Video Game Reviews

Mere months ago, on short notice, Japanese developer Cave released the iOS version of Espgaluda II, one of many of their high-intensity "bullet hell" shoot-em-ups. The port was an accomplishment in and of itself, both in regards to its arcade-perfect speed, and the slaps in the face it delivered to the ludicrous number of below-average shooters already out on Apple's App Store. DoDonPachi Resurrection (previously known better by its romanized Japanese title, DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu) is another almost-surprise release that's also just as expertly produced.

It's not always the easiest thing to explain a present-day shoot-em-up, given that their appeal to fans lies more in their scoring systems than anything to do with a story or even graphics. You can look at one screenshot of DoDonPachi and know what to expect: half a screen or more of bullets rushing toward you, and mere pixels of space to dodge them all. And on top of that, lots of glistening gold score tokens to collect before they disappear; it's an insane challenge, but with butter-smooth touch control and your own incredible waves of bullets or super lasers to fire, a game like DoDonPachi becomes weirdly fun, almost casual at times.

After two long years (and more than a million copies sold), Castle Crashers is finally available on PlayStation Network, bringing with it a couple of minor feature enhancements, and most notably, functional online play at launch.

Revisiting the game on PSN, I found the game to be just as original, vibrant, and damn near brilliant as when I wrote 1UP's original review (read that for expanded impressions) in 2008, as the multiplayer gameplay and overall presentation are still a knockout. Despite the strides seen in downloadable game quality in recent years, Castle Crashers retains a timeless feel; if you didn't play the Xbox Live Arcade version, the game should feel like a totally new release, unencumbered by the ravages of time. Sure, the game can be repetitive, and the humor is a bit crude at times, but the appeal of bashing cartoonish goons, leveling up your colorful knights, and being chased by a monstrous beast remains remarkably strong.

First, the obvious: Sports Champions is basically Wii Sports (or rather Wii Sports Resort) for PlayStation Move. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Just like Wii, Move is soon going to be inudated with cheap, hastily put-together minigame collections, and at its heart, Sports Champions is just that, a minigame collection. But like its Wii Sports cousins, it's composed of games you'd actually want to play. They all control well, and in some cases, they're superior to what you get on Wii.

The game is easy to understand: you can choose from six different events (Disc Golf, Gladiator Duel, Archery, Beach Volleyball, Bocce, and Table Tennis), with single- and multiplayer modes for each. They can all be played with one Move controller, but some events (particularly Archery and Gladiator Duel) let you use two of the bulbous wand controllers simultaneously. Playing through the game on your own earns you rewards (like new costumes or event-specific items) you can use to customize your chosen character with, and the difficulty on each event is scaled well -- easing you in with some introductory matches and pushover opponents, before putting you up against increasingly more skilled A.I. opponents. Unfortunately, the avatars you can pick from consist of an assorted mix of sports and ethnic stereotypes that don't fit in all that well with the game world, and whose differences don't make any substantial impact on gameplay.

You can't avoid comparing PlayStation Move's bowling motion controls to Nintendo Wii's. And, basically, they're the same: you hold a controller in your hand and you swing your arm. But what Wii Sports Bowling stripped the sport down to its basics; you threw the ball down the lane and tried to knock over all the pins. High Velocity Bowling for PlayStation Move, however, brings real-life variables into play, things like oil patterns on the lane and the quality of your bowling ball, in an attempt to create a more challenging, well-rounded gaming experience. Unfortunately, if you're looking for a fun, simple, pick-up-and-play bowling match, you'll find yourself frustrated by HVB's counter-intuitive controls.

The first thing I noticed was how difficult it is to use the Move controller to navigate through menus; the loose feel makes it too easy to skip past items I want to select. The game shouldn't require that much finesse to simply set up a match, but it does. Once you do start playing, you'll discover that you aren't simply just bowling; instead, you take control of a character with specific attributes and limitations. To be honest, this completely put me off the game at first. Why wasn't I able to throw the ball the same way from one bowler to another? But it actually does create an interesting challenge for you to learn how to best use (and win) with a character in order to upgrade to the next bowler or the next higher-quality ball.

When first booting up Tumble, I fully expected this Move launch title to be an HD Boom Blox copycat, minus the cute charm factor. And then while making my way through the slow-paced tutorial -- complete with that unenthusiastic, personality free, nearly monotone voice-over people seem to associate with "futuristic" -- I was worried I'd also be missing out on the absolute satisfaction of knocking down block structures like in Boom Blox. Indeed, the first real level of Tumble merely requires you to build a relatively short and rudimentary tower from rectangles and squares. Surely, we've all moved past this since preschool?

But, soon after, I found myself ever so carefully placing blocks one after another, building my tower taller and taller in order to reach the Gold medal ranking for height. Then the game would introduce a new type of block: a heavy one, a slippery one, a sticky one; blue ones, red ones, odd-shaped ones. Sometimes I'd have to build around moving obstacles or start my tower on a tilted platform. And for every few "build a tall tower" levels, Tumble includes an imaginative one requiring you to blow up structures for points, or solving an especially tricky build-goal, or directing lasers through the proper mirrors. You can progress to the next level by meeting the Bronze medal requirement, but the temptation to aim for Gold is a nice dangling carrot for repeating levels even after you make your way through the 50+ levels. And I found myself having fun...

To this day, a derisive descriptor for most Wii titles would be, "it's like Game X, but with waggle!" It's pretty stupid and lazy, and definitely fits the "snarky forum quip" category more than the "reasonable critique" one, but on occasion, it's brutally accurate. And so shall I appropriate that forumism for Sony's Start The Party!, which can be described as, "It's EyeToy: Play, but with waggle!"

Like EyeToy: Play, Start The Party! is a compilation of simple little minigames that each feature a camera or motion-control-specific game. There's Group Play (hotseat-style multiplayer where up to four players pass the Move Controller around for various challenges) divided into Party (a pretty standardized list of minigames divided into quirky game-like rounds) and Party Mix (a more randomized array of minigames); and there's Solo Play which further divides into either Free Play (choose among nine minigames) or Survival (where you progress through a randomized array of minigames until you fail). One goofy aspect to the party gameplay that uses both the Move Controller and the PlayStation Eye's microphone is that, on occasion, you can draw or record over your opponent's current avatar.

For a game where you ride office chairs and other wheeled objects down city streets,Kung Fu Rider is something that most people expect to have explained to them. However, it doesn't need an explanation, and the game knows this: the title screen shows you all you need to know: private detective Toby and his bubbly (in more ways than one) secretary Karin hide behind their doorway as a group of mafia goons wait outside for them. The two argue with each other for a few minutes, worrying about their fate, but once you start the game, they're already on the run when they find an aforementioned wheeled object in the street that they use for a makeshift getaway. No muss, no fuss.

Well, there is some fuss, as you have to complete some tutorial missions before you finally hit the mean streets of Hong Kong to escape the bad guys, but beyond that, the game is fairly to-the-point. Basically, you accelerate by flicking the Move controller downward to sort of "pump" the vehicle forward, which makes sense. But to really make a smooth path to the goal, you'll have to perform jumps, dashes, dodges, and kicks to clear out obstacles, including the gangsters coming for you.

First off, let's be clear about what you're getting in Dead Rising 2: Case Zero. This five-dollar download is no paid demo. None of the content is lifted out of Dead Rising 2. It's a unique location, with characters and places you won't encounter in the full game. In fact, I've seen much of the full game, and I'm pretty sure a key piece of information about the main characters is only available in Case Zero. It's a small detail, but it's a detail I would have hated to miss.

Case Zero's premise is simple and effective. Manly protagonist Chuck is stranded in a small town and needs to find five parts to build the motorcycle that will carry him into Dead Rising 2. But there's a catch. The military will arrive in 24 hours, at which point his adorable but infected daughter will be locked away in quarantine, effectively dooming her to zombiehood. Unfortunately, while Dead Rising 2 is happy to imply child zombies, it shies away from actually showing them. Too bad. Child zombies are a mean-spirited staple of the genre. I guess even Dead Rising has its limits.

In one of my favorite poems, "The Hollow Men," T.S. Eliot writes:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.

In other words: some of us may be lucky enough to have a fantastic idea, design, thought, whatever, locked up inside our imaginations, but all too often some ineffable force, some unknown obstacle prevents us from making that idea a workable reality.

The most annoying thing about modern Japanese games is how long they take to get to the interesting parts. Ten years ago, games that plodded through an hour of tedious exposition before loosing you upon the world were in the minority, even among RPGs. Now, compare Final Fantasy VII's rousing intro to the way its most recent sequel begins. Final Fantasy XIII takes hours to build up steam as opposed to minutes.

It's not like Square's alone in stumbling this way, though -- it's an industry-wide trend. Frustratingly, this tendency has even crept into the one series that you'd expect to be the last bastion of no-nonsense, old-school design: Ys Seven. Developer Falcom seems to have fallen prey to the collective delusion that its game has an interesting story (it doesn't) told in a compelling way (it's not) that players will be eager to sit through for a seeming eternity before the quest begins in earnest (we aren't). I've never been a huge fan of the Ys games, but I respect the series' no-nonsense nature. Ys is about laconic protagonist Adol Christin waking up in a new land, learning of an ancient prophecy or looming peril, and promptly setting out to round up an arsenal of magical powers with which to save the kingdom du jour.

Samus Aran, the central figure in Metroid: Other M, is a stoic, independent bounty hunter -- well, she calls herself a stoic, independent bounty hunter, anyway. Her latest adventure turns the unshakable warrior into a vulnerable young woman looking for direction and acceptance from male authority figures. In the hands of a great writer, this is the kind of character evolution that could work; but wrapped in a heavy-handed, meandering sci-fi tale, it just feels disingenuous.

Other M's story fails through clumsy execution. Answering a distress signal on a remote space station, Samus finds a deserted facility and a group of Galactic Federation members already investigating. She then teams up with the group, which includes some of Samus' partners from her own days in the Federation, but every meeting with this group of otherwise personality-less, generic space marines serves to drag the plot down without adding any real weight to the current crisis. Right after almost every battle, you get a flashback of the scene that happened moments before. Samus constantly adds her monologue to everything that's happening, but she delivers her lines in a droning monotone (which is probably meant to show her emotionless indifference to the rest of the world, but instead comes off as lifeless and boring). This narrative plods along, constantly interrupting the game's intense action and exploration moments, coming to a convoluted (but still achingly predictable) close.

I can't talk about Ivy the Kiwi? without mentioning famed Sonic programmer Yuji Naka. After parting ways with Sega in 2006, Naka founded Prope Ltd. and slowly started releasing quirky downloadable games that were nothing if not unique. While many of those minigames were good, clean fun, Ivy the Kiwi? has the kind of innovative spark that longtime Naka fans will love to see again.

Ivy the Kiwi? is both the hero of this game and an awkward reply to the game's main objective. As the omnipotent, ivy-clad hand of god, it's your task to wrangle the poor little hatchling named Ivy who needs help finding her mother. Since Ivy is so distraught about her mother's absence, you have to use three magical vines to guide and guard her to the exit. Sound a little tricky to pick up? Well, only for a little while.

Scott Pilgrim: The Game is made to appeal to your sense of nostalgia. A beat-em-up in the vein of old 8- and 16-bit classics with a purposefully pixelated art style, your mission is simply to get from one end of the map to the other while beating the crap out of everyone who gets in your way. And, for a game that celebrates the simple pleasure of button-mashing, it's highly effective.

The game effortlessly weaves together nerd-culture references (from Super Mario Bros. to Akira) with levels and playstyle created to remind you of games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and River City Ransom. Miniscule background animations and character details ensure that, even when you're just wailing away on clones of enemies you've seen in every other level, they all look distinct. And like RCR (or more recently, Castle Crashers) you also level up your character -- earning new powers, greater strength, and more incentive to keep going, the further along you go.

Top Gun for PSN does everything it can to service fans of the 1986 movie. From the opening theme and title card, to the Trophies with names such as "Jester's Dead" and "Target Rich Environment," this game is steeped in the lore of United States Naval Aviator Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell. What this download title does not do, though, is deliver the testosterone-filled attitude and over-the-top, hot-dogging aerial combat of its source material.

The game's storyline basically mimics the movie: you (as Maverick) compete with the "best of the best" at Top Gun, you lose your partner and RIO (Goose) in a tragic accident, then you graduate Top Gun and immediately join your fellow pilots to deal with a crisis in the Indian Ocean. I say "basically" because, while the game's plot points may be the same as the film, the world of Top Gun on PSN takes place in an alternate reality where all key exchanges take place in the cockpits of fighter jets. Yet oddly, Maverick has no dialogue. All of his thoughts are relayed via Goose: "Maverick appreciates it, sir!"

Sega's got to be pretty brave to release their old light gun shooters on Wii. It started with Ghost Squad, then House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return, and now, the much less succintly-named Gunblade NY and L.A. Machineguns Arcade Hits Pack. Like the previous titles, you obviously get two games: 1996's Gunblade NY and 1998's L.A. Machineguns: Rage of the Machines (though considering that you also fly around San Francisco and Las Vegas in that one, it's more like "Pacific Time Zone Machineguns") -- two games in a series where you control the machine gun of a slick helicopter gunship, fighting back the forces of some evil alien android army. And I've already said more than I need to about the story.

However, I mention Sega's bravery because -- and let's just get it out of the way -- these games are hideous. But they're also 3D games from the '90s; a simpler time where textures were a novelty. They're straightforward, and they're filled with noise, from constant machine gun sounds to corny music to laughable voice acting. And yet, at that point in time, we expected nothing less from Sega arcade games. And for that, I can't really fault these games for looking so obviously dated. If nothing else, they're good ports. Both games have been reformatted in widescreen (already a big advantage over Ghost Squad and HOTD) and move just as fast and smooth as the original versions. They haven't been easy to access otherwise (even if you did prefer to straight-up pirate them for a PC emulator like MAME and its ilk). And good luck finding an arcade that has them, or at least one that isn't a weekend road trip away. When it comes to budget-priced compilations like this ($29.99, for the record), I'd personally much rather have more obscure games that are easy to pick up and play with one controller than thumbing through the same 20 Genesis games we've seen for years.