I like games… sometimes.
Archive for June, 2009
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Wii)
Jun 30th
‘The Boy Who Lived’ has started his sixth year at Hogwarts Academy for Witchcraft and Wizardry, and such Electronic Arts has brought this latest endeavor to the small screen on every current platform. Ringing in the new school year with classes, perils, and hormones, Harry, Ron and Hermione set out to stop Voldemort once again.
Unless you know who Albus Dumbledore and Hermione Granger are, as well as key plot points from the previous movies or books, you should probably steer clear of this game… not because it’s bad mind you, but because Half-Blood Prince is full of fan service and inside references that will make no sense unless you’re up on that Potter.
Based upon the movie version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the story is told through a mix of in-game cut scenes and pre-rendered bits, which I can only assume at this point, touch upon the major plot points of the film coming out in two weeks. While they do a good job at leading you through the happenings at Hogwarts, some of the scenes feel a bit disjointed and happen without prior explanation.
Harry and the crew are decently modeled although during story sequences, their faces are a bit peculiar. They certainly look like Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, but the developers have attempted to throw some emotion into their face as events unfold. Good idea to help avoid the stone faced glare, but it comes off as nothing more than a replacement skin that just swaps out, instead of natural emotion.
Additionally, the entire cast is voiced and unless you turn on subtitles, you wont have to read the dialog. Most of movie actors have lent their voices to the in-game characters, including Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy and Evanna Lynch as Luna (Looney) Lovegood, but some of the stand-in voices are terrible. One particularly egregous example is that of Severus Snape… I guess Alan Rickman impersonators aren’t all that easy to come by.
The area that makes up Hogwarts is an amazing achievement on the Wii. Everything has been meticulously recreated allowing you to guide Harry through the halls, classes, courtyards and surrounding area. It looks downright stunning. What’s even more impressive is that it is all done with minimal load times. Normal exploration of the school grounds will seamlessly stream from area to area without much of a hitch (although the frame rate can chug here and there) and you’re only given a brief load screen when a large transition is happening. To add a little incentive to make sure you walk everywhere, there are plenty of Hogwarts Crests to collect, as well as “mini-crests” which will build into full Crests after you get enough. These Crests will unlock different things such as multiplayer dueling and “gags” that you can use on the grounds.
Outside of exploration, you’ll take part in three main activities which all seem a bit too much like mini-games to the point that once they’re unlocked in the single player campaign, you can jump right to them through the main menus and just play that particular one. The most entertaining of the three is Potions. You plop yourself in front of a bubbling cauldron and have to mix, heat, pour and shake all sorts of ingredients to devise the proper concoction. This is a great implementation of the Wii remote as it feels like you’re really pouring out liquid and stirring that pot. Once you get the hang of the current potion, they’ll throw something else at you to keep track of for the next.
Next up is Dueling which you do a fair amount of. The Wiimote here is used in conjuction with the nunchuck as your wand and different waves will cast different spells and dodge incoming curses. At first, it’s fairly easy and you simply cast Stupify and Expelliarmus to defeat your foe but later on you’ll be deflecting and hanging the enemy by his (or her) ankles.
Finally the weakest of the bunch, riding around on your broom with Quidditch. As the Seeker for Gryffindor, its your sole job to catch the Golden Snitch. The films depict this as a harrowing battle against the opposing team’s Seeker while dodging incoming Bludgers and other stick riders. Pretty cool stuff right? Not in this game. All it is, is a slalom race where you point the Wii cursor at the next gate. Once in a while, you’ll get someone coming in to try and bump you, but its effectively a meaningless motion as nothing changes. Just hit those gates, and a winner is you.
While two out of three are genuinely entertaining, I can’t help but think that adding a couple more things to do would have greatly increased my enjoyment of the game. Granted, over the span of about five hours, you’ll probably get tired of them just in time to see the finale, but they do say that variety is the spice of life and maybe two more gametypes would have hit the sweet spot.
I’m kind of torn with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. On one hand, you’ve got a completely wonderful and fully realized world based off of the same one you’ve been watching in the movies for the past several years, including many of the same voices you’ve come accustomed to. On the other hand, the title just isn’t varied enough in terms of actual gameplay. Still, if you’re a fan of the series, you’ll certainly find something to like about this game and as far as movie tie-ins go? It’s probably one of the best ever made.
Score: 3.5 out of 5
The Good
Faithful, well-made, and great looking representation of the Harry Potter universe
Included minigames are interesting and mostly fun to play
Find out what happens in the movie, two weeks before it hits theatres!
The Bad
Very limited selection of activities
The retelling of the story feels a bit disjointed
The Ugly
Bellatrix Lestrange’s hair
Rocket Riot (360)
Jun 23rd
Now now, before you immediately say “Oh great, ANOTHER dual stick shooter on Xbox Live Arcade”, hear me out. Rocket Riot puts robots, pirates, zombies and ninjas in the same game, lets them all fly around with jet packs, and gives them all rocket launchers to blow stuff up with. Review over.
Still not convinced? Ok, let me explain a bit. The premise behind Rocket Riot is about as silly as its pseudo retro art style. A bad pirate named Blockbeard has escaped and stolen everyone’s legs. Scientists have invented a jet pack that attaches to your butt, so everyone is now jet pack enabled (not disabled, got it?). Your job is to chase after Blockbeard through 80 levels of action.
Mechanically, Rocket Riot resembles any number of dual stick shooters that grace Xbox Live Arcade with one important addition: Gravity. You control your little pixelated fellow with the left stick. If you’re up in the air and stop moving that left stick, you’ll fall downward. On the rocket side of things, the right stick will shoot them, but again with a bit of a twist on that mechanic. All the rockets are effected by thrust and gravity, the longer you hold in the direction you want to shoot, the harder and faster the rocket will fly out. Sure, you can spam a bunch of rockets out of your launcher, but they’ll dribble out and fall to the floor likely missing their intended target. This ballistic trajectory makes it much more difficult, and entertaining, to hit your targets.
While the rockets certainly blow apart your foes, they will also destroy the environment around you in an explosion of particle cubes. Doing this can create short cuts through levels, escape routes, and reveal much coveted power-ups (or much despised power-downs) for your flier. It’s easy to rip apart the pixels, but give them a short amount of time and they’ll begin to rebuild themselves a few blocks at a time. The power-ups range from homing and triple rockets to giant-sized rockets, and if you get them you’re sitting pretty for a limited time. The power-downs are more annoying… avoid the red pickups at all costs… one of them will even replace your rocket with a “BANG” flag, leaving you completely helpless (for a limited time).
Artistically, Rocket Riot is full of charm and character. While played on a 2D plane, everything is certainly a 3D model and the perspective shifts here and there to show that off. The entire environment and cast of characters are built from 3D cube shaped pixels which, as previously mentioned, fly around in a particle storm when being asploded. The cast of characters all have an early SNES Final Fantasy look to them and consist of just about every archetype you’d want in your retro styled title, each unlocked after you blow them to bits. Zombies, Army Men, Ninjas, Robots, Pirates, Normal Dudes, and more all make appearances.
My biggest issue with Rocket Riot comes down to it’s campaign mode. Sure it has 80 levels of blasting dudes, but it only has about 5 different modes for each of the maps with a few additional gimmick maps thrown in. You’ll be doing basically the same things over and over in different themed levels, just to unlock all of the characters. By the time I hit the half way mark, it was wearing quite thin and the whimsy has lost a lot of its charm.
The mode that’ll keep you sticking around is the Multiplayer which has a bunch of different modes to play in. Normal death match, Rugby Riot, Golden Guy, all of which are entertaining and frantic in a Smash Brothers sort of way. Playing against real people is certainly a different and better challenge than against mindless drones of single player. Everyone has a regenerating health meter which works just how it sounds (this meter is also present in campaign mode) so you’ll need to get a few quick hits on someone to take them down.
The physics introduced make Rocket Riot feel just different enough to keep the dual-stick shooter game type fresh and the art style is something that needs to be checked out. Codeglue has a nice hit on their hands. Rocket Riot is, in fact, a riot.
Score: 4 out of 5
The Good
Great retro art style, complete with cube particles everywhere
Huge roster of unlockable characters
Who doesn’t like Jet Packs?
The Bad
If you go headstrong into the Campaign, you’re likely to get burnt out by the end
Levels in Campaign need more variety
The Ugly
Needing only 4 more kills (out of 70), spacing out, and dying.
Plants Vs. Zombies (PC)
Jun 9th
Around the time PopCap released Peggle, they really started their way into the hearts and minds of people who consider themselves ‘serious’ gamers. Many folks, myself included, just looked at their games as something you didn’t really admit to playing (Bejeweled) but would still find hours lost to relatively pointless jewel swapping. Now though thanks to Peggle, folks revel in their love for PopCap games, so when they told everyone about their latest title… notice was taken by many and people started talking.
Plants Vs. Zombies is their own take on the tower defense genre where you must protect your house from the walking dead. Instead of building large structures to hinder their progress, you grab a trowel, your best sun bonnet, and step into the shoes of a gardener laying down a lawn full of special plants that do your dirty work. The zombies shamble down up to six fixed lanes, and most plants you lay down will only defend on one of those lanes. If they get past all your plants, there’s a single use lawnmower on each lane to protect your house. If that goes and a single zombie comes in for dinner… game over.
Each round of play begins by picking which seed packages you’ll be able to use in battle. At first, only a handful of slots are available but as the game progresses you’ll be able to buy more slots for more photosynthetic options. With 48 different types of seeds to pick from which are unlocked as the game progresses, there’s almost endless mix-and-match possibilities. You “pay” for the majority of plants with sunshine, which is earned by clicking on little suns that float from the top of the screen onto your lawn, or generated by Sunflowers. This adds a bit of an actiony feel to the title as you’ve got to make sure to collect the suns in the midst of combat, or they’ll go away.
As you progress through the game, you’ll have to defend the front and back yard of your house in the daytime and nighttime and switch to different locations around your humble abode. Each level provides a new challenge to overcome and forces you to adapt and pick new plants to throw down. To help break things up, there are a few mini games interspersed as well, changing the way a board is played completely if only for one round.
Probably the best part of PvZ is the art style. Everything is wonderfully adorable, including the zombies with their cute little arm bones sticking out. Everything drips with a certain loving quality that shows how much thought went into making these zombies family friendly. If you don’t laugh when the Michael Jackson zombie moonwalks onto the board and summons some backup dancer zombies, you have no soul. There are plenty of other amusing zombie archetypes as well, but some of the fun found in this title is coming across them for the first time.
Not all is sunshine and daisies though. At no point during the majority of Plants vs Zombies did I feel truly challenged. While the introduction of new plants helped move things along, it felt like one way too long tutorial on the mechanics of play. By the end of the game, even though more modes were unlocked, I had my fill of PvZ and really have no desire to play further.
Additionally, there’s no typical upgrade mechanic for your plants so that large 48 seed packet list isn’t as impressive when taking a second look at it. If you want a dual Pea Shooter instead of just a single one, you’ll need to take up an inventory slot with that type of seed. Space is limited on the game board as well, so if you want to make room for that type of plant, you’ll have to dig up (with no resource return) the existing plant and plop the next on open plot. Perhaps this adds a bit more to the thought process in how you take on the zombies, but I found it more annoying than anything.
I’d also be amiss if I didn’t point out one egregious oversight on PopCap’s part. There is zero wide screen support. This game was created to be 4:3 and that’s it… so if you go full screen you’ll get some pretty sexy black bars on the left and right of the game board. The least they could have done is place some sort of graphic over there.
Plants Vs. Zombies is a charming title, but once you get past all that charm it’s still just another tower defense game that’s light on challenge. For $20 though, its hard not to recommend at least a one time play through just to check out the art, zombie designs and laugh at Crazy Dave’s helmet.
Score: 4 out of 5
The Good
Great art style
Lots of different plants to choose from
Multiple mechanics help keep the flow moving
The Bad
Not much challenge to be had till the end
Wears out it’s welcome after a few hours
The Ugly
Stupid Digger Zombie!