written on Sunday, June 7, 2009
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.
New Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 2006) is a throwback. Sure, the graphics are 3D, but the gameplay is all 2D. Part of me says I should start discussing the game's merits and flaws, but all I can think of is how it's not as good as Super Mario 3 or Super Mario World. Of course those are flagship titles, system sellers. NSMB is portable. And it feels more like an homage to than a continuation of the 2D Mario games.
The main changes to the formula are added collectibles. Every level has three special coins to find. Some are easy to get to. Some are a huge pain. I can use them to unlock bonus levels and toad homes with power ups and extra lives. It also has the hidden worlds and levels of the older games, so there are plenty of secrets. And to me there's nothing more satisfying than clearing an especially difficult level and saving my game with a sense of accomplishment.
It's too bad the game doesn't let me do that. It's a portable game and it only lets me save when I clear a castle, and even then only the first time. This is seriously annoying and makes all the time between when I wanted to quit and when I can quit without losing all my progress annoying. There are probably dozens of perfectly good levels that I just wanted to end because of this design error. Plus I think now that I've beaten the main game, the only way to clear some of the bonus levels I skipped and save that progress would be to complete them, then finish the final castle again.
$*(# that.
The main mechanics also don't feel quite right. Sometimes I'll lose speed in the middle of a jump. Infrequently, I'll fail to jump entirely. Of course, the DS directional pad is worse than the NES one from 20 years ago, and the buttons aren't the best either so maybe it's the hardware. Regardless, it still feels good, but not great. But sometimes the difference is life and death, and that's frustrating.
For some reason the game has weird difficulty spikes. Some levels are super easy. I just breeze through and get all the secret coins, barely going out of my way. Some are a huge pain in the butt and it takes me a long time and many deaths to get all the secrets. I noticed no pattern to where these more difficult levels would occur, either. Sure, there were more of them as the game progressed, but even on the final world, there were some super easy levels and the worst level for me was back in world four. It just doesn't feel like the polish was fully applied.
Because of its faults and possibly because I'm just not that interested in the genre any more it gets a three
out of five.
I gotta go back and play the old Mario games again to see if I just don't like them any more.
Oh, and I almost forgot the spoilers. People who played the original SMB know that you beat Bowser at the end of every world. They put a bizarre and macabre spin on it in this game. You beat Bowser in the first world by dropping him into lava, just like in the original game. But instead of just disappearing he flails and screams and turns into a skeleton. When you meet him again his child revives his bones with dark magic. You fight skeletal Bowser and drop him from a great height so that he breaks in pieces. For the finale, the child throws the broken bones into a cauldron to resurrect a giant Bowser. For a world where death usually means disappearing or making a face and falling off of the screen, it feels pretty creepy and out of place. I think Nintendo got tired of Mario a long time ago.
Showing posts with label DS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DS. Show all posts
08 June, 2009
04 May, 2009
Review: Elite Beat Agents
written on Monday, May 4, 2009
Elite Beat Agents is a quirky rhythm game for the DS. You tap on dots and trace paths on the touch screen in time with the music. There is also a story going on which usually has to do with someone in trouble. If you do the tapping and tracing well, their fortunes turn around. If not, their lives fall apart and you have to start over.
In the beginning, I found the game charming. Near the end, it started to suck. On the last few songs, I could do the first two sections perfectly but would consistently fail out on the third section as the game threw a wall of dots at me. It felt like the designer was wasting my time, making me replay sections I had obviously mastered. Overall I'd still say it's a fun game and worth playing, but I'd recommend sticking to the easy difficulty.
3 of 5
Full disclosure: I did not finish the final song. It is a pain, and I felt I should stop playing before it made me hate the game.
Elite Beat Agents is a quirky rhythm game for the DS. You tap on dots and trace paths on the touch screen in time with the music. There is also a story going on which usually has to do with someone in trouble. If you do the tapping and tracing well, their fortunes turn around. If not, their lives fall apart and you have to start over.
In the beginning, I found the game charming. Near the end, it started to suck. On the last few songs, I could do the first two sections perfectly but would consistently fail out on the third section as the game threw a wall of dots at me. It felt like the designer was wasting my time, making me replay sections I had obviously mastered. Overall I'd still say it's a fun game and worth playing, but I'd recommend sticking to the easy difficulty.
3 of 5
Full disclosure: I did not finish the final song. It is a pain, and I felt I should stop playing before it made me hate the game.
04 October, 2008
One More Thing on the New DS
So the new DS information was made official. It turns out the thing only plays AAC files, not MP3s, making that "feature" pretty useless, from my point of view. And the camera only takes 0.3 megapixel shots, so it's definitely just a toy. So what are the real changes?
1) No Game Boy Advance slot. Backwards compatibility is going away.
2) New SD slot for downloadable games.
Most people look at this and see themselves being charged to buy their GBA games again.
I see something far more valuable: permanent rerelease of out of print games. The main problem with the cartridge format is that games often go out of print and never come back. When I was thinking of getting a friend a DS last Christmas, there were no new copies of Advance Wars DS available. It's the third highest rated DS game of all time, and you can't buy it anymore. The same goes for the first Phoenix Wright game, and probably many other DS classics. To me, that's the potential of the new DS. It will not be fully met as legal issues will make it impossible to rerelease certain games, but it will help.
1) No Game Boy Advance slot. Backwards compatibility is going away.
2) New SD slot for downloadable games.
Most people look at this and see themselves being charged to buy their GBA games again.
I see something far more valuable: permanent rerelease of out of print games. The main problem with the cartridge format is that games often go out of print and never come back. When I was thinking of getting a friend a DS last Christmas, there were no new copies of Advance Wars DS available. It's the third highest rated DS game of all time, and you can't buy it anymore. The same goes for the first Phoenix Wright game, and probably many other DS classics. To me, that's the potential of the new DS. It will not be fully met as legal issues will make it impossible to rerelease certain games, but it will help.
29 September, 2008
New DS Information / Speculation
Wired ran an article today (yesterday, technically).
This makes sense for Japan, train commuter capital of the world. Take your upskirt photos and listen to music. And the fact that this would indicate some form of storage on the DS (possibly an SD slot) could be good. Games and applications (mostly applications) could take advantage of that. And if the article is right, this DS will only cost $30 more. So why don't I care?
I guess it has to do with all the things I'm still not seeing from Nintendo.
Nintendo is not connected. They have no community like Steam, Xbox Live, or PSN. They're not putting VoIP on the DS. The DS web browser is long out of print. What would people want from a portable device more than the ability to remain connected?
They have no intention of being middlemen for the entertainment industry, with music marketplaces, video on demand, and suchnot. Music is nice, but it's pretty old news, now. Plus if it's like previous DS mp3 players, it will require purchasing an SD card, purchasing an SD card reader, and moving over mp3 files manually from a PC. If you're law abiding, add in the lengthy process of ripping your CDs to that PC. If you're not, add in download time. Yawn.
But I'm looking at this from an adult perspective. What about the kid that's too young for a cell phone, but just the right age for a DS? Kids are savvy. They've got enough time on their hands to rip CDs (or torrent, more likely). They want cameras. Maybe this is a relatively cheap way for parents to give their kids a bunch of toys at once?
Meh. What's a core gamer trying to do figuring out what Nintendo's up to in the first place? :P
Nikkei Net, the online arm of Japan's foremost economic newspaper, reports that the new model [of the Nintendo DS] will launch this year in Japan and include a camera and music playback.
This makes sense for Japan, train commuter capital of the world. Take your upskirt photos and listen to music. And the fact that this would indicate some form of storage on the DS (possibly an SD slot) could be good. Games and applications (mostly applications) could take advantage of that. And if the article is right, this DS will only cost $30 more. So why don't I care?
I guess it has to do with all the things I'm still not seeing from Nintendo.
Nintendo is not connected. They have no community like Steam, Xbox Live, or PSN. They're not putting VoIP on the DS. The DS web browser is long out of print. What would people want from a portable device more than the ability to remain connected?
They have no intention of being middlemen for the entertainment industry, with music marketplaces, video on demand, and suchnot. Music is nice, but it's pretty old news, now. Plus if it's like previous DS mp3 players, it will require purchasing an SD card, purchasing an SD card reader, and moving over mp3 files manually from a PC. If you're law abiding, add in the lengthy process of ripping your CDs to that PC. If you're not, add in download time. Yawn.
But I'm looking at this from an adult perspective. What about the kid that's too young for a cell phone, but just the right age for a DS? Kids are savvy. They've got enough time on their hands to rip CDs (or torrent, more likely). They want cameras. Maybe this is a relatively cheap way for parents to give their kids a bunch of toys at once?
Meh. What's a core gamer trying to do figuring out what Nintendo's up to in the first place? :P
18 December, 2007
State of the Industry
The NPD sales figures for November are out (well discussed on the 1UP Yours podcast and disected on Next Gen). Since all the big games have already been released or pushed to next year because they couldn't make the holiday window, it's a good time to talk about what happened this year.
Nintendo
Nintendo mostly rules, except where they completely fail. The DS outsold the PS3, PS2, and PSP combined in November, moving 1.53 million units. Part of that had to do with them bundling either Zelda (kind of for gamers) or a pet sim (for normal people). In fact, no DS game sold in the top ten. When you consider that the DS installed base in the US alone is probably around 18 million, over double the Xbox 360 installed base, that's an epic fail.
The Wii's kind of the same story except they can't even put the hardware out there. GameSpot is selling IOUs (for the full price of the system, no less) to give desperate parents something to put under the tree. I heard a gal in the cafeteria at work talking about the supplies the big box retailers hoarded for sales last Sunday lasting for two whole hours. Again, these are stories of epic fail. But Nintendo's a conservative Japanese company, and there are Wii's sitting on store shelves in Japan, so they may have a fear that they're on the brink of bursting the bubble and having the Wii market implode. I really don't know. The truth is that gamers only have Wii's because of Zelda, Metroid, and Mario. Now that those games are out, Nintendo has one more game (Smash Brothers) the gamers are looking forward to.
Once there's nothing left but the alpha moms and mini-game lovers buying these things, who's to say whether they'll move on to some talking stuffed animal next year, forgetting all about the Wii? I thought the people calling the Wii a fad were idiots. Well, in fairness to myself, many of them aboslutely were idiots. But maybe a couple of them were ahead of me on this. Maybe they realized that the people Nintendo's marketing to now are fickle. Last year the novelty of the system and the family fun of Wii Sports sold it. This year Mario sold it. Wii Fit (a game which lets you stand on a fancy scale to control exercise games by shifting your weight) is out in Japan this holiday season. Are they going to hold it all year in the states so that they have something to generate holiday buzz next season?
Microsoft
Technically the 360 still has the installed base over the Wii, I think. But the truth is, they're not really in the same markets... at all. The 360 lovers are basically crack whores. They will let you do anything to them as long as they can see their next fix on the horizon. The thing still eats disks. The optical drives still fail. There are still folks waiting many weeks to get their refurbished, fail prone replacement in the mail. And it's kinda sorta working for them. By taking the repair bill as a huge hit in one quarter and releasing Halo 3 the next, they showed their first profitable quarter ever. They say they expect to be profitable in 2008 as a year overall. Doesn't sound like winning, does it?
Then you look at software. Four of the top ten games for November are on 360. Two of them are on PS3, but they're just PS3 versions of the far better selling 360 games. Call of Duty 360 outsold Call of Duty PS3 3.5 to 1. Assassin's Creed 360 outsold Assassin's Creed PS3 2.6 to 1. I'm guessing that's partly because Call of Duty is online, and the 360 is where gamers know their friends are, so they're less likely to want the PS3 version. Beyond that, the numbers seem to reflect the installed base, which is around 3 to 1.
Sony
As has been mentioned before, Sony's losing money like crazy. Any time one of their executives opens their mouth, only the most ignorant doublespeak falls out of their mouths (which I assume are surrounded by clown make-up). If gamers aren't so awestricken by Metal Gear Solid 4 that they're willing to drop $400 on a non-backwards compatible PS3 to play it, what has Sony got? Seriously, the best games on the system aren't selling for crap. Uncharted and Rachet aren't in the top ten at all. Next Gen said Rachet sold less than 150k copies. That's A) criminal and B) freaking bleak.
As the latest example of ignorant doublespeak, a Sony exec said they felt Sony was on a good course for their projected ten year life cycle. Do you think you can lose the better part of a billion dollars a quarter and have a ten year life cycle?
The Rest of the World
Shane Bettenhausen brought up something scary on the last 1UP Yours. These figures we look at are for North America, mostly. In Japan, it's very different. Japan's moving away from consoles to mobile platforms. There are Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy games you'll probably never see because they run only on Japanese phones (which blow ours away). And in Europe, apparently the PS3 is actually doing well enough that it might be the winner there. When a hit driven market becomes that fragmented, what does that mean? Even more first person shooters for the 360? Even more soccer and rally racing games for the PS3? Even more crap I don't care about for Nintendo systems? Blegh.
Nintendo
Nintendo mostly rules, except where they completely fail. The DS outsold the PS3, PS2, and PSP combined in November, moving 1.53 million units. Part of that had to do with them bundling either Zelda (kind of for gamers) or a pet sim (for normal people). In fact, no DS game sold in the top ten. When you consider that the DS installed base in the US alone is probably around 18 million, over double the Xbox 360 installed base, that's an epic fail.
The Wii's kind of the same story except they can't even put the hardware out there. GameSpot is selling IOUs (for the full price of the system, no less) to give desperate parents something to put under the tree. I heard a gal in the cafeteria at work talking about the supplies the big box retailers hoarded for sales last Sunday lasting for two whole hours. Again, these are stories of epic fail. But Nintendo's a conservative Japanese company, and there are Wii's sitting on store shelves in Japan, so they may have a fear that they're on the brink of bursting the bubble and having the Wii market implode. I really don't know. The truth is that gamers only have Wii's because of Zelda, Metroid, and Mario. Now that those games are out, Nintendo has one more game (Smash Brothers) the gamers are looking forward to.
Once there's nothing left but the alpha moms and mini-game lovers buying these things, who's to say whether they'll move on to some talking stuffed animal next year, forgetting all about the Wii? I thought the people calling the Wii a fad were idiots. Well, in fairness to myself, many of them aboslutely were idiots. But maybe a couple of them were ahead of me on this. Maybe they realized that the people Nintendo's marketing to now are fickle. Last year the novelty of the system and the family fun of Wii Sports sold it. This year Mario sold it. Wii Fit (a game which lets you stand on a fancy scale to control exercise games by shifting your weight) is out in Japan this holiday season. Are they going to hold it all year in the states so that they have something to generate holiday buzz next season?
Microsoft
Technically the 360 still has the installed base over the Wii, I think. But the truth is, they're not really in the same markets... at all. The 360 lovers are basically crack whores. They will let you do anything to them as long as they can see their next fix on the horizon. The thing still eats disks. The optical drives still fail. There are still folks waiting many weeks to get their refurbished, fail prone replacement in the mail. And it's kinda sorta working for them. By taking the repair bill as a huge hit in one quarter and releasing Halo 3 the next, they showed their first profitable quarter ever. They say they expect to be profitable in 2008 as a year overall. Doesn't sound like winning, does it?
Then you look at software. Four of the top ten games for November are on 360. Two of them are on PS3, but they're just PS3 versions of the far better selling 360 games. Call of Duty 360 outsold Call of Duty PS3 3.5 to 1. Assassin's Creed 360 outsold Assassin's Creed PS3 2.6 to 1. I'm guessing that's partly because Call of Duty is online, and the 360 is where gamers know their friends are, so they're less likely to want the PS3 version. Beyond that, the numbers seem to reflect the installed base, which is around 3 to 1.
Sony
As has been mentioned before, Sony's losing money like crazy. Any time one of their executives opens their mouth, only the most ignorant doublespeak falls out of their mouths (which I assume are surrounded by clown make-up). If gamers aren't so awestricken by Metal Gear Solid 4 that they're willing to drop $400 on a non-backwards compatible PS3 to play it, what has Sony got? Seriously, the best games on the system aren't selling for crap. Uncharted and Rachet aren't in the top ten at all. Next Gen said Rachet sold less than 150k copies. That's A) criminal and B) freaking bleak.
As the latest example of ignorant doublespeak, a Sony exec said they felt Sony was on a good course for their projected ten year life cycle. Do you think you can lose the better part of a billion dollars a quarter and have a ten year life cycle?
The Rest of the World
Shane Bettenhausen brought up something scary on the last 1UP Yours. These figures we look at are for North America, mostly. In Japan, it's very different. Japan's moving away from consoles to mobile platforms. There are Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy games you'll probably never see because they run only on Japanese phones (which blow ours away). And in Europe, apparently the PS3 is actually doing well enough that it might be the winner there. When a hit driven market becomes that fragmented, what does that mean? Even more first person shooters for the 360? Even more soccer and rally racing games for the PS3? Even more crap I don't care about for Nintendo systems? Blegh.
10 December, 2007
Review: Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime
Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime (Square Enix, 2006) is a pretty odd concept for a game. Let's take a minor, generic villain from our premiere RPG franchise and make it the main character in an action RPG / tank battle game.
Gameplay
It's an action RPG / tank battle game. That's pretty self explanatory, right? Okay. Maybe not.
Essentially, the game has two parts. In one, you run around as a slime (in my case, a slime named Blain), trying to free your fellow slimes who have been captured by evil platypuses. (Duh.) This part of the game is mediocre. Combat is generally slow and annoying as you end up picking up people your trying to beat up and have to drop them so you can hit them again. There's a little puzzle solving, some of which is engaging, but most of which feels like padding for a zelda veteran like myself. The real point of this part of the game is the addictive aspect of collecting everything you see and shipping it back to town on carts for use as ammo, crew, and crafting materials (for better ammo) for the more engaging part of the game, tank battles.
These aren't strategically detached, hexy, turn based affairs. Oh no. These are frantic, no holds barred, super tank versus super tank slug fests. Your tank has multiple ammo chutes, each randomly delivering ammo you have to scoop up and hurl into two main cannons, one that shoots straight across, and another that shoots in a high arc. So while you're scrambling around on the lower screen, trying to grab a load of ammo and not run over your own tank crew who are also grabbing ammo, you're also watching the top screen, seeing what enemy ammo is incoming to see whether the kinds of ammo you're picking up would be best used to block or clear a path for better ammo or actually do some damage. Oh yeah, and enemies have infiltrated your tank and are trying to kill you and wreck up your ammo chutes. GO! GO! GO!
As daunting as this may sound, I think I lost one tank battle over the course of the entire game, so as long as you're collecting stuff and saving all the slimes in the on foot sections you should always have enough decent quality ammo to cause lots of trouble. And experimenting with strategies, crew members, and ammo loadouts was rewarding, as well. Although, the farming requirements to gather the ammo for some strategies made them prohibitively expensive, timewise. I would have enjoyed a tank test mode that let me experiment with whatever ammo types I had unlocked thus far against the enemies I had already beaten.
Theatrics
Rocket Slime is short on story. The characters in it are, at best, there for a laugh. It's lighthearted and endearing. To get an idea of how goofy the game gets, one of the enemy mechs you fight is a tree themed behemoth called Chrono Twigger (after Squares' classic SNES game Chrono Trigger) with the subtitle "Its bark is worse than its bite". Ouch. Also, almost every category in the credits has been renamed something to do with slimes. My favorite credit? Asquishtant Progoocer. :D
Aesthetics
I like simple, cartoony, SNES era graphics, and that's what Rocket Slime delivers. The music is decent, if a bit repetitive.
Final Score
4 of 5
I almost feel guilty for liking a cute little collectathon so much. But I do. And the next time I'm burned out on whatever big budget action game I'm playing, I'll be right back in there, finishing the tank arena challenges, being congratulated by the slimes I saved, picking up those last few crafting recipes I missed, recruiting the last few monsters I don't have to my tank crew, and farming mats to try new ammo loadouts.
Gameplay
It's an action RPG / tank battle game. That's pretty self explanatory, right? Okay. Maybe not.
Essentially, the game has two parts. In one, you run around as a slime (in my case, a slime named Blain), trying to free your fellow slimes who have been captured by evil platypuses. (Duh.) This part of the game is mediocre. Combat is generally slow and annoying as you end up picking up people your trying to beat up and have to drop them so you can hit them again. There's a little puzzle solving, some of which is engaging, but most of which feels like padding for a zelda veteran like myself. The real point of this part of the game is the addictive aspect of collecting everything you see and shipping it back to town on carts for use as ammo, crew, and crafting materials (for better ammo) for the more engaging part of the game, tank battles.
These aren't strategically detached, hexy, turn based affairs. Oh no. These are frantic, no holds barred, super tank versus super tank slug fests. Your tank has multiple ammo chutes, each randomly delivering ammo you have to scoop up and hurl into two main cannons, one that shoots straight across, and another that shoots in a high arc. So while you're scrambling around on the lower screen, trying to grab a load of ammo and not run over your own tank crew who are also grabbing ammo, you're also watching the top screen, seeing what enemy ammo is incoming to see whether the kinds of ammo you're picking up would be best used to block or clear a path for better ammo or actually do some damage. Oh yeah, and enemies have infiltrated your tank and are trying to kill you and wreck up your ammo chutes. GO! GO! GO!
As daunting as this may sound, I think I lost one tank battle over the course of the entire game, so as long as you're collecting stuff and saving all the slimes in the on foot sections you should always have enough decent quality ammo to cause lots of trouble. And experimenting with strategies, crew members, and ammo loadouts was rewarding, as well. Although, the farming requirements to gather the ammo for some strategies made them prohibitively expensive, timewise. I would have enjoyed a tank test mode that let me experiment with whatever ammo types I had unlocked thus far against the enemies I had already beaten.
Theatrics
Rocket Slime is short on story. The characters in it are, at best, there for a laugh. It's lighthearted and endearing. To get an idea of how goofy the game gets, one of the enemy mechs you fight is a tree themed behemoth called Chrono Twigger (after Squares' classic SNES game Chrono Trigger) with the subtitle "Its bark is worse than its bite". Ouch. Also, almost every category in the credits has been renamed something to do with slimes. My favorite credit? Asquishtant Progoocer. :D
Aesthetics
I like simple, cartoony, SNES era graphics, and that's what Rocket Slime delivers. The music is decent, if a bit repetitive.
Final Score
4 of 5
I almost feel guilty for liking a cute little collectathon so much. But I do. And the next time I'm burned out on whatever big budget action game I'm playing, I'll be right back in there, finishing the tank arena challenges, being congratulated by the slimes I saved, picking up those last few crafting recipes I missed, recruiting the last few monsters I don't have to my tank crew, and farming mats to try new ammo loadouts.
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