Jackreyes' Gaming Blog

This year’s E3 happened just a week or so ago, and there were a lot of announcements by a lot of people as usual.
This is a roundup of the main announcements:
Microsoft:

‘Project Natal’ – A motion sensing camera for the Xbox 360.

Halo 3: ODST

Halo Reach

Metal Gear Solid: Rising – Will now also be available on Xbox 360 when released.

Xbox 360 Games on Demand – The ability to download full games onto your hard drive.

Sony:

PSP Go! – Probably the one thing everyone knew about before E3. It will feature 16GB onboard memory and no UMD drive. This means all digital downloads for the PSP in the future.

PS3 Motion Controller – Yup, another motion controlling announcement.

Resident Evil Portable

God of War 3 – To be released… March 2010. just 9 months to go.

MAG (Massive Action Game) – Bad name, yes. True name, also yes. This (FPS) game will feature 256 players online at a time. Sounds… massive.

Nintendo:

Super Mario Galaxy 2 – Rather than Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo’s biggest announcement seemed to be software in the form of a sequel to the very sucessful game, Super Mario Galaxy.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii – Continuing the Mario theme (surprise, surprise), Nintendo also announced a new 2D Mario game for the Wii with multiplayer aspects.

Metroid: Other M – Not continuing the Prime series, a new Metroid game for the Wii from Nintendo.

Wii Vitality – This was the only peripheral/hardware announced by Nintendo. And they weren’t too keen on sharing the details. Seems strange to me, and they’ve said its targeted at the people who still refuse to become gamers…

Its not that I just haven’t included it, there really wasn’t much announced for the DS, other than Golden Sun.

Best of the rest:

EA:

FIFA 10 -  Whilst it was to be expected, the graphics seem to be sublime. I will definitely be looking into getting it.

Scribblenauts – DS – This was my highlight of the convention, it seems to be an almost perfect game from what I’ve seen. You need to watch videos to see the extent of the brilliance of this game!

Ubisoft:

Splinter Cell Conviction – Looking like it will be a great game.

Valve:

Left 4 Dead 2 - Who didn’t enjoy L4D? Well, its already causing quite a controversy because fans think that this should be released either as DLC for L4D, or an expansion.

Well, thats about it really. I might have to write an individual article for Scribblenauts soon, but for now, I think I’m done reading and writing about E3.

~Jackreyes

This week has been pretty poor article-wise, but nonetheless, here is our Weekly Roundup.

This week:

• Svenn Reviewed Frets on Fire, the freeware PC Guitar Hero-like game. See here.
• I wrote an article about games to look forward to in the coming days (and months). See here.

Ok, so it really was a bad week, but next week will be better (I hope).

~Jackreyes

This game, cleverly aka BWii is a sequel to the original Batallion Wars released on Gamecube. Having never played the first game, I didn’t know what to expect. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised, it seems to have a nice campaign along with Wi-Fi play.

I have to say, even though the graphics aren’t revolutionary in comparison to the PS3 or 360… I think they are very impressive for the Wii and I love them. The vehicles and grunts may not look realistic, but I think that is whats so great about Nintendo and the Wii, they can pull off unrealistic and replace it with fun. Because that is what this game is… good fun.

The gameplay is great. The campaigns are well thought out and work really well. The first ones do a good job of teaching you how to play. However after only playing 4 of the campaigns and them still sort of teaching me, I’m a little worried about the length of the game because my save file says 25% completed already.

The controls seem to be pretty good using the wii remote, you press Z to lock on then wii remote to aim and press B to shoot. If instead of B you press A it’ll send the troops you currently have selected attack. The control stick on nunchuk is used for moving player around and C changes the camera view. Moving the nunchuk in a to the side (shaking sort of) will make you perform a combat roll to get out of the line of fire. If you use the D-Pad to select different troops and then hold down A you can become a different soldier type, or even a vehicle.

The WiFi I only tried once and the other guy disconnected. There are 3 different WiFi modes; Co-Op, Skirmish and Assault. I only tried Co-Op but then the other guy basically lost all his troops then disconnected. It seems to be lag-free and work well though. Still uses Friend Codes. You can find mine here. Just comment to tell me you have added me and put your friend code here too.

Ratings:

Graphics: 9/10

Gameplay: 9/10

Control: 8/10

WiFi: 9/10

Overall: 8.5/10

83%

I never got to writing this article until now >.<

I had a date on March 9. It was so dang beautiful. It was the best night of my life! What? You think I had a girlfriend? Noooo!! I bought Super Smash Brothers Brawl and played it for quite a while. The story is well set up, and even if there is absolutely no dialogue, it works amazingly!

The story mode is called the SubSpace Emissary. The story is basically that there’s the SubSpace Emissary, who are destroying parts of the Smash World with special bombs that turn the area into SubSpace. We also have the 2 greedy kings (Bowser and Dedede) beating the crud out of our heroes and turning them into trophies. The story is actually full length this time, and lasts probably 10 hours.

Brawl includes a new an improved group mode, which includes rotation (automatically swaps out players if you’re playing with more than 3 buddies), improved special brawl (bunny ears + large sized character + high gravity + metal), and the removal of the cruddy game variants we didn’t like (coin and bonus).

The game includes a lot more items and characters, such as the long awaited Sonic The Hedgehog, and the unexpected Solid Snake . There are about 34characters total, and will keep you playing for a while until you finally get them all. Some items from melee reappear, as you battle with an improved beam sword, super scope, and fan (it’s only better because you can trap people in your fan’s fury for a while LOL). The bumper (remember from the original SSB?) made a reappearance too. The nice new toys you get to play with are the cracker launcher (sounds a little weird), which shoot fire crackers at an angle that you choose, the smash ball, which summons your character’s special attack, and the Smart Bomb (Star Fox), which makes that huge explosion you see in Star Fox 64.

The vault mode (has collectibles) has a lot of nice features, such as the returning trophy feature, sticker feature (another nice collectible), stage builder (have not tested it yet), and screenshots + replays. I have not really tested much on Vault.

I have a few complaints about Brawl (it doesn’t matter how good a game is. There is always going to be something wrong with it).

1. Final Smashes are cheap and unbalanced. Kirby’s is almost impossible to avoid, and knocks you off the map easily, but Peach’s only makes you fall asleep and doesn’t make you fly off the map.

2. The game doesn’t have a dedicated camera mode. You can only angle the camera when you have paused the game. A lot of videos I see on SSB use the dedicated camera on Melee and angle their shots while the game is not paused. The zoom is not as good anymore (doesn’t zoom in as much as it used to).

3. No language changing

Gameplay: 9/10

Graphics (based on my taste, not compared to those fancy 360 and PS3 games): 10/10

Concept (same as always): 8/10

Controls: 10/10 for 4 different methods

Music: 9.5/10 because it is like a compilation of all the Nintendo stuff

Replay Value: As high as the moon gets.

Overall: 9.5

-sakuramaxx

As you may have noticed Super Smash Bros. Brawl got released in US on the Wii.

Pretty sad for PAL owners at the minute. Although Datel have given us the option of playing the import with their new freeloader which ONLY lets you play imported games, it does NOT let you play backups. So if you order the freeloader and US import then you can still play. As far as I know the Wi-Fi is flawless in UK and Europe too.

For those with the game, here are a few extras (as if you need any):

Bin2Jpg: This piece of software converts your SSBB .bin screenshots into .jpg’s assuming you have an SD card. Link.

SmashLevels.com: This site allows users to upload and download custom stages again using the SD card. The site only has 41 stages up at the time of writing this post, however this site should only grow.

Soon I will hopefully have created a guide to unlocking characters.

Also expect other SSBB threads to turn up around here.

Stay Tuned.

-Jackreyes

Yeah, it’s delayed.  U.S. release date is now March 9th.

WRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!

Sakuramaxx

This review has been a long time in coming. Probably because I’ve been playing the game instead of reviewing it, so far i’m on my 13th star out of 120 I think. If you think this review will have some negative parts that you could annoy your nintendo fanboy friend with then think again.

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW!

This really is an excellent game, if you have a Wii then you won’t want to miss this game. It is unlike all other Wii games, and unlike all other Mario games too. You may think Mario is just the same game repeated with better graphics. If you do think this then you need to try different versions of Mario. In the beginning he was 2D and extremely pixilated now he’s 3D and looks great. So in the beginning Mario could only jump on the bad guys and get to the end of the stage. This has all changed, he can jump, spin and fire star bits at the enemy and instead of getting to the end of a flat stage he can go off course and venture east or west if you want him to.

Now down to the storyline and basic gameplay. So I will now admit the Bowser kidnapping Peach story is long past its sell-by-date. Bowser comes along with his airships and takes the whole castle, you are trying to save Peach and have just gotten to the castle so you get taken too but instead of ending up with Peach and Bowser you instead end up with a girl/woman named Rosalina and her star shaped luma friends. She and the luma want to help you find Peach so they allow you use of their observatory that uses the power of stars to send you to different galaxies. The trouble is Bowser has already stolen most of these stars and is abusing them or using them for evil. So it is your job to go into space and get the stars.

Obviously there is no online play, that’d be a little wierd in a Mario game, I mean what could you do?

This game is amazing, so if you don’t feel like playing Super Mario Galaxy to rescue Peach then do it to see what the Wii can really do. This is the best game I’ve played on the Wii so far and I expect it will stay that way for a long time.

Above: One of the first bosses in the game, you have to climb to the top of him then… I won’t spoil this game anymore.

Graphics – 10/10

Gameplay – 10/10

Controls – 10/10 – Sorry I didn’t mention controls in the review, its A to jump, B to fire star bits, shake remote to spin and jump and Z (on nunchuk) to do a ground pound.

Overall – 10/10

98%

Yep… it was only so long before I wrote a Wii review… lol and it just had to be from EA sports.

I know you’re probably thinking that all EA sports titles are the same and never change etc. Well… as true as this normally is, you have to remember this is the Wii, the console that has the ability to use amazing controls as well as great gameplay. So this year I thought EA have had a year to perfect their motion controlled sports games so I decided that basketball could be fun. So I went out and got it.

First put-off no symbol on the box to say it has Wi-Fi/Online Play (edit: It says on the back it has online play, no Nintendo WiFi Logo because I don’t think it uses the nintendo servers for online.). Other than that the box looks nice. I got home then started playing. It took a couple of games to get used to the game and controls. The family play controls make it easier for the rest of your family (hence the name) to play. Even my dad was playing and scoring baskets.

The Advanced Controls were for the more serious gamer. It took a little longer to learn these controls but still wasn’t too bad. This game is a fun, easy to play game. Great if you like playing or watching basketball. A bit similar to other EA sports games so I won’t review NBA Live 09 next year… unless I have nothing else to review.

Great fun. Great game. Fun to play with others.

Graphics – 9/10 – Some of the most impressive graphics I’ve seen on the Wii so far. Bravo EA

Gameplay – 8.5/10 – Great fun

Controls – 9/10 – Great controls!

Online – Untested so far

Overall – 9/10 – 87%

Jack.

Ok so I obviously play a lot of DS and Wii titles, more DS though. I obviously can’t get around to reviewing them all but I try to do as many as possible.

Ok so I want people to realise what DS and Wii games are worth buying and what clearly aren’t.

So here is my currently playing list and what ratings I think the deserve so far.

DS: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney 1 – 10/10 – 98%

DS: Hotel Dusk Room 215 – 8/10 – 85%

DS: Arkanoid (Japan) – 8/10 – 80%

Wii: Nothing I hope to get some new Wii games for christmas though.

Jack.

Wow.

I got the US version today. It’s amazing, my surprise game of the year so far. Having never played the 360 Arcade version I didn’t know too much about this game, so I took a chance in getting it, and thank god I did. It is the must have game for people who get addicted or are easily bored. It is a game that you can play for hours, it’s the tetris of a new age with the graphics being similar.

Ratings:

Graphics: 7/10 – They did what they were supposed to, but the graphics don’t really matter in this game!

Gameplay: 10/10 – Wow, Could it be any better? The answer is, no.

Controls: 10/10 – Modes for left and right handed people, no complaints. In fact the controls are great, I choose to use the A, B, X and Y buttons instead of the stylus though.

Multiplayer: 9/10 – WiFi highscore tables are nice and so is the multiplayer I’m sure but I haven’t tried it, it missed out on the 10/10 by not having a combination of the WiFi and multiplayer, which would have allowed you to really play against people online.

Overall (not average): 10/10 (98%) – You could hardly hope for a better game.

The aim of the game is surviving the hordes of bad-guys coming by shooting at them and gaining points which will add to your score and then they drop ‘Geoms’ which are like a currency for unlocking new features, also for every lot of ‘Geoms’ you pick up your score from is multiplied by that amount until you lose a life then you have to build up your multiplier again, the max is 150.

It truly is a great game, buy it for 360 Arcade, PC (Vista and XP), Wii, Phone or of course DS!

Jack.