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Club Nintendo's Game and Watch Collection

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:15:42 -0500

Now most of you probably are confused as to what the Game and Watch collection is, and how to get it. Well, to get it you’ve to score 800 Nintendo Points, which is equal to 800 USD. Yes, this game costs 800 USD. This game consists of 3 games from the Game and Watch era; I wish they had put more though. (The 2D guy in Smash Brother’s most don’t like because he’s 2D.) The three games also have 2 settings, Game A and Game B (easy and advance). These are full ports of the old Game and Watch games. The three games they chose were Oil Panic, Donkey Kong, and Green House. They also added an alarm clock. You set the alarm then it goes off when it’s that time to let you know you need to go. The alarm could be annoying, but it lasts no longer then a minute.
First game on the menu is Oil Panic. Oil Panic is perhaps the hardest one of the three. Oil drops from the ceiling and you’ve to catch it in your can. Your can holds a max of 3 oil drops then you have to dump it out on the side, but you can dump it at 1 or 2 if you want. When you dump it you have to make sure the guy underneath is there to catch it with his oil drum. If you miss an oil it causes a fire. Three fires and you’re out. If you miss an oil dump it’ll land on a car sales man or a buyer. If the oil lands on a person 3 times it’s game over, as well. As time goes the oil drops and the guy move faster. It may sound like a good thing to have him move quicker, but he doesn’t stay still as long as he used to. Each oil droplet is 1 point, dumping the can at 1 bar is 1 point, 2 bars is 2 points, and 3 bars is 5 points.

Gameplay footage:

Note: You can play with the Dpad, but I was using my left hand to hold the camera.

Next on the list is Donkey Kong. Yes, they’ve a Game and Watch to Donkey Kong. This one would be the medium of the three. With this one you play the NES Donkey Kong game. You’re limited on the spots you can jump, so you have to frequently back track. Then when you get to the top screen you have to flip a switch and jump onto the crane to release one of the switches under Donkey Kong. You also have to watch for falling barrels. You’ve to do that about 4-6 times before he falls and dies. After he dies it resets and it gets harder! Well, with each switch it gets harder. The barrels start to move faster, he starts throwing them directly over you instead of randomly. This platform comes across the top of the middle section to prevent you from jumping and climb while still being able to live. Three deaths and your Game and Watch of Mario dies. You die by getting hit by a barrel, hitting the platform across the top, or failing to catch onto the crane. Each barrel you jump is 1 point, a switch is 19, and Donkey Kong was 20.
Final game on the list is Green House. This is hands down the easiest of the three. With this one you’re a person in a green house being over run by bugs and you have to kill them all before they destroy the plants. You only get three plant deaths before a game over, so you’ve to be a bit quick. There are four flowers on the bottom left, bottom right, top left, and top right. The top ones are being attacked by worms. If you get a worm within you step it’s 1 point, within your second step it’s 2 points, and if you get it right before it eats a worm that’s 3 points. The bottom is being attacked by spiders. Spiders are worth 3 points at the bottom, and 1 point for each time you shoot them back up the web. You can farm them like no other to get easy points. As time goes by it gets harder because more bugs come out and they’re all faster.
Overall I say this is a good game. It’s a nice quick pick me up and easy to put down. The only way to get it though is by registering tons of products at Club Nintendo. So, only if you’re a hardcore Nintendo fan, like me, would you have this.

Was I a target audience? Yes, I love old and retro games.
Did I like it? Yes, I saved up 800 Nintendo points and whored my self out to get it.
Score - 87/100
Reason: Well, despite it being an amazing game it can get a bit boring with only 3 games.

They came for brainsl; I gave them a review!

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:57:26 -0600

House of the Dead: OVERKILL

Now, as we all know the Wii is indeed in some need for third party games that aren’t a bunch of over-priced mini games. It also needs some games that are exclusive to get people more willing to buy into and play the console. This is exactly what House of the Dead: OVERKILL offers. Personally, I’ve been satisfied with my Wii, but those are some common complaints. Not only is that exactly what House of the Dead: OVERKILL is but it’s more. I grew up in the era of American arcade gaming. That means I played tons of pinball machines, fighters, racers, DDR, adventure, NeoGeo games, and rail shooters. I mostly played rail shooters. House of the Dead has always been my favorite series, but my second favorite rail shooter (My favorite being CarnEvil, but it never went past 1.). With OVERKILL House of the Dead has now become my favorite rail shooter series. It’s obvious OVERKILL creators are rail shooter fans themselves and looked at tons of rail shooters to inspire OVERKILL. Examples: It has the multiple item/ item power/fire rate system from Ghost Squad. Time Crisis, and Umbrella Chronicles. It obvious they took the good from a lot of rail shooters and made it better, they even took some bad ideas and made them better. They made some things up of their own, which pushes the competition even further. There were a tons of rail shooter firsts with this game. This is the first rail shooter that I’ve seen with bullet physics, recoil, and spray for all weapons and they were appropriate to the weapon. Like, a SMG has more recoil and spray then a handgun. The shotgun have more spray than the SMG and handgun together. Each weapon also has their own reload speed and firing rate that vary based on the weapon. They put a lot into the engine in this game. The recoil system also affects when you move. When the character is moving the recoil and spray greatly increase. The zombies are live actors, they aren’t on rails. I didn’t realize that until one time the game skipped past a zombie and I entered the next room. As I was shooting the zombies in the next room the one zombie I skipped came around and appeared into view and started to come towards me. Also the zombies never walk the same path all of the time. The zombies also adapt to which limb you shoot off. For instance, if you shoot them in the leg and/or knee and it doesn’t fall off then they start to limp on the leg that’s damaged. If you shoot a leg at the right spot it becomes unusable and they fall to the ground and crawl towards you. If you shoot off their arm they adapt and cover the arm that was shot off. This is also the first rail shooter I’ve seen where if you shoot someone in the head, no matter where at, is an instant kill. With the limbs that fly off they don’t vanish. They stay in the game and sometimes they fly off into the background and you’ll run over them later, or they’ll hit the wall and bounce off with mild force in the resisting direction. You can also shoot the limbs as they lie on the floor to get rid of them. They also took the bad self-moving camera choice from RE:UC and made it work better. It’s also trigger able so you can turn it off, on, or toggle it in game with the D-Pad. The reason it’s not bad in this one is it’s not so sensitive that when you try to reload you move the screen, or incredibly slow. It also knows how to stay put. If I turn the screen to the left then I move back to the center of the screen it still stays left, not quickly going back to the normal screen view. Also, there are movies and “Hold your fire” moments, like in every rail shooter, but they managed to fix these too! Every time one of them happens the game will reload your weapons. Yes, it’ll reload both for you. That’s such an amazing thing because I’ve had countless times people die on me because I had to reload. You can also fire off screen. Say you’re trying to shoot an item but it’s barely off screen, well now you can shoot off screen and the game counts where your cursor is really at in the world, which is another nice feature. The grenade system is nice as well. They took the House of the Dead 4 grenade system then upgraded it. They’ve a more realistic explosion, and they explode on impact now. So you no longer have to wait 3 seconds after throwing it with the zombies moving out of blast range to get a nice player-sandwich. There’s also tons of unlockables in the game. They call them “achievements” which is nice there’s some form of achievement in this game. It really causes you to play more because you want to unlock everything. The money system is pretty rough. It gets hard to get money in the game after a while, so save up and buy everything important first. There’s also an amazing bullet time feature in the game in which everything slows down. Voices, bullets, Wiimote sounds, yes everything slows down. Now lets get onto some negatives. It’s easy to tell they decided to add and change features later on in the game. This is easy to see because when going through the start of the game you’ll notice everything has a good amount of detail and fine touches, but later on quality drops. It really bugs me that as the game progresses it loses visual quality. There are some bad load times, especially if you got a defunct disk like mine, and the game freezes up at random. The developers have announced this problem and said it was because they packed so much onto the disk, but they didn’t get a dual-layer WiiDiskette. Sometimes the subtitles in the game flash by too quickly, like literally, there was a time where a full sentence shows up for 2 seconds then is gone. Then there’s dual wield mode. It’s literally a single player version of co-op. You need two Wiimotes and your P1 Wiimote will shoot your left hand weapon and P2 Wiimote will shoot your right hand. It’s literally a pointless mode to play, other then for the achievements. If you have two Wiimotes you’re better off playing co-op and getting 4 weapons as opposed to two. Dual Wield mode would be amazing if it supported two players. Then you and your friend could be firing 4 weapons at once. Yes, the game supports four Wiimotes (figured I’d let you know this) but when you select Dual Wield mode it blocks out the second player join button. Even with that bad stuff there’s still more to make up for it. There’s the amazing “70’s” sound-track. The Grind House horror style, which is done oh so well. The voice acting is synced up really nicely, and throughout the game there’s the movie flicker lines. You know for old movies the black lines that flicker across the screen. Well, this game has them and they’re not pre-generated. I’ve never run through a stage and realized the same sequence of lines on screen. The characters I also strongly believable and realistic. Some more annoying then others (Varla Gunns) some really badass (G). Also, this is one of the real mature games for the Wii. A lot of games get a “mature” rating but are really a teen game, but they get the mature rating because the Wii simulates the motions. There’s also a small amount of waggle. When certain zombies grab you, you have to waggle to break free and upon doing so you smash the zombie with what ever weapon you have and kill it. There’s tons of swearing, dirty jokes, and toilet humor through the game. I mean there’s TONS of swearing. The game opens up on the line “Wassup motherfucker!”. A few incest and necrophilia stuff as well. Also It has some cool minigames. I really only like one of them, and it makes up for the other two, it‘s called “Stay Alive“. You and up to three friends compete against each other wave after wave of zombies to see who can get the highest score. You all share health and the timer. As a heads up, to make this game easier, upgrade the AMS pistol. The other two are okay, one is a target practice range at a carnival, and the last one is you shoot zombies following civilians to save the civilians. Once the civilians get to the safe point they’re okay, but you’re each assigned a color to guard. As you see this game has some negatives, but way more positive things about it. I say House of the Dead: OVERKILL is a must buy for any Wii owner over the age of at least 15, or a really mature 13 year old. Everyone I know is shocked at the content of this game, especially with the ending and the final boss. I’m surprised they didn’t card me when I bought this as well, as it even says “Recommended for adults only” on the box. If I had to rate this game I’d give it a 100/100.

Even if you’re on the tip of buying the game is published by Sega, so you know there will be a price drop in at least 6 months, but this game is really worth the $50.
Am I this game’s target audience?: Yes
What is this game rated?: Mature (recommended 17+,18+ in other countries)
What the game really should’ve been rated?: Mature (I recommend 15+, and that’s even pushing it.)

Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 01:37:54 -0600

So, why're updates taking forever again after we had that speedy time of updates every day or two? Well, the title explains it. I got into the SMT:Imagine Closed Beta(Not really so closed beta as you just have to go to FileFront for your CD key.) Now, I hate RPG's, along with MMO's, and anime. So, then, why am I playing an anime-like MMORPG? I don't know. It's really fun is about all I can come up with. In no way does it bring anything new to the MMO, muchless the RPG field, unless you hadn't played a previous SMT game(for the RPG element) or Phantasy Star Online (for the fighting element). I guess that's why I like this game, it playes just like PSO. Now, the closed beta has been open for a good 3-5 days now and there's some major issues with the server. See, the first two days the server ran perfect. There was only like 100 people, if that, and no lag or anything. Now that FileFront started to give out CD keys the servers are crashing like mad crazy and there's lag like you couldn't believe. The server's really aren't meant to handle this many people yet, and they really need to fix it, and fast. Now, the game's introduction pisses me off. Why? Because there's no voice actors for the opening movie. That kinda bugs me as SMT is known for it's good voice actors. Plus, you go through a prolouge, then you go through aditional training where they explain how to walk and attack, after you've walked a full dungeon and killed about 15 monsters. Plus, the prologue ends with you dying! ARGH! It ends with you getting raped by a giant demon, and yet you're still a live, and they later prove it's not a dream. Kinda bugged the hell out of me and my friend. The monster taming system's pretty cool. Any moster you can fight you can tame to be your pet. It's nice, but very annoying. Another annoying feature is that random monsters that are usually peacful will come up and attack you at random only when you have a pet, or they'll kill your pet out of no where. Your pets do become very useful as they help you kill monsters and heal you. The EXP system is nice aswell in this one. I remember in Lord of the Rings Online I was working hard as hell to level up, in this one in a matter of a day and a half I was level 8. The community is okay. Some people are cool, most people don't kill steal or item steal like in other games (Ragnarok Online). The problem with making an MMO off a game, or it's series, is that people who've played the game forever or made the game their life act so stuck up. That's always unavoidable because people want to make them selves feel so much better for a wasted life. Also the way you earn skills is a little bit on the odd side. You have to open up an expertise menu and tell it which ones you want it to collect XP for, but you're allowed so many expertise XP points. You only get the XP points by using something of that type. So I want to be a mage, so the more spells I use the more they get XP. It's a nice feature so you don't waste time leveling skills, but the fact that you have a cap on expertise XP really limits what you can do. Also the character customization is crap, as with any MMO that first starts, but still I expected a little bit more better. They could've used some of the character models from past SMT games and allowed you to mix them around and such for more options. Then the bugs are fun to exploit. There's currently a leveling up bug where when your EXP reaches above 100% it'll show that ammount. For instance, mine was 113.7% and when it finally caught on I had killed a monster so I got the free 13.7%+ the ammount of EXP % I should've got at the lower level. There's also a buy, sell, and repair exploit that when you do such action there's a chance you'll get your money back. I had repaired my weapon then it said,"Action could not be preformed." and I got my sword repaired along with the money back. Then there's the bug how when you pick up items they don't stack, so you have to manually stack them together. Also, the money takes up an item slot. Overall, I do reccommend this game. It doesn't put anything new to the table, but if you liked Phantasy Star Online it's for you. It's one of those free games where people who donate cash get special items. Also, the game has a really amazing sound track. Oh, the thing that pisses me off the most is the fucking update client. It checks every file everytime you start it to see if you have them. Sure, that's nice, but from when the game first came out there's 1800+ files. With updates there will eventually be 3000+. So everytime I load the game I have to wait like 7 minutes before I can play because it checks every file to see if you have it, or if it was modified. I guess that's good for hacker prevention. I say give it a shot, no problem trying it out since it's free, but it's currently pretty buggy and laggy, but what MMO doesn't during it's first 3 years?

Also, I will plan on doing game reviews once I get some stuff set up, this is the first of them.