Author: Sean

Goldeneye

Though I’ve never been the biggest James Bond fan (they broke the mould after my namesake, Sean Connery, left the role), I did find the idea of playing a first-person action game in the fantasy spy setting appealing. Eurocom have done a pretty decent game here, though a few issues stopped me from wanting to hang onto it and I never did finish that second playthrough thanks to a really irritating last couple of levels.

The highlights are the controls, superb voice-acting, the fact that there’s an attempt at storytelling at all and the visuals. As with their other Wii highlight, Dead Space: Extraction, the facial animations are amazing and convey even subtle emotion brilliantly (take a look at the intro to the St. Petersburg Statue Park mission for a prime example).

Though there’s only a half dozen actual missions, they’re divided into a few levels each and feel fairly substantial. On the downside, one of the last: “Enter the Cradle,” is a nightmare gauntlet that will require multiple attempts even on the easiest difficulty and is challenging to the point where it’s no fun at all. Ditto the penultimate “defend the scientist” level – honestly why do designers even put these into games; does anyone actually enjoy them? I don’t mind tying mission failure to the death of an ally, but having to defend said ally against seemingly endless hordes of attackers whilst they keep moaning at you to defend them gets really old really fast.

Though the controls are good, they don’t feel as good as The Conduit, it must be said. I don’t get how I can have the “continue tracking movement if pointer off-screen” option checked and yet have attempts to look down quickly stop as if I didn’t have that selected. I suppose I might have been able to get the desired result by tweaking the dead zone more, but without the ability to test settings realtime as I could in The Conduit, it ended up feeling like a chore.

Level design is excellent, making the levels feel less linear than they are, but the AI is a bit goofy and results in some amusing moments. Even when you’re moving ever-so-slowly whilst upright you can cause a guard to turn around as you sneak up on them, but crouched you can practically circle them undetected. Likewise if your weapon is silenced you can cause untold carnage and property damage and so long as you don’t cap the guy standing next to one of his mates no one will know you’re there. In the aforementioned St. Petersburg mission there’s a bit where you can go up on the roof of a building with some baddies inside and look down through skylights at them. Now you might think that shooting out any of these windows would raise the alarm, but if your gun is silenced you can not only rain down glass on their heads but shoot them down in what would actually be plain sight of their mates without anybody so much as blinking twice. It might seem like Yahtzee-style nitpicking, but those kinds of things do tend to take me out of the game a bit.

Being a solo gamer I didn’t have a chance to try out local multiplayer – though having even a 42″ screen carved up into four doesn’t seem like it would be the best multiplayer FPS experience. Despite another concurrent Activision title, Call of Duty: Black Ops supporting the new Headbanger headset for the Wii, Goldeneye has no such support or any other method of interacting with other players during online play beyond shooting them. Playing against the equivalent of clever bots never really interested me in the early days of online multiplayer on the PC; without so much as keyboard texting available I couldn’t be bothered to do more than confirm that the online multiplayer works.

Overall this is a decent game if you’re a fan of the genre, but in all honesty I’d hold out for Conduit 2, which will support the new Headbanger headset, won’t require friend codes for voice chat and will offer both a more substantial single-player campaign, better visuals and on-the-fly control adjustments.

My Starry Night (WiiWare)

I skipped Hudson’s other non-game title, My Aquarium (mainly because I have a real one), but my interest in the heavens combined with the low price made this seem like a safe bet.

You get several fully-voiced and text-based planetarium-style star shows about the constellations and major stellar objects that easily make this worth the meager 500-point asking price, but I couldn’t help feeling like there could have been more content. There’s no DLC, but that just seems like a missed opportunity. Though there is a mode where you can highlight objects of interest to review the matching entry in the glossary it feels like My Starry Night is lacking in visual data beyond a few Hubble telescope images. Being able to view maps of our moon, Mars, Venus and other planets in the solar system as well as information about the human exploration of space would have been great and certainly worth downloading for an extra fee.

You’re getting more information than the average gadget catalogue “home planetarium” at a fraction of the cost – even if it’s not as visually impressive. If you share my interest in the night sky – and also live in an urban area where light pollution prevents you from seeing most of it, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions

I tend to avoid licensed tie-ins like the plague – especially multi-platform ones – but I was drawn to this one because I’m a fan of the classic Spider-Man comics and it looked like a quality port rather than the half-assed Wii release you’d probably expect. Having played through once I can say that whilst the game has its share of bugs (ha ha), it’s quite playable and doesn’t feel like a dumbed-down port in any way. From a story perspective the plot is as lame as the worst of shoddy comic-book crossover event stories, but what makes it fun to play is quality voice-acting and often-humourous dialogue combined with simple beat-em-up action.

The main graphical issues are those I’ve come to expect from any 3D game: namely camera glitching and the odd bit of clipping. The camera never breaks the game, but it does have an odd tendency to rotate around your character a bit when you perch on a high point for more than a couple of seconds. I did get trapped in a wall and stuck on scenery once, but I was able to resolve matters without having to restart from a previous checkpoint.

Controls are an area that is relatively trouble-free, but for the near-absence of user-definable settings. There are two control schemes which offer a choice in the method of executing normal and strong attacks. By default attack strength is tied to a tilt of the remote – not a huge deal, but there are combos that require rapid switching between strong and normal attacks and it’s nigh impossible to pull this off with any degree of consistency. The alternate control scheme offers separate buttons for strong and normal attacks, but replaces the ability to quickly block/dodge by holding/releasing a button with a toggle between offensive and defensive postures that feels awkward and decidedly less agile than Spider-Man should be. In the end I chose to suck it up and avoid combos that involved toggling between attack strengths so I could retain the ability to quickly pop in-and-out of a defencive posture. If I had the ability to remap controls I could easily have found a compromise that would have made pulling off many combos less hit-and-miss.

The game’s length feels just right with a dozen missions split between the four characters. Despite some differences between the attacks of the four heroes (and the Noir universe gameplay) there’s a lot of repetition because nearly all the bosses bar the Noir ones fling out mini-me versions of themselves to fight as fodder, revealing a lack of imagination on the part of the game designer.

What has kept Shattered Dimensions on my shelf is the great dialogue – especially Stan Lee acting as the narrator – though the one-liners peppering the fights are over-used and repeat too often, to sometimes embarassing effect. The new characters created just for this game are so well-designed and acted that you wouldn’t know they weren’t based upon a character written for one of the comics. There’s also loads of unlockables in the form of extra attacks, stat levelling and alternate costumes to justify extra replays for completists.

Whilst not as strong as Marvel Ultimate Alliance, it’s still a good bit of fun for Spider-Man fans despite the flaws. I enjoyed the cut scenes, in-game dialogue and the data files for all the characters, though I’d love to see a stronger Spider-Man game in the future which addresses the shortcomings of this one.

Batman: The Brave and The Bold, The Videogame

Hot on the heels of Spider-Man was the release of this DS/Wii-exclusive Batman game. In many ways it’s the superior game: better writing, glitchless gameplay (thanks to the old-school 2D perspective), solid controls and incredible animation-like graphics. Where it falls a bit short is length: only four episodes you can blast through in under five hours. With five characters to play as (four + Batman) and multiple weapons to level-up you’ll get some decent replay value though.

The biggest edge this game has over Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions is that dialogue between characters continues throughout each episode rather than being over-reliant upon canned one-liners for background noise. This dialogue is often amusing and keeps the game engaging despite the repetitive beat-em-up gameplay. Way Forward really did a great job here and I like the fact that the tone of the episodes is closer to the Batman Animated series from the late 70s than the darker Batman of modern cinema. For fans of classic beat-em-up action it’s not to be missed!

Fuelled by nostalgia we’re seeing a resurgence of the 2D platform game from smaller developers looking to relive the glory days of the late 8- and 16-bit eras – though thankfully they’re generally better-crafted than in the time of the “platform glut” of that era of gaming. Dreambox Games’ new WiiWare game ROBOX is one of the most recent to grace the Wii Shop, combining the open-world exploratory feel of Super Metroid with the difficulty of old-school platformers like the Super Mario series.

>In true retro fashion there’s a paucity of choices in the startup screen: start one of three possible save games (good for a household with multiple players) or view the credits. An opening text sequence introduces the story of a robot probe dropped on an alien world. Damaged in the landing, our hero – looking like a cross between a car battery and “Marvin the Paranoid Android” from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – must fend his way through assorted hostile alien lifeforms whilst trying to collect the tiny, but helpful creatures who will effect his repairs.

As befitting a game of this type the controls are very simple and use the remote on its side with buttons for jumping and shooting. Despite the use of an arm cannon to blast a few enemies, this is definitely more of a platforming game and you’ll find yourself hopping over obstacles and having to bounce vertically through mountains and trees as you explore strange alien environments.

Your overall mission is to collect tiny creatures found in globs of yellow amber scattered about the vast game world. Once you have them you’ll need to effect repairs by switching to the alternate play mode inside your robot via the “-” button. In this portion of the game you point the remote at the screen in order to select the little creatures and move them about with the d-pad. Each has different abilities you’ll need to figure out on your own, but they work together to repair damaged circuit pathways to switch on weapons and other enhancements used in the bulk of the game. You can only use each one once, meaning you’ll always be on the lookout for that next bit of amber to get something else turned on to help you reach more places in your planetary survey.

There’s a further mode of play in which you shoot bugs with the pointer during intervals where your robot travels through the trees squished into the side of a giant caterpillar, but this merely serves to break up the platforming sections from time to time. Mostly you’ll be jumping and occasionally blasting enemies in order to pick up that next little critter to try and turn on another enhancement.

If I have a serious complaint with Robox it’s the level of difficulty which symbolises pretty much everything I dislike about platforming games in general. There’s plenty of leaps of faith where you’re up in the trees and cannot necessarily see the platform you need to jump to; missing it can mean a bit of a slog before you can try again. Often you’ll need a small running start to make leaps at the limit of your abilities or there will be obstacles that inflict damage and cause you to fail a jump unless you time it just right. The frustration factor can be pretty high – especially considering you can go through some serious gaming hell only to find a bit of amber outside your reach because you haven’t gotten that extra jump boost repaired.

Checkpoints abound and save points seem nicely placed, but even so there’s a few gauntlets to run where a mistake means repetition and there’s no margin for error. Given you can only take three hits before falling to pieces (though over time you’ll be able to increase that figure) you’ll find yourself starting back at the last checkpoint a lot. You can transport between save points, but without a map your only clue of where to go next is the indicator showing the total number of amber pieces to find in any sub-level on the transport screen. You’ll have to be the kind of person who enjoys exploring just for the heck of it (and doesn’t mind respawning enemies) if you’re going to perservere.

Although I’m clearly not enamoured of the game’s genre or difficulty, what I cannot complain about is the brilliant artistic vision Robox presents. This is definitely amongst the most beautiful Wii games full-stop, with an art style clearly inspired by funky animated films like Yellow Submarine and Allegro Non Troppo. The creatures and landscapes are full of character and there are wonderful touches like butterflies flitting about. Despite terminal frustration in my time with Robox, I always enjoyed the brilliantly animated inhabitants, quality sound effects and the soundtrack.

There’s a lot of game here (and a good-looking one at that), so if you do like the old, hard-as-nails platform games of yesteryear you’ll probably get on well with this one. For novice gamers or folk who like their games less than back-breakingly challenging, tread cautiously: this one’s definitely for the core platforming crowd.

Metroid: Other M

If you’ve read this site at all you know I’m not a big fan of Nintendo’s core franchises. I haven’t played many of the original releases and I’ve not been terribly thrilled with their current incarnations on the Wii. The reason I bought a Wii is because of 3rd party content and that continues to be the bulk of my software purchases.

Nevertheless I do recognise that Nintendo puts out a quality product, so I find myself roped in by the hype that surrounds the latest entries in their long-running franchises like this new Metroid game. Moving away from the awkward first-person perspective of the Prime games was certainly a good move and gives the game broader appeal. It’s technically brilliant: the graphics are amongst the best on the Wii and it’s possibly the most cinematic experience I’ve had playing a game without feeling like a mere spectator thanks to using the d-pad to trigger fantastic dodges – replacing what would probably be a passive QuickTime event in a lesser game.

The addition of a narrative structure is also a big draw and makes Samus and her universe feel more real. Part of this is the way new abilities are earned: rather than having some initial set-up strip her of the extra powers as in the Prime games so she can find them all over again, she conceptually has the extra abilities, but can only use them when given permission by her commanding officer.

For the weapons I could buy this no problem, but the cracks started to show when I found Samus taking damage in a lava field only to be ordered to turn on the heat protection in her suit later – wait, she was willing to die because she hadn’t been ordered to turn on a built-in feature? A very poor design choice which broke the “realism” of the game for me. Likewise she has a grapple beam that can be used to swing between hard-to-reach areas, however she’s only allowed to use this when she needs to reach a colleague in danger – again defying rational sense when the use of the beam would have helped her in completing earlier missions without any harmful side effects.

Ultimately what killed the game for me was that it simply wasn’t bold enough in structure. Though it’s certainly more action-packed than all of the Prime games put together, the fact is that it’s too much a prisoner of the previous games in the series. Apparently the designers feel that the fans want to essentially play the same game over and over again – and given the sales and howls of anger when there’s a major deviation from formula they’re probably right. For people who aren’t longtime fans though, it means you’ll start to feel serious deja vu when you play your second game in any series.

Samus has her standard beams and does the same stuff as seen in every other Metroid game: fight in a fire world, ice world, sand world, jungle world, etc. against the same basic enemies that change slightly to fit the new setting. There’s a sub-boss and main boss in each of these areas which are decent enough, but not always that fun to fight. I got as far as what I presume to be the first encounter with Ridley (who seems to appear in every Metroid game like a bad comic-book villain) before throwing in the towel due to the length and monotony of the fight.

I’m a bit disappointed because I really wanted to like this game. Samus appears to inhabit this rich universe of limitless adventure possibilities and yet she’s effectively fighting the same battles time and again because that’s what the fans want. Well, you guys can have it; the only Metroid I’m interested in is Metroid Prime: Pinball on the DS.

Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast (Gamecube)

This was my first attempt at playing an FPS using a joypad since the Playstation days and man is it awful. I was drawn in by nostalgia as this is the best Jedi Knight game going and I played it many times through all difficulty levels on the Mac before I largely left Mac-gaming behind in favour of the Wii.

Using a second analogue stick instead of a mouse is simply horrible as I knew it would be, complicated by the fact that your view will auto-centre when you start moving. I was hoping that when you got your light sabre and the camera switched to 3rd person it would play like any other 3D action game, but sadly you continue to use the C-Stick to change view which feels really awkward. The inability to freely remap controls makes it even worse – why the jump button is A and firing weapons or using the force is mapped to the squishy analogue triggers is beyond me. It adds to the feeling of fighting with the controller to do the most basic things and it’s really not worth it in the end.

Visually the game is pretty much the same as the PC versions, though the cut scenes which are played out using the in-game engine on the PC/Mac versions look like they’ve been tranferred off an old videotape, which is pretty jarring. I would be over the moon if Lucas Arts remade this instead of working on more Force Unleashed stuff, but that’s just a fantasy.

If for some bizarre reason you actually like playing first-person action games with a gimped dual-stick interface then have at it because it’s the best Star Wars action game going, but otherwise play something with less crappy controls and save yourself the bother.

When I was a kid growing up in the States in the 1970s, I can remember very much wanting a Rock’em Sock’em Robots set, though I only ever got to play with a friend’s and never actually had my own. For the uninitiated, two players each press buttons to execute their robot’s uppercuts in order to cause the other’s head to pop-up before pushing the head back down again for another go – pretty basic stuff.

Around the same time, Tomy was making something a bit more sophisticated which had little plastic figures made to look like proper boxers that could pull off jabs and uppercuts, bob-and-weave and block. I couldn’t really find any information about it online, but apparently Parker Bros. sold it as “K.O.” in the States. Now Takara-Tomy has released a WiiWare version as part of a series of downloadable games based upon their classic toys (there’s a train town game and one with racing plastic cars, too).

Though the controls are pretty much the definition of the Wii put-down “wagglefest,” it’s the presentation and OTT cheesiness that makes this a must-buy in my book. Right from the get-go you know you’re in for a treat when an announcer says the name of the game: “Ken-toesh Foory Foory Boxing,” followed by a dramatic Japanese pop song – presumably the Takara-Tomy equivalent of “Eye of the Tiger.”

There’s two primary play modes and a couple of mini-games included. The controls are the same for all games: Nunchuck and Remote motions perform left and right jabs, respectively, whilst holding the Z or B button will perform an uppercut with that hand. Holding A blocks and you can use the control stick or d-pad to bob-and-weave. Before each game you need to choose your fighter – and your opponent if playing solo – from a selection of four, with more to unlock during the course of play. If you can’t make up your mind there’s also a random selection button.

In the first play mode you’re participating in a straight-up boxing match: either a single bout or a four-way tournament (if solo, the other three will be CPU-controlled; otherwise it’s a two-player game). Both players have stamina and health gauges to watch. You can either throw a lot of jabs and quickly tire yourself out, meaning a vulnerable recovery period where your fighter sits defenceless for a few seconds, or try to time those uppercuts. Uppercuts deal more damage and use less stamina, but they’re slow to execute and leave you exposed to a counter-blow.

If you lose all your health you’ll get knocked down and need to alternate presses of Z and B in order to build up your stamina and a little of your health again before the announcer counts to ten. Every time you get knocked down requires more button presses to refill your stamina and you’ll get back less health. After a couple of canvas make-out sessions you’re unlikely to get back up again.

The other game mode is a bit simpler but has the same choice of single game or four-way tournament for one or two players. Instead of trying to wear down your opponent who can then get back up again, you need to land enough blows on them to wipe out their hit points (these vary from fighter to fighter), which automatically knocks them down. There’s no uppercuts in this game so it bears a closer resemblance to Rock’em Sock’em Robots, with players furiously bobbing, jabbing and blocking in order to land a few hits to knock the other guy down. The first player to get the pre-set number of knockouts required wins the game.

The two mini-games provide a decent challenge, but aren’t quite as engaging as the main game. The first sees the player’s chosen fighter facing four panels which can be hit with jabs and uppercuts. A series of round targets will appear in front of them which must be hit in order to rack up the points. Make a wrong move three times and it’s game over, with the highest score being recorded for each individual fighter.

The second mini-game is called Speed Knockout and sees players fighting every other boxer back-to-back in an effort to knock them all down in the least amount of time possible. Your opponents won’t punch you, but they will dodge and block as you wear them down, just like the first game mode. As with the other mini-game the best time is recorded for each fighter separately, though there are no leaderboards or initials for bragging rights.

Furi Furi Boxing shines in the visual department with large figures standing in a base with buttons that looks just like the classic toy, sitting in a boxing ring with an audience of coloured pegs. The light glints give a plastic appearance to the fighters and their movements are slightly stiff and jerky just as you would expect the toy to look in action. After being knocked down the virtual plastic boxers wriggle about trying to get up and if they succeed it’s in one smooth movement – excellent. After winning a bout the victor bobs up-and-down in time to the music with one fist raised whilst a voice-over says “YEAH!”

There are eight fighters in total with four available initially (actually there’s twelve, but I’ve yet to figure out how to unlock the special metallic ones). You’ll encounter all of them in the Speed Knockout game. Unlocking the others is pretty simple: play 10 single player games of each of the two primary modes, 10 of one of the mini-games and then ten tournaments of either kind.

Possibly the greatest part of the game is the brilliant voice talent. Each boxer says “Good choice” in their own voice when selected and announces their name before the fight. The fighters have the English names of various animals and pronounce them with a lovely Japanese accent. I never get tired of hearing “I am Beyah” (Bear) or “I am Tigger” (Tiger), etc. before the fights. After winning a tournament a picture of the smiling face of the winning boxer appears with the voice-over saying “I am Champion!” – classic!

For the importer this is an easy choice. The menus are pretty simple and the options include a selection of three camera angles (I opted for behind the fighter for all the modes as the side views make it too hard to dodge blows) and whether to turn off the music – though during a game you can only change the latter. There’s an illustrated tutorial which goes over the controls and how to unlock the extra boxers as detailed above so you don’t need to refer to the Operations Guide in the Wii Shop (though that includes a comparison of all the fighters’ stats – including the special metal ones).

I think a little nostalgia is worth the 1000-point price tag of this little gem. Cheers to Takara-Tomy for bringing back some memories.

It’s a well-worn cliche that one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover; the gaming equivalent would probably be not to judge a game by its teaser trailer – a sin I was certainly guilty of with regards to Monsteca Corral. Orange plasticine figures stomping across a hillside, robots, astro-maggots – what the heck is this? If you’re willing to take a chance, however, you’ll find a fun game with a strong artistic vision and a surprising level of challenge.

Monsteca Corral is superficially similar to games like Pikmin and Little King’s Story: players guide a group of orange monsters called “Stompys” across a landscape of trees, water and robots in a quest for gas bubbles to feed to a giant grub called the Astro Maggot. The reason for feeding gas to this colossal subterranean caterpillar is to blow it up like a balloon until it can fly your stompys away into space – apparently they want to find someplace not overrun with annoying robots bent on locking them up and digging up the countryside.

Although the game’s premise may sound bizarre it’s pretty straightforward to play: use the Nunchuk to control the camera and the remote pointer and B button to direct your stompys in a given direction. Initially you’ll start out with a lone stompy that comes stomping (ha-ha) in from the fog surrounding the playfield who must then “corral” the others who are just lazing about picking fluff out of their navels or whatever. When an active stompy runs into a stationary one they join the march and it won’t be long before you have a small army of the things running around collecting gas bubbles, beating on robots and trashing their buildings.

Robots are your nemeses. They have little time for pesky orange beasties and will try to lock them up in special jails or give them a good pounding, so you can either avoid them or get a gang together and strike first. Hitting a robot with a group of stompys will send it flying, but if you don’t want it coming back to get you, you’ll want to drive it into a body of water to founder until a Heli-bot can rescue it; by which time you should be safely out of the area.

A group of stompys can also bring down large installations by surrounding them, with a little pointer jiggling over the offending structure to speed things along. The robot buildings release multiple gas bubbles when they collapse, giving you an incentive to knock them down rather than pursue the time-consuming process of roaming the countryside to collect the precious stuff before running over to the Astro Maggot to drop off your bounty. Once your Maggot is ready to take flight, just guide your corral to it as it emerges and touch it to establish a silk tether to ride it out of there!

If that sounds simple, it’s because for the most part it is. The game levels aren’t designed to be difficult to complete since there’s no real “game over” condition. Instead, the challenge lies in completing enough achievements in the available levels to unlock the next group for play.

Achievements consist of simple tasks like completing the level within the par time, evading robot detection or completing the level with all stompys and no injuries. You can also try to destroy all the buildings within the time limit – though this can be rather time-consuming in some of the later levels with a high risk of failure. Working against you is the fact that the par time is a bit tight and only two of the achievements aren’t tied to it: no injuries (you’ll need to collect all the stompys within the par time to earn this) and the robot evasion award. On the plus side, once earned achievements don’t need to be earned again so you can focus on different ones over multiple replays.

As you go through the levels additional controls will be made available and further opposition will appear in the form of the aforementioned Heli-bots and the most implacable opponent of all, the dreaded “Imposter” bot. New controls take the form of using the – and + buttons to select a subset of stompys to control. The idea seems to be dividing them into groups to do different things, though it’s a bit impractical until later in the game when you can start using “slug juice” to paint a trail for stompys to follow on their own using the pointer and the A button.

Best to leave dividing your corral into smaller groups for multiplayer games where a few of your friends can join-in to directly control them. Whilst the group and trail controls work well enough in solo play, the limited rotate/zoom camera control and single-screen presentation make dividing your stompys into groups on your own a risky proposition – especially with the Imposter Bot and his pals about.

The Imposter Bot hangs out in a little house and will emerge if your stompys are up to mischief nearby like dumping digger bots in the drink or smashing a building. He’ll run right at your stompys and can move over difficult terrain quicker than them. If he gets close enough he’ll leap into the middle of your corral and explode, sending stompys flying and forcing you to gather them up again, costing you precious time. The Heli-bots are less problematic but still a threat as they’ll pick up your stompys and put them in the “monster jail” until you can smash that building and bust them out. Destroying their landing pads is the only way to get them out of the picture, but carries the risk of getting nabbed.

If those pesky robots weren’t bad enough, achieving par is complicated further by the fact that the Astro Maggot only stays above ground for a limited time to feed, so you need to gather a lot of bubbles when you get the chance. Of course if you collect too much gas your stompys start to float a bit which slows them down or worse results in them taking to the skies. A quick flick of the Remote will make them “release” the gas (complete with grade school chuckle-inducing sound effects), but that applies to your whole corral – not just the one or two floating ones – meaning less gas to deliver to your ride out of there.

After the Maggot has had its fill it takes several seconds to emerge again, with no real indication of where it’ll pop-up. If you only have a quarter of the par time remaining you’re almost guaranteed to fail if you haven’t topped up the Maggot completely considering the time required to reach it and get aboard thanks to some slightly dodgy motion control implementation for stompy jumping.

The lack of sensitivity settings means false detection of motion direction is common, so you’ll jump left when you swing right, etc. When boarding the Maggot dirigible you need to either be right there when it comes out so you can just touch it to get your stompys tethered (rare) or you need to get them under it and motion upwards to try to jump up and hit it. The camera angles are such that it’s hard to tell which stompys aren’t tethered and whether or not they’re jumping in the right direction. It’s a minor issue overall, but when you literally only have seconds to make par it can be very frustrating to miss it over a couple of stragglers.

The biggest mediating factor for any frustration you might feel is the overall experience of playing the game. Rather than opting for highly-detailed designs, the development team have packed an impressive 20+ levels into a small footprint (only 125 blocks – smaller than many Virtual Console games) by opting for a simple, but unique look for their game. The environments and their inhabitants are brightly-coloured models with textures largely limited to certain terrain types and terrific water effects. The consistently excellent frame rate and absence of noticeable glitches indicate a well-polished game.

When it comes to the interface minimalism is the order of the day, allowing for the playfield to be largely unobstructed by gauges and the like. The stompys have icons floating near them which change colour depending on whether they’ve been corraled or not and can be seen through the terrain to act as an aide in locating them. A flower in the upper-right corner grows a petal for each stompy corraled, which also shrinks if they get injured. Round icons in the lower-right corner indicate the achievements and their current status and a gauge in the opposite corner will show you how full the Astro Maggot is. This gauge also flashes when it surfaces and pulsing green rings emanate from its location to show you where to carry your bubbles (if only there was the vaguest clue of where it was going to emerge next time)

In keeping with this clutter-free presentation, the level-select screen is represented by an uncoiling fern-like plant – though to be honest it took me three play sessions before I figured that out! Having the currently selected level also highlight the flower on the branch which represents it would have made this a bit easier to suss out rather than just pressing the control stick in various directions and noticing the background image changing.

Binding everything together is a delicate and lovely soundtrack of simple tones. The whole experience immerses you in the game world which resembles an interactive art installation, so complementary is the look and sound. Monsteca Corral’s levels contain other colourful creatures besides the stompys, leaving me with the impression there are more Monsteca adventures to come, which is certainly welcome.

Considering you can complete a level in 10 minutes or less (not counting replays for achievements, mind), the combination of music and visual style makes for a relaxing break from blasting aliens or pummeling people senseless in other games. For 500 points, it’s well worth checking out, so take the chance and enjoy.

Metal Slug (Virtual Console Neo Geo)

This is a bit embarassing. I actually originally downloaded this for the PAL Wii before purchasing a second-hand copy of the Anthology, so technically this is my 3rd time buying this game (not to mention all the quarters I sunk into it at my local laundromat in San Francisco). SNK has definitely gotten it’s money from me so far eh? Well it’s well-deserved as this is a cracking action game and one of a few games deserving of the label “classic” from the 1990s arcade scene. This is naturally the home version and in some ways the better for it because you have a cap on the number of continues per play and options you can set for the number of lives and difficulty to up the challenge if necessary. Just remember that when prompted to save and load data it’s talking about your last continue point and not your score and initials, which are automatically recorded.

No question that this is the version to get – though you cannot remap the controls, meaning you need to get used to the funky remapping from Neo Geo to Classic Controller. God knows why D4 decided to map the 1-4 buttons as A,B,Y,X, rather than following the NG controller layout (which would be Y,B,A,X on the CC), but if you can adjust your play style you’ll probably like it better than using 1 to shoot, 2 to jump and remote jerk to throw a grenade or whatever in the Anthology version.

Metal Slug 2 (Virtual Console Neo Geo)

A sequel that’s even better than its predecessor is a nice thing to see. This is epic in length, has new spaceborne villains and some groovy transformations thanks to poison-gas-breathing mummies. After their experience with Metal Slug it seems SNK got clever and compressed the audio making this game about half the block size of the first one and creating the tantalising possibility that the outrageous Metal Slug 3 could surface for download on the Wii. D4 please make it so!

R-TYPE II (Virtual Console PC Engine)

If you’re thinking this is a port of the arcade sequel to R-TYPE, think again. When released in the States and Europe the entire TG-16 port of R-TYPE magically fit on a single Hu-Card, but apparently when originally released in Japan this wasn’t the case and the game was split into two. As a result, my decision to re-purchase R-TYPE on my Japanese Wii due to a funny desire to have all my arcade-style Virtual Console games on one machine has meant I’ve effectively paid for it three times (I know, more money than sense and all that).

The good thing about splitting the game in two is that R-TYPE II starts out at a stage I’ve NEVER been able to reach previously (I’ve made it as far as the ships that make a web of little dots – the area after the ship boss you blow apart piecemeal). The bad thing is that starting this far into the game means it’s really really hard – so hard that after more than a dozen plays I couldn’t even reach the “first” boss.

It’s actually more challenging than Super Darius – and that’s saying something! The developers did try to compensate for this in a few ways: you get five credits rather than three for extra continues and the majority of power-ups you find are speed-ups to give you a hope in hell of dodging all the crazy enemies and lasers flying at you. Nevertheless I’m satisfied with it and it’s a quality release. If you’re like me and have a Japanese Wii for your VC jones, bite the bullet and get R-TYPE and R-TYPE II – twice the fun at twice the price!

Although on its surface Fantasic Cube resembles Konami’s arcade/MSX classic Quarth, it sadly fails to live up to that positive first impression. It’s not that it’s a bad game, but simply that it lacks the hook that a really good puzzle game needs to hold a gamer’s attention for any length of time and ensure repeat play.

Taking a page from Puyo Puyo in an attempt to compensate, there’s a few play modes on offer: a Story Mode with cute little cut scenes and boss fights, two attack modes where you’re trying to complete levels with the longest play time or clear the most cubes and a two player mode which can be played against AI, a local player or even online. Regardless of mode the gameplay is the same: a ship at the bottom of the screen fires coloured blocks into a downward rolling column of other coloured blocks which need to be cleared in classic “match 3” fashion in order to eliminate a cube containing an enemy robot in the last row.

As stated earlier, the mechanics work fine, though the isometric perspective can make it difficult to spot gaps between rows which can form during the course of clearing chains of cubes. You have a choice of controllers, but it’s all pretty straighforward: d-pad for left/right movement, a button to fire a cube and a button (or two depending on controller choice) to toggle between cube colours.

It’s the latter control that eliminates any of the tension you’d get in any other match three game of this type: the ability to select the colour means you can actively control the set-up of chains and you can clear the closest block to you – though at upper levels cubes appear which have a grey coating until an adjacent block is cleared. There’s also a “star power” gauge that can trigger a “Super Roulette Challenge” which will result in one colour of block being cleared in the visible part of the column, but this just makes the game easier than it already is; other than breaking up the tedium, it’s not clear why this extra bit was included.

The biggest problem in this game that the basic gameplay just isn’t that interesting: the target robot is devoid of character and doesn’t do anything besides rise up from the centre cube in the last row when you get close enough. In story mode the bosses are all different, but the fact that you have to slog through four identical levels to get to them makes the game far more of a chore than it should be: I could only motivate myself to play through half of the dozen or so worlds before pulling the plug.

Though the bosses themselves are different, the boss battles are all the same: the boss is at the top of the screen periodically generating new rows of cubes; you need to clear all of them and fire blocks directly at the boss in order to wear down their life bar. All the while they’ll be throwing explosive blocks at you which will stun you, meaning more rows of cubes to clear. This can actually get quite annoying in the more challenging boss fights as you can be close to eliminating the the last row only to get clobbered and have another three generated before you get control of your ship again.

I’d probably have a better opinion of this game if the story mode had been more like a boss rush without the standard play mode, reserving that for the challenges and multiplayer, but to be honest if you have a Japanese Wii you’re probably better off buying another match-3 game like Puzzle Bobble Wii and the excellent MSX port of Quarth instead.

Pearl Harbor Trilogy: Episode I (WiiWare)

I’m not the biggest fan of “sim” games: whether it’s driving a car, raising a pet or flying a plane. I find the attempt at realism to be rather tedious – after all I already own pets, I can drive a car if I want and if I want to play around with a million controls to fly a plane I guess I’d learn that as well. Arcade style games on the other hand can be a blast: that’s what Pearl Harbor Trilogy is and it’s a damn fine one.

It’s a port of a portion of a PC release, which is what Legendo seems to spend most of their time on, but like many independent developers the growth in home consoles, and the Wii in particular, has gotten their attention. Whilst I didn’t care much for their WiiWare platformer, this ticks all the boxes for me: intuitive and responsive controls, a decent amount of substance in the form of twenty missions split into two campaigns and fun gameplay that won’t take up hours of your life unless you want it to.

You can play an American or a Japanese campaign with the objectives more or less evenly split between attacking ground/sea targets and shooting down enemy planes. The AI is surprisingly good, forcing you to manoeuvre frequently to avoid enemy fire and you can quickly hit a button to have a look back to see how many bogies are on your six if need be.

There’s three control schemes: Remote, Remote+Nunchuk and Classic Controller. The Remote+Nunchuk set-up is similar to that used in Sky Crawlers, though without the ability to remap the fire buttons to the Nunchuk it doesn’t feel right, so I’d suggest using the Remote on its own which is very intuitive and feels almost like playing Excite Truck – surely one of the best implementations of the Remote tilt sensor ever.

Though the mission objectives can seem a bit repetitive the challenging AI and excellent controls more than make up for it. There’s optional enemy markers and a radar scope to keep you from getting lost and you’ll have so many planes around you it has all the frenzy of a real aerial war, minus having to keep track of your ammo – or the threat of actual death.

Given the number of missions, unlockable planes and an extra pick-up-and-play dogfight mode, this game is an absolute steal at 700 Points. If you have any interest in fast and furious aerial dogfighting action with an emphasis on fun over realism, do check it out; especially since more instalments are promised depending on how well this one sells.