Reviews Wii

Wii-tastic!

Review – No More Heroes

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No More Heroes looks to be another feel good indie hit, which means it will be used as fodder in a growing debate in the entertainment world. These days, a surefire way of garnering critical acclaim and a small but fanatical following is to produce something that appears to have hipster/geek chic and indie cred. Do this, and watch people fawn over how “charming” your work is, while still containing a powerful message about something. Go far enough, and you will have something that goes beyond the rest, reaching a level of acclaim it has no right holding.

Examples of this are not too hard to find. On television there was Gilmore Girls, a show whose every DVD boxset had to include a booklet explaining every pop culture reference used in the season (making sure it looked like an old marble composition notebook for those who thrive on nostalgia). Its supporters considered this the best dialogue on television, while others couldn’t stand how any given scene sounded like a group of scriptwriters trying way too hard to sound clever. →  [post launches in virtual reality],[put on your VR headset now],[left click on your mouse to open the remainder of this post in your web browser on your digital computing device]

Review – Manhunt 2

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Rockstar Games’ Hot Coffee scandal is something of a classic debate among myself and some of the staff writers. Long before that in the summer of 2005, I waged war against two good friends (and even better gamers) about the topic. We spent the last hour and a half of work arguing about who to blame and what it means, the debate continuing into the Walmart parking lot and only ending when we stepped into our cars.

The last point of discussion was a desperate attempt of a younger (and much more idealistic) me to fight for the future of gaming. I claimed that Rockstar could have used both the Hot Coffee mini game and the fiasco itself to prove just how unfairly harsh critics of the gaming industry are compared to other media outlets. They could have pushed for a more tasteful look at sex scenes in games, or stood up for the industry when no one wanted to. Instead, they acted like a bunch of scared teenagers after pulling a prank (or pissing off a tiger). →  Lame is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

Review – Guitar Hero 3

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Guitar Hero 3 does a lot to make me question game reviews. Or should I say, it brings to light many of their problems.

As I expected, it loses out with much of the standard, value driven review sites. While it stays afloat in many reviewer’s minds by adding online multiplayer and more tracks, it has also been grilled for things such as lack of create a character (a criticism I actually agree with, if for no other reason than developer Neversoft has been doing this since 2000) or online co-op play. Once a good game becomes a franchise, the stakes become continuously higher, and nothing short of a disc filled to the brim with their checklist of standard game features will make a reviewer happy. It also makes me question how every tacky addition to each year’s Madden avoids getting clobbered the same way.

I only dream of being this metal.

The gaming public isn’t any easier on Guitar Hero 3. →  Post of Tsushima

Review – Metroid Prime 3

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The moment I saw it at E3 I knew it would be one of the Wii’s killer apps. If you read any of those lesser video game sites around you know that their reviews have borne my predictions out. This review then is not meant to tell you whether or not you should buy this game.

I can tell you that right off the bat: if you have any interest in FPS or adventure games, or, to use the portmanteau generated by the ever clever gaming forum communities, first person adventure games, you need to play this game. Buy it, rent it, whatever your wallet allows, it deserves a play-through because it is one of the best games currently on the Wii and it has a lot of innovation to offer.

The purpose, then, of this review is more to focus on a list of do’s and dont’s for videogames, a list of what we ought to expect out of developers as we proceed in this new generation of consoles. →  Read Dead Redemption

Review – Mario Party 8

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Mario Party 8 is great for those who love board games, but don’t have a properly calibrated floor to play one on. I was so bored playing the required 80 hours of remedial shoots and ladders needed to unlock all of the party games that I started to appreciate Warhol’s “Sleep”. The party games combine the all the fun of watching real estate infomercials with the innovation of watching a marathon of real estate infomercials.

  No disrespect to Tom Vu, however. In his infomercial, this late 80’s real estate mogul turned seminar hawker/ pimp had a waterfall that he built using the leftover chicks from the playboy mansion. And best of all, he would act like he never saw them. He would give the original crib tour and walk by as if he just had a non-woman waterfall built of regular rocks and Waterfall-Mart bought supplies. He didn’t have a Wiimote, but Mario Party 8 is still many bikini waterfalls short of even having the radness of Tom Vu.
 →  Final Fantasy Mystic Post

Review – Madden 08

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The Madden Curse Comes to the Wii

For years we’ve seen each Madden cover supermodel fall to the “curse” of becoming overpaid, injured and irrelevant. And just as eerily, the infamous curse is plaguing the upper right corner of its cover as well.

I know I’m supposed to unconditionally lower my expectations for the Wii’s substandard graphics and love it because of it’s removable showerhead inspired controller, but this is just lazy. (And by the way, the joy of flailing a little white rod at my TV is neither new nor innovative.) Crowd shots, backgrounds, stadium flybys and even the loading screen still shots rely on heavy, let’s say, “artistic” blurring to compensate for these worse than average Wii graphics. Whereas the animations have finally improved on the other two consoles, the motion capture for the Wii looks like it was recorded in the Madden bus toilet using a breakfast burrito and some pork rinds.

Believe it or not, this other Madden endorsed product is less poop filled than Madden ’08 for the Nintendo Wii.

 →  Contains 10% more consonants than comparable articles.

Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition – Mini-Review

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ZOMG, I love Resident Evil 4. It’s damn-near my most favirotest game evar. If I could, I would cuddle with it:) And after putting in over 10 hours of delicious zombie(?)-filled action with the Wii Edition last weekend, I decided to write a review for it, to show you guys how much I like you.

But then I realized that the only thing Capcom really changed with the Wii version is the controls, so there would be no point in writing a full review for a two year-old game that’s only marginally different.

If you know nothing about RE4, first, shoot yourself in the foot with a rubber bullet, and then go read the GC or PS2 reviews. You really should be ashamed of yourself.

But anyway, how does the Wii version control, you ask? In one word, brilliantly. It’s safe to say that the Wii-port is the definitive version of Resident Evil 4, all because of the controls.

They break down like this. →  God of War: Readnarok

Review – Metal Slug Anthology

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Old games don’t stop aging, and when they get old enough anniversaries are certain to pop up. These are great opportunities for everyone in gaming. Publishers get a fantastic excuse for re-releasing old games from dead platforms, and despite what message board all-stars will tell you, gamers can also benefit from these “franchise-milking opportunities”. They give some a chance to play a classic they missed out on, or for an old fan to have an entire series on one neat little disc. Good times all around.

Except it is rarely the case where things work out so squeaky clean. Sometimes a company will take it too far, such as Nintendo’s audacity to charge twenty dollars a pop for NES games that had a 50% chance of being tucked away somewhere in Animal Crossing. Other times you will get a complete surprise; Tekken 5 was a 10th anniversary game, so it happens that the standard disc contains 66% of the franchise’s history on it. →  I’ll read you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!

Review – Godfather: Blackhand Edition

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There seems to be a belief among some third party developers that in order to make a Wii game, it is essential to attach meaningless gestures to everything you do. The best example is Red Steel, which forces the player to drag and drop icons on the main menu or shake the remote several times to open a door (because the first time it didn’t respond properly). This leads to cranky reviewers dropping two, maybe even three points from their final score because they simply can’t be bothered with such annoyances.

Then you have a game like The Godfather: Blackhand Edition. None of its menus require Wii gestures. When you swing the remote to open a door, it actually works. Or you can just hit the A button and be done with it. A lot of folks have worried about the Wii receiving lackluster ports with tacked on Wii controls, but with The Godfather EA has found the sweet spot, providing us with an already good game and making it better with motion controls that are logical, responsive, and never unnecessary. →  [post launches in virtual reality],[put on your VR headset now],[left click on your mouse to open the remainder of this post in your web browser on your digital computing device]

Best Game Ever / Review – Dragon’s Trap / Curse

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It’s somewhat bizarre that my normally useless extensive knowledge of the Sega Master System would come in handy because a Turbo Grafix 16 game is released on the Wii. But despite the comical circuitousness, I happen to know a thing or two about Dragon’s Curse. You see, as far as Master System games go, this game is anything but obscure. It’s actually so beloved that a great Master System emulator is named after the game.

In an attempt to completely confuse America as revenge for dropping atomic bombs on them, Japan has seen it fit to rename the game called Dragon’s Trap (Master System) for release on the TG16, where it would be called Dragon’s Curse. That wouldn’t be very good retaliation, though, considering the cancer rates are still abnormally high in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So to make things harder, this game is also known in the states as Wonder Boy 3 the Dragon’s Trap, or Monster World 2.

OK, Wonder Boy 2 for the Master System is actually Monster Land 1, though it’s called Monster World 1 in Japan. →  Lords of the Read 2