The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

[Shapermc]

[Shapermc]

[Tim]

[silentmatt]

[SuperWes]

[dessgeega]

so i got the chance to play elebits. it is really swell. though i'm not sure if i like stages requiring me to keep quiet when i just want to toss things around.

i beat the first "boss". uh, what do i do next?
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[Shapermc]

The stages with "limits" aren't actually as limiting as you would think at first. If you just play the level a little more carefully you'll probably finish it. Hell, on the sound ones I don't even pay attention and I still pass those.

Next, you throw a trailer home!
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dessgeega]

so the black elebits are really really cute, but a terrible idea. i hate that the game becomes more and more about tiptoeing around trying not to break things or make too much noise or wake up spiky death creatures or dodge frigging tanks when all i want to do is throw furniture around. i get the impression the developers came up with this really neat physics toy and had no idea how to make it into a game.

the red elebits are cutest of all, however. it breaks my heart when they cry.
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[dessgeega]

played super monkey ball. the jump key, at least so far, feels like something that didn't really need to be added. also, boss battles (huh?). the stages are awfully flat for a game that gives you more vertical mobility than any other one in the series.

it's sort of like mawashite koron, though, in that though i admire an earlier game's striking level design, the newer title has a more appropriate control scheme that makes it worth playing. (have i mentioned lately that snes cameltry is amazing?)

anyway, i'm probably going to import kororinpa when the wii freeloader is released.
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[dessgeega]

okay, so, i got a game over and tried to start over at the beginning of the "world". it wouldn't let me pick the first stage until i held B, and then it made me play the stage over and over until i reset the game. (there's no pause button on this thing?)

it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that i prefered just picking one of the sets of stages (beginner, expert, superduper expert) and playing through as far as i could on one credit. monkey ball wii wants you to just play the stage you're up to over and over until you get it, game-overs be damned. maybe some of you don't see that as a flaw, but what's the purpose of one-ups when there are no real gameovers?

although - monkey wii's stages are longer than the original's, which seemed to each be based around a single element or trick, and could be completed within seconds once you'd mastered them. i'm not crazy about wii's stages. i'm especially not crazy about the enemies who wander them at random, bumping you off.

monkey frisbee golf is impossible.
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[Ethoscapade]

dess, your monkeyball impressions more or less confirm the things i feared all along.

oh well. i'll still be playing it at some point this week or next; home for the holidays = back to work at gamestop and that means free "rentals" of our stock (the company actually endorses this).

are trauma center or excite truck worth trying out? i'm almost definitely going to play monkeyball (still my favorite cube game) and elebits, but the in-store demo of excite truck made me feel as though any supposed underappreciation might as well pale in comparison to f-zero gx anyway. trauma center, meanwhile (my favorite game on the ds!) just seems unnecessary. but eh.

[a_plus]

wait, wii monkey ball had a jump BUTTON? you can't just flick the controller to jump? that seems odd to me.
i mean, hey, kirby tilt 'n' tumble did that.

[dessgeega]

yeah, the jump button is weird. it feels totally antithetical to the purity of the first game, where if you were intended to jump there'd just be a slope with a high-speed bump at at the end to send you sailing through the air. jumping is a really big thing to add to the formula, but the stages don't really do all that much with it, so it just feels like excess baggage. i imagine that speedrunners will be able to exploit it like crazy though.

[dessgeega]

played tony hawk's downhill shennanigans. it's an actually pretty successful reformulation of tony hawk that ends up being sort of like ssx, obnoxious character designs and all. but custom skaters is where it's at anyway. the game is divided into events, each of which has a single goal (trick, slalom, race, destroy property) on a stretch on one of the game's downhill courses. eventually you get to do big ole races down the entire course. there's a lot more racing than in any other tony hawk (in any tony hawk?), because the downhill downhill always downhill lends well to it, and makes the game a lot more focused on the whole. oh, and it's apparently by toys for bob, who developed star control! how about that!
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[Nana Komatsu]

I watched someone play this at the mall a few weeks ago and thought that I wouldn't be able to handle watching Tony Hawk become a racing game after the greatness of the original few games, atlthough a reboot is probably better than the mess I've heard the most recent games are.

[dessgeega]

holy shit excite truck.

excite truck is seriously fucking great. it's kind of obnoxious that you need to complete the first part of the tutorial before single-player is unlocked, but you ought to have the controls explained to you before playing. yeah, this game is hot. relation to excite bike: it's all about positioning your vehicle, especially in midair, and carefully balancing your use of boosts. but fuck, this game is fast. crashes are barely penalized, which is great, and points are awarded for a stupid amount of things, including crashing nicely. the turbo jump (hit the boost button after leaving the ground to soar through the air at high speed) is fantastic. and flying through the air, twisting sideways, and landing sideways on the wall of a clift and turboing along it is amazing. this is a great game. it's probably the first wii title since wii sports to seriously impress me in its execution.
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[Nana Komatsu]

[dessgeega]

almost!
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[Mister Toups]

[player 2]

[Mister Toups]

[Shapermc]

[Shapermc]

Shortly after the holidays I did something I haven’t done since… well, since the N64: I bought a sports game. Granted, it was for the Wii and it is a fantasy themed Golf game (not a very serious and “real” sports game), but it is still the first time I have done this since someone duped me into buying Mario Golf for the N64. Super Swing Golf is the single player console version of PangYa! Golf: a Korean MMOGolfPG. Online multiplayer has been replaced with a sappy crappy story mode for single player, but all the obsessive compulsive aspects of an MMO should translate well over to a single player golf game, and considering the controller, you can’t really go wrong with the developer’s first attempt on a console.

I only got to play with the game for about an hour last night, but my impressions aren’t that high. Long load times combined with what appears to be crappy widescreen makes the poor implementation of the story very irritating and nearly painful to watch. But, seriously, it’s Golf. Do we care about the story at all? I don’t.

Anyways, the game is a mixed bag. The controls don’t feel very natual because I don’t seem to get any feedback on what I’m doing wrong. The only indicator for if you’re hooking or slicing is the bar at the bottom of the swing screen, but you can’t really see it if you’re swinging the club right because it’s gone by the time you look at the screen. The camera movement feels pretty wedged into the game: it makes due with the controls but it’s highly imprecise. Reading the green is also very difficult because the game divides the green into blocks which show the slope of the ground, but the way they display it is just a dot on the grid showing the slant. The main problem with this is that if there is shade over the green then you can hardly see these indicators because they’re about the same color. Combine that with imprecise camera and you have mild frustration and irritation.

Swinging is great though. It feels much more like golf than on Wii sports. I would relate it to more how bowling feels like in Wii Sports: i.e. it judges things that you can’t really put your finger on which accurately reflects how you are playing. It’s also got nearly 1:1 movement for the swing arc. The only difference is that there’s a slight delay which I assume is the game judging/processing your swing.

As far as difficulty goes, well I either suck at golf or the game is a fair bit more difficult than I would expect for a fantasy themed golf game. Both of these are likely possible. I got my butt kicked on the first round of the “story mode” and two times in a row on the second match. I only got about an hour in with the game, but it feels like it may demand more knowledge of golf than a non-golfer may have.

All the other things are here: purchasing clubs, balls, clothes, caddies, and apparel. They do it through Pang points which you earn for many different things all related to playing golf. You get the most by completing challenges in the story mode, so spending time there will net you much more Pang more quickly. While the game started as an MMO golf game in Korea, this sort of customization and obsessive compulsive attitude works really well with a single player story based game as well. Though… I do kind of wish there wasn’t a story and you could play online.

The big problem: there is only one save game at a time. So you can’t have two players playing the game on different save customizing their characters using their money. It would have to be a pot of money which you would have to share with other housemates which will/could/probably will result in stealing and aggravation. The addition of more than one save per console would have been a huge benefit for this style of game with such a level of personalization.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Cycle]

Wii Play

I got Wii Play for christmas, mainly for the extra remote.

FUN FACT: In australia, buying Wii Play with a remote is cheaper than buying a remote on its own in some stores, so people like my friend have three copies of this game. It's literally a free game. In fact, it's a MINUS free game, since they basically give you some money back! So maybe it's plus free. Whatever, I guess.

Anyway, it's pretty neat, but nowhere near the level of Wii Sports. It feels too empty and lacks real depth and options, and feels too much like a remote training program than a real collection of games (which, in reality, it is). The games, especially in single-player, feel like minigames that you would find in something bigger, unlike Wii Sports which actually feels pretty complete.

For example, I was dissapointed to find that when you play table tennis solo, the goal is to rally the ball 100 times rather than the game pitting you against an AI opponent. If they actually had a proper opponent ready, and each game had a couple mission modes like the 100 rally thing which you can earn medals in, it would have been great and this collection would have been closer to Wii Sports standards.

I like the Wheres Wally game, although it got confusing because of all the fricking Hitlers and Christs in my mii parade. Hey guys, get original! Oh! And I really like that when you do the rally challenge in ping pong, as you do better you slowly attract a bigger crowd. Nice touch!

Let me do a little summary of each game. The shooting game is a really nice Duck Hunt homage, even if you only hear the dog rather than see him (and his bark hints that a duck is about to fly onscreen) and is fun in both solo and two-player (but obviously more fun with two). I only wish it had more modes or was longer, it's really fun. I look foward to the first lightgun game on the wii!

The Where's Wally game is also pretty rad. Basically, the game gives you a task and you have to spot one or more Miis in a crowd. You may have to find a certain face, three of a kind, the fastest moving, etc. There are a couple different scenerios they throw at you and in combination with the different mission types, it's pretty fun. I play this one on my own, but it's also great in two-player. Again, I wish it had more modes or a better scoring mode, rather than just different medals. I want to do time attack, for example!

The bubble game is boring, tedious and long. It's just not fun at all. My brother and I forced ourselves to finish it, and even quit the first time to go do something else.

I already talked about ping pong, but it's pretty fun in two player. It's not as close a representation of the sport as Wii Sports tries, but it still does a pretty good job and is lots of fun.

Billiards is ok, it plays pretty much like Virtual Pool which I played years ago on the mac. The interface could have been a little better, but over all it did a pretty good job, even if I think it shouldn't hold the cue straight for you when you take a shot plus sometimes it's difficult to control the power of your shot, but maybe we just need more practice like with some of the Wii Sports titles. I've never played the included game type, but I don't like it that much and wished it included a couple others, or just 8 ball.

There is a trippy version of pong also included, which... plays like pong except you can move your paddle forward, backward and change the angle of it. I love the graphics, not as impressive as plasmapong though. A fun little one, this is. It seems the puck moves faster over time though, rather than depending on how hard you hit it, but I have to double check that. Minus points if that is the case.

Fishing looks great, with its paper cut-out visuals, but it plays a little iffy. It's not bad, I just expected something a little closer to... fishing. This is arcade fishing, though, and it's fairly fun with two players.

The cow racing game is pretty hilarious, it really feels like you're trying to handle an (almost) out of control steer as it rages down the track. You hold the wiimote on the side and it works really well for this game. However, again, I wish there were more options to make it more like an actual racing game, rather than a "hit more scarecrows than the other player" game.

The final game is a Combat clone, which is pretty neat. You can either use a single wiimote and aim with the motion detector and steer with the digital pad, or you can use the better option and use a nunchuck to control the movement while aiming with the sensor. This is a pretty fun game, which involves taking out all the tanks in the level either on your own or with a friend. As level has a new layout and the tanks get tougher as it goes on. While this mode is fun, it's surprising they didn't have a deathmatch option. Imagine four-player wii combat! It would have been awesome.

But yes, the games are fun but a lack of depth and options means you won't be playing this on your own too much, and while it's a blast in two-player, it's really just something to put on when you feel like giving Wii Sports a rest, but I can hardly fault it since it's a freebie. It's entertaining enough in solo and quite a good blast in two-player to warrant a copy and the games on show give a good idea of some of the crazy ideas we may see in future Wii titles. It's just that, with even just a little more time and effort, this could have been much more.

EDIT: Dess just told me that americans don't get this game until feb next year! Weird, it was a launch title here. We won't get elebits or excitetruck for sometime, though. And we probably won't get the plush elebit pre-order bonus
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[Shapermc]

After another hour with Super Swing Golf I like it a bit more. The game has a learning curve much like golf does I imagine. It takes a bit of getting use to but I beat the tar out of some more people, bought some more clothes and a new ball. I still need to work on technique and all that, but it's not as tough as I thought it was the other night. Also I learned that it isn't a 16:9 widescreen game, which helped because now I'm not watching it stretched.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dmauro]

cross-post about super swing golf:
I got this for Christmas, and was really excited about it after getting so into Wii Golf, but after doing the tutorial I'm not too excited. If I wind up all the way for a swing, it doesn't register correctly and jumps to about 20% power, so I can only go up to maybe parallel to my shoulders. And then the swing through seems to make it too easy to get pangya. I was really into the system that wii golf had where you had to practice how much force you needed. I'm not too into the green's grid system either. It's not visually intuitive like a topographic display is. And I liked having the birds eye view of the course overlayed at all times in Wii Golf as well. So really it's striking out for me at first glance, but I'll give it a go in the main game and see what I think.

[SuperWes]

Just tried out Super Swing Golf without reading these impressions. It's pretty shitty! I'm really surprised at how difficult it is, and not in a good way. You're pretty much forced to play at Par level if you want to be able to beat even the second opponent. They don't seem to rubberband the AI at all in the early levels, meaning they want to be great right from the start.

Putting takes forever to plan and isn't as intuitive as Hot Shots, and the game isn't streamlined at all. They make you wait for your opponent to hit the ball, watch it go through the air, and land before you can even do anything, making the game one of almost as much waiting as it is playing. When it actually becomes your turn, every shot pretty much requires you to press the 1 button twice to go to the overhead view and line up your shot, press the - button to clear out of the camera view, press the B button to enter swing view, then move the remote back, press the A button to tell it you're ready to swing, then swing. It's incredibly overcomplicated! And the putting makes you closely examine even more screens just to see if you're putting uphill or not.

It makes me respect the Hot Shots and Mario Golf games that much more. If anyone's genuinely enjoying Super Swing Golf, I highly recommend trying out one of those.

Hopefully it'll be better in multiplayer and the whole thing won't feel like a wasted Christmas Gift.

-Wes
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[dessgeega]

so i've cleared every course in excite truck. they get more awesome as they get harder, which is great. excite truck is probably best understood as a stunt game that takes place during a race, with winning the race being just one possible stunt. i find scoring points more compelling than finishing in top places, and it also means there are many more options for completing each course.

it's too bad it's harder to navigate courses without crashing in multiplayer because of the split-screen. but the easier courses are still pretty great to play.

i have come to like truck throws a lot. it's fantastic that the game scores them, since they're based on the totally videogamey premise that touching a magic icon can make the world change shape. and it's incredible to watch all the trucks in front of you flip into the air, smash into the side of a bridge and fly to pieces.

get an s grade in every course to unlock super excite mode!!
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[dessgeega]

okay, i just got an s grade in every course and unlocked super excite mode.

have i mentioned this is a good game?
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

Obviously not enough times.
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[dessgeega]

excite truck is a good game, rero.
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[Cycle]

but is it as good as motorstorm!

i just realised i watched a motorstorm video ages ago and was looking forward to trying it. I hope it's as rad as it looked. same with excite truck!

curse you, pitiful aussie line-up.
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

Yeah like, what the hell, why haven't we got ExciteTruck?
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[Cycle]

not till feb fucking twenty second.

no elebits till april!

we need the wii freeloader (wiiloader) NOW.
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[dessgeega]

[12:41:23 AM] somerez says: yeah the wii lineup here sucks
[12:41:30 AM] somerez says: no wonder it didnt sell as well here as the rest of the world
[12:41:50 AM] somerez says: bring on the wii freeloader, i say
[12:42:07 AM] anna says: they should call it the wiiloader
[12:42:10 AM] anna says: i would buy ten
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[Nana Komatsu]

I still can't get over "it's a wii, wario!"

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

I have.
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[Nana Komatsu]

Well that's good for you!

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

Yes it is.
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[dessgeega]

i still think it's fabulous.
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[Cycle]

hey rero, have you found those episodes of the zone yet? if you send them to me I'll turn them into computer files and give you some money for the trouble of finding them.
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[Cycle]

Let me emphasise just how terrible the Aussie Wii line-up is:

Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam
Open Season
Splinter Cell
Marvel Ultimate Alliance
Happy Feet
Madden
Need For Speed Carbon
Spongebob

The launch titles were:

Call Of Duty 3
Super Monkey Ball
Zelda
Rayman
Cars
Red Steel
Monster 4x4 World Circuit (includes steering wheel)

So like half our library is shitty licensed games.
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[dessgeega]

[Cycle]

That would be great, unfortunately it's one of the crappy licensed games. Happy Feet is an Australian CG animated feature that will probably end up on your shores soon, if not already.

I wish I knew how to give good massages. It's a good thing I'm so incredibly handsome, so it doesn't matter that much.
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[dessgeega]

i give great massages

ladies
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[player 2]

[Cycle]

I'm thinking about picking up Downhill Jam, but I have little interest in Madden since I don't even know what the actual sport is called. I just know that it's not as violent and fast as our version of football. Apparently. Super Monkey Ball, I'm not really that interested, I had my fill of that with the first game... and I have Zelda. I might pick-up Rayman, but I'm dissapointed there isn't any decent single-player games coming out for awhile. I'm not going to have much to do after Zelda, it seems!
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

[dessgeega]

tony hawk's single-player totally exists just to unlock stuff for multi-player. the wii is definitely a multiplayer-focused console, with the exception of zelda (which is a gamecube game, after all). it's definitely not a machine to play when no other people are around.
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