Well, that was unexpected. I'm flipping through the latest EGM after the roomie checks the mail, and I'm reading through their blowout preview of Square-Enix's upcoming titles. Most of it is typical stuff, but the preview blurb for the DS's Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days is amazingly negative. Check this out:
An ambitious multiplayer take on Kingdom Hearts, the oddly named 358/2 Days wasn't nearly as impressive as Birth by Sleep. Square-Enix may simply be asking too much of the humble DS hardware, and the lack of an analog controller hurts, too. Worse, rather than making enemies clever and challenging for four players to take down, the developers simply bumped up their hit points. There's hope for this one, but it definitely needs work.
Ice burn.
Here's a surprising bit of corporate honesty for you. During BusinessWeek's coverage of the Xbox 360 price cuts (which hit this week), Microsoft Senior Vice-President of Interactive Entertainment Business Don Mattick came right out and admitted that even with the price cuts, it was very unlikely that the 360 could outsell the Wii on a worldwide basis.
Luring such gamers should keep Microsoft ahead of Sony, though even Microsoft's top Xbox boss acknowledges the company is unlikely to catch up to Nintendo. "I'm not at a point where I can say we're going to beat Nintendo," says Don Mattrick, senior vice-president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business. Indeed, Nintendo is likely to run away with the lead in the current generation of console gaming, leaving Microsoft and Sony to battle for second place. Microsoft's lead over Sony, coupled with the changes it's bringing to the console, positions it to secure that spot, Mattrick says: "We will sell more consoles this generation than Sony."
The situation with Disaster: Day of Crisis grows increasingly bizarre. Hot on the heels of the announcement of an October 24th European release date out of nowhere, word hits of a Japanese release set for September 25th. WTF, just three weeks from now? The game's going to end up on Japanese shelves with almost no marketing whatsoever given that kind of timetable. Is Nintendo just trying to get a bad game out the door in as much of a low-key fashion as possible?
At this point, we really should have heard something about a North American release from somebody. Is it even coming out here? There's a growing number of games that see Japanese and European releases while skipping over America completely, like Tingle's Rosy-Colored Rupeeland. Is Disaster: Day of Crisis going to be another one? Here's hoping Nintendo of America drops some sort of information for us, ASAP, or it may time for Disaster's fans to learn how Wii importing works.
Disaster: Day of Crisis
As you may remember, we took a real shine to N+ when we got to play it hands-on at Atari's booth on the E3 show floor. It shipped for the DS on August 26 and should be sitting on the shelves of your favorite game retailer now. So, now it's time to ask the question: is it worth your $30? How'd it turn out? Is it worth buying over, say, the 800 point XBLA version or the totally free browser game version?
As always, we'll turn to a sampling of the game's highest and lowest review scores as aggregated by Metacritic. With its overall average sitting at 81%, it looks like N+ has acquitted itself quite well on this platform. Do note before we get started, though, that a lot of outlets reviewed the PSP and DS SKUs of N+ together despite the two games offering different level and feature selections. For our purposes, we'll try to focus parts of the reviews that are specific to the DS version.
It connects via a little attachment for your wiimote which theyre saying will work with the Wii MotionPlus. When I started it from zero it synced up instantly and with no issues. The unit on Mega Man 9 had some desyncing issues, but the others didnt and Chris, the Nyko guy I was talking to, said that the drivers were still being finalized and they were squashing those desyncs as we speak.
The D-pad is a little slippery, and while I may not be a wizard at Street Fighter, I know how to do a Shoryuken and I was having a little trouble. Nothing that wasnt alleviated by a little practice, but it reminds me of the Dreamcasts D-pad, which could have been better. They say theyre modifying the D-pad to give it a little more texture.
I decided I wanted to play NES Metroid today. Once that would've meant pirating a ROM, firing up an emulator, and wrestling with my lousy USB controller. Now, in the era of Wii-- hey! I can just go download it all legal-like.
So I fire up the Shopping Channel to buy me some Metroid, and ... oh, look! I can't download it, because Wii needs 95 blocks of internal system free. Back to the Wii menu, into data management...
First I delete some stuff I bought for review purposes that sucked. That takes me to... 92 blocks free. Magnificent. So, I yank my SD HD card out of my camera, a bad boy with 4 gigs of storage space.
Oh, but wait! My Wii can't recognize SD HD cards! I'd have to go out and buy, presumably, a small crappy $20 SD card for Wii use. Awesome! Nintendo is penalizing me for not liking low-capacity storage media.
The SD cards Nintendo seems to insist are the cheap and easy way to store Wii DLs are already lousy out-of-date technology I'm not interested in owning. Give us a real storage solution, Nintendo, an external hard drive or SDHD support or something practical.
Now here's a case of IGN using their powers for good. IGN's teamed up with D3 Publisher and a bunch of professional game designers to craft nine custom levels for Treasure's Bangai-O Spirits. The levels are all up here to be freely downloaded (like all Bangai-O Spirits custom levels), and include submissions from the likes of Infinity Ward, Naughty Dog, the creator of Deus Ex, Vicious Cycle, and Infinite Interactive. After you've played all the levels, vote for your favorites in IGN's poll. Why bother, you ask?
The level that wins the most votes from fans will earn a $10,000 gift from D3Publisher in the level designer's name, to be awarded to a graduate student at The Guildhall at SMU for tuition assistance. Voting ends September 8, 2008.
That's right, one of these levels is worth $10,000. I can't begin to guess which one, as I must guiltily confess to not having nabbed a copy of Bangai-O yet. Maybe I can rectify that later today...
Bangai-O Spirits
The Homebrew Channel has brought much good to the fan who likes to mod his/her Wii, but it's also unleashed something fairly horrible on the Mario Kart Wii online community. Right now a hacking code for the Wii homebrew program Ocarina is doing the rounds. It enables infinite items of any type in Mario Kart Wii online play - Bullet Bills, Lightning Bolts, Blue Shells, whatever. The video above shows a game played with the code in action, and the main player using infinite Blue Shells. It's like a vision of hell.
No official word from Nintendo about this, but I've seen a few reports of people using the hack disappearing from races in the early laps. Obviously that doesn't always happen, or the video above wouldn't be possible.
Mario Kart Wii
A thread on Capcom's really quite good Capcom Unity forums has brought along some useful and depressing news. If you were holding your breath for Ducktales, Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers, or Darkwing Duck on Virtual Console... well, I'd suggest breathing. Ever-helpful Capcom VP of Strategic Planning & Business Development Christian Svensson has bluntly stated that part of the Capcom NES library is unlikely to see VC release.
Licensing issues abound. I think you'd be hard pressed to see them show up, but you never know.
No Bionic Commando, no DuckTales, still waiting on Mega Man 2... what is Nintendo America's damage with Capcom lately? Anyway, if you're the type to keep a machine around that can play NES carts, then these games are probably ones you'll want physical copies of for the time being.
Things are looking good for fans of the Conduit. From its display booth at PAX comes the promising revelation from High Voltage's Rob Nicholls that The Conduit has found a publisher and is definitely going to be able to ship in Q1 2009, with a full singleplayer campaign and both online and offline multiplayer, possibly with LAN support. High Voltage isn't ready to announce the publishing company's name yet, but promises an announcement within the next month.
The new info about controls and gameplay is stunning. Some weapons have projectiles you can control with the Wii Remote, either by pointing or tilting. GameSpot revealed in their hands-on that the Conduit will support Wii MotionPlus as an aiming option and WiiSpeak for voice chat. Cursor sensitivity and turning speed are all customizable, along with mapping of all buttons. Single-player campaign is set to run roughly 10 hours with nine missions, and plenty of bonus secrets to find.
- << prev
- next >>
- EGM Has Nothing Good to Say about Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days
- The DS's upcoming Kingdom Hearts title got some coverage as part of a Square-Enix blowout in the recent EGM, and... well, they apparently hated it.
- http://www.omgnintendo.com/article/103156/egm-has-nothing-good-to-say-about-kingdom-hearts-358-2-days/
Read >>