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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 The art style looks 10 years out of date and the music sounds like it belongs on a PSOne game but it captures the annoying Wii-style music featured in games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit.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.”

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.