Wario Land: Shake It!!

Wario Land : Shake It!! : A 2D platformer based on the gimmick that the main character can shake any object he can grasp, effectively making it a knockoff of…



Mischief Makers : A 2D platformer based on the gimmick that the main character can shake any object she can grasp. Except the shaking aspect is better implemented, and it’s a good deal more easy on the wrists since you’re just mindlessly pressing buttons to shake instead of the whole damn controller. But I won’t waste too much time crying about one game ripping off another long forgotten game of years past. After all, everyone was quick to forgive Bioshock for the same thing.

Story : I feel like we’ve been through this before; Wario’s greed finds himself traveling into an alternate world. Except that this world is referred to as the SHAKE kingdom and the villain is the SHAKE king, who’s kidnapped a princess, as well as the economy-shattering infinite coin bag. I shouldn’t cry “unoriginal!” at a game like this knowing that this game isn’t exactly marketed towards a scholar audience (not that I’m a scholar) but a shred of originality would be nice, considering this is I believe the sixth Wario platformer to date.

The very first thing I noticed about Wario Land : Shake It is that the graphics are incredible.

I’m serious here. I can’t remember the last game to completely leave my jaw at the floor the way that this game did. And as far as I can remember, I’ve never made graphics a major point of discussion in any review I’ve done. I probably won’t when I review Gears of War 2 or Far Cry 2 or the Xbox port of Metal Gear Solid 5 (I can dream, right?) Today’s games aren’t looking particularly better than the ones of last year, or the year before that, and games like Call of Duty 4 and Star Wars : The Force Unleashed seem to be getting all too close to that uncanny valley where visual imperfections stand out more than impressive feats.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Wario Land on the Wii (the Wii of all systems!!!) is the best looking 2D game I can recall, and this is coming from the self-admitted Guilty Gear fanatic. The characters and especially Wario look and animate crisply and fluidly. The character sprites come off as more like cartoon characters than…well, sprites. This must’ve been what people in the 80s wished games could look like one day after playing Dragon’s Lair and thus I feel like I’m living a long forgotten dream. While the pursuit of cutting-edge realism in video games continues to be sought after amongst game makers, this game proves that the more creative routes can yield satisfying results as well.

The rest of the game, however, feels a bit less ambitious. The gameplay is similar to past Wario Land games (the more traditional sidescrollers, not the ones where Wario was indestructible, which produced some oddly creative puzzles in of themselves) in that Wario shoulder tackles, grabs and throws things and has a cliché butt stomp. The kicker to each level is that at the end, Wario rescues some smurf…thing and needs to run back to the beginning of the stage before a timer runs out. All the while, an alarm signals, and some paths open and close, changing the possible paths home.

Oh, and there will be shaking. Predictably, you will be shaking the Wiimote to shake. Perhaps the developers realized that the Wiimote is so bad at picking up accurate motions that designing a game based on random flailing of the controller would work best.

Most of the Wiimote functionality borrows from the Mario Galaxy idea of subtly throwing mechanics into the stages, like canons or mine-cart unicycles that require tilting and aiming the remote, most of which come across as a novel break from the action as opposed to a nuisance. On the other hand, the SHAKING becomes a bit too frequent. The idea is that Wario, the Nintendo symbol (and perhaps company reflection) of greed, is obliged to shake every money bag he comes across in order to grab the shiny contents.

Maybe in somebody’s mind, this would be a good idea to get kids excited, to watch them shake the remotes with the action, but even this gets a tad annoying after the second and third level. And while one’s first inclination may be to just not shaking these bags and just plow through the levels, but the game really wants you to shake…in fact it won’t let you progress without shaking those bags!

For you see, in order to advance to the next world, you must go to an in-game shop and purchase a map for a large sum, with prices ramping up as you progress. On top of that, money bags and coins in general become harder to find. Unless you very diligently explore every level from top to bottom on each play through, you are not going to find anywhere near enough gold to progress within the game world. Mind you, exploring isn’t a world of fun either, as some areas appear only after that alarm goes off, and I’d like to know who thought it would be a fun idea to make the player try to explore with a time limit.

And even if you make a modest effort to shake every bag that you can think of finding, you just might find yourself grinding. Grinding…in a platformer! That is to say, you’ll replay earlier levels repeatedly to make more money. This slaps the player in the face as a means of artificially lengthening the game. Perhaps the developers were insecure about the game’s length, but Wario Land isn’t at a bad length for a platformer. In fact, it’s actually a longer game than it appears to be, being that the game has a few “hidden” levels that are quite challenging and should’ve been part of the main game. Or perhaps the developers felt that the player should be forced to explore and see all that each individual level has to offer. I don’t really buy that excuse either.

The game throws in several side missions and goals like “finish the second half under a time limit” or “finish the level without getting hurt”, as well as stashing away hidden treasure chests in each level. I like throwing these in as a means of giving the player incentive to replay the levels, but I just wished that they’d be worth something, like gold coin bonuses to give the player an alternate means to buy those blasted maps as opposed to replaying the levels that the player knows where the big coin stashes are over and over again to pay off that $200,000 fine for that final map.

So Wario Land : Shake It(!!?) breaks itself. It hides away its best levels, with the remaining levels being average at best. All the while, it forces the player to revisit those average levels in order to make the gold necessary in order to progress and play more of those average levels. It does feel like a shame that such a visually gorgeous game ultimately went to waste. I guess the potential for a Mischief Makers release on the Virtual Console is always there, but there’s no controller on the Wii that could accurately recreate it. As for anyone that remains curious about the gameplay experience, well just grab a small, long object and shake it for a good half hour. If you’re still amused, you can either buy the game or shake harder until you move on to headbutting the wall repeatedly.

Pros : Some really well-done boss fights. Better than the Wario Gamecube game (which, ironically, was made by the same developer as Mischief Makers)

Cons : Ho-hum music. And the game wants you to unlock these music tracks.

3 stars

The first rule of Project Mayhem is that you do not ask questions about Project Mayhem.

Fable 2

Fable 2 : An action/RPG hybrid from a developer best known for not really keeping promises. Fable 2 gets off easy as the only broken promise here is the lackluster co-op play.

Story : A revenge plot involving an evil man who killed your sister trying to summon evil magic for a grand scheme. Nothing we haven’t seen before in these kinds of RPGs, though the solid voice-acting makes up for it in part. Fable 2 works best when it’s relishing in its decidedly British sense of humour, which you’ll pick up on right away with the opening cutscene of an incredibly well done, computer generated and extremely cinematic clip of a bird dropping.

There’s a new epidemic in video games. I’d like for it to be referred to as the Bioshock’s Disease. The most common symptom of this ailment includes immortality, to a point where one has the utmost disrespect for the mere notion of death. To be more exact, Bioshock’s Disease refers to games where the punishment for the player running out of health is meaningless. Instead of having to start from a checkpoint or even a quick-saved location to retry the previous challenge to correct your mistakes, the game merely slaps you on the wrist and throws you right back into the thick of things, even going so far as to not heal your enemies from your previous encounter. Hence, skill is unnecessary so long as you can grind through every battle, and actually beating the game is more of a formality than an accomplishment. I know Lego Star Wars did this first but Lego Star Wars is meant to be played by kids and their game skill-impaired parents. Bioshock is a shooter/RPG, a hybrid of the two chief nerd-driven genres, what’s that game’s excuse?

The latest victim of Bioshock’s Disease is Fable 2. Here, the game punishes your death with a paltry loss of experience points and some scarring on your character’s body, before your character springs back to his or her feet to exact revenge on those pesky bandits. Now, for awhile I actually thought this was pretty clever, to scar your character and dampen his or her attractiveness rating. But the game has the gall to force me to deal with this issue instead of letting me load a previous save (well I guess you can reboot the system but man does this game take a good long time to load up,) so I have to deal with the slight disfigurement. This presented a problem back when my character was intended to be an angelic gun-slinging thing of beauty, but after complete 180 in beliefs and a hearty dose of defeat, she was transformed her into a hideous, evil Oprah monster.

But unlike its hospital roommate, Fable 2 presents more diversity in the combat than Bioshock. As evident by my frequent visits with cruel and soft death, it takes awhile to develop a personal strategy, but the game does succeed in letting you create a style to match your character as opposed to being forced to use a mishmash of everything (ala Bioshock) or letting dice rolls determine battle (ala every other Western RPG.) There’s a decent system for combat, ranged attacks and magic (perhaps the most satisfying to use as the game has no sort of mana/MP system to limit use), or you can create a combination of sorts. What fields you specialize in will affect your character’s appearance, as does your alignment to good or evil, the foods you eat (and you’ll find yourself eating fatty foods once you run out of potions during the initial period of time in which you’re afraid of dying) as well as many other factors that will change your character’s appearance. In a refreshing change of pace from The World Ends With You and it’s need to reward following fashion trends with stat boosts, there’s no tactical benefit to any of the clothes you choose to purchase, meaning that your character’s attire is more about preference. In Fable 2, your character becomes a reflection of how you choose to play the game, and I admire that.

It makes me wish I could use my character instead of a generic henchman when I play online co-op with a friend, but alas, that remains a missed opportunity.

Lets be honest here, most RPGs (and most games in general) that claim to let the player create either a good or evil character only let the player paint their adventure with the most broad of brush strokes. Either you’re a righteous Jesus-figure with sparkling white teeth who will either save the world from evil or sacrifice himself to save the world from evil, or a tyrannous, murderous thief with black armour who’ll probably use the villain’s evil scheme himself to enslave the world. Fable 2 stretches things out, and has fun with both ends of the spectrum. As a good guy, citizens will love and adore you, giving you gifts and discounts. Meanwhile, an antagonist will be feared and loathed by his people. The game also gives a solid variety of ways to boost your morality meter in either direction, stretching beyond either helping the homeless man or murdering everyone in town. Want to be the politically correct hero? Buy some shops and lower prices. Marry and have a kid. Rescue slaves and fight bandits. Work a job and improve the town’s economy. Or, if you have a change of heart, you can jack prices on your stores and sacrifice your husband to an evil cult. I was surprised by how much content in the villages that the game gives the player to toy with.

I’ve heard the complaint that certain aspects of the game are too easy. All you need to do to make a lot of money is grind a job for awhile and then purchase a few houses and businesses, as they’ll generate revenue even when you’re not playing. Likewise, all that’s needed to have a spouse is to do a few expressions and then give him/her a ring that matches their caste; perhaps a commentary on the lost sanctity of marriage in modern society. I’m never a big fan of grinding in general, so these aspects didn’t bother me at all. Rather, that these aspects are so easy to access simply means that you can toy with them sooner. I found that there’s a strong sandbox element in how you fiddle with the game, whether it’s pillaging every household, getting drunk and setting up an orgy with some prostitutes, or just throwing around expressions like the ones from Fable 1, the game gives plenty of chances to toy with the citizens of Albion, and at least get some good laughs out of it.

A small complaint; every job and pose is performed by the exact same mini-game of trying to position of a moving dot within a green area. I don’t like how most of the regular jobs are dictated by this mini-game. But I do find it funny that expressions are also dictated by this. It’s obscene, yet humourous that there’s the presence of a mini-game for pumping your fist, burping, flirting, farting and telling people to kiss your backside.

Now, getting to the actual video game aspect of Fable 2, what appealed to me about Fable 2 is that there’s a decisive lack of filler. Except for perhaps the single coliseum sequence, I never felt like the game was trying to stretch certain aspects out or grind enemy battles in a vague attempt to lengthen the number of gameplay hours. I never felt annoyed whenever the game told me I didn’t have enough “renown points” to continue the main storyline, as that simply meant I could indulge myself in some of the game’s surprisingly well-done sidequests. For the most part, these aren’t like the typical RPG sidequest of “go to the middle of nowhere and kill X number of randomly placed enemies”, but rather they have their own elaborate, entertaining subplots and twists.

I firmly believe that the people who will dislike Fable 2 the most will be any player that’s looking for a hearty challenge, or has the mentality that you need to finish a game ASAP and move on to the next one. I rarely felt compelled to progress through the main quest, and that’s only a slight insult about the main quest. Rather, Fable 2 provided me with a toy chest of curious items that I wanted to sit down and play with, you know, just like the play sex you made your cousin’s Barbie and Ken had. I guess the best way to describe the game would be a smaller, more intimate version of Oblivion; much less virtual content, but what you get is unique, interesting, and fun instead of just rearranged versions of the same single village, dungeon, cave and wide-open space. It’s one of the few games of this console generation that you’ll find yourself yearning to play through multiple times over, and score considering, I think that’s one of the highest compliments I can give a game in 2008. Now, if only this game learned to fear the reaper...

Pros : This game is decidedly British. As opposed to the small, confined spaces of Fable 1 that came complete with invisible walls and long load times, this game has large, wide-open spaces that encourage exploration and…well still have long load times but still. A handy menu that displays available quests and sales (!) and lets you quick-travel to them.

Cons : The magic hotkeying system is a little weird, making you assign certain spells to charge levels.

4 stars

And I do think that far too many gamers will miss out on Fable 2, if just because they’ll try to finish it before Fallout 3 is released. What’s even more frightening is the prospect of gamers trying to power-finish Fallout 3 before Gears of War 2 comes out. And there’s an assortment of games coming out that’ll encourage THOSE gamers to plow through Gears 2. And at the end of the day, most people are just going to go back to online Call of Duty 4 deathmatches or their World of Warcraft addictions anyways (Embarrassingly, I’m heading back to Mario Galaxy when it’s all said and done.)

Guilty Gear 2: Overture

May the box art not scare you away.

Guilty Gear 2 : Overture : Some kind of bizarre attempt to create a new kind of strategy game.

Story : So thousands of years ago there was this big war between humans and this race of monsters that may or may not have relevance in the later plot, but probably does since the game shoves this backstory down our throats some two or three times in the opening sequence. From what I was able to gather, there are beings from an alternate dimension that are causing chaos and series mascot Sol Badguy is somehow destined to deal with all this, and the dimension that spawned these beings is the same dimension that channels magic by way of monitoring the laws of the universe….if none of this makes sense, you’re not alone. Why the developers felt need to invent some kind of bizarre laws of magic other than to try and put over the universe as more unique than other sci-fi/fantasy realms (and much more contrived too), I don’t know. What I can tell you is that the story is: poorly written, repeated to the player over and over again, slowly talked to by each character, and TERRIBLY voiced.

To illustrate many, many points, I will try to explain the gameplay of Guilty Gear 2: Overture in the following, italicized paragraph. If you get lost, just skip it and move on; you’ll help prove my point.

A battle in Guilty Gear 2: Overture consists of two fighters on opposite ends of an arena. Each fighter has a masterghost on their end – a representation of their soul. These masterghosts automatically summon orb creatures that can be used to capture giant posts stationed throughout the level called ghosts. These ghosts supply the mana necessary to summon servants. These servants are AI controlled characters that can do your bidding, as assigned from the Organ menu. You and your opponent compete to capture the ghosts and ultimately destroy the rival’s masterghost, of which is surrounded by a barrier that one needs the servants to destroy.

The first point I’d like to make is this; why is there such a need to conjure up such bizarre terminology? Why must a unit summoning menu be labeled the “Organ”? Why is the main headquarters the “masterghost”? Why do so many Japanese games do this, come up with needlessly abstract names that only serve to confuse players before they get used to hearing them used in a sentence? I know a lot of American online games can be guilty of reusing generic terms like “respawning”, “cooldown”, and “buffering” but at least these terms have become universal, resemble what they’re describing, and don’t come off as the game trying to be hip. Why must a checkpoint be labeled a “ghost”? I guess this is all part of the “Gambit Syndrome” (I’m making that up right now, named after Final Fantasy 12’s odd choice to name AI movement patterns “gambits”), where naming conventions need to be toyed with both in the name of trying to be stylish and to make the game seem more complex than it actually is (or should be.)

If all of this sounds very complicated, well, don’t worry. You have not one but TWO modes designed to try to explain all of this. The campaign slowly (and I mean slowly!) tries to break the player into the finer aspects of the game. Well, it progresses slowly in the regard of explaining how to move and jump, and then throws at you a large volume of text relating to attack properties, character attributes and the stuff that would actually need a hands-on explanation instead of a lengthy cutscene, including the two characters having dialogue in a vague attempt to lead into a tutorial about how to freaking walk. The campaign is set up to break players into all of these complex mechanics, but the downright slow pace of the story sequences kills any interest one may have in trying to learn. “Free mission” mode also offers a few tutorials as well, and while a game like this needs all the help it can get to explain itself, that any game needs this much time explaining itself should’ve had designers questioning the very nature of the game they were trying to make.

And I can best sum up the game they were trying to make like this: one on one Battlefield 1942. The big difference is that you and your opponent are more powerful than everyone else, who happen to be AI controlled. Now, the game is functional enough that you can’t just barge into enemy territory and claim a victory, but if there’s a strategic element to this game, then I can’t be made to find it. My attempts at fighting online typically resulted in stalemates where me and my opponent kept alternating between the same ghost points and dying a lot. The whole point of these online waypoint-based shooters is the co-operative element; you and your allies work together to take out enemy points and win through proper planning. That aspect is altogether lost here, and the resulting game just feels like a bad, poorly designed God of War, except with static maps and really bad collision detection..

I love the Guilty Gear fighting games. They threw subtlety to the wind and unleashed a caffeine-infused, post-apocalyptic, Dragonball Z-esque, heavy metal, sexually confused explosion onto the eyes of players bold enough to even look at the screen. The fighters fly all over the arena throwing lightning-fast attacks in a game engine that was not only not broken but surprisingly deep. Every move name was some kind of obscure heavy metal reference, and every fighter was a stroke of genius, from the metrosexual possessed dude in spandex who’s attacks come from the ghost from The Grudge to the schoolgirl (who was actually a boy) fighting with his yo-yo and teddy bear of death. It was a gloriously bizarre breath of fresh air in the otherwise slow and plodding fighting game genre at its time. The last Guilty Gear fighter, X2, is still being re-released over and over again ala Street Fighter 2: Turbo and its like.

Only two characters from the fighting games are present here, and while they’re arguably the main characters (Sol and Ky Kiske), they’re also the least interesting of the bunch. So as far as fan service goes, this game has one strike down. The game has five playable characters, but they all handle more or less the same way, so the only difference is in the design of your troops, which at least live up to the series’ standard of weirdness and volume (Sol’s masterghost is a motorcycle engine). However, the number of menu bars and explosions will keep you from appreciating the foot soldier women wearing gas masks and other potentially interesting details.

The final verdict on Guilty Gear 2: Overture probably doesn’t matter to most people that read this. The box art alone should’ve been enough to scare away most people that aren’t interested in cross-dressing anime characters, and even the Guilty Gear crew seem to be a little too “experimental” for most anime fans. On top of that, the swarm of major video game releases will be enough for this game to be long forgotten. Which leaves us Guilty Gear fans… well, if you absolutely must find out how the story advances, then that’s the only circumstance I could possibly recommend this mess of a game to you. But I tend to hope that nobody plays Guilty Gear for the storyline.

Pros : The traditional Guilty Gear heavy metal-influenced soundtrack is in full effect here.

Cons : Wikipedia tells me that the inspiration for this game was a mod from Warcraft 3. Those mods tend to be fun for like 2 minutes when you need a break from the regular game, but a $60 game? Oh, and you can’t hit enemies while they’re down – why?

2 stars

To be fair, the Guilty Gear fighters have a similar issue with bizarre terminology. I don’t quite understand what a “roman cancel” is supposed to be myself.

World of Goo

World of Goo : A structure-based puzzle game where the player erects long objects by taking a lubricant-like substance and forming it in a matter that makes it hard.

Story : Something about an evil corporation and their grand scheme, and a whole lot of “goo balls” that seem to have nothing to do with this grand scheme. The cutscenes, which look like some kind of cross of Emily The Strange and a stoner Flash cartoon (but I guess that’s what you expect from this kind of game) are pretty neat. But my oh my, how defeating the evil corporation has become the hip thing to do in video games nowadays, what with this, de Blob, Mirror’s Edge and a few other games I’m forgetting. Did that many people think Beyond Good and Evil was a more original game than it really was?

The goal in a level of World of Goo is to construct structures using the aforementioned goo balls in a manner that creates a path to a far off pipe that consumes the leftover balls, which will hopefully be enough to meet a minimum requirement needed to pass. All the while, the physics engine of the game challenges the player to create apparatuses that are structurally sound enough to not collapse (or to deliberately collapse, catch fire, explode, inch up a wall, or whatever the level is asking for.)

The challenge in reviewing World of Goo is that the game makes every possible joke that can be made about the game for me, sans the sexual innuendos that I just leaped at the opportunity to get out there at the beginning of this review. Each level has a couple of signs that mention the gimmicks of each level, and then promptly makes fun of them. Whether it’s calling detachable goo balls insecure or breaking the fourth wall, these signs (which on average, are funny about 3 times out of 4) cover every possible joke that could be made about a game called World of Goo, with a particular fondness for computer nerd humor. There’s even a 9/11 joke in there.

I’m serious, a world trade center joke in an E-for-Everyone-rated video game! It’s not a very offensive joke, mind you. In fact it might be the friendliest, most charming September 11th rib you will ever hear, and I wouldn’t put it past a family member of a victim to smirk when they see it.

Going back to the gameplay, the developers at 2D Boy (all two of them) manage to squeeze out a lot of mileage with this whole goo idea. Each level has its own gimmicks, and the variety of goo types mix up the gameplay just enough to keep things fresh. Only on a few questionable areas did I find a puzzle with a solution that didn’t make sense. One area required that I put enough weight on a block to push it down. I assumed I could just put all the goo blobs on it and the deed would be done, but it was not to be; only after a large tower was built did the weight acknowledge the existence of these feverish blobs. But that said, I only made myself resort to looking up solutions to certain puzzles online about two or three times, and otherwise found myself accomplishing each challenge on my own, with the same sense of accomplishment and pride that came with solving a puzzle in Braid…

…except without the nonsensical Manhattan Project subtext, and much more replay value. The game keeps track of how fast you complete a puzzle, with how many moves it gets completed and how many extra goo balls you finished it with. The extra balls you collect go in this side area where you’re instructed to simply make the largest tower possible, passing by clouds that represent other player’s towers. Interesting in theory, but being that I can’t see the names of the people I’m passing, then I may as well be trying to topple some predetermined fake scores, like the Top Ten fake, deliberately small high scores every arcade game has, begging to be dethroned by the player after a couple to fill them with a sense of pride that lasts until the machine shuts down for the evening and erases any new data.

But I digress. World of Goo is a fun, unconventional puzzle game, one with an aura of flair and freshness around it. Since most puzzle games these days are a retread of matching or aligning tiles, it felt fresh to see a new concept brought to the table. And after the time I spent putting down Star Wars : The Force Unleashed for its abuse of physics, World of Goo gave me a bit of faith that maybe something more special than bodies acting like ragdolls can come out of this high-tech mumbo jumble.

Pros : Costs 1500 Wii points. Getting 2000 Wii Points is the same price in Canada as 1400 Xbox points, so you can get this and an NES game for more or less the same price as Braid, and this game is much more worth it.

Cons : There comes a point where the game asks you to manipulate boxes, and you’ll wish that rotating the Wiimote could in turn rotate the boxes, instead of having to watch them spin on their own axis. No online scoreboards for a game that begs for them. A few moments had me yearning for the quicker, more accurate controls of a mouse. In other words, the game’s biggest faults are with the Wii system itself, and I wonder if these are corrected if you play the game on Steam. Also, since blobs intend to overlap each other, it takes some fumbling to grab the blob you wanted – not fun in high-pressure situations. The “whistle” doesn’t always work. But I still loved the game anyways. 

4 stars

So I guess Braid is going to be my new whipping boy after all. I’m sure if I tried hard enough, I could sneak a Braid joke into a Resident Evil 4 review or something.

Never skipped a level!

Braid

Braid : A 2D platformer with sinister arthouse intentions.

Story : A young chap named Tim made some kind of mistake and is trying to rescue a princess from some kind of monster…

…or that’s what you’re led to believe. This game takes a Killer7 approach to game design in that not everything is what it seems, rather that there’s some kind of hidden truth behind all of these goomba-stomping levels. Braid reminds gamers that the potential for storytelling in video games is nowhere close to fully tapped, in part thanks to an incredible end game sequence. There’s also an affinity for abstract imagery, in that the game has several text sequences, “paintings” and such that flesh out the themes of each level and give some insight in the life of this Tim fellow.

But man does this game love making you read. Whether or not there’s much value in all of this reading is another question. The aforementioned texts at the start of each level are meant to give emotional value to that level’s gimmick, but don’t advance whatever plot is actually present in the game. Rather, the only actual story twist is the above mentioned end game sequence, and if the game ended with that, then I would’ve been able to walk away and label Braid as a work of genius. Instead, Jonathon Blow decides to crap all over things in an attempt to take the symbolism one step further. After the end, the player is treated to many, many more blocks of text that, essentially, explain to the gamer (or should I say “the reader”?) that the entire game is meant to be symbolism for another, seemingly unrelated story. I can’t help but find this to be a slap in the face, belittling to the adventure I thought I was on, moreso than the Super Mario Bros 2 “it was all a dream” end sequence. This aspect feels pretentious, unnecessary, and the whole game could’ve been stronger without it.

The well-dressed schoolboy manner of Tim, combined with the painting-esque art style, the puzzle-solving focus and the decided lack of guns anywhere in the game give me the impression that this game is trying to reach out to a more civilized gamer of either gender and not just testosterone-driven 13 year old males like pretty much every other game, and I respect that. The driving concept behind the game is that Tim here can rewind time to his heart’s content. The game creates the idea that you’re not supposed to die, rather, should an evil rabbit off you, time can be rewound to a safer point. The goal of each level is to collect puzzle pieces that ultimately form some kind of image, with each puzzle piece requiring the player to overcome some kind of abstract puzzle, demanding a degree of outside-the-box thinking. Each world also has its own gimmick to complicate the matter, from platforms that can’t be affected by rewinding to the entire flow of time moving back and forth based on what direction you’re walking in. For the most part, every single platforming puzzle is ingeniously designed, and you’ll feel a great sense of accomplishment in collecting that seemingly out of reach piece. Even the moments where I caved and looked up a strategy guide left me looking at certain pieces and thinking to myself “wow, that’s actually pretty ingenious.” And besides, should you screw up, the solution is typically a quick rewind away.

…and that’s Braid in a nutshell. Five worlds of clever puzzles that push the notion that games can be a powerful means of interactive storytelling… or at least until the game strays and tries to be even more than it should be. If Jonathon Blow’s intention all along was to preach about the Manhattan Project, then I feel like he should’ve just written a short story of some kind, because that’s what you’re getting at the end. Placed in the context of the rest of the game, this alternate story feels tacked on and existing only to downplay what is otherwise a potentially powerful yet minimalist story of love gone wrong. As for the rest of the game, buy it if you like the idea of solving very well-designed puzzles, but between the story issue leaving a bad taste in my mouth and the notion that a solved puzzle can no longer challenge you, I doubt I’ll be spending any time revisiting Braid. The game costs 1200 Microsoft points, which will set Canadians back about $20, and I personally don’t think that the game is worth it.

Pros : Effectively uses aspects from Super Mario Bros for imagery.

Cons : Who’s idea was it to throw in invisible stars? Seriously?

3 ½ stars.

I don’t feel like a big guy for picking on an “independent” game. Not that this game screams “independent” when you look at its budget.

Final Fantasy 4: The DS remake

Grinding : Grinding is the art of making your characters fight enemies over and over to earn experience points, as to improve your characters’ stats. A very important point to remember as I review…



Final Fantasy 4 : The Nintendo DS remake of a spoony Super Nintendo RPG.

Story : Despite the fact that Cecil is a dark knight, he seems to have regrets when his king asks him to do a few decidedly….dark things. His second thoughts wind up sabotaging him and results in a quest with a ragtag group of colourful partners to stop evil forces from collecting sacred crystals that serve a more sinister purpose. Back in 1991, the storyline of Final Fantasy 4 was considered groundbreaking (so I’m led to believe) in that it was unheard of for your party members, let alone protagonists in general, to die. With the shock value long since passed, one can see that the writers at Square thought that they were really clever at the time to have thought up this idea of killing off the good guys, as members of your party seem to be all too willing to leap at the chance to sacrifice their lives to save the group from a mildly dangerous situation. The melodramatic nature of the script is accentuated by the occasional voice-acted cutscene, and the one aspect that I like about these particular sequences is that you can skip them. The actual dialogue, on the other hand, you’re still forced to scroll through while hammering the A button, (always a big no-no in my books, especially right before a major boss fight.) Otherwise, I’d say that if you’re into the Final Fantasy story format then you’ll probably enjoy it here too, but later games feel more fleshed out in contrast to the paper-thin cast of characters you’ll see here. On top of all that, I hate it when the main character of a game is gullible, and Cecil can’t see an ambush coming if there was a sign pointed in front of him reading “TRAP HERE, DO NOT STEP FORWARD!”

Final Fantasy 4 sits uncomfortably in the middle of an imaginary RPG spectrum. On the left are early Japanese RPGs from the NES onwards, like the first Final Fantasy, where your party of backstory-less, emotion-less avatars plodding through dungeons filled with harsh random battles while grinding up your levels for hours on end to hope that they’re strong enough to thwart the difficult end level boss in the dungeon who’s location you needed a strategy guide (or 1-900 hint line from back in the day I guess), partly because the translation from Japanese to English was so poor that the in-game characters don’t make a lot of sense in the clues that are supposed to lead you there. On the right, more recent JRPGs with hours of cutscenes about characters with elaborate backstorys and motivations that are all out of the player’s control, (though what is in control is some kind of needlessly-convoluted chart used to “level up” the characters) and the combat is simplified enough that you can mash the one button to continuously attack all your enemies on your guided path to the next cutscene. Playing through the Final Fantasy 4 remake, the idea I got was that this game seems to obtain the most notorious aspects of both ends of the spectrum, though I wouldn’t call it an ideal balance of old and new virtues.

As you can guess from the first paragraph, the game leans towards the radical right when it comes to story. Perhaps the flaws in the story were easier to forgive in 1991 when people were amazed that a Super Nintendo game had so much storyline. Nowadays, anyone who’s played an RPG or two in their lives can guess most points, like how the presence of magical crystals that can summon an almighty evil force in the wrong hands pretty much guarantees the forces of evil will get their hands on these crystals as to force the player into a climatic final battle. And while it was shocking to see your party members die to save the team, that characters are frequently making the ultimate sacrifice means that they’ll get inevitably replaced by new, lower-leveled party members. And there will be grind. You’ll get to a point where you’ll have to grind levels to move on. The FF4 grinder isn’t as lengthy as other RPGs, but it sure is rustier. The later dungeon enemies are powerful, and develop area-sweeping attacks that can wipe out your party and erase all the progress you’ve made after your last save point, including all that grinding. These dungeons want you to grind too, they’re begging for you to grind. The original game had plenty of corridors with matching tiles and paths leading nowhere, all vying for you to get lost, wander and have plenty more random battles. Maybe that's why your party members seem so eager to take any excuse to be put out of their misery.

Fortunately, this DS update includes a map of the areas you’ve explored on the bottom screen, as to reduce the random wandering and make this random battle issue…slightly less bothersome. There’s a few tweaks, including a summon whom gets powered up by playing DS touch screen mini-games, which means no one will actually care. And I’ll admit that the graphical update is actually quite welcome here – the original game had a very technologically limited, stripped down visual style that was all too eager to show off this brand spanking new Mode 7 technology the SNES was bringing (despite how pixilated it may be) and new, much cleaner 3D graphics help to bring out of the nuances of each character without butchering them (unlike, say, every single Mega Man game released after the NES).

I could start listing the “innovations” that Final Fantasy 4 made but when looking back on old games like this, I value the replayability more than anything else, and Final Fantasy 4 can be a tough game to replay, as you can see, as it requires the same level of sacrifice as some of your allies in the game. For what it’s worth, this is the definitive version of Final Fantasy 4, and someone who’s new to the franchise and is eager to explore the history or some kind of nonsense like that would do good to pick it up. It’s a solid role playing game, but it brings the archaic game design of days gone by, mixed with the need to shove a story (good or bad) down our throats. To its credit, I’m aiming to finish the game, so I guess it has value to JRPG fanatics. But this game was already re-released on the Game Boy Advance a few years ago…

Pros : Enemies are depicted as more than a single, motionless sprite.

Cons : Cecil has chicken legs.

3 ½ stars

And most reviewers will kindly point out that Final Fantasy 4 was originally released in the States as Final Fantasy 2. But I tend to think the only people that actually played Final Fantasy 2 back in the day were the diehard RPG fanatics who already knew this so I tend to think there’s no need to try and point this out every freaking time someone brings up Final Fantasy 4.

Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise

Viva Piñata : Trouble In Paradise : A gardening game on the Xbox 360. The biggest new feature in this game is online play, and I shutter to think of the racism a game about piñatas inspires on the bigot breeding ground that is Xbox Live.

Story : Professor Pester hates happy things, and has begun a crusade against happy things by waging a very subdued war on pinatakind. Along the way, he destroys some kind of database of marginal importance and you’re asked to rebuild it. Well, you don’t have to, I mean it’s not like the world is at stake here. After the introductory cutscene detailing this diabolically pointless scheme, the game just cuts loose and lets the player mess up the sandbox as he or she sees fit.

A piñata’s goal in life is to die. These nihilistic objects are shaped like animals and brought to parties where, like a pagan sacrifice, children beat them so that their innards may explode and our children can feast on them like the savages they are.

When you’re younger, you tend to let the more absurd things slide, or at least if the absurd things were cool enough to have their own action figures. Pokemon games made the player capture and collect wild animals, and then trained them to fight other people’s animals, essentially a child’s version of cockfighting. GI Joes pitting a legion of Americans against international terrorists in a large scale war where nobody actually died. And now we have Viva Piñata, Microsoft’s attempt to create its own children’s sensation, complete with its own TV show and everything. But the absurdity of the concept might be a little much for most kids to swallow, especially since there isn’t the instant gratification of giant explosions and a villain vowing to get you next time, that most Saturday morning fare presents. That said I can probably sell plenty of people on this game just by its own bizarre concept.

Apparently, the world is filled with bright-coloured piñata animals. And apparently, these animals love to go to parties, get beaten to death and have their entrails feasted on. At least that’s what this Langstrom fellow told me, he seems to be in charge of this operation. So the goal of your farm is to listen to what animal is wanted for what party, find a way to convince this animal to stay at your garden, fatten them up so their “candiosity” meter is full, and then send them to the doom they’ve been yearning for. Depressing, yet funny at the same time.

If I call Viva Piñata a “gardening game” then it’s bound to turn off the people that should be playing it. The idea is that you have this space of land that you can edit to your heart’s content. Meeting certain requirements will cause wild piñatas to appear, and if you meet other static requirements (or you just flat out captured them from another land, a new feature in this game that gleefully reminded me of Pokemon’s poaching mentality), then they’ll stick around. The game is at least forgiving enough to slowly break you into the many, many gameplay mechanics within, going from planting seeds to just dropping the seed instead of planting it (it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out) so you’ll rarely feel overwhelmed when the game asks you to plant sweet yams to draw in some arctic creature thingy.

I guess the appeal of Viva Piñata is that it has a way of surprising you. Making all kinds of alterations will cause different Piñatas to appear. You could be adding a pond in an attempt to lure some frog creature your current mission objective is asking for, but at the same time, you’ll bring in some other wild creatures. That rabbit you were planning to bring to a party? He just lured in a fox, and this fox is going to kill your rabbit because that’s what foxes do. I can’t remember any kind of children’s game that dealt with death like this, but I can’t help but smile at how the game has its own bright, colourful, happy food chain! A sound effect of children cheering plays every time a piñata is busted open and passes on, almost celebratory of this grim event. Or perhaps this game is one big denouncement of vegetarianism.

Oh, and there’s reproduction to. If two of the same species meet the correct “romantic requirements”, usually involving food (which I guess the same could be true for real humans), then you can put two piñatas in a special house where they will FUCK and inspire the stork to send a child. Well, FUCKing in Viva Piñata is symbolized by some mini-game of trying to collect hearts on a board or something, but still. Between Spore and now this, bizarre animal sex is slowly becoming the next big thing in children’s games.

What I like about Viva Piñata is that you can play it at your own pace and still make progress. You don’t have to buy into Langstrom’s scam of sending piñatas overseas or fill in every single entry in that farce that is “the database” to enjoy the game. Most any landmark accomplishment, like stumbling across a new piñata or causing torrid piñata sex, will grant experience points. Your garden leveling up will have a variety of benefits, often opening up new things to buy, places to go, piñatas to slaughter and so forth. And just tinkering with things will cause new piñatas to appear and a grin on your face. The game has a way of just making time slip away, hours will go by as you find yourself casually tweaking away at your garden, all excited because that cat that’s been stalking the outside has finally stepped in and devoured your mice.

Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise isn’t addictive, but rather relaxing. It’s a good game to play if you have blood pressure problems. Now, there are a few odd complaints I can throw at it. More than anything else, I wish I didn’t have to worry about watering flowers. Yes, I know that this game is supposed to be about gardening and all, but eventually my little space is going to grow enough that keeping track of all the vegetation is going to be a problem. And I also wish that I didn’t need to endure a load time, every time I went to one of the store owners of the area so I can purchase the one seed I was looking for to bring in the one species of animal that’s been lurking outside.

I can’t imagine kids liking this game. Asking for a child to run a garden is either asking for too much or akin to asking to pay $50 for more chores. The lack of, well, action is also enough to make kids run back to the next big anime cartoon or attempt at reviving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But for the rest of the world, Viva Piñata is fun, relaxing, bizarre, humourous, and an unlikely time sink. If Katamary Damacy taught us anything, it’s that there’s appeal in a game that relishes in how little sense it makes, and Viva Piñata is gloriously perverse entertainment.

Pros : And if you don’t like something, you can beat it to death with a shovel.

Cons : Reincarnates the E-Card reader. Using that Xbox camera that nobody owns, you can scan these collectable Piñata cards for items and such. Quite frankly, this feature can burn in hell.

4 stars

Here’s some footage of the TV show that co-launched with the original Viva Piñata. That the original game launched with a TV show in a blatant attempt to create the next big thing is my excuse for not playing the first game.

Star Wars : The Force Unleashed

Star Wars : The Force Unleashed : An action/adventure game based on the Star Wars universe where players control an all-too-powerful dark Jedi knight, capable of incredible feats beyond anything seen in any of the movies. I’d rather not say that this makes Luke Skywalker and such seem like pantywaists in comparison to this “Starkiller” chap, and instead just say that your belief is going to be rather suspended, even by the standards normally held by the bizarre fiction that is Star Wars.

Story : Okay, I’d like to know what came first. Did the dev team conjure up the idea to do a Devil May Cry knockoff Star Wars games with the latest cutting edge technology on the market, and scoured the elaborate mess that is the Star Wars canon to find a convenient niche that they could fit the story of an army-slaughtering evil Jedi? Or did George Lucas feel that the storyline gap between the final prequel movie and the original Star Wars movie was important enough to be told, with a video game no less? If it’s the latter, then sorry George… I can say that I did not like this story at all. All of the characters feel robotic and uninteresting, and call it the nature of the game being a prequel but you can guess all of the events that happen in the game as they progress. Finally, I can’t stress enough how much I hated Starkiller. Besides his occasional moment of forced dashing hero-moments, he’s such a gullible character throughout the story, and lacks any sort of emotion or personality. With these traits in mind, wouldn’t it have been better that the game took the Jedi Academy/Knights of the Old Republic avatar route of letting the player create his Jedi character instead of playing as the lead singer of Linkin Park?

I can sum up The Force Unleashed quickly by saying its God of War with a physics engine and the John Williams score blaring in the background. Seriously. There are moments where the game just feels like it’s ripping off its Greek cousin a little too hard. It was one thing to see air combos – you know, where your character somehow stays suspended in mid-air to swing his sword around, regardless of whether or not there’s an enemy in the air with you. These were quite thrilling when they first appeared in Devil May Cry, and while I didn’t raise any questions seeing them in Ninja Gaiden or God of War, warning signs went up a bit when The Thing was floating in the air with punches in Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Now they’re just getting a bit tiresome. Also borrowing too much from the God of War rulebook of death dealing is the quicktime event – where you press a sequence of buttons to initiate of a cutscene of Starthriller bringing a large enemy down. There’s one for every boss, as well as one for the many midbosses that you’ll fight throughout the game, and believe me, there are many. Hence, you will see the same mini-movie of Starkiller crumbling an AT-AT or poking a rancor in the eye many times over. It hurts moreso when you consider that some bosses will actually summon mini-bosses to fight for them!

Sometimes it’s the small and seemingly insignificant issues that make the biggest difference, like how God of War covered up this above problem through zooming the camera in on the action most of the time, instead of cutting away to the same fixed angle every time one of these events is initiated, as is the case here.

Now, where The Force Unleashed strays away from ripping off every “Stylish Hard Action” game of this generation is when Darth Dimwitted remembers he’s a mystical warrior from space and not a mystical warrior from Greek mythology. Namely, he can throw lightning bolts, as well as his enemies, using his mind. The player is given an unholy trinity of offense in the form of lightning bolts and Force-gripping most objects, along with his lightsaber attacks. Surprisingly, these elements are quite balanced and you’ll usually find yourself mixing up your attack to progress. This Force inbreeding continues when you upgrade your Starkiller by purchasing new attacks that unlock unique cocktails of death, like throwing a lightsaber into someone’s chest while you’re levitating them and then throwing lightning into the saber. (Again, this custom upgrade system is furthering the argument of a personalized avatar creation system for the game’s protagonist instead of this guy who tries so hard and comes so far but In The End it doesn’t really matter…because he’s a nimrod!)

Which brings me to the next major point of discussion about The Force Unleashed : physics. Physics Physics Physics. This game loves its physics. It seems like this game has some kind of physics engine in play for everything. There’s a physics engine for moving objects and simulating their weight, there’s a physics engine for bodies moving and falling, there’s a physics engine for water, there’s a physics engine for broken glass, there’s a physics engine for broken wood, there’s a physics engine for electricity, there’s a physics engine to simulate bodies being electrocuted, there’s a physics engine for smoke, there’s a physics engine for enemy intelligence, there’s a physics engine for finding enough John Williams scores to play throughout the entire game, and so forth. Admittedly, this does have its swell moments from all of these physics engines. Being able to casually throw storm troopers into incinerating force fields is always a jolly time. If this game strives to make you feel like a complete badass, its these natural moments of destruction that succeed at it, moreso than the over-the-top scripted death sequences of the quick-time events. And finally, it’s great to see a game where trees react to things flying at them by shattering into a hundred splinters instead of the norm in most games where, at best, the trees stands tall while you phase through it and at worst, the tree simulates a metal pole that can withstand the fiercest car collision…at Niko Bellic and his car’s expense.

These physics are also the game’s greatest downfall. It’s great to see that the player is thrust in a mostly realistic game world, but if this game taught me anything, it’s that death happens a lot in reality when challenging an army of clones. Many games and especially older games have a temporary knockback invincibility period – you know, the 2 second period after sustaining damage when your character kind of “flickers” on and off and is invincible from attack long enough to move out of the way.. I guess that was deemed too unrealistic for this far too realistic game, which is a shame since Starkiller needs it badly to kill stars, it seems. On countless instances, getting shot at from an awkward angle would cause Starkiller to fall down and slide down a gradual slope and spend an obscene amount of time for the ragdoll physics to animate before he thinks about getting back up again. All the while, enemies are chipping all of your health away, just as you were about to fall off into a bottomless pit. I’m okay with dying in a game a lot, so long as the death was some kind of twisted learning experience, and in death, I was able to progress a bit further. And while you won’t become one with the Force as often here as in certain other challenging games, the deaths almost always feel cheap, awkward, unwarranted, and ultimately annoying.

Likewise, I found that I needed to use these disturbances in the force to overcome some other bad design choices. I couldn’t tell you how I beat almost every boss in the game. If there was some kind of attack patterns I was supposed to pick up on and engage them accordingly, I didn’t learn them. Most of the battles were won through the enemy accidentally tripping on something and me taking out 85% of their health bar from slashing at them while the game took a questionably long time trying to process their body sliding across the floor before deeming the time right for them to get back on their feet. Even the climatic final battle, well the final climatic battle if you’re going for a dark side ending (yes, like practically every Star Wars Jedi-based game, there’s a light side ending and a dark side ending, and mercifully you need only do the last level over to see both. Spoilers be damned, but shame on you if you were expecting to be an evil villain throughout the entire game), I was never able to land a single blow on my adversary, until fate would have him somehow trip up on a loose tile on the floor, thus opening me to pounce on his body and obtain victory within a single combination of attacks.

Or maybe that’s the point, being that this game’s selling point is controlling an evil warrior, perhaps the game is trying to promote kicking your foe while they’re down. One of the loading screens promotes this practice.

For what it’s worth, I willingly finished the game in a couple of days. I’d say the game is about 6-7 hours long, which is the right length for this kind of game. Except for the frequent mini-boss fights and perhaps one “Purge Trooper” too many, I never felt like the game was trying to artificially lengthen the play time, which is worlds more than I can say for most other games today. Even though the game comes up with painfully contrived reasons to revisit old locations, perhaps in an attempt to get away with reusing some textures and such, the game is courteous enough to alter the level designs and throw in enough curveballs to keep things feeling fresh. At the least, I can say “better than Devil May Cry 4” when it comes to the matter of this game. I’d wager that most people who bought The Force Unleashed will like The Force Unleashed. If the thought of toying around with a legion of Storm Troopers with your mind appettizes you, then by all means. You just have to be able to deal with a good deal of other crap that the game will throw at you. But at the end of the day, like most big-budget games these days, popcorn entertainment. All of its advancements are the same technical advancements every major game seems to brag about, but bringing little new features to the table, and thus while fresh and fun as of October 11, 2008, will be rendered obsolete when the next big action game comes out.

Pros : Mercifully, you never feel like the game is bragging about these physics engines and is shoving them down your throat, like the oh-so-many stupid demonstrations scattered throughout Half-Life 2.

Cons : The visuals are approaching the uncanny valley – some aspects look so good that the flaws stick out more, like how robotic the Starkiller’s love interest it. I guess, ultimately though, the biggest thing I wish this game had was surprise, or lack thereof. Except for a late-game boss fight, nothing in this game was particularly memorable or surprising. Or maybe I’m only making a big deal of this from having just reviewed No More Heroes and finding nothing to rival battling a neurotic Superman-figure who fires lasers from his groin.

3 ½ stars.

Or maybe I have to embrace that the future of games will be more like The Force Unleashed – physics engines up the ass. Maybe the day when a massive screen filling explosion would only cause your character to flinch a bit and turn invincible long enough to shoot at the boss a bit are long gone.

Kirby Super Star Ultra

Kirby Super Star Ultra : An “expanded” edition of the Super Nintendo pseudo-compilation, Kirby Super Star.

Story : Actually, Kirby Super Star is a series of smaller adventures, each one based on either saving the world or saving food. I’m not going to criticize a story aimed at kids of being uninspired so it is what it is. This Nintendo DS version adds computer-generated cutscenes in spots to tell the stories, and while I like this addition for “Revenge of Meta-Knight” as a means of documenting its’ series of events, for the most part the cutscenes did nothing for me. On top of that, the cutscenes feature the same MIDI music and sound effects of the 16-bit original and the combination doesn’t mesh well together.

Odds are that if you’ve been gaming for a significantly long time, then you’ve probably made gay jokes about Kirby. Maybe it was when the first Game Boy games were released and you made a joke or two about his tendency to suck things up and swallow, but those jokes feel too juvenile, too easy. Besides, at the time, it was a clever and outside-the-box gameplay mechanic, a fresh take on the mascot platformer of the day. Then we got Kirby games on consoles capable of producing colour, and we came to realize that Kirby was intended to be coloured pink. A little flamboyant but at least it was different, and you can’t blame the guy for being born the colour that he was. Besides, I’m sure it’s not an issue that bothered too many people, as most wrestling fans associate pink with either highly skilled technical wrestlers or burly men with lengthy goatees. And perhaps there may have been a joke or two when Kirby started absorbing his enemy’s powers, like the fire creature giving Kirby flaming abilities or the stone power that made Kirby hard.

Kirby Super Star gives grounds to all kinds of suspicions of Kirby’s affection for the not-quite fairer sex.

One of the distinguishing features of Kirby Super Star is the ability to play two player co-op. Kirby just need to devour an enemy to take its power, press a button and before you know it, you’ve summoned an ally. That can either be controlled by a dim-witted AI partner that likes to die a lot or by another player.

As an aside, I tend to think that the concept of “multi-cart multiplayer”, that is a multiplayer mode on any handheld game that requires both players to possess the system and a copy of the game itself, can straight piss off. It’s already hard enough getting together with a friend who has a DS, let alone asking for said friend to buy the same game. The “single-cart” alternative to this for Kirby Super Star on the DS is to allow the second player to use his system as a controller while he observes the action from player 1’s screen. Considering how small the screen on the system is to begin with, this feature can only slightly less piss off….but still piss off nonetheless.

Back to tabloid accusations. This is the first time in years that I had played through Kirby Super Star from beginning to end, and thus I had completely forgotten about Kirby’s experimental phase, and how Kirby would often break into a romantic kiss with his partner.

These public displays of affection seem to occur as a means of regenerating the partner’s health bar. They also only seem to occur only after Kirby picked up some food to recover his health. So not only is Kirby fond of Knuckle Joe’s sweet embrace, but he’s kinky in the regards that he likes to pass food along through an oral exchange. And these make out sessions can occur as frequently as there are bits of food on the ground so if there’s 5 apples on a bush, it’s possible for Kirby to get some Waddle Dee dong five times in a row.

Back to the game, the original Kirby Super Star was a collection of ten-odd smaller games, each about half an hour long. The quality of these games varies and you’ll probably consider only three of them to be actual GAMES that measure up. “Spring Breeze” is meant to be an easy campaign meant to break new players in and that’s fine, except the second game, “Dynablade” isn’t exactly any stiffer in terms of difficulty. “Gourmet Race” is essentially a mini-game sidescrolling race to collect as much fruit before you reach the finish line, fun for a few minutes but there’s only the one big level to race and thus the experience finishes prematurely. “Revenge of Meta-Knight” is the first actual adventure of notice, the gimmick being that Kirby and his sexmate must penetrate Meta-Knight’s ship and leave a white splash of destruction over the madman’s plans. “The Great Cave Offensive” adds a treasure-hunting gimmick and asks the player to scour every dark alleyway and inside every closet for hidden secrets. “Milky Way Wishes” isn’t a nickname for oral sex, but rather the original game’s final adventure, which differentiates itself from the other games in that you can collect the actual powers as items instead of absorb them by putting things in Kirby’s mouth. There’s also an Arena mode that pits you against all the bosses in one giant gang bang battle. Finally, there’s a couple of mini-games that don’t really add much, other than seeing Kirby characters get freaky and dress up like they were in feudal Japan.

Kirby Super Star Ultra, the Nintendo DS version, embodies a trend that I hope Nintendo stopped a long time ago – the handheld re-release. Nintendo used to be in the habit of taking older games and “updating” them George Lucas-style for their handhelds, simplifying challenging levels, adding voicework that was completely out of place and throwing in assorted mini-games that no one really cared for. I was hoping that the advent of the Wii Virtual Console would end the farce that was the Super Mario Advance franchise and its kind but here we are…

Kirby Super Star Ultra claims to add 6 new games, but that’s a lie. I’d consider it being honest if it said 1 and a half, maybe. “Revenge of the King” is the one actual new adventure, a new campaign filled with new enemies, though most of them are just redrawn versions of the old enemies, akin to them being in drag, and thus this new mode doesn’t leave much for one to be excited about. The next set of new games break into the biggest failing with this new edition of Kirby Super Star. “Meta-Nightmare Ultra” is essentially most of the game’s levels replayed from the perspective of Meta-Knight, an overpowered version of the knight power-up, with the ability to heal and use an area-sweeping super attack. The novelty of the new character wears thin, though, and being that most of these campaigns are already pitting you against similar challenges and many of the same enemies, bosses and especially mid-bosses, this gets a bit tiresome by the end. “Helper to Hero” is essentially the Arena, except you play as one of Kirby’s many, many penis pals, whom don’t really differentiate too much from just plain playing as Kirby with superpowers anyways. Finally, “True Arena” pits the player against the redrawn new enemies from the new campaigns, most of which aren’t quite different from their original versions. The original Kirby Super Star had a small repetition issue in this regard, but the problem of sleeping with the same enemy is amplified with great volume in this new game.

I hope it’s not homophobic to give this game a terrible score. Kirby Super Star Ultra isn’t a bad game, and maybe the episodic format lends itself better to handheld play sessions. But I would’ve much rather have seen this game released on the Wii Virtual Console, at a quarter of the price with none of these needless add-ons and the ability to play two player co-op on the one console on a big screen that sits on a table and not the shaky hands of your angry partner. This used to be heralded as one of the best Kirby games around, but nowadays I would go on a limb and call this new edition the worst Kirby game on the DS, in comparison to the underrated but TERRIBLY NAMED “Kirby Squeak Squad” and the more original “Kirby Canvas Curse”, a game where you must grip Kirby as a pink ball.

Pros : ….you’ll have a gay ol’ time?

Cons : The new tacked-on mini-games added to the DS version are lame, even by the standards of tacked-on mini-games.

3 ½ stars

As of recently, I’d developed a newfound heterosexual affection for the Kirby games. There really aren’t too many games like them in terms of gameplay mechanics and it’s a wonder why you don’t see too many games try to knock off the power-stealing gimmick.

No More Heroes: The best game of 2008 that no game is likely to top this year....

No More Heroes : An action game for a more crass generation.

Story : For the first time since the Pokemon trainer decided to capture and manipulate wild animals for fame and fortune, we have a main character who’s goals are unjust and selfish, remain unjust and selfish to the end, and he’s all the more admirable for it. Travis Touchdown wants to become the top ranked assassin in the world, not to save the world from evil or exact revenge for some deceased family member(s), but to justify buying his presumably expensive lightsaber in an online auction, to score with a French broad, and out of straight-up machismo. These are ambitions that any man can relate to.

If you’ve never played Killer7 before, skip this paragraph. If you never played Killer7 before and really, really, REALLY value my opinion on these things, then you’ll go to a store, any store, and odds are you’ll find it lurking in a bargain bin because hardly anyone actually bought the damn game out of fear of playing a shooting game that didn’t star some kind of marine-like figure in a futuristic armor suit. Now, No More Heroes is like that, but with more conventional gameplay mechanics (I guess “conventional” is the right word. As in most of its gameplay mechanics are logical, in comparison to Killer7’s 3 or 4 gameplay ideas that almost made sense), less of a need to preach about divinity, and a good deal more of the absurd sense of humour.

Though you really should buy Killer7 too.

No More Heroes is the first game….okay maybe the second game in a good long time where you actually feel like the developer cracked his skull open and poured out a nasty ooze of drug-induced creativity onto his project. And to tell the truth about the first one, Super Mario Galaxy feels more like a quiet daydream on the bench in the park in comparison to the full-on acid trip of No More Heroes. The pretentiously named developer in question, Suda 51, seems to have sat down and thought of everything he’d like to see in a video game, and the results are “Star Wars meets Grand Theft Auto meets Mexican wrestling with the presentation of Space Invaders and one pop-culture dig too many” which is the game I’ll be presenting to you right now.

Each…actual level involves our protagonist going through a linear pathway slicing up enemies along the way with his handy lightsaber. Despite how so many people seem to dream that the Wii should have motion controls to virtually handle a lightsaber, the developers at Grasshopper studios have a bit more grounds in reality than say, the Red Steel or Zelda : Twilight Princess game makers, and acknowledge that the technology in the Wiimote is painfully inadequate for this. Hence, the Wii motion controls are limited to using broad motions when the action on-screen slows down to execute finishing blows that cause enemies to explode in a blast of blood and quarters, along well as other smaller, supplemental controller uses that don’t grow tiresome like pretty much every other Wii game. I can draw similarities to God of War in this regard too; despite there being a lot of combat in the game, that it’s so gratuitous is what keeps it more entertaining than actual Star Wars lightsaber games.

The culmination of each of these levels is one of the game’s boss battles, each one representing a ranking on the Top 10 assassins presented to the player in the fashion of some kind of 70s arcade game scoreboard. I can’t attempt to spoil any of these battles as they get more and more bizarre, but I will say that the game does a good job of making you want to progress through a level to see for yourself the identity of the person whom you’re only given a name for at the beginning of each stage. None of the boss sequences disappoint, despite some of the later bosses have an obscenely large health bar that you’ll be widdling away at for a good long while before you finally get your gratifying kill. The game relishes in its strangeness and the only moments where the game attempts a serious tone seem to exist only to make fun of cliché plot twists in other mediums like…well I’m not ruining the game.

Between these levels, the game throws a giant city at you for Travis to explore. Now, this isn’t Grand Theft Auto-caliber by any stretch, you sadly can’t go around killing people and your only vehicle is this out-of-place futuristic bike that fears the palm tree. The virtual city is more of a means to access upgrades through shops (purchase lucha libre tapes to learn new moves, buy trendy t-shirts, power up your character by finding dodgeballs for some drunkard in a bar, etc) and access an assortment of sub-missions. The one annoying flaw with No More Heroes is that the game won’t let you progress to a new mission without first grinding away to earn some money. The system for earning money works like this: first you do an ordinary job like pick up litter or work at the gas station, all using the Wiimote for it’s sole intended purpose of handling mini-games, and doing those jobs will unlock assassination missions that often comprise of killing a lot of enemies in a room for larger sums of cash. You’ll have to grind these latter missions for the loot required to progress the story, in what is essentially an unnecessary attempt to add a couple more gameplay hours into a game being released in a world where being branded “short” seems to be a sales kiss of death.

This artificial means of adding a couple more hours to the campaign is easily the biggest flaw with No More Heroes, ironically one of the few instances where the game conforms to the standards and expectations of mainstream gaming. But even then, it’s a small flaw, one that’ll only drain about an hour or two of your life away anyways, in comparison to the other 6 or 7 hours of fun and bewilderment you’ll experience the rest of the time. It’s this type of creativity and fun alone that makes this game a must-have. I really do believe that not only is this the best game of 2008 so far, but that the chances of any other game this year dethroning it are slim, as none of the upcoming major releases seem to have a fraction of the imagination and intestinal fortitude of No More Heroes.

Pros : I always believed that the speaker on the Wiimote was useless in that the sound from it was muffled, killing the intended purpose of making you feel like you were shooting arrows out of your controller. No More Heroes realizes this and uses the speaker as a virtual phone, for the French girl to call you up and berate you.

Cons : I’ve mentioned the grind issue already…

4 ½ stars

With all due respect to Grand Theft Auto 4, for all of its attempts to be realistic, Niko Bellic is never seen on the can.

Iron Man : The Game based on the movie based on the comic book

Iron Man : The video game rushjob adaptation of the summer blockbuster motion picture.

Story : Like most movie-to-game adaptations, the plot here is an incoherent mishmash of cutscenes that assumes that the player has seen the movie, leaving the rest of the world to be confused and force them into paying money to see it to make sense out of how this series of events is happening. And really, the only movie-based games that can get away with this are Lego-based.

Playing Iron Man on the Xbox 360, one gets the impression that the developers at Secret Level Games had a grand vision for the iconic Marvel hero. Oh they weren’t content with making an ordinary action game with a sprite that somewhat resembles Iron Man like that Game Boy Advance platformer that nary anyone remembers. They wanted to make THE Iron Man experience, the mother of all video games, living up to all the unreasonably high expectations gamers on the internet whom have never programmed a game in their lives dream of when thinking of what a next-generation game should be.

Expectations like open-ended, non-linear worlds (regardless of whether or not there’s anything interesting in this open world), destructible environments, real life physics, and 20-40 hours of gameplay length. Iron Man is not only going for all of these ambitions but gunning for this while giving Iron Man the power to fly around freely without restraint; no fuel restrictions, no running to fill some kind of P-meter to temporarily fly, none of that nonsense. It’s easy for one to take for granted that making this kind of game needs a good deal of time, effort and thought to make function properly, and well the pressure to release a game alongside it’s movie counterpart to cash in on the movie buzz tends to cut off all but the most resourceful dev teams.

Come to think of it, I can’t really think of a great or even good game/movie tie-in from this current generation of consoles that wasn’t a broken mess.

The levels consist mainly of wide-open spaces, filled with a lot of air so that the player can freely zip around in and feel like they’re Super….ehhhh, Iron Man. Being that Iron Man is a master of aviation and thus bottomless pits and other platforming sequences present no threat, one must then find other ways to test the player. And thus the developers went to the Halo route and filled the levels with enemies and slapping on the marketing slogan “You Are a One Man Army.” However, games like Halo and…well pretty much every game has the player controlling one person fighting an army of minions, but games like Halo tend to have a rhyme to the reason, adequately arming the player with munitions, cover and the mobility to slay these minions through a sharp trigger-finger and some cunning. Iron Man literally throws tanks, copters, jets, gun turrets and foot soldiers with rocket launchers at the player and you the player have only the armor you entered the fray with to fend yourself. These open-ended environments wind up sabotaging the experience in that you’ll be shot at in every direction with no cover, and no means to see all these bullets coming.

Seeing the bullets coming becomes an issue when it comes to catching missiles. This game seems fixated on this little gameplay mechanic where, with a well-timed button press, you can catch an incoming missile and throw it back at the pilot. I assume that this is to be the preferred method of choice for taking down copters and planes since it seems to take a small munitions-depot worth of Tony Stark’s own firepower to destroy any of these vehicles. Of course this doesn’t work so well since missiles can fly at you at any direction and thus you can expect to take a rectal pounding of explosives. Well there’s another quick way to destroy vehicles; you can approach vehicles and engage in a mini-game where you mash a button repeatedly and hope you pressed it fast and hard enough to break the tank, or else fail and have to try again. The issue here is that you’re going to get sick of doing this over and over since all of these vehicles have a habit of respawning. This respawning problem also goes back to my earlier point on open-world environments and being shot at from every direction; even if you tried to systematically destroy every enemy in your way, some tanks will still respawn behind you and shove a few warheads up your red and yellow metallic ass.

So this is a game that does a good job at simulating the feel of letting the player get shot at. I’m sure someone is thinking to themselves “gee, maybe you wouldn’t have to fear the reaper if you tried moving out of the way of all those bombs!” Again, poorly-planned out design haunts the game, this time from the perspective of Iron Man. Every single button on the controller is not only used but needed often, almost single-handedly defending Nintendo’s stance that games have become too complicated (…almost.) You have buttons to accelerate, hover, air-brake, fire missiles, fire the unibeam...some buttons have multiple uses and flying is its own convoluted mess. Doing the air side roll that’s supposed to be used to dodge incoming attacks requires an unintuitive button combination to use and is ultimately useless against bullets that move at the same speed as, well, bullets should move in real life. Oh, and in an attempt to simulate the Star Trek-esque fake science that has often shown up in Iron Man comics where Shellhead will talk of “rerouting power” to different parts of his suit to somehow make that part shoot more lasers, you can use the d-pad to reroute power to armor or weapons and whatnot to boost the stats in said area. It’s an idea that has potential to be interesting but telling your batteries to try even harder to pump energy into your shields doesn’t offer much solace against things that explode.

If Iron Man had about another year, give or take, of time in development and was perhaps a bit more thoroughly thought-out in the planning stages, then it could’ve had to potential to be something special. But like most games based on major motion pictures, the looming time limit before the movie is released and all of its subsequent buzz is in the air to be cashed in on will always restrain what can be accomplished in the game. Secret Level Games had a great vision for the Iron Man video game, but the existence of an Iron Man movie got in the way.

Pros : Robert Downey Jr. doesn’t phone in his voiceover performance as Tony Stark. One would think that the next Iron Man movie will deal with Tony Stark’s most well-known character trait – his alcoholism, and thus one wonders how the video game adaptation will incorporate this.

Cons : All I’ve been doing is ripping into this game. So I’ll use this section to explain how embarrassing it is that the above-mentioned Game Boy Advance Iron Man game is better than this.

2 stars

Frighteningly enough, Secret Level Games is also working on a new GOLDEN AXE game, due later this month.

Soul Calibur 4

Soul Calibur 4 : A Medieval-themed fighting game. Or at least a medieval-themed fighting game with the camp-value turned all the way up. Oh, and there’s Yoda thrown in there for some reason.

Story : So we can now confirm that "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away" was simply referring to 1500s Europe. Or at least an alternate dimension of 1500s Europe where the nutrition of the general population was different enough to make their women significantly more endowed and the men look significantly more like Elvis. After Soul Calibur 3 became a box office bust due to Namco trying to sell it on the name value of just the franchise itself, SC4 returns to the series to its co-branding ways by introducing assorted Star Wars characters in a manner far less believable than any Zelda or Spawn cameo ever could.

Let us get what appears to be the biggest selling point out of the way. A fighting game with Yoda seems like somebody's dream come true, at least to those who cheered with glee when Yoda drew a lightsaber in Attack Of The Clones and proceeded to have as great of a fight sequence as a Muppet possibly could. In Soul Calibur 4, Yoda is the modern update of the little T-Rex with boxing gloves from Tekken 3; limited moveset, but short and unthrowable. On the surface he seems unbalanced but he has so few moves that he's just not fun to use either, more a novelty you use once and never touch again than anything else. Likewise, "The Apprentice", the anti-hero from the upcoming Star Wars : The Force Unleashed, is moreso painfully unbalanced and someone who can learn his abilities will be throwing weird-looking lightning balls much to the world's dismay. Needless to say, you won't make any friends using either character online.

Soul Calibur 4's other major selling point is the character customization. Players can either edit existing characters or create new ones from scratch. Appearance-wise, your editing options aren't as robust as a typical wrestling game filled with a hundreds of different pairs of tights but at the same time more than a golf game filled with maybe four or five choices of hat. The one thematic limit here is that your appearance choices are restricted to whatever would be believable Middle Ages/Conan-esque attire so don't expect to create your dream axe-wielding clown cyborg. Likewise, your choices of movesets are limited to the ones used by existing characters, understandable since getting too in-depth with move selection would shatter what little delicate balance any fighting game should have. But the game tries to make up for this with upgradeable character attributes that can be unlocked through the assorted story modes. These can include "Your character starts with a thimbleful of more health" or "every now and then you'll break your enemy's guard with what's normally a guard-breaking attack". Casual fighting game fans can't possibly be made to care about such minute changes while the hardcore crowd will shy away from anything that can disrupt their PRECIOUS balance of the game so needless to say, the odds are the option to use these attack upgrades will almost never be exercised. So in conclusion, the upgradeable aspect of character creation is a big waste of time and will make you wish the developers spent more time on something more useful.

The actual fighting mechanics themselves have changed little. A new one-hit kill system has been implemented, but it'll only come into play if your opponent blocks an obscene number of shots so odds are the only way you'll see these super attacks is if you play in Practice mode. The other new gameplay addition is the way your fighter's armor will shatter with enough blows, and this ultimately feels like an excuse to get the female fighters out of what little armor they were wearing to begin with. Going into gameplay modes, "Tower of Lost Souls" is your typical fighting game challenge mode, with the incentive of unlocking more clothes for custom characters, so your interest in that mode will vary on how badly you want a more revealing corset for your busty brawler. "Story Mode" is poorly named, in part of how bad the story is. Each character gets a text introduction explaining their background followed by some 3 or 4 fights, then a boss fight, then a not-very-rewarding story about what happens once your fighter wins the big prize of two shiny swords. If there's one weakness inherent to the Soul Calibur series, it's that the storyline is always very hokey and overdramatic, yet despite this (and despite the presence of the first ever fighting game character designed by Frank Oz.) the game takes its story, theme and characters very seriously, even providing a flow chart to explain in great detail every characters motives and relationships. It's a great feature for you the player to not use.

Soul Calibur 4 does have the one saving grace of functional online play. It's not the most fleshed out online mode of any fighter, but it's sufficient enough to get the job done, and courteous enough to let you play without any of those blasted character upgrades. And the core fighting gameplay is still solid, rewarding players who study the nuances of each character and any given fight can be won by a smart player over a button-masher. But without any enthralling story, interesting solo gameplay modes or the same tutorials that SC3 had to explain the finer points of the game, the game fails to create new smart players, rather its appeal is limited to current fans of the series. That said, existing fans should go out of their way to purchase SC4 so they can go online and wage war on the hundreds of Killik fans worldwide. Please do that.

3 1/2 stars

Ninja Gaiden 2

Ninja Gaiden 2 : An action adventure game where players control a bondage-clad ninja warrior and get immersed in a world where DD is considered pitiful endowment for a woman and demons and cyborgs work side-by-side to eviscerate you.

Story : Ninja warrior Ryu Hayabusha goes on a revenge/save the world quest against some sort of empire-like evil that attacked his home village and is attempting to revive an ancient lord of hell. Along the way there’s some overly-endowed female character that doesn’t seem to serve much of a purpose in the storyline. I could’ve sworn this was the exact same storyline as the last game. Remember how back in the day, people used to praise Ninja Gaiden games for being trendsetters in video game storytelling? My how times changed.

Someone at Team Ninja has assumed, perhaps safely so, that certain concepts in action/adventure games, such as puzzle-solving and platform jumping and anything that doesn’t involve something dying tend to keep the gamer away from doing more productive things, things like killing and watching things die, and thus we have Ninja Gaiden 2, a game that features very little of the former concepts and an excess of the latter. For the most part, each level is a linear path from point A to point B, and along the way, you will either kill many enemies or be killed many times over. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, the game surprisingly doesn’t get old in the death-dealing field until perhaps near the end, but a little variety wouldn’t hurt either.

Ninja Gaiden 2 is also a very masochistic game, perhaps one of the most masochistic games of all time. The game doesn’t pit you against generic demons that look handicapped like in Devil May Cry games, taking turns to attack you but politely waiting for you to finish your current air combo on their brethren before swinging their arm back to motion that they plan to attack you sometime in the future. No, right off the bat you’re battling skilled ninjas with exploding shurikens. Later the ninjas start sporting machine guns and rocket launchers. Dogs wielding katanas swarm you. Tanks and mechs try to halt your progress. Demons will spawn from hell to attack you. Later the demons get cybernetic implants. It’s like the enemies were designed by a group of college kids trying to prove that ninjas are superior to pirates by conjuring up the most inane enemy concepts to pit against our hero, regardless of how inappropriate they may be to the game’s theme. It also helps that your weapon selection is very diverse, giving players the choice of a hearty variety of ways to impale and dismember your adversaries. Granted, most of them aren’t as useful in the end as say, the dual swords or the claws, but there’s something rather satisfying about pounding armored machines to death with a staff.

That said, how much you enjoy the game will depend on your patience. Enemies have no qualms about attacking you off-camera, and if you’re playing on normal, you are going to die a lot because some enemy learned of the cameras sacred ninja-secret blind spots and will pick you off from a distance. If you’re sadistic, by all means play on normal, but if you’re a little more human as far as your gameplay skills are, then you’re better off playing on the easier difficulty.

Ninja Gaiden 2 is not a great game by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a fun game, and it can be a satisfying experience, watching your ninja warrior topple a legion of mechademons, but your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance of certain aspects, like the enemies being really, really, really cheap. Oh, and your tolerance of graphic imperfections (ironic considering Team Ninja’s pedigree) and uninspired plot.

Pros : It’s currently inspiring a lawsuit between the game’s head designer and Tecmo. If you hate life, you’ll get plenty of chances to kill and be killed.

Cons : For all of the aforementioned cheesiness, it still takes itself far too seriously. Main characters still look like Barbie dolls.

3 1/2 stars