With WiiWare's better-than-expected launch lineup behind us, Konami compiles all of our pre-launch WiiWare fears into Critter Round-Up, a limited and thoroughly awful release that practically nullifies all goodwill previously found in Nintendo's downloadable games service.
Critter Round-Up places you in the role of a farmer who must satisfy his obsessive-compulsive need to sort his animals by species. Starting in a large enclosed area, you must separate animal species by constructing a series of fences in straight lines. While it starts out simple enough, the process soon becomes frustrating, and the game never comes close to being fun at any point.
Warning labels are everywhere in our modern society. The video games we play are no exception, with many titles preceded by screens cautioning against violent content or the fact that playing online will completely ruin your fun. Star Soldier R, though, is the first game I've seen to feature a pre-purchase warning based on predicted personal taste.
Prior to accepting your Wii Points, the Wii Shop Channel warns that Star Soldier R is not a complete shooter experience. Rather, it's a collection of timed challenges. Think of Star Soldier R as a vertically scrolling shooter take on Pac-Man Championship Edition's competitive formula -- gameplay comes in two- or five-minute bursts, and focuses on score and technique, rather than the genre's usual premise of survival against extreme odds. The result, while fun, may not provide the kind of longevity that shooter fans expect.
There are few games so bad that getting angry at them is warranted, butTV Show King manages to be one of them. I want to give the benefit of the doubt to Gameloft and believe the game got rushed out the door, or that perhaps they just haven't learned how to properly develop for console hardware as powerful as the Wii yet. After all, Gameloft's usual specialty is casual titles for mobile platforms, which are hardly going to demand a lot of voice acting or compensating for what the game is going to look like in 16:9 aspect ratio.
That said, TV Show King falls into the upper end of the WiiWare price range, and I can't find it in me to take it easy on this game when the same $10 it costs could snag you LostWinds, Pop, or Defend Your Castle instead. The mobile market to some extent represents a captive audience that tends to accept corner-cutting and game limitations as a basic problem of their hardware. WiiWare doesn't work the same way and GameLoft can't afford to approach their titles as if it did.
Anyway, review behind the cut. Really, it's much more restrained than this! Sort of.
You know, I don't think anyone in the world likes Blackjack this much.
Do you love Blackjack enough to pay seven dollars to play it? Given the choice, I'd decline before I even knew any further details. While Blackjack can be fun in small doses or as part of a larger collection of casino games, it's still a fairly simplistic card game that won't hold your interest for long. There's some element of strategy involved -- carefully weighing your hand against the dealer's opening card is key to winning -- but after a few hands, you'll be ready to head off to the craps table.
Man, I've never been more wrong about anything in my life. In the short amount of time I'd played WiiWare's Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King to gather early impressions, I'd passed some pretty silly judgments on it. I'd decided that it was well-made for what it was, but felt that it was lacking in depth and presentation quality, especially considering that it arrived as WiiWare's most expensive launch title.
At the insistence of others (including a roommate who is so hooked on the game that she's sitting here playing it right now, in my room, as I type this), I was urged to play some more and reconsider my initial reaction. I did, and I was impressed by what the game eventually became. My Life as a King contains a deceptive amount of depth, and its limited gameplay scope features enough content to make the experience more than worth your 1,500 Wii Points.
We're moving up in the world, baby. Impressions? Oh, hell no. We do reviews now.
The OMG Nintendo editorial staff (consisting of myself and Sardius, because Kou is all DS) are going to be the main WiiWare review team for GamePro in the future. You can catch the reviews on the GamePro main site... or see them hours ahead of time by just tuning your RSS readers right here.
This is the first of the review wave, covering a simple but elegant game called Defend Your Castle that just begs to be played by drunken frat boys with poor hand-eye coordination. Seriously, this game has it all: death, stickmen, death, explosives, death, epic combat, death, and also more death. Just check behind the cut for the full review.
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