The Lamer Gamer

Been waiting long enough.  Sure there’s no HD, but it’s free as opposed to the Xbox version.  Ordered the disk today, have to see how it pans out.  The Wii already has a leg up as it’s whisper quiet and the 360 is loud as a jet engine.  But if the quality sucks, or for whatever reason stutters etc., it won’t matter how quiet and free the Wii version is.

Well, it is and it isn’t a typical rail shooter.  Ammo isn’t unlimited, for all but the basic weapon, kinda standard.  You can pick up peculiar, non-weapon items, not so standard.  Oh, and you’re on-rails, duh.

But aside from the tie in, to a successful game on non-Wii platforms, the game isn’t that good.  The on-rails thing kills me, as Dead Space itself, allowed for a lot more mobility, and strangely it didn’t feel necessary as you clearly have the means to direct yourself around the map.

But oh well, I played, and played, and for some odd reason it took me a while to stop playing, not cause it was good, it’s just that I thought it would eventually not be as agonizingly boring.

I probably missed out on some fun story elements, but I’m better off leaving this game alone.  It’s a shame, cause I was pretty sure, this was going to be the first game for an adult on the Wii.  Ehh Wrong!  It’s gross, but still sucks eggs.

How come every review I read of The Conduit is positively glowing?  You’d think it was the second coming of GoldenEye or proof that FPS games actually work on the Wii.   Well it isn’t, and they still don’t.  Oddly, The Conduit does remind me of GoldenEye.  Could just be the sound effects, or maybe just the flow of the game.  It’s certainly not that I see shades of the best FPS of its time.

The game is very similar in style and interface to Metroid 3 which in and of itself is more of an action game.  You use the pointer to aim and the Nunchuck to toggle the lock-on feature.  In fact The Conduit uses a virtually identical weak lock-on toggle where generally the target is more or less centered on the screen and you can aim freely with the on-screen pointer.  There are some flaws to this style of play though.  Using the WiiMote is somewhat unstable for long periods of time so I frequently found it difficult to hold my arm steady of the course of playing for an hour or so.  I suppose you can argue for or against that being a good thing (reality vs playability), but I found it annoying.  For some reason, you can’t look up, at least not much.  So sometimes you’re locked-on to things you can’t shoot at.  The cursor can get lost sometimes if you don’t keep it lined up right, also annoying, but again, realism.  The levels are pretty much the same.  A few different types of enemies, but the situations are the same, and the AI kind of dumb.  There ends up being a lot of shooting down hallways at guys who don’t quite duck behind obstacles.  Oh and you have the ability to duck behind things, not exactly a cover system.  I virtually never used it.  And then there’s the ASE, the All Seeing Eye, a little glowing orb that projects an eyeball like on the back of your dollar bills.  It could have been a really neat tool, but instead basically serves no purpose.  You can find hidden stuff with it, and interact with some computers, but that’s about it.

The plot isn’t anything to write home about.  It’s so devoid of development and the gameplay so lacking in variety that I was getting dangerously bored by the time I’d reached the beginning of the 8th mission (there are 9 in single player).  I love playing through games to advance the story but this was tedious.  But I trudged through it, and kinda wish I hadn’t.  Upon completing a number of waves of bad guys in the same room, the game just ends.  There’s no boss battle, no aftermath and no idea what the hell just happened as the surface of the story is barely scratched over the course of the campaign.

Here’s a summary of the progression if you know nothing of the game.  You’re working for the bad guy but don’t know it.  He want’s you to kill the good guy.  Aliens attack. What are these portals?  Bad guy tries to kill you. Good guy contacts you.  Kill lots of aliens and henchmen.  Good guy dies, bad guy escapes.  Good guy not really dead.  You escape. The End.

Um, so where did the bad guys and all this bizarre technology come from?  Who knows.   It’s like a shitty episode of Lost where they posed a bunch questions and forgot to include suspense.

And now I’m glad that I’m done with it, cause I don’t want to play it anymore.  The developer mentioned waiting to gauge the reception and sales before discussing a sequel.  I wonder if anyone is particularly looking forward to that.  Not Sega’s finest hour as a publisher.  Maybe they should go back to making consoles.

I’m not going to address the general makeup of Pikmin New Play Control, as it’s the same game as the original Pikmin.  So if you liked or disliked that, your opinion probably won’t change.  Mostly, I focused on the new interface.

It would be a bit of an exaggeration to say that Pikmin 2 was such a great improvement upon plain old Pikmin that it renders the original unplayable.  I am, however, forced to compare my copy of Pikmin 2 to Pikmin NPC in some ways because I don’t have a copy of the original any more.  There really wasn’t a point in having both once 2 was out.

While Pikmin 2 added a lot of gameplay elements (Louie, caves, purple and white pikmin), Pikmin itself remains a solid game.  Ultimately the gameplay really isn’t that different in 1 vs 2, but I find using the Gamecube Controller to be much more desirable.  Trouble is NPC (which is a poor reuse of an acronym to begin with) doesn’t really add a lot to Pikmin.  Throwing Pikmin feels much slower, probably because I can’t move my thumb as quickly when holding the Wiimote as I could with the Gamecube Controller, I suppose because the grip is odd.  The cursor looks/behaves in a way that I find harder to aim than it used to be.  By separating the directional and cursor controls, NCP adds some flexibility, but it takes right back in requiring the player to actually be more flexible to work other controls.  Not just the camera, but anything on the WiiMote D-pad.  It just feels awkward to use the down side of the D-pad (so as to mass direct all the Pikmin en mass), which like the camera controls I use quite frequently.

Oh, and let’s see how I stacked up guessing the control structure for Pikmin NPC

The original Pikmin controls and how I’d like to see them remapped (and actually were):

I believe that’s a failing grade for my psychic skillz.  I should have seen it coming but they really stuck with the same buttons.  This is probably a much broader design decision with the Wiimote/Nunchuck for overall compatibility, but specifically I don’t like how this works with Pikmin.  Maybe it was too much to hope about the whole shaking the Wiimote to throw the little suckers, but I’m bummed about that.

Pikmin NPC is a 2 out of 5,  especially at $30.  I already paid you $10-20 more than that for it the first time around, and it is in essence the exact same 8 year old game aside from the change to widescreen.

Seriously, within minutes of starting Deadly Creatures I was involved in a battle of SciFi Channel proportions akin to Boa vs. Python or maybe Anaconda 3.  Despite the silliness of having my Tarantula engaged in mortal combat with a large snake, the rest of the game seem to play much more sanely with me beating up similarly sized bugs.

Deadly Creatures is an action oriented game with an odd twist.  Not that you’re a bug, it’s that you’re not specifically involved in the plot.  You hear the voices of Billy Bob Thornton and Dennis Hopper overhead and muffled, as you little creature runs around slaying and eating other creepy crawly critters.  The two human characters are apparently hunting gold, which you can see as part of the underground environment, but of course have no use for because you’re a bug.  It’s weird but really fun to keep playing along not specifically driving the plot, but hearing the characters talk about it nearby.

The gameplay has some simple yet fun combat along with some prompted finishing moves.  It is rather satisfying to stab other bugs as the scorpion.  Haven’t gotten to the end yet though, so can’t really speak to the plot being really great yet.

I noticed an article on Gamasutra that pretty closely mirrors my own experience with the Wii.  For some odd reason, even though I had to have one, I hardly play it.  Well, there are perhaps a few reasons why that is.  For one, if a game exists for more than one system, I’ll probably pick it up for the 360.  So that’s pretty much limiting the Wii to Wii Only titles.  While Wii Sports is a good time passer when I have friends over, I hardly ever pick it up and bowl or play tennis by myself.

I’m somewhat resistant to buying the Balance Board,  as there aren’t enough games to support buying it at this point, plus at roughly $95 I’m kinda turned off.

There are some newer games like Deadly Creatures that look fun, but nothing that looks to have a ton of replay value.  Guess I’m stuck with Mario Kart for the time being.

Seriously!

Sony’s execs are roughly one step away from casting “Yo Momma” jokes at the Xbox and now the Wii.  In yet another case of diarhea of the mouth one of Sony’s execs again fails to get “it”.  This on the heels of another comment that’s fresh in my mind about how Sony was saddened that Xbox didn’t have enough zip.  Still not as good as when they dissed Halo 3 on Wikipedia.

So Kaz Hirai, Sony’s chairman disses both the Xbox and Wii in virtually the same breath, still failing to pick up on why people are buying more of those systems than his own PS3.  The knock on the Xbox isn’t completely without merit.  I’m sure the PS3 will have a longer shelf life from this point than the Xbox simply because it has more under the hood than the Xbox, so when it comes to the next big media movement, maybe the Xbox won’t be able to keep up.

Trouble is, Kaz is really saying “The PS3 is so technologically superior to the Xbox that people will eventually realize that they need one, oh and F#$% the Wii, they’re not a real competitor since

“they’re a different world and we operate in our world.” – Kaz Hirai

Yeah, Nintendo operates in a different world than Sony, the real one, where they’ve discovered how to print MONEY, wheras Sony, like a pimply, geeky teenager continually laments how nobody “gets them”.  Not only is the Wii the least technologically superior of the 3 systems, but it’s the crazy best sellingest.  WAKE UP!

Anyway, there’s a fun history of the recent trash talk at Technologizer.com

Gamespot posted something of a first look at the “New Play Control” element of the upcoming Pikmin re-hash.  The post is kinda lacking as it doesn’t really describe much about the controls, and after reading it a few times I’m fairly certain the author is mixing up the Control-stick and the C-stick on the GameCube Controller.  

“…your onscreen cursor, which has been mapped to the Wii Remote and lets you move around by pointing at the screen instead of twisting the C-stick on the GameCube controller.” - Shaun McInnis

I’m assuming that he means the pointer replaces the Control-stick, which I partially expected.  My hope was that they would decouple the pointer from Olimar’s movement, pointing with the pointer and moving the the Nunchuck Control-stick.  This leaves the C-stick function of directing Pikmin relative to Olimar still needing a home.

The original Pikmin controls and how I’d like to see them remapped:

I’m having trouble figuring on how exactly the camera controls would work. I’m not a fan of the 1 and 2 buttons on the Wiimote, they’re hard to reach, but I’m running out of buttons.

One other interesting note.  McInnis made a simple observation that had escaped me for a long time; Pikmin is an RTS, on a console, and it succeeded.  I had never really thought about that.  It’s vastly simplified, there’s no free camera and your building is limited to building more Pikmin, but the controls really worked, and that’s something I haven’t otherwise seen.

Why the hell doesn’t Square Enix release Dragon Warrior on the Virtual Console?

This was probably the first RPG I was ever into, and I sucked at it for that matter.  I’m pretty sure I still have the original NES cartidge, but no working NES. I’d gladly hand over the 500 points to load it up on the Wii.  Rumor is that Square Enix isn’t willing to publish this and other ancient titles for that low low price, and wants more like $30 a copy, like PSP Final Fantasy I.  Considering that they’ve beaten this to death a number of times with GameBoy and mobile phone versions, you’d think they’d be willing to let this one drop for $5.  Guess not.

Cause I don’t.  I’d rather have some decent games.  Something Sony apparently doesn’t feel is a priority.  PS2 had tons of exclusive games that I wished I could get.  Aside from Metal Gear, I don’t feel like I’m missing out.

So now, Sony is making some lame pitch about how the PS3 is clearly worth the extra few hundred dollars over the 360 and the Wii, complete with a table (which I stole).

For serious now.  Who the hell is taken in by this chicanery?  I have both the 360 and the Wii and I payed less than the PS3 cost at the time, and you can do just about the same now.  Or if you’re looking for parity, the 360 Elite sells for $399 at BestBuy and is missing the WiFi and Blu-ray, but has a bigger hard disk (yeah I know you can free upgrade the PS3 HD).  Plus didn’t I hear that Sony figured out how to bring down manufacturing costs by ~35%, are they still losing that much on this console?

I agree somewhat with the complaint that Xbox Live costs $50/year.  But then again, both free services for the Wii and PS3/PSP kinda suck (we’ll see if they can actually do something with Home).

But it isn’t really the price that bothers me.  I’d buy the PS3 with the bonus that I could play some old PS1 games I still have, if I could find one or two really great titles (I’ve seen Resistance and I do like it, but I don’t think that’s enough). And thus, it comes back to games. You have to think that if they had a few solid, exclusive franchises, people would buy the damned thing.  I bought an N64 solely for Ocarina of Time, though I got it early and with GoldenEye.  Same sort of thing for the GameCube, only that was Metroid.  The 360, pretty much for Halo 3.  Sony still has Metal Gear, but lost GTA, and Final Fantasy over the years and you have to believe that hurts them.