about the time you’re tossing them into a meat grinder that things get kind of weird. OK, there’s no gore, but the concept is macabre enough. E for Everyone or not, it’s best if you don’t think too hard on it and just subject the little guys to the tortures designed for them across the game’s 11 mini-games. (more…)
ZTGD Weekly Review Wrap-Up
This week I break down the latest holiday reviews including Assassin’s Creed II, Crystal Alliance and a pair of PSP Minis games that are definitely ones to look out for.
Check it out on ZTGD.
ZTGD Weekly Review Wrap-Up Episode 10
The Wrap-Up returns after the long holiday to breakdown the latest reviews including two expensive pieces of hardware and of course the latest games including LittleBigPlanet, Way of the Samurai 3 and of course Modern Warfare 2.
JumpStart: Escape from Adventure Island
From the same folks that brought you and your kids JumpStart: Pet Rescue comes JumpStart: Escape from Adventure Island in all the kid-friendly trappings of an educational game for a slightly older audience – 5-9 years old, that is. Opening with a high flying adventure sequence that has an airship losing altitude and crash landing into an island (not nearly as fraught with trauma as it sounds) you child’s avatar is greeted by a friendly kanagaroo that explains that the island is chock full of helium tanks that will get you airborne again. These tanks that the islanders have in bountiful supply, however, must be purchased with sand dollars earned by completing tasks, or lessons and mini games. (more…)
ZTGD Weekly Review Wrap-Up Episode 9
This week I break down the latest collection of holiday madness including Ratchet and Clank, Dragon Age: Origins, Dark Nebula and of course Wii shovelware.
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