Archive for the “Wii Reviews” Category

The concept of Ivy the Kiwi is sound – a Kirby: Canvas Curse-style platformer where you guide an adorable bird through all manner of hazards. Ivy never stops walking, and you can’t control her directly. To get her to go where you want, you point with the remote while holding the A button to draw vines on the screen that she’ll walk on, which you can use in a number of ways. Problem is, using the Wii’s motion control instead of a DS stylus presents some annoying difficulties… …

We take it you’ve all seen Inception. Good, wasn’t it? Rather than get bogged down in debate over who was dreaming or what was being dreamed, cast your mind back to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s amazing bit of hotel wall-running. As his world loses its center of gravity he finds walls becoming floor, becoming ceiling, becoming walls again. Audacious stuff. Good news, readers: And Yet It Moves is basically That Scene in Inception: The Videogame… …

Since its introduction last year, Metroid: Other M has been touted as several different things. Some promotional materials suggest it’s a brand-new take on the franchise, depicting Samus Aran as an ass-kicking, skull-crushing heroine with hot new moves from developer Team Ninja. Other days Nintendo claims it’s still the Metroid you know and love, full of hidden power-ups and long periods of total isolation – just you against the hostile environment. And there’s still a third angle that says Other M is all about Samus’ personal background, and the story will be the most intense, cutscene-filled extravaganza a Nintendo console has ever seen.

These three viewpoints are indicative of the game itself – it’s a collection of very different ideas sandwiched into one game that occasionally can’t pull them all together. It often feels like Team Ninja had an idea, and Nintendo had an idea, and neither game was fully realized, opting instead to mash together first and third-person views when one or the other would have sufficed. Make no mistake, Other M has a few outstanding, franchise-defining moments as it draws to a close, but overall it’s a bit of a letdown… …

We lost a little piece of ourselves last season when 2K Sports announced that their long-running NHL 2K series was going on hiatus. Things are tough all around for sports-minded gamers, after all, with franchises dying (March Madness, College Hoops, and NASCAR) or being put on indefinite leave (The BIGS, All Pro Football). When it turned out that NHL 2K11 would actually exist this year as a Wii exclusive, it kept our hopes alive that maybe, just maybe, the once-proud 2K pucks name will be restored to glory… …

We lost a little piece of ourselves last season when 2K Sports announced that their long-running NHL 2K series was going on hiatus. Things are tough all around for sports-minded gamers, after all, with franchises dying (March Madness, College Hoops, and NASCAR) or being put on indefinite leave (The BIGS, All Pro Football). When it turned out that NHL 2K11 would actually exist this year as a Wii exclusive, it kept our hopes alive that maybe, just maybe, the once-proud 2K pucks name will be restored to glory… …

This is the most timid, lily-livered apology of a videogame we’ve played in quite some time. Oh, it’s for kids though, isn’t it? Yeah, that makes its paucity of ideas or guts all okay and everything. Let us tell you: each grey hair and worry line that sprouts onto your visage in the haze of your bathroom mirror should be celebrated with a full-on street party, because it means you’re another feature removed from the target audience of ass-biscuits like this that are packaged up and palmed off as games at 50 bucks a pop… …

In Tournament of Legends, gamers are given the unique opportunity to fight as the C-list celebrities of forgotten Greek mythology. Characters are obvious stand-ins for classics and the roster includes a snake woman with snake hair, a skeleton, a big cow-guy and a dude with a raven’s head. Even though Tournament of Legends doesn’t employ any authentic historical characters, it does utilize authentic Roman Numerals for most of the numbers in the game… …

Let’s get straight to the point: Arc Rise Fantasia is an aggressively bland but competent JRPG. Its predictable story won’t captivate you with any originality, and its battle system won’t engross you with any deep strategy. On the other hand, its gameplay won’t frustrate you with any glaring flaws either. If you made a bingo sheet full of RPG clichés, ARF would nearly fill every square. “Average guy” main character who turns out to be descended from a race of magical ancients and/or deities? Check. Mysterious magical girl from a foreign land? Check. Best friend who betrays you? Check. Stilted dialogue? Oh man… …

You get a rough time of it as a Harry Potter fan, not least if you’re a Harry Potter fan over the age of 12. For most people this involves hiding your literary shame by buying the ‘adult’ versions of the books (no, we’re reading Dostoyevsky’s Konstantin Potter and the Goblet of Dense Russian Prose) or obscuring your replica lightning-bolt scar under a shaggy haircut and a porkpie hat. For those of us who quite fancy running around Hogwarts and blasting Dementors in the face, we’ve had to endure worse: a series of lame, lazy or frustratingly not-quite-there games, all of which failed to make the most of Potter’s wizarding world… …

You know all those “bullet hell” shoot ‘em ups that insist on cramming as many projectiles on the screen as possible? The kind that seem to require a superhuman level of hand-eye coordination to survive? Sin & Punishment is the accessible, tough-but-not-impossible version of the genre, tossing endless amounts of lasers, missiles and rocket-breathing monstrosities in your face, albeit in a manageable, less rage-quitty kind of way… …