Game Play Quickies: Big Willy, The Force Unleashed Demo, Zak & Wiki and Tenchu

Generally when you're sick, if you aren't watching Robin Hood - you're playing games.

Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleashed (Wii)
I haven't been this wildly disappointed in a title in some time. The Girl and I are more or less fans of the series and probably would have been in line to play another one "just because" and while in general this game suffers from concepts which feel cut and pasted from the other titles - that's not the real crime here.

The real crime is that for the Wii this game was released half-cooked. The textures are simply inexcusable - sub PlayStation 2 for certain ... they'll make you wonder where your N64 controller is hiding. The HUD, and this might be some kind of odd HDTV conversion, looks miserable. There are weird additions to gameplay like hitting floating orbs to mind control which seem tacked on to appease someone who thought it would make for "good Wii play".

It's just bad, and in an cheap and ugly way.

The Force Unleashed Demo (PS3)
I think I had been warned about this in a preview - the problem with The Force Unleashed is that you'll run around slaughtering people left and right and the suddenly, jarringly, run into some boss or miniboss which gives you an absurd amount of difficulty. Even on hard I mowed down every bipedal foe in the demo except for the AT walker at the end. Which, damn you Kratos, seems to require beating up to a specific point and then engaging in some "follow the button" minigame to kill. If there was a game mechanic I wish people would think twice about using - this would be one of them.

Don't get me wrong - I'm either buying or renting this game. This is largely, though, because the Star Wars games end up being such better experiences than the movies (as the apparently wildly disappointing Clone Wars can prove). Basically if you want a good Star Wars movie these days, buy a game or call Genndy Tartakovsky.

Zak And Wiki (Wii)
Love it. Looove it. Wish I had unwrapped it when I got it so many moons ago. There's not much to say about the title since most everyone else has mooned excitedly about it - but it's an adventure title which harkens back to the good things about King's Quest with very little of the bad. Completely brilliant.

Tenchu: Wrath Of Heaven (PS2)
Remember when I bemoaned the lack of PS2 compatibility in the new PS3 models? This is the reason why. Tenchu still looks pretty decent upscaled and aside from some lingering camera issues still delivers the goods when it comes to sneaking around like a ninja, jumping on victims from above and doing very sinister animations on them.

Games That Aren't GTA IV

So the entire Internet seems to be afire with one particular acronym that needs no introduction. So allow me to buck the curve here a bit. I actually rented two game recently in the hopes that The Girl would get into them. Fortunately for her (and possibly me), I tried them out a bit first.

First up was Sims 2: Pets for the DS. We found two player Sims 2 almost strangely addictive on the PS2 ... a kind of multiplayer Animal Crossing with a lot more sex, as it were. I figure that if a game removed the coop but replaced it with a puppy that maybe everything would be OK.

What the resulting math actually turns up is a bizarre corner of the Sims world where a person lives in a tiny house, shoves animals in to a big blue container, seems to need either nap or wash a lot, and occasionally tortures the animals with horrific mini-games. There's nothing quite like spraying down some stranger's dog with a hose or trying to force a cat to do a backflip in order to really get your sadism on. In general, the normal Sims micromanagement just gets in the way and the pet mechanics are just troublesome and unrealistic.

Round two was Samurai Warriors: Katana for the Wii. Having read next to nothing about the game, I was kinda hoping for the normal Dynasty Warriors play with Wii graphics and perhaps some change up in the controls. Instead, it's basically a warped rails shooter with a sword ... a rails slasher if you will. Thanks to a weird mashing of gesture schemes the game is mostly just waving the controller around while mashing the A button. The only two player here is that exact same thing, only split screen so that it can happen for two people (separately) at once.

What's weird is that the game highlights one of the odd things about the Warriors franchise. It does a handful of things really well - like allowing you to take one hundreds of enemies, and some things really bad - like character customization, game objectives and voice acting. Katana has more pick and play potential and gold to boost your character - but nowhere to go with it afterwards. Why nobody has taken this concept and made a two player RPG with the traditional trappings still confuses me.

So we might join the HD revolution in the near future - at which point I'll probably buy GTA IV about three nanoseconds later. I'll keep you posted.

Back to those controllers...

So we've been playing on the React and Nerf controllers a bit longer. The Nerf controller has held up to its promise. Actually, The Girl tossed it across the room once and a shoulder button popped off. After a very quick bout of panic it seemed the button was rather well designed for this and we managed to simply pop it back on.

The React controller, on the other hand, has been shelved. The real problem isn't the completely useless tilt function - but rather it's almost useless wireless function. Once the controller is turned off or goes to sleep - it has one hell of a time picking up the signal again. It's not a lot of fun to return from the fridge only to have to spend a few frustrating minutes pressing various buttons and begging a controller to recognize a transmitter two centimeters away.

And I make a lot of trips to the fridge...

Last Word On The Shelf Theory

My local (suburb) Best Buy has a stack of 360 Elites right next to a stack of PlayStation 3's. By the Guitar Hero II stand, there's an equally large stack of 360 Premiums.

So whenever the blogosphere would like to begin screaming irrationally about how nobody wants the Elite, that would be fine. I'm walking away from this one now.

On a side and potentially more constructive note, I got a Nerf PS2 controller and the React PS2 motion controller (which has a tilt sensor). One of these is a really dumb idea and the other one isn't - but I'm not sure which.

Game Play: Dark Cloud 2 Final Thoughts

Dark Cloud 2 went back to GameFly in an unfinished state. That was kind of sad for me considering the number of hours I had poured into the title. Unfortunately, while so much of this game is gold, the end chapter just somewhat falls apart. All the work you've done up to a point suddently feels meaningless and you're forced to revisit all sorts of old dungeons only with hugely more difficult monsters. This means the game really, really wanted me to go and replay old levels to grind up all my weapons before advancing into the final boss fight.

In other words, not much new for a lot of work. It is a great game and has many mechanics I wish new games would steal from, but I didn't have the patience for that last push.