Wow. Haven't posted for eleven days. It's been a combination of being sick and not having the enthusiasm that has kept me from posting in the last week and a half. I'll try to post a bit more frequent (that shouldn't be too hard). And seeing as there's been a few new games coming up that I'm interested in, I may also have some reviews sooner or later. -Kyle
I've been playing a number of games (most of them not incredibly recent) and I've decided to compile my two cents of each game into a single post. Enjoy!
Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii)
Boy am I loving City Folk. Many gamers complain it's more of the same, which may be true, but I on the other hand have never played an Animal Crossing before this one and am addicted. I boot it up (just about) every day and play for an hour or so. I'm loving it.
Sonic and the Secret Rings (Wii)
I never got around to playing this launch title. I heard it was average at best and steered clear of it. But borrowing it from someone has given me the chance to explore what is an entertaining 3D Sonic game despite it's flaws. When you get going at top speed you'll really see the game shine. There's a lot of clunky mechanics that hold this one back from greatness, but it's still an entertaining ride.
LIT (WiiWare)
I bought this two days ago. It's a fun little WiiWare title. It's not without its flaws, specifically polish. Nevertheless it's a unique and entertaining environment based puzzle game that involves making paths of light by turning on lamps and breaking windows.
N+ (DS)
N+ may seem like a simple platformer, and what it really is a simple platformer that's a load of fun. The basic platforming mechanics of running, jumping, and getting to the goal are present and a lots of fun. I'm so close to beating this one, though the last episodes are increasingly difficult and pretty brutal.
Upcoming purchases
I'm definitely getting House of the Dead: Overkill, MadWorld, and New Play Control Pikmin soon, as I'm very stoked for those. I'm also going to get Deadly Creatures sometime, but not right now as I'll have my money spent for a little while. I also haven't decided on Tenchu yet, it looks to be a fun game but I just don't have the money and play time for it. I'll probably hold out until the summer where I can catch up on my backlog of games.
Comments or questions? Drop an email to kylehogg@gmail.com or leave a comment below...
Showing posts with label impressions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label impressions. Show all posts
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip (Wii) impressions
Decided to not do a review on the game, since I don't have Wii Balance Board, nor did I play more than three to four hours of the game. I rented it from a local movie/game store. It was pretty expensive, so I only got if for a night. This'll be pretty much like a review, except no scores or anything. -Kyle
Also For: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo DS, PSP, Playstation 2
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher: Ubisoft
Date Released: November 16, 2008 (USA)
ESRB Rating: E10+ (Everyone 10+)
Shaun White Snowboarding has come to a plethora of systems (pretty much every one on the market right now). But on the Wii, we're getting something a bit different from 360 and PS3. With the subtitle "Road Trip" comes a whole new graphical style and in game structure. Is it the better game? I can't tell you that, since I haven't played the other versions. But is it good? I can tell you that in my impressions below.
The storyline of the game is nicely voice acted and includes some pretty good cutscenes. You and your crew are following Shaun White around the world to different mountains to snowboard the heck out of them. At the beginning you only have access to two characters. But after each mountain you'll gain another. You don't meet up with Shaun until completing the last mountain, but with him and his superior skills you can take down any other rock you left unturned.
The basic flow of the game is in mission-like levels. Each level has a primary and secondary objective. The primary ones are required completed to advances, as they earn you event tickets. While the secondary ones are harder and earn you other extras. There are four general types of goals: Score x number of points, make it down the mountain in x number of minutes, a combination of the previous two, or collect x number of crowns/pieces of trash. The collecting ones are rather tedious, as you'd rather be just snowboarding. Besides that and the annoying half-pipe levels, the objectives are generally a lot of fun.
At the start of the game you only have access to one mountain in Alaska, but you'll unlock others such as Europe, Park City, and Japan. On each mountain are half a dozen or so objectives. You go through them in a pretty linear progression. At the start of each location, only one mission is open. Beat that and you'll get an event ticket. Each mission is unlocked with a certain amount of tickets and the final run of the mountain, where you gain another member to your expanding crew, is unlocked when you have accumulated five tickets.
Since I don't own Wii Fit, I didn't get to try out the Balance Board controls, which critics say is essential for the game. Nonetheless, I found the remote-only controls to work very well. You control the basic movements of your selected snowboarder by tilting the Wii remote. A is to crouch, in which you gain speed, but lack precise turning. The B button is to slow down and carve, especially useful in the collecting levels. Flicking the controller up causes your character to jump. When in the air (from jumps or drops) gesturing with the remote in different directions does the tricks. To make more variety in your tricks, pressing either A, B, or the two combined allows you to pull off different tricks. I found the controls to work surprisingly well.
The multiplayer included is pretty nice. You have co-op and competitive. To unlock courses though, you'll have to play through co-op. It's split-screen only, so the lack of only co-op is disappointing. But who was expecting that? It's a Wii game... sigh.
The game does go pretty easy on you. You'll be surprised at just how magnetized your board is to rails. On which it's pretty rare to fall off. And sure, you have to time your tricks to not mess them up, but it's not as difficult as some other snowboarding games such as SSX. Overall, it's a pretty dang easy game , albeit an entertaining one.
Ubisoft decided to ditch the realistic graphics of it's hi-def brethren and go with a cartoony, colorful art style. And their choice was for the better. Wii games that have tried to be realistic have failed in this day and age, so style trumps realism (as is evident with No More Heroes, Wario Land, and Mega Man 9). The style is really nice and the cutscenes that come with it are equally pleasing. The music's average, with some nice upbeat tunes here and there. Plus, there's some nice voice work in Road Trip. What I really found nice was the change from the norm. Instead of you just choosing a snowboarder and shredding it up, you choose a snowboarder and a camera man/woman. What results from this is some nice graphical touches such as the PAUSE and REC words at the beginning of each run and break-ups in the camera feeds after big jumps.
I rented the game for only a day from a local movie store and am glad of it. The game's short, and I ripped through the main game in three to four hours. There may have been a bit more for me to complete, with all the secondary objectives and runs I missed, though all in all it's a short-lived experience. Though the multiplayer is a fun distraction too.
Comments or questions? Drop an email to kylehogg@gmail.com or leave a comment below...
Also For: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo DS, PSP, Playstation 2
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher: Ubisoft
Date Released: November 16, 2008 (USA)
ESRB Rating: E10+ (Everyone 10+)
Shaun White Snowboarding has come to a plethora of systems (pretty much every one on the market right now). But on the Wii, we're getting something a bit different from 360 and PS3. With the subtitle "Road Trip" comes a whole new graphical style and in game structure. Is it the better game? I can't tell you that, since I haven't played the other versions. But is it good? I can tell you that in my impressions below.
The storyline of the game is nicely voice acted and includes some pretty good cutscenes. You and your crew are following Shaun White around the world to different mountains to snowboard the heck out of them. At the beginning you only have access to two characters. But after each mountain you'll gain another. You don't meet up with Shaun until completing the last mountain, but with him and his superior skills you can take down any other rock you left unturned.
The basic flow of the game is in mission-like levels. Each level has a primary and secondary objective. The primary ones are required completed to advances, as they earn you event tickets. While the secondary ones are harder and earn you other extras. There are four general types of goals: Score x number of points, make it down the mountain in x number of minutes, a combination of the previous two, or collect x number of crowns/pieces of trash. The collecting ones are rather tedious, as you'd rather be just snowboarding. Besides that and the annoying half-pipe levels, the objectives are generally a lot of fun.
At the start of the game you only have access to one mountain in Alaska, but you'll unlock others such as Europe, Park City, and Japan. On each mountain are half a dozen or so objectives. You go through them in a pretty linear progression. At the start of each location, only one mission is open. Beat that and you'll get an event ticket. Each mission is unlocked with a certain amount of tickets and the final run of the mountain, where you gain another member to your expanding crew, is unlocked when you have accumulated five tickets.
Since I don't own Wii Fit, I didn't get to try out the Balance Board controls, which critics say is essential for the game. Nonetheless, I found the remote-only controls to work very well. You control the basic movements of your selected snowboarder by tilting the Wii remote. A is to crouch, in which you gain speed, but lack precise turning. The B button is to slow down and carve, especially useful in the collecting levels. Flicking the controller up causes your character to jump. When in the air (from jumps or drops) gesturing with the remote in different directions does the tricks. To make more variety in your tricks, pressing either A, B, or the two combined allows you to pull off different tricks. I found the controls to work surprisingly well.
The multiplayer included is pretty nice. You have co-op and competitive. To unlock courses though, you'll have to play through co-op. It's split-screen only, so the lack of only co-op is disappointing. But who was expecting that? It's a Wii game... sigh.
The game does go pretty easy on you. You'll be surprised at just how magnetized your board is to rails. On which it's pretty rare to fall off. And sure, you have to time your tricks to not mess them up, but it's not as difficult as some other snowboarding games such as SSX. Overall, it's a pretty dang easy game , albeit an entertaining one.
Ubisoft decided to ditch the realistic graphics of it's hi-def brethren and go with a cartoony, colorful art style. And their choice was for the better. Wii games that have tried to be realistic have failed in this day and age, so style trumps realism (as is evident with No More Heroes, Wario Land, and Mega Man 9). The style is really nice and the cutscenes that come with it are equally pleasing. The music's average, with some nice upbeat tunes here and there. Plus, there's some nice voice work in Road Trip. What I really found nice was the change from the norm. Instead of you just choosing a snowboarder and shredding it up, you choose a snowboarder and a camera man/woman. What results from this is some nice graphical touches such as the PAUSE and REC words at the beginning of each run and break-ups in the camera feeds after big jumps.
I rented the game for only a day from a local movie store and am glad of it. The game's short, and I ripped through the main game in three to four hours. There may have been a bit more for me to complete, with all the secondary objectives and runs I missed, though all in all it's a short-lived experience. Though the multiplayer is a fun distraction too.
Overall Thoughts
I found the overall game to be fun and the style enjoyable. Though it may have been a bit short and went pretty easy on you, I'd still recommend at least a rent to anyone reading, especially if you have a Balance Board, since I heard that's supposed to be even better.Comments or questions? Drop an email to kylehogg@gmail.com or leave a comment below...
Friday, October 3, 2008
Impressions of Nintendo's Fall Media Summit
Nintendo's recent event has left a warm feeling in many Nintendo fan's hearts. After E3, so people claimed Nintendo was abandoning the hardcore. Though this certainly wasn't the case, it did seem that Nintendo was focusing more of their time and effort on more expanded audience games. A month or so ago, Nintendo announced they were having two press conferences, one in the United States, and the other in Japan. Though the info from the U.S. one was embargoed until Monday, a lot of news came out of the Japan one, and here are my impressions of the event. (For a recap of all the news that came out of this event, check out this page on NeoGAF.) Here's my impressions of all the news... Enjoy!
DSi
Definitely the biggest announcement at the show, the newly redesign of the DS sports a lot of new features. The most notable feature being the two cameras, one on the outside, the other on the inside. These open up a whole new realm of innovation for games. Plus it functions as a digital camera, so you'll be able to put them on your computer and on you Wii Photo Channel.
Some more additions, are the SD card slot, an Internet browser (probably a lot like the Wii's one, as it's powered by Opera), slightly larger screens, and an apps store, much like the iPhone's. I'm guessing Nintendo will also use this as a chance for classic Game Boy and GBA games to be downloaded and stored on the new flash drive. Nintendo also took out the GBA slot, which is kind of a mistake in my opinion, as how will Activision continue their Guitar Hero: On Tour series?
The DSi is supposed to be released later this year in Japan, sometime in Spring 2009 in Europe, and in Late 2009 in the US, which sucks for me, as an American, I'll have to wait a whole year. Nonetheless, this is a day one purchase for me. And I'm incredibly relieved I didn't pick up a DS Lite in the past few months.
New Games
The three, biggest announcements in games had to be Punch-Out!! Wii, Sin & Punishment 2 (Wii), and Mario & Luigi 3 (DS). Punch-Out!! looks to retain that classic arcade feel with overly exaggerated characters. Sin & Punishment 2 is the equal to the Japan-only N64 release that was supposed really good (it was later released on the Virtual Console, but I have yet to check it out). Thirdly is Mario & Luigi 3, which is supposed to be released as a launch title for the DSi. All three games look very excellent, even in the early stages of development.
"Play it on Wii" Titles
Nintendo plans on releasing a lot of their best core GameCube titles on the Wii later this year (in Japan at lesat) and through out next year. They're not ports, but remakes. Their probably going to be cheaper too. The seven games confirmed so far are: DK Jungle Beat, Pikmin, Pikmin 2, Chibi-Robo, Mario Power Tennis, Metroid Prime, and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. All of the games seem prime choices to implement Wii controls (especially the Pikmin's and Metroid Primes). I'll probably pick up most of these, since I never owned a GameCube (I know, I know, you can chew me out in the comments). I'm surprised Super Mario Sunshine and Wind Waker aren't in that list, but I'm sure we'll probably get those sooner or later. For a full information, check out the IGN article detailing each game...
Wii Storage Solution
The long awaited storage solution for the Wii is here. You'll be able to load and save directly off SD cards. It's not a hard drive as some were expecting but, hey, it'll make do. It seems strange that Nintendo took so long for just this, but at least it's here.
Missing...
Though the event had some pretty good news, there were several games missing from the conference. Disaster: Day of Crisis and Fatal Frame 4 are both like this. Both have been released in Japan, published by Nintendo. So you'd expect some kind of showing or at least a release date for the US. But none of this was found. Also notably missing was the rumored Kid Icarus. Whatever happened to Matt (from IGN)'s prediction of it showing at E3? I'm actually starting to doubt the existence of it.
And that round it up. What were your impressions of the Media Summit? Did I get something wrong or miss something big? Leave a comment below...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
