Archive for the ‘Nintendo’ Category
November 8, 2007
House Party
Check out a sampling of Mario Party DS’s gameplay in this movie.
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Nintendo gave us a few minutes with Mario Party DS at its press event a few weeks ago, and now we’ve gotten our hands on a prerelease version of the game to subject it to further scrutiny. Not that too much scrutiny was really necessary–this is 100 percent, grade-A Mario Party. Anyone who has played the recent console versions should know exactly the sort of minigame/board game action they’ll find in the DS game. But that’s probably the most impressive thing about this package, from what we’ve seen so far: Hudson seems to have crammed the full Mario Party experience into the handheld, even if you have only one copy of the game.
Like its console predecessors, Mario Party DS is for four players, though you can play against up to three computer-controlled opponents if you don’t have any friends. You roll the dice and then move that many spaces on the board, and the type of space you land on determines what happens to you. You might get some coins or lose some coins, face Bowser’s wrath, take a shortcut to another spot on the board, or visit an item store to purchase a power-up that will help you out. The ultimate goal of any Mario Party is to have the most stars at the end of the game, and you pick those up as you make your way around the board. Again, this should all be old hat for veterans of the series.
It wouldn’t be a Mario game without Bowser and his cronies causing trouble.
At the end of every round, you’ll jump into a four-player minigame. This is where Hudson seems to have provided the most meaningful new content in the game, since a lot of the minigames take advantage of the DS’s touch screen or microphone. One game we tried had us racing against our foes to hop across a series of candles–but we had to use the microphone to blow out each candle before we could jump onto it. Another game had all four players using a bow and arrow on the touch screen–by pulling back the bowstring and aiming with the stylus–to hit targets on the top screen. Some of the games are three-against-one, such as one where three players run around on a disc with jets of water shooting across it, and the other player rotates the disc with the stylus to make those players get knocked off by the water. The computer-controlled players in the games we played were laughably easy to beat, but the minigames were quite a bit more fun against three other real people.
Surprisingly, it looks as though you’ll get the full Mario Party experience with only one copy of the game via the DS’s download play. We were able to have those three friends join in with the standard download play option, and it only took a minute or so to get into the game and choose one of the same five game boards you’ll find in the single-player game. It seems like all the minigames will be available during a download-play session as well, since the game would transmit data for a few seconds each time we started a new minigame. We can’t say what kind of multiplayer options you’ll get with multiple cartridges, since we have only one copy of the game in-house, but we’ll tip our hat to Nintendo’s generosity for giving you such a robust multiplayer option when only one cartridge is present.
This is classic board game Mario Party, through and through.
As we mentioned in our last look at Mario Party DS, the game offers some other gameplay options outside of the main board game, such as the ability to play all of the minigames you’ve unlocked at will. There’s also a puzzle mode where you can sample a number of puzzle games from previous Mario Party games, such as Bob-omb Breakers, Stick & Spin, and Piece Out. These seem like moderately entertaining time wasters that follow established puzzle conventions, drawing from games like Tetris Attack.
Mario Party DS isn’t reinventing the franchise’s wheel, but if you’re into this series, now you’ll have a DS version you can take with you anywhere. The game has a nice art style, with full-resolution 2D cutscenes featuring some attractively rendered artwork. The game is out in the latter half of November, so look for a full review soon.
-If Its Games
November 8, 2007
Here is the game that Wii owners have been pining for, a game that has tons of appeal for both the less experienced player and the longtime gamer. A game that deftly combines accessibility and challenge, all wrapped up in a package that’s both deep and addictive. Super Mario Galaxy is all of this and more. It is simultaneously one of Mario’s best adventures and a game that doesn’t require fandom of the portly plumber’s previous engagements to appreciate. The sheer quality of Mario Galaxy’s wonderful level designs, tight controls, and brilliant presentation is the sort of thing that just about anyone who loves gaming should be able to appreciate, and that many will fall head-over-heels for.
Mario takes to the stars in Super Mario Galaxy.
The premise for Mario Galaxy begins in fairly well-worn territory. Mario receives a note from his beloved Peach to come to the castle, for she has a special “gift” for him. He arrives, only to walk straight into chaos as Bowser and son arrive in a fleet of airships and use a giant UFO to pluck the Princess’ castle right out of the ground. Mario gives chase, but is unable to rescue her before the fearsome twosome jet off into space. This all certainly sounds par for the course, but it’s where Mario ends up that gives Mario Galaxy its own flavor. Mario eventually hooks up with a creature called a luma, from a race that looks like some kind of cross between an invincibility star and a headless chicken. The lumas are led by an enigmatic woman named Rosalina, who lives with them on a crazy spaceship called the comet observatory. Mario learns that Bowser has made off with a gaggle of power stars used to power the observatory. To reach Bowser’s hideout, Mario has to travel to all the various galaxies in the universe to collect as many power stars as he can in order to power the ship back up, fly to the center of the universe, rescue the princess, and set everything right again.
Mario 64, anyone? If you played that seminal game, Mario Galaxy’s star hunt progression probably sounds familiar to you. But apart from that basic structuring, you can hardly call Mario Galaxy a Mario 64 rehash. If anything, Mario Galaxy simply takes the basics of what made Mario 64 such a dynamite game, and turns them completely crazy.
The definition of crazy here has a lot to do with gravity and physics. Each galaxy contains a series of little worlds that can’t even really be called planets so much as they are floating puzzles. In many of these worlds, Mario can walk just about anywhere. When he lands on a sphere, he can walk all over it, going sideways and upside down in the process. Sometimes you’ll simply jump in one area and end up gravitating toward the ceiling or walls or even another nearby planetoid without even realizing it. Often Mario will need to track down launch stars, which, when you shake the Wii Remote while standing near or inside one, will send you flying to a whole new, previously inaccessible area. There are even sections where you’ll be floating through space, using specialized pull stars to hop from area to area, all while floating through the spatial void.
Practically every galaxy you explore is an absolute joy to experience. The level designs here are top flight in every regard, with tons of clever and sometimes dastardly traps and puzzles for Mario to navigate. The difficulty doesn’t start off terribly high, but as time goes on, the game ramps up nicely, building the challenge steadily until the final areas, which, though perhaps a bit frustrating to inexperienced players, provides the exact sort of tough workout you’ve come to expect from a Mario adventure. But even aside from the challenge level, simply exploring all these various galaxies is half the fun. Whether you’re floating from land mass to land mass on a giant spinning flower, running frantically around a giant series of platforms that shrink to nothing the first time you touch them, or taking on one of several terrific 2D side-scrolling areas reminiscent of New Super Mario Bros. for the DS, you won’t be wanting for variety while playing through Galaxy’s dozens of levels.
In a sort of nod to the suit-happy gameplay of Super Mario Bros. 3, Mario can don a number of different costumes that give him new abilities. For instance, in several levels, Mario can take on the abilities of a bee, buzzing around through the air via his new pair of wings, and wall-climbing specific honeycombed areas of the environment. With others, Mario can freeze water to walk over it, launch fireballs (natch), fly, wrap himself in a Mario-sized spring and jump to great heights, turn invincible (natch, again) and even turn into one of those pesky boos, allowing him to float around and pass through some solid walls. In most cases, the game takes great advantage of these abilities in the context of each level. A few involving the bee suit are a bit frustrating (given that you lose the suit when you touch water) and the spring suit is kind of a pain to control given Mario’s perpetual bounciness, but otherwise, these abilities add a great dimension to the already excellent gameplay.
All the crazy gravitational pulling and perspective shifting is undeniably cool, and also potentially a little queasy.
Apart from the screwiness of the spring suit, there’s very little issue to be taken with Mario Galaxy’s controls. At its core, it controls much as Mario 64 did, but with a couple of Wii-centric twists. For one, Mario’s primary attack is a basic spin move (the same spin move you use to activate launch stars). Simply shaking the Wii Remote engages the spin, and it’s an extremely responsive mechanic. The one trick to it is that you have to wait a second before spinning again, so you want to make sure you’re able to get away from whatever bad guy is nearby if you happen to miss.
The other key change is the addition of the Wii Remote as a pointer. Simply by pointing at them on the screen you’ll collect star bits, which can be found just about everywhere and serve as both Super Mario Galaxy’s currency and as a weapon. Firing star bits is as simple as aiming the Wii Remote at an enemy and pressing B to launch. But you don’t want to fire off too many of those, as they come in handy for unlocking new stages later on. Only in a few specific cases does the game really dabble in true motion control, such as sections where you’re surfing on a manta ray or walking on a boulder. But even these few divergences from the standard gameplay formula are largely successful and quite fun.
Mario Galaxy’s journey is scattered and epic all at once. There isn’t much of a thread tying together all these disparate worlds, apart from the fact that they have power stars hidden within them somewhere. And yet, at the same time, the lack of cohesion in what you’re doing never really gets in the way of your enjoyment of it. Because each level is so much an island unto itself, it actually makes each one stand out all the more.
It helps that practically every stage in the game has a great deal of replayability purely on its own merits. These levels are just inherently fun to go back to again and again, and that the game gives you plenty of reason to is even better. Once you complete an area, you can go back and engage in a specialized version of it in certain cases. Essentially, comets will enter orbit in some of these galaxies, and thus change the way you play in some bizarre way. Whether it’s speeding up all the enemies in an area, putting you on a timed run, or having you race against a doppelganger Mario, there’s a nice variety of change-ups to experience. The adventure probably won’t take you more than 12 to 15 hours if you just collect the minimum number of stars necessary to get to the end level, but you can certainly tack on a great deal more to that if you’re into going back and collecting all the stars. And if you want to unlock the game’s neat end surprise, you’ll need to get all of them.
There is even a multiplayer component to the game, albeit a limited one. Another player can point their Wii Remote at the screen and take part in some of the basic fun, like collecting star bits, shooting star bits, and the like. You can even directly assist Mario by pointing at him and pressing A at the same time as your friend to make him do a super jump, and stop certain enemies from attacking by highlighting them with the pointer. It’s not the most involved co-op mode you’ll ever experience, but it can be fun if you’ve got someone enthusiastic alongside you.
As wonderful as Mario Galaxy’s gameplay is, its graphics are even better. There simply isn’t a better-looking Wii game available. A great deal of credit is due to the art design, which is simply phenomenal. The character designs, level details, animations, all of it is incredibly colorful and vibrant, and just a joy to look at. The technical engine does its part as well, keeping the frame rate drops to minor, infrequent bouts. One area especially worth noting is the game’s camera, which takes a largely cinematic perspective, albeit with a limited amount of player control. You can adjust it right or left in certain areas, and go to a first-person view if you just want to look around. There are a few areas where the camera prevents you from seeing things perfectly, but mostly it does an excellent job of framing the action, especially considering all the kooky perspective shifting the game does as you run around these oddball environments. The only thing that’s kind of a bummer is that you’ll undoubtedly wish at some point while playing that the Wii could support resolutions higher than 480p; but even with the limited resolution, the game just looks beautiful.
Some of the new suits are seriously awesome.
Audio is also excellent, thanks largely to the top-notch soundtrack. Much of the music is made up of classic Mario tunes from a wide variety of different games, and it’s all modernized and orchestrated. These are some of the best renditions of these tracks since the originals, and you’re sure to be humming along as you play. There’s little voice work in the game, but the few voice samples that are there are used to nice effect. It’s probably better to just hear Bowser snarling than it is to hear him being a chatty Cathy, anyway. The sound effects are a touch on the shrill side at times, but the bulk of them fit the vibe of each stage nicely.
When all is said and done, the thing that really makes Super Mario Galaxy such a standout game isn’t the fact that it’s another Mario game, but the fact that it doesn’t even need to be a Mario game to be successful. Sure, it’s got all the nostalgic flavor Mario fans would want, with the updated soundtrack, familiar foes, and various other Mario-related bric-a-brac scattered throughout the adventure, but the game never leans on these nostalgic aspects as a crutch. It instead puts the whole of its focus on its gameplay design, and with good reason. You could probably swap in just about any other characters from practically any other franchise, and this would still be a phenomenally fun game. That it layers all these memorable characters and components on top of that phenomenal design just makes it all the sweeter. If ever there were a must-own Wii game, Super Mario Galaxy is it.
November 8, 2007
Yves Guillemot CEO of Ubisoft has said that they currently have 400-500 people who are dedicated to the Wii platform right now. He said Ubisoft will have “Nintendo-like quality” on the Wii by next year. He also said that the PC is market is growing and that Ubisoft will be delivering Far Cry 2 on PC first, as well as launching casual MMOs at the end 2008.
November 8, 2007
Reggie Fils-Aime has said Nintendo is tackling a production bottleneck to ensure third-parties are able to get software on shelves in time for the holiday season. Reggie said a crush of production has been created at their factories for software due to publishers shifting to the Wii. In response they\’ve ramped up capacity and are working with publishers to ensure that their best titles get into the marketplace. He was also keen to point out that it was only a very short-term situation that should be resolved within 3 weeks.
November 7, 2007
Is it possible to be legitimately spooked by a handheld game? Console games have been designed to make use of the home field advantages of having a large screen and complete control over lighting to enhance the experience for years, but when you’re playing on a tiny screen on the bus, can the experience compare? The answer, as proven by FPS-with-a-dash-of-survival horror Dementium: The Ward, is a resounding yes, though its inherent flaws prevent it from truly becoming that which it aspires to be.
Dementium tells the twisted tale of a man who wakes up in the bed of a monster-infested hospital after taking a wheelchair trip from hell. You will navigate him through the worn halls of the massive building and try to piece together who he is and why he’s there as you battle zombies, parasitic worms that wail like babies, and the occasional cleaver-wielding demon. The game is divided into a series of chapters that for the most part correlate to the various floors of the hospital. Chapters vary greatly in length–some are as short as a minute or two and others last as long as half an hour–and are often punctuated by short, tightly directed cutscenes that introduce new enemies or shed new light on the protagonist’s identity and past. At several points in your journey you will encounter a powerful boss, such as the aforementioned cleaver-wielding demon, that will tax your skill and supply of ammo in a climactic battle.
Apparently, creepy little girls are still a staple of modern horror.
The gameplay itself is very much a mixture of Doom and Silent Hill that combines some of the best elements of each for a fairly straightforward horror experience. Early on, you will find a flashlight to light your way through the pitch-black corridors, and as you navigate through the twisted hospital two melee weapons and five guns will become available. Dementium is essentially a traditional FPS in terms of action and control, but thanks to the sparse placement of ammo, combat becomes more of a fight-or-flight scenario than a matter of deciding which of your weapons are going to splatter your enemy. Unfortunately, while you apparently have the physical dexterity to use larger weapons with both hands, you lack the rudimentary skill to use the flashlight simultaneously with a weapon, leading to situations in which you must quickly toggle back and forth between your guns and your flashlight to see what you’re shooting at.
In addition to running and gunning, a number of puzzles are thrown in that range from a simple substitution cipher to a complex treasure hunt for three pieces of a photograph to learn a door code. You have access to a notepad to scrawl clues or hints in, but the various maps you find inexplicably don’t allow this. While the map system borrows a page from Silent Hill’s playbook and keeps track of doors that are locked or broken (which is nearly all of them, also like Silent Hill), it does not keep track of the many blocked-off corridors you will encounter, and the ability to self-notate these would have been welcome.
Dementium shines the most in terms of presentation, most notably in the area of sound design. It is imperative that you play it with headphones, because listening to the audio clues provided by the 3D sound system is essential in determining what is around the corner. Each enemy makes a unique sound, and often, as is the case with the flying Medusa heads, a brief audio warning is all you’ll get before you’re attacked. In addition to enemy sound effects, certain rooms are filled with intensely creepy noises such as children’s singing and phrases spoken backward. An appropriately moody and ambient soundtrack composed of mostly piano pieces rounds out the audio front and contributes greatly to the sense of isolation and desperation that wandering around in a darkened hospital will produce.
Graphically speaking, Dementium runs at a crisp frame rate that never dips despite the number of enemies or atmospheric effects that may show up simultaneously. Textures are incredibly high-quality given the DS hardware, and the flashlight produces a realistic effect, even flickering occasionally, and is appropriately useless in fog to help heighten the mood.
It’s close to midnight, and something evil’s lurking in the dark…
Unfortunately, for every step that Dementium takes in the right direction toward producing an excellent horror experience on a handheld system, it is held back by a series of flaws that undermine its achievements. Level design is incredibly repetitive, and it’s not uncommon to find several completely identical storerooms down the same hallway; enemies respawn the moment you exit a room, and so that zombie on the other side of the door that scared you the first time will be there every time, minimizing the fear factor in subsequent visits; and the poorly implemented save system, which forces you to restart at the beginning of the chapter upon death despite saving each time you open a door, is counterproductive given that forced replays through lengthy chapters all but eliminates the horror and replaces it with frustration.
Ultimately, Dementium: The Ward is an entertaining shooter that makes great strides in creating a portable horror experience but holds itself back from really accomplishing what it set out to do. Easily beatable in four to five hours by an accomplished player, its static puzzles and enemy placement leave no reason to run through it again, but its memorable sound design and creepy ambience make it well worth a play.
November 7, 2007
The number of crime scene investigators in Las Vegas has grown by one in the upcoming CSI: Dark Motives, a crime-solving puzzle game for the Nintendo DS that looks to re-create the themes and techniques used on the hugely popular CBS television show. The game is based on the PC version of the same name and recently, we stepped into the shoes of a CSI expert for a quick look at the game to see if we could bring the bad guys to justice.
A CSI agent’s most useful tool? The touchscreen and stylus.
In Dark Motives, you’ll play as a new CSI hired by Dr. Gil Grissom to help tackle the night shift at Las Vegas’ CSI lab, one of the busiest such facilities in the entire nation. After a quick pep talk from Dr. G, you’ll receive an introduction to your partner for the game’s first case, Catherine Willows. At any point, you’ll be able to go to your partner for hints as you progress through a case; however, the more you ask for her assistance, the lower your final grade will be once Grissom reviews your case performance.
Your first assignment in Dark Motives will be to uncover the mystery of a televised motorcycle stunt gone wrong…almost fatally so. Though the stuntman who performed the jump for a reality show lived through the crash that followed, he’s still more than a little perturbed about what went wrong. As you investigate the circumstances, you’ll go through the same procedures from the CSI show: questioning suspects, collecting evidence, and analyzing the data. These steps will take you across multiple locations in Vegas–from the site of the accident and the promotional offices connected to the reality show that aired the stunt to a motorcycle shop in town that may or may not have had something to do with the tampering of the bike.
Your interface for all of these tasks is, naturally, the combination of the DS’s touch screen and your stylus. When investigating a location for evidence, you can move the stylus over the screen and areas of interest will turn the normally blue arrow icon green. From there, you can use any of the collection or detection tools in your CSI goody bag to do such things as dust for fingerprints or, in the case of the motorcycle stunt case, lift tire tread markings off of asphalt. In the case of the motorcycle accident, you’ll also investigate the bike itself, as a few pieces of the wrecked bike might be useful in putting together your case.
While evidence collecting has its moments of tedium, there’s more to Dark Motives than pixel hunting. With your evidence collected, you can head back to the crime lab and put your fancy gadgets to work for you. For example, you can confirm fingerprint matches, analyze data disks for encrypted e-mail, identify liquid samples, and more. As you build up evidence, you build a case file on the multiple players in each case, which you can access at any time by scrolling through with the left and right triggers.
Technology can only take you so far; sooner or later you’ll need your own brainpower to solve the crime.
As your case improves, you’ll eventually be able to request a warrant from your friends at the police station, which you can then use to search areas that were previously off limits. With a warrant, the sequence of events continues: ask more questions, gather more evidence, wash, rinse, and repeat. With all of your high-tech tools and a little deductive reasoning on your part, you’ll soon have enough evidence to nail the person responsible for tampering with the motorcycle. With that case closed, it will be time to move on to the four cases that make up Dark Motives’ gameplay. And presumably, each will be successively more difficult than the last.
There’s little doubt that Dark Motives is going to have rather limited appeal. Fans of the show and those who prefer methodical games that test your powers of observation are the most obvious candidates. For the CSI faithful, the game’s presentation hark back to the television show, including video crime scene re-creations played on the DS’s upper screen that are definitely reminiscent of the show. Budding investigators should clean their eyepiece and monitor their objective lens for the game’s release later this month.
-If Its Games
November 7, 2007
Two years ago, one of the Xbox 360’s standout launch titles was Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, a $5 downloadable game that helped establish digital distribution as a viable delivery service in the console space. Having done that, the franchise is now turning its attention to brick-and-mortar retailers with a full-priced follow-up in Geometry Wars: Galaxies for the DS and Wii.
Helping launch that attack on retail will be Vivendi Games division Sierra Entertainment, which today announced that both versions of the game have finished development and have been sent off for duplication. Geometry Wars: Galaxies is set for release on the Wii November 20, with the DS edition to follow on November 27.
In addition to the Retro Evolved game, each version of Galaxies also includes a campaign mode with more than 60 planets, power-ups, new enemies, and multiplayer action. Those who own only the Wii version will be able to download a version of Retro Evolved to their DS systems, while each version will unlock bonus levels in its counterpart.
Both games have been rated E for Everyone. The Wii version will retail for $39.99, with the DS edition fetching $29.99. For more on the games, check out If Its Games’s latest impressions.
November 7, 2007
China will soon be getting a limited edition Mario 64 iQue DS. iQue Limited manufacture and distribute official Nintendo consoles and games for the mainland Chinese market, under the iQue brand.
November 7, 2007
Square Enix is offering gamers a bottle of red wine in a special bundle when their upcoming title Wine no Hajimekata for DS goes on sale in Japan on November 28th. The whole game and wine bundle is available for a converted price of just over $40 USD.
November 6, 2007
Tiny Tactics
Check out the latest footage of Final Fantasy Tactics A2.
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Square Enix is celebrating Final Fantasy’s 20th anniversary in a big way this year, and a revival of the sleeper hit Final Fantasy Tactics series is a significant part of that celebration. The role-playing magnate recently released an excellent PSP port of the original PlayStation game complete with new content and wireless multiplayer, and now there’s a new Final Fantasy Tactics on the Nintendo DS, too. Well, at least in Japan. The awkwardly titled Final Fantasy Tactics A2: The Sealed Grimoire is in stores across the pond, and we’ve been hammering on its dense strategy-RPG mechanics to find out what’s new this time around.
Tactics A2 is basically a quasi-sequel to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on the Game Boy Advance. That explains the A2, in case you were wondering. Similar to the GBA game, A2 presents a much more lighthearted take on the franchise than the original, plot-heavy PlayStation game. Much like in Tactics Advance, A2 casts you in the role of a schoolboy named Russo (or Luso–take your pick) who is sucked into a magical book at the beginning of the game and deposited in the mystical land of Ivalice (seen in Final Fantasy XII and a number of other games). You’ll quickly join forces with this game’s version of the perennial Cid character–who in this case has a disturbingly pointy nose, but seems adept at combat–and a host of Ivalice’s other indigenous races, like the bunny-eared viera and the lizardlike bangaa, to throw down in the turn-based, grid-oriented combat that should be quite familiar to series veterans.
The overworld itself is quite simple, from what we’ve seen so far. It’s essentially a group of locations represented by dots, all connected by pathways. You can move your character to a location or the nearby town by simply clicking on it, though you’ll have to visit the town to actually enable the combat missions at each location. Once you’re in the town’s pub, you can do things like read the daily newspaper or talk to the bartender to pick up the missions that are currently available. From what we could tell, the level of each mission is indicated by a ranking number, and once we’d completed enough of the missions in the starting area, we were able to exit the relatively small initial area and access a new town and a bunch more missions.
Combat here should be old hat for strategy RPG fans.
Even if you have little to no skill with the Japanese language, you’ll be able to draw upon previous strategy RPG experience to muddle your way through the combat in Tactics A2, since the fundamentals are unchanged. At the beginning of a mission, you’ll be able to place Russo and his current allies–each of whom specialize in offensive magic, healing, ranged attacking, heavy melee combat, and so on–in their starting positions and tell them which way to face. Then it’s a matter of moving your characters one turn at a time while your enemies do the same, issuing attack and magic commands per the standards of this genre. The battlefield is situated on the bottom screen–though, strangely, there’s no touch-screen control whatsoever that we’ve found so far–and as you’d imagine, the top screen is used to show character stats, turn order, and other relevant information.
Of course, there are a handful of combat mechanics–some new, some old–that identify this as a tactics game. The judge law system is back, whereby one of Ivalice’s enigmatic combat judges will mediate your battle and award you a bonus at the end if you don’t violate the rule he’s laid down at the beginning of the match. As far as we can tell, these rules typically restrict you from using particular abilities and such. There’s also a new “clan ability” system, which we’re honestly still trying to figure out. You can select from a number of buffs at the beginning of a battle–including increases in power, speed, and luck–but how these relate to the clan you’re a member of, we haven’t determined yet. There’s a lot of Japanese text in here.
The story unfolds primarily in towns between battles.
The visual presentation in Tactics A2 is of the same whimsical, cartoonlike style used in Tactics Advance, and we’ve generally been quite pleased by the lush color palette of the game’s entirely 2D graphics. Our only complaint so far is that with no ability to reorient the battlefield, the characters tend to stack up on top of one another in close quarters, and it can be hard to see exactly who is standing where. But you can cycle through characters pretty easily to plan out your attacks and position your magic spells, so the fixed perspective isn’t a huge problem.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is looking like a solid, lighthearted follow-up to the previous Game Boy Advance game. Newcomers to the series who recently cut their teeth on The War of the Lions shouldn’t look for the same dramatic gravitas here, but the gameplay looks like it will satisfy those armchair fantasy strategists among you. We’d recommend waiting for a domestic release unless you’re highly proficient in Japanese, though sadly, we don’t know yet when that’s going to happen.
-If Its Games
November 6, 2007
In September, French publisher Ubisoft was rumored as a possible suitor to acquire Eidos parent company SCi Entertainment, a transaction that would include its stable of multimedia franchises such as Hitman and Tomb Raider. Ubisoft denied that rumor, but today the publisher revealed that it had been in the market for an acquisition with the announcement that it will purchase Japanese studio Digital Kids.
With a staff of 20 developers in Nagoya and Osaka, Digital Kids has worked with Ubisoft on its Petz series of games, specifically Hamsterz Life. In a statement, Ubisoft explained the deal by pointing to the studio’s track record in creating pet simulators that appeal to both Japanese and Western audiences.
The publisher’s acquisition of the DS-specialist development house is expected to close before the end of the year.
November 6, 2007
Sega’s role-playing Shining series got its start winding through some deep, dark corridors. Shining in the Darkness is the progenitor of the whole line, from the turn-based strategy series Shining Force to the hack-and-slashfests of Shining Soul and everything that gleams in-between. However, aside from the art and musical direction, this dungeon crawler shares little in common with its more complex descendants. This is a first-person, turn-based hack through some of the most fiendish labyrinths ever to grace the Sega Genesis, and it’s a test of both perseverance and patience. There are reasons that games like this just aren’t made anymore, but at 800 Wii points (about $8), if you’ve got a serious hankering for twisty mazes, hidden treasures, and hordes of monsters, then Shining in the Darkness can scratch the itch.
A castle, a town, and a dungeon. What more do you need?
You’re a soldier in the Kingdom of Thornwood, and nefarious deeds are afoot. The princess Jessa has been kidnapped, a great knight of the land (your father) is missing, and the perpetrator demands that Thornwood be turned over to him. He’s Dark Sol, an imposing and dastardly sort of wizard who has cunningly holed himself up in an ancient labyrinth. Being that you’re an able swordsman yourself and heir to your father’s considerable legacy of service, the King orders you into the ruins to put a stop to Dark Sol’s plans and save the princess.
Initially you’ll be alone, but soon enough two of your friends join the cause: a shifty-eyed priest named Mylo and a young elf mage named Pyra. There are a couple of cute scenes as you encounter them and they barge in on your adventure, but once they’re in your party, they keep quiet. You navigate through the dungeon and town from a first-person viewpoint, but when you meet enemies it’s a typical turn-based affair. You can use melee attacks, and your friends can bring into play a number of offensive and defensive spells to assist you. Monsters commonly appear in large group clusters that you’ll select for attacks or spells. However, you can’t select individual monsters to attack, which means you can easily end up wasting turns unless you allow for some random targeting. The enemies themselves are a cartoony menagerie of critters that range from slimes and skeletons to giant crabs, with plenty of palette swapping to get the maximum mileage out of each tentacle. They’re progressively more numerous and nastier the further you explore, and you’ll also have to keep cutting through lower-level monsters on your way to more challenging areas.
The labyrinth itself is a giant, multitiered maze of passages with no comprehensive map available. There is a particular item (and later, when you get your two party members, a spell) that lets you bring up a map of your immediate position, but you cannot scroll the map to view other areas, and nothing is marked. You can’t see if a given passage is a dead end, you can’t see where stairways to other areas are, and you can’t mark the location of various items. It takes a good memory and spot-checks of the map (or a pencil and a large sheet of graph paper) to make your way through the mazes with any sort of efficiency, and there are multiple levels and areas to navigate. As you go along, you get better spells and items that let you delve deeply into the labyrinth for long periods of time–and you’ll need all that time to steadily level your characters, find important treasure, and kill powerful monsters. The hook to this game is that drive to explore every nook and cranny, open every chest (even if monsters pop out to bite your face), collect rare items to make armor and weapons, and to get powerful enough to slaughter everything in your path. It’s definitely satisfying to come back to a difficult area and crush monsters that wiped the stone floor with you two levels prior, or to turn a corner and discover a new stairway that leads to parts unknown.
Shining in the Darkness feels its age, though, given that the sweet, sweet hook of character progression and dungeon domination is often coated in a bitter layer of mindless repetition and monster squashing as you advance. When you exit the labyrinth, you’ll have to fight your way back up to where you left off, including any of the lower-level monsters that might happen to be in your way. You can encounter battles as frequently as every step, and given that there’s essentially no strategy involved in fighting most of them (just hit attack or group spells until they all go away), there’s not always all that much to engage the brain. Somewhere between your tenth and hundredth group in a row of malicious toadstools flexing at you as you inch along, you can easily become unhinged.
The cartoon style of the visuals works quite nicely for the most part. The characters and creatures you encounter are all bright and goofy in their own way, and certain areas such as the cozy tavern really have a lot of personality. The problem is that most of the time you’re not hanging out in the tavern and rolling the dice to see if you’re getting drunk; instead, you’re plodding your way down rows and rows of featureless corridors with nothing interesting to look at. The lack of defining landmarks (aside from the occasional torch or puddle of water) also makes travel harder and harder, given that you’ll need to check the map very often if by chance you get turned around and forget which stretch of empty hallway you’re looking at. Music in the game is limited to only a few tunes, but they do have remarkable longevity and somehow remain catchy the whole time. There’s nothing like finally returning to town after a long drudge in the dungeons to hear the lively tavern music faintly spilling out the door.
Will you beat the dungeon, or will the dungeon beat you? Depends on where you keep your graph paper!
The charming look and feel of the game and the satisfaction of progression are the salve over the irritation that the frequent encounters and identical-looking mazes can produce. Shining in the Darkness can last you well over 20 hours of exploring, advancing, and wiping monsters off your sword as you move to confront Dark Sol, but if you’re the type of person who goes cross-eyed at the thought of trying to manually map your own dungeons, you’re better off giving this a pass. If you’re a fan of thoroughly old-school-style dungeon crawlers, it’s 800 Wii points of pure insanity.
November 6, 2007
In 1992, Namco produced a side-scrolling action game for the TurboGrafx-16 called Samurai Ghost. You haven’t heard of it because few people bought it back then, and those who did hated it. It was complete garbage. This garbage is now available as a download from the Wii’s Virtual Console service.
As the title explains, you play as a samurai who has come back from the dead. Your goal is to save China from a demon infestation. So, over the course of seven short side-scrolling levels, you walk forward, jump if need be, and use your sword to stab whatever creatures appear. Occasionally, the creatures will leave behind candles or logs, which refill your health, as well as colorful orbs that let you hurl energy waves with your sword. At the end of each level, you’ll square off against a large boss that does the typical “attack and show weak spot” routine.
Since when did samurai have flowing red hair, or fight in China? This game is nuts.
The design itself isn’t bad–simple, maybe, but there are plenty of good games out there that chiefly involve walking, jumping, and slashing. Nobody complained that Castlevania or Strider were too simple.
The problem with Samurai Ghost is that Namco’s programmers put zero care into fashioning the design into a decent game. Every level has the same simplistic enemies and the same style of platform-jumping sequences. Progress through the levels is excruciating, because the ghostly hero walks too slowly, and his attacks frequently leave enemies unscathed. Some enemies can block your attacks with their swords and shields, and that’s understandable. However, more often than not, what you’ll witness is your sword just passing through enemies without hurting them. You can perform different sword-based attacks by holding the up and down buttons when you press the attack button, but that hardly matters when the game only registers that you’ve hit an enemy half the time.
You won’t get any satisfaction from the visuals and audio either. The actual samurai ghost is very detailed and has a striking mane of red hair, and his animations are remarkably fluid. However, nearly all of the enemies are crude, two-tone globs that vaguely resemble balls of fire, disembodied hands, and the occasional goblin. Their choppy movements consist of approximately two frames of animation. The audio consists of a few clangs, some grunts, and a selection of woefully generic Asian-tinged action music. To put it bluntly, Samurai Ghost wasn’t worth 50 dollars in 1992, and it hasn’t been made any less horrible now that it costs six dollars.
November 6, 2007
In the original Castlevania, you journeyed up multiple floors of a castle, merrily whipping zombies and Dracula’s generals until you reached the throne room and unleashed your fury against the Count himself. However, as it turns out, old Drac cast a deadly curse on you right when you dealt the fatal blow. So now, in Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, you have to break the curse by–get this–recovering the Count’s body parts from the various monster-filled mansions the villagers socked them away in. That’s not the only twist, either. This second installment does away with the linear level structure from the first game and instead lets you explore a contiguous world of towns, mansions, and haunted wilderness at your leisure.
Don’t worry–those forests and mansions contain plenty of platforms to jump across and ghoulish enemies to whip. All of the classic Castlevania stuff you like is here, including the holy water and dagger subweapons that allow you to really go bananas on your undead victims. Day-to-night transitions change the look of the backgrounds and cause enemies to gain strength at night. That’s merely a minor wrinkle for a skilled vampire hunter such as you, although it certainly is sweet to see the formerly sunny pastures bathed in moonlight and the villages infested with zombies during the nighttime hours. The main difference between this game and its level-based predecessor is the structure of the quest. You visit multiple mansions, you talk to townsfolk to get clues, and you use the hearts you collect to buy weapons and items from the shopkeepers located in each town.
You’ll find yourself hurling holy water everywhere to reveal fake walls and floors.
Before you get too excited about the prospect of playing an open-ended, old-school Castlevania, you have to bear in mind that the game provides very little guidance as to where to go or what to do when you get there. Shop entrances are often hidden behind fake walls. Two mansions are totally hidden until you equip certain crystals and kneel in very specific spots to reveal their entrances. You’re supposed to talk to the villagers in order to get clues that’ll help you figure this stuff out. Unfortunately, the subtle hints from the Japanese version were butchered by whoever translated the game into English. Somehow, from “hit Deborah Cliff with your head to make a hole,” you have to deduce that you need to kneel down in the western graveyard with the red crystal equipped to summon a tornado.
Realistically speaking, you have two choices. You can go online and read a guide that tells you what to do, or you can try to work through the game the old-fashioned way by throwing holy water on every brick and kneeling down on every inch of ground.
To the developers’ credit, they thought to give you unlimited continues and a password system. So, assuming you have all the time in the world, it is possible that you’ll finish the game eventually. And, if you do invest the time necessary to figure things out, you might come to appreciate how the world in Castlevania II is structured. The first time through, it could take you weeks to reassemble Dracula. The second time it will take a couple of hours. Your reward for the next victory will probably be the best of the game’s three ending sequences. In any case, whipping skeletons and throwing knives in werewolves’ eyes is always fun, regardless of how cryptic the world structure is.
Thankfully, it isn’t 1988 anymore. You’re reading this on a computer that’s “plugged in” to the Internet. Badly translated dialogue is no longer an insurmountable boundary to enjoying what this game has to offer. So if you want to explore Transylvania and lash the undead, and you don’t mind checking your favorite gaming site when you get stuck, you probably won’t regret downloading the NES version of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest onto your Wii.
November 6, 2007
If you’re a big fan of the block-building, tower-toppling game that is Jenga, you might know that, like Coke, it’s now available in a number of different flavors. Throw ‘n Go Jenga, Jenga Xtreme, and Jenga Truth or Dare are just a few examples of Hasbro’s attempts to make Jenga more interesting. However, like cherry, vanilla, and lime, they really add very little to the original formula, and in some cases actually detract from it. Messing with Jenga feels uncomfortably like messing with Tetris, but that hasn’t deterred Atari and UK-based Atomic Planet Entertainment from coming up with plenty of “enhancements” for their Wii version of the game, titled Jenga World Tour. We recently had an opportunity to spend some time with a work-in-progress version of Jenga World Tour and, frankly, we’re not convinced that the finished game will be nearly as much fun as 54 wooden bricks.
Regardless of whether or not you’re familiar with Jenga, you’ll need to check out World Tour’s brief tutorial mode to get a handle on the game’s controls. They’re straightforward for the most part: The A button is used to grab blocks, the B button is used to tap blocks, the C button is used to hold nearby blocks in place, and the analog stick and Z button are used for camera controls. The Wii Remote controls your in-game hand, and it needs to be moved quite delicately once you’ve taken hold of a block. Gameplay modes in Jenga World Tour include quick play, arcade, free Jenga, and world tour, the last of which is where we chose to spend our time on this occasion.
Even sharks and anthropomorphic slot machines can enjoy Jenga…
Though it has no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever, the character roster from which you’ll choose your avatar is worthy of a mention simply because of how varied the options are. We chose to play as a goldfish, but could just as easily have opted for a snowman, an astronaut, a parrot, a girl in a bikini, or a tyrannosaurus rex with glasses and a blonde Mohawk. The first game on the world tour takes place inside a fancy apartment somewhere in the US and uses conventional wooden Jenga blocks. Enjoy them while you can, because from here on things go downhill and, at least based on our experiences with the work-in-progress version, into a near-unplayable freefall.
The second stop on the Jenga world tour is China, where vines growing on some of the blocks prevent them from being moved and add stability to certain areas of the tower. Next up is Nepal, where you’ll be playing with slippery blocks of ice that occasionally freeze together. Neither of the aforementioned environments messes with the Jenga formula too much, and though they don’t really add anything worthwhile, they look like works of genius compared to what’s still to come.
Even if Jenga had existed in the Cretaceous period, it seems unlikely that anyone would’ve been playing. Any paleontologist with an ounce of common sense will tell you that dinosaurs and Jenga don’t mix, but Atari and Atomic Planet either never received the memo or chose to ignore it when designing the world tour’s fourth locale: a prehistoric Zambian jungle. The footsteps of passing dinosaurs are so heavy that they cause the whole Jenga tower to shake and even to jump into the air on occasion. In testing, we found that towers generally fell over in two minutes or less, even if no player made a move. Assuming that a game in this locale ever lasts long enough, there are purportedly pterosaurs that will bug you and need to be shaken off with the Wii Remote as you play, but to date we haven’t actually seen one.
If you make it through the jungle level, your next stop will be medieval England. Here, atop the white cliffs of Dover, you’ll play a game of Jenga using a tower that’s under constant bombardment from four catapults. The catapults don’t detract from the game nearly as much as the previous level’s dinosaurs, but they don’t add to the experience in a meaningful way, either. The best thing we can say about them, in fact, is that when our artificial-intelligence opponent–who generally completed each move in under five seconds–was struggling to place a block atop the tower after taking it from the bottom, it was the catapults that finally put our opponent out of his misery by knocking the tower down over 10 minutes into his turn.
Next up is the requisite underwater level, where you’ll play against a shark and have to put up with shoals of clown fish swimming across the screen and obscuring your vision at regular intervals. It’s not so bad, really, and the way that the tower of Jenga blocks behaves underwater is quite convincing. Playing underwater feels a lot like playing in slow-motion at times, and we unwittingly used this to our advantage during our game. After placing a block on top of the tower, the whole structure started to sway, and we knew right away that it was ultimately going to fall. However, it took so long for the first block to hit the ocean floor that the collapse was deemed to have taken place during our opponent’s turn, and so we were awarded the win.
