The Gamer's Quarter

[kirkjerk]

So I got Smooth Moves.

It's decent. I'm a little bummed that it's closer to a GBA WarioWare than the GC version in terms of sorta lackluster multiplayer support. Sometimes I almost think Nintendo is trying too hard to seperate WarioWare from Mario Party.

It's interesting that the Wiimote is by and large a superset of all the Nintendo handhelds' controls, including the DS... like with Mario Party, you find yourself wishing for a kind of "Ultimate" version containing every game from the previous titles, rather than just cameos... though running into the WarioWare twisted microgame set was pretty amusing in a postmodern sort of way.

The minigames (as opposed to the microgames, longer challenges that you gradually unlock) are fairly compelling and innovative, especially the one where you have to catch and balance lightly physic-y blocks... very nice and Zen. But I find myself longing for the "toys" of Twisted; I think that remains the champ of the series, especially considering it's such an elegant and imaginative use of what is essentially a single mechanic.

Some of the microgames are such that you don't know what exactly the controller is reading... but in practical terms, it's good to figure out when you actually need to be pointing at the sensor bar. I still kind of long for "honest" 3D triangulation with the controllers, I don't know if that's feasible though, just because of the physics and limts of timing circuitry involved.

As always, it's 9volts retro-levels that I find the most compelling. There's just something about the slicing and dicing of previous titles that I find very compelling, kind of a reward for being a Nintendo player for 2 decades or so. Especially because the Wii is powerful enough to excerpt GameCube and N64 titles...

Still, the crowning glory of 9volt for Smooth Moves has to be the Star Fox boss level. The boss waving around a Nintendo lightgun is just too cute... and I think the control scheme is much closer to where Miyamoto et al wanted it to go. (Side thought: could there be a market for VC-ish remixes of old titles, improving the control scheme when it makes sense to?) I was bummed in 2 ways by the sound effects; one is while they got the communicator beep-in noise they don't have the character's gibberish-speak, and I would have loved to hear that announcer ghosty "Good Luck" in it.

So, a good game, and culturally/design/wacky compelling for casual gamers in a way Wii Sports isn't...closer to Rayman in that regard. Still I'm waiting for multiplayer to really kick into gear on this system. Wii Tennis, that one Rayman sliding / curling battle, and a few Monkey Ball games (quite a few of which sound better on paper than in person) are the only justification for having 4 Wii-motes at this time. (And then I gotta figure out if I can buy "Play" without getting a Wiimote...)
_________________
=/ \(<D)_/
==/\/ >_ kirkjerk.com

[dessgeega]

[kirkjerk]

[Nana Komatsu]

Oh god do I want this game ;_;
_________________
resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[dessgeega]

[Ethoscapade]

dess, out of curiosity did this article of yours talk about rhythm tengoku at all? because popular appreciation for twisted notwithstanding, now that i've finally played rt it feels more like warioware than any of the sequels, and i like it almost as much.

[kirkjerk]

[dessgeega]

[kirkjerk]

[dessgeega]

i'd say each iteration of the series is made up in equal parts of games which are common to the series (haircut, push-ups, weightlifter) refitted for the new input device and games which were made just because they were so logical given that particular input device (gravity-altering games in twisted). though frequently the latter games will be added to the former category in a subsequent release.
_________________

[kirkjerk]

[dmauro]

How does the multiplayer work?

[aerisdead]

Mostly, you take turns.
_________________
aerisdead

[Harveyjames]

I hear there's a two-player game in WW:SM featuring two runners running down a track, who I think are shackled together somehow. You each control a different runner, one player holding the nunchuck and one holding the remote. Each has to jump when their runner nears a pothole. Looks fun!

[Nana Komatsu]

[Harveyjames]

Yeah, I liked the announcer. Apparently they got a Canadian guy to do it, in Japanese. It made me feel like I was watching a fucked up TV show. A bit like Tetra's Trackers.

Doods. Tetra's Trackers is amazing so you know. It's a show you watch on TV and it's a Zelda game at the same time. There's really nothing else I've seen like it that mixes those two entertainment mediums in such an amazing and successful way.

Having said that no-one would ever play it with me twice because they didn't understand it and found it the most baffling experience of their lives.

[david]

I got Wario Ware a couple days ago and I find it distinctly less charming than the two Game Boy games (haven't played the DS or Cube versions).

First, the handheld games had this really charming campy toy-ness to them. It was partially to do with the scale. On the TV, all the wackiness is just too big and noisy for me. The movies for each character were always kind of cute before, but now I feel like I'm watching an inane, bombastic kid's show. It doesn't help that the first time through you can't skip them --- the first fifteen minutes I spent with the game were mostly taken up with watching dumb movies! The introductions of the forms slow things down even more. Yeah, I know they have to make each one understood, but it was another super-smug-in-its-wackiness thing I had to watch when I wanted to play. And they're deliberately sluggish, with that droning voice. It reminded me of the "Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy" thing they used to do on Saturday Night Live, but not funny (correct me if I'm wrong to remember Deep Thoughts as funny).

The inclusion of so many forms is a good way to use the remote's versatility, but it also compromises one of Wario Ware's best gimmicks, namely how it uses very simple and restricted inputs to perform a huge range of actions that one would normally never expect to find in a video game. The original game was a brilliant and affectionate tribute and testament to video games as a form, suggesting in its manic way that anything was possible. In Smooth Moves, the player's vocabulary is vastly expanded, so there isn't the same wit found in doing a lot with a little. Beyond that, it's often very predictable what game will show up once the form is announced. I know if it shows me the "discard" form (which instructs you to put the controller down and pick it up at the right moment), it's probably going to be the microgame where you answer the phone. The microgame collection is effectively split up into all these categories, making the selection feel far less diverse and surprising.

Finally, the controls are inconsistent. There's a form which might be called The Dumbell, or something else, but basically you hold your fist out palm-up like you're going to lift a dumbell. And sure enough, there's a microgame where you do just that. I lifted that thing three times and it only registered the first! I'm moving my arm, and nothing is happening on the screen! I'm staring at a totally static drawing of an arm, not moving. I'm going to give the hardware the benefit of the doubt and assume I was maybe lifting faster than I was supposed to. But there's nothing in the game to tell me that! Another example: one of the boss levels has you deflecting katana slashes with your own sword, Red Steel-style. The form is "The Boxer," which means hold your fist out in front of you, remote perpindicular to your arm, palm down. As soon as the game starts, though, the arm on the screen, holding a sword, is rotated the other way, palm up! And when I turn my wrist, the movement is very inconsistent. The arm on the screen "pops" from a palm-up position to palm-down, like it has no idea which way I'm holding the controller. If I hadn't lost that game four or five times already, it would be less annoying.
_________________

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

the toys are brilliant. providing we're talking about twisted.

my father imed me this morning to say he bought this game off amazon, so i guess i'll be playing it soon.
_________________

[Nana Komatsu]

I didn't realize that each set of minigames (per character) would have a different control form because I've only played Touched and as Shaper said, they are all virtually the same.

I am still eagerly anticipating this game!
_________________
resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Shapermc]

[kirkjerk]

[dessgeega]

the "each character is based around a different mechanic" thing is actually really smart, the games in touched are just too similiar. in twisted (which is the first warioware to organize them like that) it works wonderfully, partially because of the strength of the mix games that become available at the end.

apple hun is excellent. that's one of the smartest things twisted does, i think: make the more compelling five-second microgames available as longplay score- or endurance-based games. also, laser cat.

and the record-scratching is pretty cool. though the best part about the records is listening to the mona pizza song.
_________________

[dmauro]

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

How premodern.
_________________

[Shapermc]

[kirkjerk]

[kirkjerk]

[dessgeega]

i think the phone numbers are great.

i've gotten 100% completion (minus the final unlockable) on both the japanese and american versions of twisted.
_________________

[jdoe]

What is the final unlockable in Twisted?

[kirkjerk]

[dessgeega]

you only get phone numbers after you've exhausted all possible toys you can get from a character. so don't think of them as poor substitutes for rewards so much as a never-ending source of easter eggs. it's a much better alternative to the machines just drying up and never giving anything else.

some of them are pretty cute, funny and / or unnerving.
_________________

[Shapermc]

Well, Smooth Moves ended both better and worse than I expected.

It was shorter than both GBA games it seemed, but that's ok because the ending isn't the "end" as much as it is just letting you know when the other stuff starts. You get two more characters after the end which just don't use the standard rules, so it made sense where they put the credits.

I think there are only six games to unlock, which is quite disappointing because some of them I don't want to play very long, if at all. Two of them are very great though and will get a lot of time out of me.

Then the game both shines and mocks itself with the thrilling (Green Elephant) tower because it removes the intro instruction of how to hold the "form baton" and works so much better for it. I wasn’t on board with the complaints about showing the forms until the game showed me that the whole game could be done w/o them.

Also the Smooth Moves/Rhythm Tengoku Wii thread (the movie) ruins the end of the game, and arguably the best boss/micro game: Don’t go to that thread.

The worst offense of the game is that they removed medals. After unlocking all the towers (easier than I thought it would be) I went in to start medaling and… I can’t seem to see how to do it.

The game is a step up from Touched! for sure, but no where near the original two GBA games. This game feels like a brief touch with something that could have been good/better. Arm wrestling your Mii friends is fantastic (I beat tablesaw last night), but the pseudo-real graphics at points really stand out as the opposite of what the series is aiming at. The removal of the form positions would have made this game really good, and the inclusion of medals would have extended the game beyond a two evening affair, but as it stands the game isn’t all that great.

So, it’s final, I’m going to have to import Rhythm Tengoku.
_________________
“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]

medalling just did not work in the warioware games. who wants to play each of a hundred microgames twenty times in a row just to unlock a single toy? it works in rhythm tengoku mostly because the individual stages there are the game, not just five-second fragments of one, and partly because you unlock lots of different stuff over the course of medalling the entire game, so rewards are frequent rather than distant.
_________________

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

well, that solution requires making a lot of additional content. and it still doesn't solve the fact that these games which are meant to be randomly strung into an ongoing test of recognition and reflexes just aren't interesting individually, repeated over and over twenty times.

i think it might be best that they just dropped it.
_________________

[kirkjerk]

[kirkjerk]

[Nana Komatsu]

I have a copy of this game now! But I still don't have a Wii. ;_;
_________________
resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

so i've been playing warioware wii. i just cleared (SPOILERS) jimmy p.!!!! initial impressions:

i've been playing sitting down, since the vast majority of the games don't seem to care whether i'm sitting or standing. then every so often a game will come up that assumes i'm standing, and i will usually flounder. i guess i should try playing standing, but it seems needless for most of the game.

the games i've unlocked so far are really great. the tower game is very nice (though i suspect i would have preferred some ongoing stacking-ever-higher game to a stage-based one) and barrel shooter is fantastic (when you get the lock-on powerup it's panzer dragoon wii again). i like tower tennis a lot. it's sort of like an auto-scrolling devilish with gravity. or just scrolling arkanoid.

the form cards are fabulous. they are really good. and jimmy t.'s movie is adorable, as well the parallel later on. i like the way the game integrates miis (particularly my own). i don't like that mona went from rock star to cheerleader (or that her boss stage is gender roles: the game).

"it's a wii, wario" is still the most clever fucking thing ever.
_________________

[kirkjerk]

[dessgeega]

i've now unlocked everything except the very last thing.

okay, playing standing up is a lot better. though a lot of games don't seem to require it, by the end they come often enough to justify being on your feet. the game really comes together once you've unlocked all the games - it's the diversity of play mechanics that really makes the game work. that's why i disagree that the mix which doesn't give you a form demonstrates that the game would work better without them - most of the more interesting / amusing forms in the game don't appear in it.

yes, the final boss is amazing. the kelerometer is great too.

best staff roll ever. and the music hall is fabulous.

and balloon trip. ballon fight theme remix and videogame sunset are both things that i live for. there are only six (i'm assuming) unlockable games in this warioware, but they're all excellent.

and "strike a pose" is the best between-level interlude in the series so far. so this is a strong episode in the series. i havn't tried multiplayer yet, but i probably will soon.
_________________

[kirkjerk]

[david]

Perhaps I was overly harsh with this game before. It's about what I should have expected. I still find the handheld versions more charming, but this game is all right. It's definitely better with a friend... I confess I'd been playing it by myself in an irritable mood... not exactly ideal conditions!

The controls for some games still seem really unreliable. Maybe it's just a problem of the design not giving me all the info I need to execute something properly, so it doesn't work and I'm just sitting there like a fool going, "but I fucking WAS swinging it like a baton!!!"

As much as the Wii remote can enhance the connection to the game, when it fails, it fails big time. There's a much smaller difference between hitting a button and getting no response than flailing your arm around and getting no response.
_________________

[dessgeega]

also: the swordfighting boss makes me want a swordfighting wii game.

and: the "drop" game is wonderfully psychological. it can be really hard to let go. and is a really good deterrent to not wearing the wrist strap.
_________________

[kirkjerk]

[david]

You can navigate the Wii Sports menus with the cross pad if the cursor isn't on the screen.
_________________

[kirkjerk]

[Nana Komatsu]

I have been playing this for the last four hours and I really like it.

I think the form introductions are hilarious. They have that deadpan tranquility (like the main character from Perfect Hair Forever) that totally cracks me up.

I can see where the control issues that others were having come from, but really they've mostly been limited to a few specific minigames for me. There are a few where I'm not quite sure what movement I'm making is corresponding to the action on the screen, but when I went back and played them again most made more sense.

I am sad there is no more Mona Pizza but at least she's still driving the kickass scooter!
_________________
resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people