In late 2006, out of nowhere, Taito announced a PlayStation 2 sequel to their relatively obscure arcade game of twenty years earlier, Kiki KaiKai. The Western gamers who noticed, and who knew the game's SNES sequel as Pocky & Rocky, cheered, especially when the screenshots showed up, revealing a vivid 2D game that kept the same multidirectional shooting gameplay and top-down perspective as the original. And then Taito cancelled it.
Kiki KaiKai 2resurfaced in September of last year, from publisher UFO Interactive, with altered character sprites and a new name to reflect the severed Taito relationship: Kiki Kai World. At this point a Wii version was revealed along with the PS2 version. We then had to worry about whether the Wii version would actually show up, since not even UFO's own website mentioned it.
In November, UFO changed the name again, to Heavenly Guardian, probably to remove any link to a property that Taito (or, rather, their parent company Square Enix) could aggressively protect.
The possibility of this game actually coming out seemed so remote that I never dared get my hopes up. It had already been cancelled once, and it had gone through two name changes and a publisher change. It seemed a lot more likely that Kiki KaiKai 2/Kiki Kai World/Heavenly Guardian would quietly disappear. I am happy to confirm that, after repeated near-death experiences, Heavenly Guardian is real and available. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't played it myself.
Gameloft's first WiiWare entry, TV Show King, might turn away most gamers with its casual premise and 1000 Wii Points tag, but the publisher has made an effort to pack value in the trivia title -- 3,000 questions, Mii integration, and a game show atmosphere complete with a smarmy host and a busty blonde. Is all that enough to warrant its $10 price? Read our review to find out!
Without a doubt, LostWinds is like finding a diamond-encrusted Hummer in your box of corn flakes. Sure, the WiiWare launch line-up hasn't been as boring as corn flakes, but there are some titles we could do without. And, LostWinds is so good, we're wondering if there'll be anything besides Alien Crush that can stand up to it this year on Nintendo's download service.
Like a child counting down the days until Christmas, I've been looking forward to Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King. I'm a sucker for Square Enix anyway, and the prospect of a $15 game (even if there is pricey DLC) was too much to resist. That's why it was so shocking to discover that my first few game days in Padarak were ... well, boring. Everything was very controlled and linear, and I couldn't run around and explore. Instead, I sat through cutscenes explaining more than I wanted to know at that point, when all I wanted to do was flex my new architek power. And then, once I was free, I had very little in the way of resources! Frustrating.
Several hours later, since I was still playing, I realized that maybe I wasn't so bored after all. The simple directive of get more stuff sucked me in as soon as I had a free hand with the game, and before I even had time to think, I was obsessed with building up my little kingdom. Without my even realizing it, My Life as a King had gone from boring to fun.
Nnooo's Pop is an unusual puzzle/shooter hybrid. It has a lot in common with matching-based puzzle games: activating multiple objects (in this case, bubbles, activated by tapping) of the same color as they fall builds a score multiplier, and gameplay-modifying items are found in some of the objects. However, unlike Columns or Bust-a-Move, there is little immediate penalty for missing. Bubbles don't build up and kill you when they fill up the screen -- they fly by at a constant rate regardless of your actions. You are required to pop consistently to fill a timer, but the lack of building stacks does change the character of the game a lot versus that kind of puzzle game.
Instead, Pop's tension is based more on recognizing the flying bubbles quickly, and popping as rapidly as you can with some semblance of strategy. There's no penalty for popping different colors, but popping the same color builds your score multiplier. Big bubbles add more time but less score, and small bubbles add more score but less time. Since all of these effects are still positive, the basic strategy of the game is to pop the hell out of anything that is a bubble. In this way, the game feels very much like a scrolling shooter.
The browser game that many of you have tried at one time or another has been revamped for Wii and launched alongside WiiWare earlier this morning. After spending a good bit of time with the game, we're confident that we can present a decent review of the title. With a price point of 500 Wii points, as well as a fairly addictive game just lurking beneath that small admission price, we're happy to report that Defend Your Castle is a good game and well worth your small sum of money.
When we received our Nyko Kama wireless nunchuk, we thought about what games would be the most appropriate to use the nunchuk with. As such, pretty much all of our games qualified as good candidates, so we went with Super Mario Galaxy, No More Heroes and Wii Sports. How did the Kama stack up against Nintendo's nunchuk? Read on to find out!
Based on data pulled from GameRankings, folks over at GameFunk have prepared the nice little chart above. Apparently, Wii games don't get that great of marks from reviewers. Compared to the marks of games on other consoles, it makes the Wii's library look even worse!
Here's the numbers:
Xbox 360: 374 games: 26% good, 24% bad
PS3: 122 games: 33% good, 17% bad
Wii: 189 games: 11% good, 37% bad
But, before you punch your computer monitor in a fit of rage, know this: the Wii does have a lot of shovelware. It's just the price of success, as publishers and developers see the console as a means to make money. And that's what they're in it for.
Destineer's Summer Sports: Paradise Island follows the same idea as Wii Sports: an assortment of casual sporting events to be played in multiplayer, with simple, representative motion-based controls. While it's obvious that this is where the money is on the Wii (to the point that even Game Party is a hit), Destineer smartly chose not to imitate Wii Sports outright.
Summer Sports seems to be an attempt not just to cash in on the Wii Sports phenomenon, but to serve as a companion to Nintendo's remarkably popular Wii pack-in. To that end, it features eight games that Wii Sports does not, and a surprisingly effective island theme.
Some of the minigames are total clunkers that make a compelling argument against motion controls, but some manage to deliver on the promise of Wii minigame collections: simple-to-understand controls in unique, fun games.
With its inclusion of bikes, stunts, and the Wii Wheel, Mario Kart Wii is an almost note-perfect riposte to all of those accusations that Nintendo is reluctant to innovate in its first-party games. In fact, in its bid to simultaneously please both newcomers and veteran players, Mario Kart Wii ends up feeling like the biggest deviation for the series since its inception sixteen years ago. And, on the whole, that turns out to be a good thing.
Oh dear. This isn't going to be pretty. We're going to hazard a guess that Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's opinion of Super Smash Bros. Brawl doesn't exactly coincide with the view taken by most of our readers -- frankly, it sounds like he hated every minute of Nintendo's scrapper.
But before you start punching out that hate-filled, trembling-with-rage email to the man, stop right there and hear him out, because you may just find yourself agreeing with some of his points -- even we had to concede that a number of his grievances have bugged us in the past. With that in mind, take some deep breaths and head past the break for one of the most venomous Zero Punctuation reviews to date, and the usual dose of NSFW language.
Imagine our delight when we had a brown envelope from Hudson sitting on our doorstep Friday afternoon. As we opened the parcel up, we found the above items: a preview copy of Deca Sports and this sweet little wristband. Huzzah!
But, woe was us for we would not be able to just play and selfishly enjoy the four available sports on the demo disc by our lonesome (or with some friends). Oh no, we have a job and have to let our readers know what we think. So that's what we did. But, we didn't just settle for playing the included sports and writing up a preview. No, instead we decided that we'd do a nice little video for you. And for all of you who enjoy reading things, we wrote up our opinions as well.
So head on past the break for our hands-on look at Deca Sports for the Wii!
I'll be frank -- when I first started Baroque, I hated it. Being thrown into such a strange and ugly world with the barest of backstories was completely disorienting. I had no idea where to go or what to do, and didn't have the luxury of taking my time to explore because my vitality meter was plummeting from the get-go. One character (known as the Coffin Man) kept yelling "goddamnit!" at me, and when I finally got to the place where I was supposed to be, it wasn't long before I died.
If I hadn't been reviewing this game, I probably would have quit right there. But, since it's (clearly) considered bad form to write a review after only twenty minutes of playtime, I trekked on -- and I'm extremely glad that I did. Once I delved deeper into the world of Baroque, I realized that first impressions aren't always the best impressions.
Now that you've kindly read through my personal aside, let's move on to the actual review, shall we?
Wii Fanboy favorite No More Heroes is the focus of this week's Zero Punctuation, and it actually gets off fairly easily compared to the roasting received by most games. In between describing Suda 51 as "the 51st result of an illegal Japanese cloning experiment to create the world's most auteur game designer" and fretting over what the game is satirizing and what it isn't, Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw admits he enjoyed playing as Travis Touchdown, and eventually praises Grasshopper's game for its "unpredictable story and quirky aesthetics."
Finally, as if we didn't already admire the man enough, he reveals his deep-seated love of Branston Pickle. Way to make us forgive every mean thing you ever said about our favorite games, Yahtzee. Hit the break for the full, NSFW review.
Most games sound good; after all, someone, somewhere, has to approve them and throw money into the development process, and on paper, Obscure: The Aftermath sounds great. In practice, however, what could have been a fantastic addition to the Wii library simply falls flat due to far too many technical issues.
Obscure: The Aftermath is a video game take on teen horror films. As the follow-up to 2005's Obscure, the sequel picks up with many of the same characters after they've survived a nightmarish experience at the hands of crazed high school teachers. Now the main cast of characters is older, supposedly wiser, and living it up at a local college ... until things turn bad, as they so often seem to do when you're young, attractive, and in a horror scenario.
In late 2006, out of nowhere, Taito announced a PlayStation 2 sequel to their relatively obscure arcade game of twenty years earlier, Kiki KaiKai. The Western gamers who noticed, and who knew the game's SNES sequel as Pocky & Rocky, cheered, especially when the screenshots showed up, revealing a vivid 2D game that kept the same multidirectional shooting gameplay and top-down perspective as the original. And then Taito cancelled it.
