Category: Reviews

So, how was it?

Go Vacation – MotionPlus Games

Welcome BACK! Free Roaming time is over – it’s time to get into some more activities! Go Vacation supports a shitload of control options through its wealth of games, including Wiimote, Wiimote + Nunchuck, Balance Board, MotionPlus, Wii Wheel and the Zapper. Today we’re going to get out our fancy new controller to play some MotionPlus games.

Windsurfing is the first game I’m going to talk about, because it really took me by surprise. Expecting a passable point A to point B race, I got a creative use of Wii controls I’ve never seen before. No buttons are used in this, and there are two things you control. The first is the sail’s angle, and the second is the direction of the boat. These are BOTH controlled, simultaneously, with the Wii Remote.


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Big Beach Sports 2 – Motorsport Massacre

Oh yes, this game exists. Reception of the first game was mixed – some people actively hated the game, some passively hated it. Big Beach Sports managed to sell over a million copies; a very impressive milestone for any game. Despite this claim to fame, the game was a broken mess, and was only popular for being the first Wii game to feature Cricket. The motion controls didn’t work and it was a frustrating game to play. THQ decided this was a formula for success, and now it’s back. I’ve been lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of Big Beach Sports 2, and I thought I’d give THQ a chance to redeem themselves. After all, they went to the effort of getting a special team to handle this sequel. What could go wrong? With two all new racing mini-games, I couldn’t help but try it.


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Conduit 2 – One Man, Three Balls

Conduit 2 demands your attention. It’s a first person shooter with incredible controls, great graphics, good humour, addictive gameplay, a wealthy amount of options and customisation, and a whole lot of style. It’s a fairly short game, but it’s full blown entertainment from start to finish, and makes no compromises or excuses for it. Michael Ford is here to kick ass and take names, and he’s all out of names. Life’s too short for formality – there’s no time for “the” anymore – this is simply Conduit 2, and it’s time to shoot bad guys.

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Mario Kart 7: A Diagnosis

So I’ve done the basic run through of 150cc and played some online matches. I think I’m prepared to talk about Mario Kart 7. This isn’t a review because I hate reviews and any Mario Kart 7 review that doesn’t read: “it’s Mario Kart“, is a waste of time. I am going to file this under reviews though because, you know, convention. Instead this is an analysis of changes made to the Mario Kart formula in this, the seventh entry to the series. It’ll be posted here and over at Koopa Beach.

First up, I am really disappointed that the game doesn’t feature some of the more extensive time trial options that Mario Kart Wii included. By that I’m talking about being able to download regional and worldwide ghosts and examine the top ten rankings. This was a real source of motivation to improve in Mario Kart Wii and I’m proud to say I made the top ten in Australia for Cheep Cheep Beach and Vanilla Lake. That came from seeing that my times were close to the top times and having amazing ghosts to compete against in the form of wifi friends and housemates. The other great thing it did was tell stories. If you followed the world record times closely you’d see new shortcuts and techniques for tracks open up. It was incredible and I was hoping to dedicate a significant amount of words on Koopa Beach to just that aspect of the game as it went through early development stages. As it stands though, that commentary will now probably come from the elite players who I expect will be hanging around at the established time trial communities. That link I just made though is dead at time of writing. And any stories that do come will only be fragments strewn across message board posts. It looks like history may be lost.

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Jeep Thrills

I like the trees in this game. I really, really do. Or rather, I like some of the trees in this game; the purple ones. These trees stand out with their inexplicable glowing branches, almost like sickles that have cut into something unknown. Humanity has a deep-seated fascination with which they cannot comprehend, like the popularity of hit shitcom The Big Bang Theory. Merely catching these in the corner of your eye makes it virtually impossible not to veer off the road into their warm, Grimace-like embrace.

Jeep Thrills is somewhat thrilling. This is another budget release from Funbox Media, the same publisher responsible for thrusting all those explosive copies of Speed upon the PAL market. And much like that racer, Jeep Thrills is actually pretty old for the first world, originally released in America back in 2007. It’s also a PlayStation 2 port, just to complete the whole ‘yep this is a Wii game alright’ package.

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Battlefield 3

battlehead
Battlefield 3 is a fucking disgrace and a monument to everything fucked up about gaming in 2011.

So let’s start this by talking about the user experience. You load up Origin, EA’s malvolent store slash game launcher client thing that is not Steam and it has some validation thing that takes way too long. Then you click on Battlefield 3 and it runs another validation thing to make sure you don’t live in the future; once it confirms that you don’t, you can load the game. Except that Battlefield then doesn’t load the game – instead it opts to fire up your web browser and takes you to a website EA calls the Battlelog, some people have called it Facebook For Murderers, others ‘one of the worst ideas in video game history’. Your web browser will be as unprepared as you for Battlelog, forcing you to install two plugins for your web browser to continue. Now so far in this review I’ve talked about what you do when you first play Battlefield 3; I’m going to talk about what I did for a moment: At this point in the process I turned to my one, solitary friend on Origin, who was playing Battlefield 3 at the time, and complained about the validation shit. I said, “all I want to do is shoot cunts!” He laughed and responded with “I hope you like dying.” Now at the time I thought this was just him shit-talking my gaming skills, but in reality it was an ominous warning of what was to come. Battlefield 3 is a game about dying. Continue reading “Battlefield 3” →

Spyborgs

If there’s one thing every video game could be improved with, it’s mayor Mike Haggar from Capcom’s very own Final Fight. Even the crappiest of games would become instant stunner deals (Streetwise never happened) with his inclusion. Just… pile-driving everything non-stop. For example, imagine Data Design re-releasing Billy the Wizard as Mike Haggar the Wizard. He’d spin that entire castle right into the Earth’s core, before beating up on some garbage bins to restore his stamina with filthy, discarded roast chicken.Sadly, Spyborgs has a distinct lack of Haggar, but it is at least in the same genre as Final Fight. Side-scrolling beat ’em ups are a rarity in this day and age; especially ones that actually make it to retail. This final product is actually nothing like Bionic Games’ original vision for the title. It was initially unveiled as a ‘comedy’ adventure inspired by early 90s cartoons and what looked to be rather large bags of steaming horse urine. Thanks to a huge amount of internet backlash, Spyborgs’development went into chaos and somehow mutated into this no-nonsense, bog-standard brawler.

There’s a story, but it’s not very important and rarely ever gets in the way (this is a good thing). Essentially, someone’s being a dickhead and it’s up to the remaining members of the ‘Spyborg Initiative’ to save the day. See, just how much cooler would that have been as the ‘Haggar Initiative’? You better believe there’d be chest hair everywhere. Alas, there are three characters here, each with their own strengths and weaknesses (urr hurr no way) – a quick but fairly weak ninja, a slow but insanely powerful robot, and some guy with a gun fused to his arm to impress the ladies. While Spyborgs is best played with a friend in co-op, each stage will always have two of the three playable characters in action during single player. The CPU does its best to help out as the second player, and you can freely switch between the two at any time.

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Mario’s Cement Factory

Before he became a plumber to partake in typical plumber-like duties such as punching bricks, crushing turtles, crotch-polishing flagpoles and breaking into castles to let off fireworks, Mario owned a cement factory. True story. He made sure to let people know it was his, calling it Mario’s Cement Factory. This wasn’t a joint business venture with his brother – no, this was all Mario. Presumably Luigi just owned a gun, which he’d point towards the back of his trembling mouth each and every night.

Mario’s Cement Factory is one of those few Game & Watch games re-released through the DSiWare service. I like the idea of having these available for 200 Points ($3 something in Kangaroo money) a pop, but also lay awake in bed at night with the thought of never getting another awesome Game & Watch Gallery cartridge compilation ever again. This is a faithful replica of the original 1983 LCD handheld, and as far as Game & Watch games go, it’s probably one of the more hectic.

For whatever reason, Mario’s decided to do this all by himself. Conveyor belts dump bags of cement into chutes on both sides of the screen non-stop. As the company was put together with a budget of fifty seven cents, these have to be manually emptied and can only hold three bags at a time before the entire factory comes to a grinding halt. Naturally, arriving at this dreadful situation kills Mario and perhaps the universe itself.

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Steel Diver

Steel Diver – what a history this game has. It started out as a tech demo at E3 2004 for the original DS, and quickly became a game everyone wanted to be real. In a time when Nintendo was criticised for their apparent lack of new franchises, this game was labeled unique, old-school, complex, and refreshing all at the same time, and had hardcore gamers foaming at the mouth. “Submarine Tech Demo” was used in message board arguments around the world to illustrate what Nintendo “should” be doing.

Fast forward to 2011, and the game has finally been released as Steel Diver on 3DS, with fully fleshed out levels and modes, on a brand new console with updated graphics, and a third dimension added. Nintendo fans and the press were set to go absolutely BALLISTIC over this game, everything they wanted was finally here, and to top it off, it was a launch title for a brand new system. However, something was wrong. The game received no hype, no coverage, and nobody bought it. Was the game bad? It was covered so poorly, you probably don’t know anything about it. That’s why I’m here. I’m going to tell you ALL about Steel Diver, so sit back and enjoy another Pietriots review with your favourite beverage.

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escapeVektor – Chapter 1

escapeVektor is a new game on WiiWare from Australian developers Nnooo. It’s hard to compare to anything because this is a brand new gameplay concept. It’s like Pac-Man, with cannons, switches, boosting, scoring depth, and a personality. The concept has you controlling Vektor, a human who somehow got converted to computer code and is now stuck inside a CPU with no memories left, except his ability to code, of course. Now you have to capture cells in each level to escape the CPU and figure out what’s going on. escapeVektor is an intense, engaging gameplay experience that nobody should miss out on.

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Bejeweled 2+Blitz

Imagine a game that took pity on you. The game knew you were down on your luck, you didn’t really know what you were doing. That things weren’t working out with your new girlfriend and you felt you couldn’t relate to friends anymore and your self esteem was at an all time low. A game that would let you sleep with her win. After the mild exhileration you felt worse afterwards. Bejeweled 2+Blitz is such game.

Bejeweled
Bejeweled makes a big fuss out of the most minor of achievements in an attempt to improve your sense of self worth.

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Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom

The Forsaken Kingdom is a land that’s been taken over by darkness for 100 years. Water is disappearing, trees are dying, and the great guardian Majin has been held captive by dark soldiers. As a thief, it’s your job to save the Majin, then travel the land searching for the great fruit needed to restore the giant Majin’s powers to what they once were. It’s the only hope against the darkness.

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Mortal Kombat

After decades of a romantic courtship, the relationship between shock fighter Mortal Kombat and the censorship prone Australian Classification board ended in a messy breakup earlier this year, resulting in the refusal to classify the game, effectively banning it. While rumours were abound that customs would seize any copies imported from overseas, my housemate James courageously decided that he was going to import the game. While I suspect he had little to no interest in the game before it was banned he is the kind of person who thought that Mortal Kombat Annhilation was a good movie. Anyway I’ve taken to recording James’ comments while he plays the game because I think he has a lot of good stuff to share. Continue reading “Mortal Kombat” →