Controller1.com Focus Test: Red Faction and more
A Doritos tie-in, Samurai Showdown and the Red Faction Guerrilla Demo.
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REVIEW: BOOM BLOX
Reviewed on Wii. Developed and published by Electronic Arts
Another quick review. Boom Blox was EA’s first partnership with Steven Speielberg since Medal of Honor. And just like Medal of Honor we have the traditional Normandy Level, as well as robust online multiplayer and a somber score by Michael Giacchino. Wat?
Boom Blox is a cutesy puzzle game where you are presented with a puzzle to solve, usually within a limit of throws. You might be throwing baseballs, or bombs with your Wii Remote, or you might be throwing last night’s curry leftovers but wither way you’re presenting your HDTV with a mortal threat so use the jacket and the strap. Like World of Goo and Peggle, Boom Blox also uses a simple physics system as part f the game, which probably explains why the games looks so very N64. It might look like it doesn’t need the RAM expansion pack you got with Donkey Kong 64, but I’ll bet the physics chew up more CPU power than the particle effects.
Boom Blox gives you a choice of gameplay styles, from levels where you have to manipulate two green blox so they connect and explode to levels where you just have to make the diamonds hit the ground, to vanishing blox and even a few levels with a frickin’ laser pistol. Each level scores you on how many points you get and you can squeak by with a bronze score. But Gold is where it is at, baby.
If you already have a Wii, you should hunt the bargain bins for Boom Blox which has sold OK enough to warrant a sequel but I don’t know whether its a game you want iterated on again and again. There’s exploration mode, where you just play a level at a time and unlock the next challenge, Adventure (Why?) and a mode where you can create your own shitty levels that just recreate badly a game from the NES. Well, Mario 1-1 might be hard on Boom Blox but there’s always Little Big Planet for all your knock-off needs.
This isn’t a graphical game, even for the Wii. The art style looks 10 years out of date and the music sounds like it belongs on a PSOne game but it captures the annoying Wii-style music featured in games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit. Its awful. Wii give up.
So if EA can do something right on the Wii, does that mean there’s hope for the future? No, EA Sports Active says ‘Hi, lard-ass.”
REVIEW: WORLD OF GOO
Reviewed on Macintosh. Also on PC, Wii. Developed by 2D Boy. Published by 2D Boy
This cute puzzle game has you building scaffolding out of cute balls of goo. That’s it. You have to direct your little balls of disgustingly cute-but-still- rather-disgusting-if-you-stopped-to-think-about-it towards their doom in a vacuum nozzle at the end of each level. The catch is, you only have a set number of little dungy spheres with which to reach the top. You also have a quota of shitballs you need to suck up in order to complete the level.
There’s not much to say other than go buy this game. 2D Boy are former EA Employees (and isn’t everyone these days) who got together and made this charming game. Probably the only thing worth getting on WiiWare, its made a decent impression if not necessarily a large one in the sales charts. The developers offered the PC version with no DRM and all they got for their troubles was increased piracy. Which is a shame, because the game is brilliant.
A new breed of puzzlers uses physics as part of gameplay. World of Goo, like Peggle uses the physics as part of the game, unlike the shitfest that is Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts.
You can build your tower higher, but you also have to build your tower so it supports its own weight. It’s like reverse Jenga. Which means it is good. Because Jenga is shit.
Its quite a relaxing game though it does require some brainpower. It also makes an excellent contrast to the carnage of today’s shooters so is quite a nice way to unwind at the end of a hectic week (as my week has been). The graphics are pitch perfect and the jazzy music score is divine. There’s none of this unicorn shit here, just one fantastic little package.
I urge every reader of this site to try out World of Goo.
controller1.com rating 3/3
REPLAY SOMETHING, DAMMIT!
I’m in need of something new to play. I’ve played out my stack of 2008 games that where worth playing. I’ve been dipping my toes into DLC on both 360 and PS3. I’ve even played a Wii game.
But I have absolutely nothing left to play. Out of the games that have come out since, say, last September, I have played every one of the games I wanted to. Gears 2, Resistance 2, Fable II, Little Big Planet, Killzone 2, Fallout 3, Call of Duty World at War, Mirror’s Edge, Left 4 Dead, Boom Blox, Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts, Prince of Persia, Singstar, Guitar Hero. If it wasn’t mentioned, then I didn’t want to play it that badly. I’ve done DLC for WaW, GHWT, Halo 3, Fallout 3 and unsuccessfully for Burnout Paradise. I’ve even got Peggle and World of Goo.
I didn’t get around to Quantum of Solace (no great loss by all accounts) or Tomb Raider Underworld but neither of them is interesting enough to me ATM. I have only bought two full games in 2009 (R2 and KZ2). RE5, SFIV, Wolverine, Bionic Commando, weren’t even blips on my radar. Madworld didn’t interest me and House of the Dead might be too short to divert me for more than an hour or two. Infamous is still two weeks away. That’s two weeks where (technically as I am snowed under at work, I should be pulling a few extra hours there and probably will be) I have time to play something.
OR
Time to play something good again. Hey, here’s a thought. I could play CRACKDOWN again. But I won’t. Why? Because of three reasons. Each of which is more compelling that the previous
1. Crackdown 2 or APB might be out later this year
2. Infamous is out in 2 weeks and is way too similar
3. Cam won’t shut the fuck up about Crackdown in the podcast if I start playing it again
So next on the list is Halo 3′s single player.
I very much enjoyed the single player campaign of Halo 3 apart from one level (and every Halo has one level that’s less fun to play that the others and it invariably involces the Flood). The reason this won’t happen is because Halo 3 is providing my MP fix.
Then there’s another great 2007 game, BIOSHOCK
Won’t happen. Not because I’m going to play Bioshock 2 in a few months, it’s because everytime I mention Bioshock during a podcast I have to play that little stinger. And despite loving the first one, I have no faith the second one will have the same soul as the first one.
I don’t really want anything on XBLA or PSN. My bro keeps saying I should get Flower for PSN. My wife gardens in her spare time. Trust me. We have Flower.
Or I just get my head down and get this massive milestone done and feel invigorated. Like Norsca fresh.
Blah, Blah. At least we have a podcast coming.
REVIEW: PRINCE OF PERSIA
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PS3, PC. Developed by Ubisoft Montreal. Published by Ubisoft.
Prince of Persia as a game series has one of the more interesting origins stories which we won’t go into. PoP as a Ubisoft franchise has a less interesting background. The formerly 2D Prince made the leap to 3D with Mattel’s PoP 3D. To all intents and purposes, it was rather ordinary. In 2003, Ubisoft (who had acquired some of Mattel’s gaming library a year or two previously) released Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
Here, in order to lesson the rather punishing lessons of trial and error the play would often endure in a PoP game, the reversing time mechanic was introduced. It was a great game with fantastic atmosphere, a great story, brilliant platforming based on contextual button presses and some button mashing combat that was neither here nor there. It came out and didn’t sell all that well until Ubi cut the price rather substantially wherein the game found its audience. For the followup a year later, Ubi looked at what the perceived barriers to purchasing the game and decided to lesson the whole Persian aspect, darken it up, more combat oriented and flushed any atmosphere down the toilet. Warrior Within was shash. The trilogy capping two Thrones was better but by then the damage was done.
Flash forward a few years and Assassin’s Creed, flawed it may have been, sold gangbusters is followed by a new Prince of Persia.
The new game is a sort of return to the atmosphere of the first game, with more platforming, less combat, a better story.
And its a great game being held back by TERRIBLE controls
The controls are quite simple and the game likes to do things for you. Which, if you’re a person who likes to have more than minimal control over what you’re doing can be very frustrating. You jump across a gap onto a wall. But you don’t have to press jump again because that will just have you jumping off into a chasm.
Time and time again, the game’s control system will confound your expectations and having you leaping to your doom because your mind can’t accept you don’t need to press so many buttons.
Just as Sands of Time featured the rewind time mechanic so that you didn’t have to constantly restart at checkpoints, this game has your constant companion Elika as a magical princess who can rescue you if you fall.
Many people have praised the removal of death of an obstacle to playing the game. That’s so much bullshit. All it is is a checkpoint system hidden by a cutscene of some chick grabbing your hand.
The game is sort of an open world. You get to a new area, jump for a bit, are confronted by a boss. Once you beat the boss, Elika fertilized the area and there are little glowing lightseeds you much collect. Think of them as Agility Orbs and you’re close to the mark. So the game is frustratingly good in so many ways, but ruined by unintuitive controls that are fairly loose in response to you inputs. But the graphics are rather spectacular with very solid sound. Presentation is obviously Ubisoft Montreal’s strong point. Gameplay, isn’t.
As a fan of Sands of Time, I’m highly disappointed by this title. Fans of Mirror’s Edge and Assassin’s Creed (you know, people you can sell any platformer to as long as you say its parkour) will be just as disappointed as real gamers.
controller1.com rating 1/3 (should have been 3/3 if the damn thing was playable)
NOW PLAYING: BOOM BLOX
also: not playing Burnout Paradise DLC. Thanks Sony. Thony.
Its a long weekend where I live and I decided to try out the recent DLC for Burnout Paradise. Well, after about 5 hours of patching Burnout, updating the PS3 firmware, updating my CC details on PSN, buying the DLC and the finding out that for some reason DLC is coded to the region of the game on a region free consoles where game patches are region free.
So after flushing $28 down the Sony toilet (unless I can borrow someone’s local copy), I popped in Boom Blox, a game I’ve had sitting around for 5 months into the Wii, a console I have not played at home in over a year. Boomblox is one awesome puzzle game.
The premise is the game is quite simple. You have a puzzle and rotate the camera around the puzzle to get a good angle, use the pointer to aim at where you’d like to hit, lock on, then through the miracle of waggle, throw the ball at the piece. You knock down some colours, avoid knocking others and otherwise play variations of this theme.
There’s not much else to say about it except its a helluva lot of fun.
Whether there’s enough of a game to justify this as a full price game is rather debatable. As it is, I can’t see how I could pad it out to a full review.
I have to say that Halo 3 is still a great MP game. Call of Duty 4 and WaW are very good experiences but H3′s Mythic pack has been a lot of fun. Sometime I get bitchslapped and other times, I do ok. But the game is rarely laggy for me (compared to WaW- which must have a sizable install base of its own). And I’m not even using the Good Connection option in the matchmaking options.
ODSTSTSTSTSTSTD might be an expansion pack but the fundamentals are so good I don’t think its an issue.
Controller1.com Focus Test- Prince of Persia
In this podcast, we look at the recent Prince of Persia game. Clint asks where’s the Assassin’s Creed, Cam ponders the imponderables and George tries to remember where he put the receipt.
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