OMG Nintendo.com

So we've run through virtually everything I saw that I could post about, and now it's time for the wrap-up post that spotlights the best games on display this year. Well, "best" relative to "things Kou and I played or saw that we really liked." Highly subjective? Sure, but so are all the E3 wrap-ups trying to make you believe that there were no great Wii or DS games at the show this year.

Note that this Best Of list isn't in any particular order. These games are all so different that ranking them against each other would be fairly pointless. Generally I consider anything for Wii or DS a "Nintendo game", even if it's third-party, since to a Nintendo fan it's just all stuff to go in your favorite system. Finally, I'll be up front and say that the list is pretty biased in favor of action games or games with action elements to the gameplay. Traditional RPGs and other turn-based games tend to leave less of an impression on the show floor, due to the limited length of most demo sessions.

Anyway, boring stuff out of the way, let's get on to talking about some great games worth looking forward to in the rest of 2008 and early 2009.

Lock's Quest

• Platform: DS
• Genre: RTS
• Developer: 5th Cell
• Publisher: THQ
• Street Date: Fall 2008

I wasn't super-impressed with Drawn to Life, its rampant creativity aside. Frankly, I don't need to play a game that makes me feel like a capricious and neglectful God whenever I close my DS case. I suffer enough anxiety problems already just trying to take care of my cats, let alone a fictional world whose fate rests on my ability to draw malformed stickmen.

So, when other guys who cover the same Nintendo turf I do were freaking out hard about Lock's Quest back when it was announced, I didn't get too excited. Nothing about the game clicked with me until I actually had time to stand around the show floor and play a level (with lead designer Matt Cox telling me all sorts of interesting things while I did). When you get your hands on Lock's Quest, two things become readily apparent: one, it's absolutely nothing like Drawn to Life, and two, the game design is sheer freaking genius.

Lock's Quest is an RPG/RTS hybrid that takes the classic flow of RTS play and breaks it up into distinct game phases after RPG sequences have set up where a fight is happening and why. You get a Build phase to prepare your fortifications, turrets, and traps, and then a Combat phase where you resolve the battle. The emphasis is fights is on defense and outlasting the enemy rather than pure offense, a major departure from most RTS and RPG designs.

Lock is supposed to be an engineer, and you actually see the best results in gameplay from... using him like an engineer, to repair walls and other defenses. Lock can do enough fighting to keep battles from being purely passive once you've got your structures in order, but once you've blown through his special abilities it's time to run back and hide beneath your walls until your HP gets buffed back up to full. Winning a battle is just a matter of outlasting the combat timer without enemies getting into whatever point you're defending, or Lock getting killed.

This is simple-sounding stuff when you explain it, but brilliant in execution. You can do everything of interest with the stylus, from building to using Lock's attacks, and the infinitely-respawning enemies in each battle create some real tension as the clock ticks down. None of the mechanics here are strictly new, but they're combined in an original and thoughtful way. Lock's Quest may not set sales charts on fire, seeing as how it's not a terrible licensed casual party game, but anyone who really loves DS gameplay needs to check it out.

Rhythm Heaven

• Platform: DS
• Genre: Rhythm & Music
• Developer: Nintendo
• Publisher: Nintendo
• Street Date: TBA

You also need to check out Rhythm Heaven, too. This is a really hard game to describe, but showing you screens or a video wouldn't help either. This is really just something you have to play, and one of the hidden gems of Nintendo's 2008 E3 showing. (By which I mean, one of the rad titles core gamers would love that was present at the show, but that Nintendo inexplicably chose not to talk about.)

Rhythm Heaven is, as one might think, a rhythm game about making music. You play it in DS's book ratio, touchscreen on the left. This is not a game about tapping arrows, matching colored buttons, or any other form of frantic input-feeding. It is about feeling the beat of a particular song (specifically, the cool chiptune playing in the background of a given stage), and performing a certain action exactly when the music dictates you need to do it. There's no verbal cues, and no onscreen cues besides the animation on the right screen. What you need to do is dictated entirely by the animation.

If you get the beat right and take your actiions at the right time-- whether it's fitting bolts into lugnuts, refueling robots, or helping a loud-mouthed kid shut up-- then you become a part of the music as your sound effects blend in with the background song to complete it. If your timing is bad, well, the song sounds worse and the animations let you know that you're screwing up. If you don't feel bad when the refueling machine breaks a robot's neck because you were off by half a beat, then you may not be human.

Most rhythm and music games are extremely obvious titles. Mash buttons, collect victory. Some might have you waggling your Wii Remotes around instead, or poking like a madman with your stylus, but the principle remains-- the games are so simple you can play them without bothering to think about what you're doing. This won't slide in Rhythm Heaven, which expects you to become a part of the music and synchronize with the world around you. This is a game you need to think about and practice if you want to get any good at playing it. That's what makes it more worth your time than the vast majority of competing rhythm games out there, whether on the DS or not.

Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars

• Platform: Nintendo Wii
• Genre: 3D Action-Platformer
• Developer: Red Fly Studios
• Publisher: Gamecock
• Street Date: Q4 2008

There is a certain quality that the developers and publishers at Gamecock appear to have in abundance. Whether you call it moxie, chutzpah, or good old-fashioned testicular fortitude, this quality always seems to result in games with stand-out concepts and art direction. This is especially appreciated here in the Nintendo enthusiast's corner, where sometimes it feels like we see precious little that isn't a sequel, clone, or outright shovelware.

It's that maverick spirit that makes Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars notable. Few developers put serious effort into 3D platformers anymore, and the ones who that don't employ Shigeru Miyamoto frequently fail to bother with crafting quality stories, art direction, or sometimes even hit detection. What Red Fly Studios appears to have done with Mushroom Men is create an excitingly original and consistent world from the ground up, beautifully realized and fully integrated with its much-touted Les Claypool soundtrack.

While there are some fantastic abilities like your mushroom telekinesis, what's impressive about Mushroom Men is the way it uses the protagonist's diminutive scale. Most of the objects you find and use to construct weapons are convincingly rendered pieces of real-world junk. The object you use to grapple, a vital platforming mechanic, is nothing more than one of the "sticky hand" toys you could once get at any supermarket vending machine for a few quarters.

Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars brings a real sense of wonder back into platforming in much the same way Super Mario Galaxy did, by bothering to construct a world worth exploring and a character who's fun to explore it with. This is an impressive feat by itself, and even more impressive for a small developer like Red Fly Studios. I've expressed concerns about the game shipping in finished state, and, well, I do still have them. Polish is the question mark that hovers over virtually all indy games on virtually all platforms, even a humble one like the Wii. That said, I do believe that if Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars goes onto store shelves in truly finished state, as the game Red Fly envisioned when they started the project, it's going to be brilliant piece of work.

Samba de Amigo

• Platform: Wii
• Genre: Rhythm & Music
• Developer: Gearbox Software
• Publisher: Sega
• Street Date: September 23, 2008

I praised Rhythm Heaven for not being a traditional rhythm title, but there's nothing wrong with that type of game. When done well, you can get a nicely fast-paced, completely intuitive experience often enhanced by whatever custom controller the game requires. The Dreamcast Samba de Amigo had the misfortune of coming out both in the waning years of that system and before American gamers had warmed up to the idea of games that required pricey peripherals like the original maraca controllers. It's a game that deserves a second chance, and a remake on a popular system like the Wii that incidentally makes custom controllers unnecessary for play is just about perfect.

Samba de Amigo is nothing new, being a traditional rhythm title and all, but its premise is incredibly well-executed. Provided your Remote's batteries aren't dying (a problem the demo stations suffered intermittently throughout the show), then the maraca-style shaking input is flawless. Shake above your head, at your hips, or down low as the game dictates, somethings with one or both hands, and occasionally songs ask you to strike poses that always register correctly when you're doing them right. (Kind of depressing this is so rare with the Wii.)

Like the original, the Wii remake is a showcase for some fantastic Latin music, both traditional songs and fiery covers of pop hits. Just listening to it is infections, and really helps Samba de Amigo stand out from the rest of the rhythm-game crowd. Perfect control, good music, and solid core gameplay is really all you can ask from a rhythm game in its most basic sense, and Gearbox's Samba de Amigo is marvelous at all of them. Samba de Amigo is a fun, kinetic experience that excels at what a lot of people want most from a Wii title, an excuse to get off the couch and play on their feet.

N+

• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Genre: 2D Action-Platformer
• Developer: Silverbirch Studios
• Publisher: Atari
• Street Date: August 2008

N+ is the rare game that takes a long-established genre and manages to turn it completely on its head. That it started as a Flash game just proves there's no excuse for the yearly parade of cash-in clone titles we usually see on console. No, N+ is something entirely different and special, a game that's an entity unto itself. If you try to play it like any action platformer you've ever played before, you're going to die a lot and probably fling your DS across the room.

N+ is instead a game that emphasizes problem-solving and platforming skill in equal measure. You play as a ninja, but he's not the springy, flippy sort of ninja. In fact, his jumps feel very heavy and strange at first. It's only when you've settled into the gameplay groove that N+ starts offering you rewards for your patience.

Each level has a time limit. During each level, you can increase your time available by gathering gold as you look for the switches you need to open up the level's exit. This can mean ferreting out doors, avoiding enemies, or trying to navigate through positively devious traps. There was only had time to play the game's first ten levels during our demo session, but by the tenth the game was heaping death on you with alarming frequency. I can only imagine how lethal the last ten levels are.

It's rare for a modern action game to demand much thought from a player. If anything, action games only seem to grow shorter and more brutish, demanding ever-diminishing amounts of thought and attention from players. N+ is the antidote to this depressing devolution, a game that keeps you on your toes while also not wasting a lot of your time with a dopey story or even excessively flashy graphics. N+ is pure gameplay, and should be right at home on the Nintendo DS.

Wii Sports Resort

• Platform: Wii
• Genre: Arcade Sports
• Developer: Nintendo
• Publisher: Nintendo
• Street Date: Spring 2009

The massive disconnect that exists between what people who buy the Wii want, and what the journalists who cover the Wii want, is most easily demonstrated by the tepid response granted Wii Sports Resort and the new Wii MotionPlus accessory at this year's E3. Wii Sports probably moved a couple million Wiis by itself, for a time played so enthusiastically that injuries it caused merited medical journal coverage. There are so many news stories about Wii Sports having miraculous energizing effects on hospital patients and the elderly that they're not really news anymore.

You'd think a sequel to Wii Sports would be treated like a tremendous, titanic thing. This game is probably going to sell at a rate that puts Wii Fit to shame and causes all sorts of shortages and e-bay shenanigans, especially if Wii MotionPlus units aren't available outside of the Wii Sports Resort pack-in for a time. It's what everyone who falls into the overly-broad casual gaming category is probably going to play incessantly through 2009.

Ah, but it won't have a storyline, or an ending, or special challenges to complete. It's a pure arcade experience, something you play to have fun with and stop playing when your arms hurt. That's apparently all it takes to make a lot of games writers decide that it can't possibly be really important. That takes us up to now, where the Wii is the top-selling US platform and Nintendo's profits are at record levels, while countless outlets cite it and Nintendo as hopeless failures.

The fact of the matter is, Nintendo doesn't have to prioritize the core gamer anymore, and that makes the gaming press  which is comprised almost entirely of core gamers - extremely uncomfortable. That's not really a bad thing. If all it takes to totally upset our little world is Nintendo opting to publish a game that lets people swordfight, jetski, and throw frisbees with 1:1 motion control support, then our world is a place too hopelessly insular to be relevant anymore. Wii Sports Resort is what most of the world is going to be playing in 2009, and there's no good reason not to join in the fun.

Madworld

• Platform: Wii
• Genre: Action
• Developer: Platinum Games
• Publisher: Sega
• Street Date: Q1 2009

I kid the core gamer. I sort of have to-- at the end of the day, I'm more of a core gamer than the sort of person that's able to play Carnival Games without experiencing feelings of guilt and loathing. That means that while I have no problem with Nintendo making "games for everybody" like Wii Sports Resort, I still occasionally want to play a stylish, darkly comic, hyper-violent bloodfest on my system. Hey, Madworld's coming out? Thanks, Sega!

Madworld is a real testament to the design strength of the Platinum Studios guys (formerly the Clover guys, who did brilliant things that didn't sell). Madworld should be a vile, hateful little game, but it's got the one thing going for it that Manhunt 2 never did: originality. I mean, seriously, rendering an entire game in Sin City-style black & white, with color reserved for blood and sound effects? I'm not sure even the announced Sin City video game would have the sheer moxie to try and pull that off.

Yet, pull it off Madworld does. Just the demo session was a glorious car crash between indy comic absurdity and the satiric sci-fi of the late 80's, as you watch a character trapped in a "Running Man" type death-game decide that the way out is to see how many guys he can carve up with his chainsaw and how many heads he can shove traffic signs through. There are kills where you pull guys literally apart, kills where you leave their bodies hanging from the ceiling-- great stuff, and a clever use of the art style.

If Madworld looked totally realistic, the violence would simply be gruesome and gratuitous. Instead, its more stylized approach makes it clear that this game is going to deal primarily in grimly humorous satire. You aren't just killing guys in ludicrous ways, you've got constant wrestling-style color commentary chiming in to praise you hilariously for especially wacky kills, and chattering away in the background to kill time when you're not doing so hot. Madworld looks like it could be a brilliant title, so here's hoping the game itself is as good as the demo was.

Wario Land: Shake It!

• Platform: Wii
• Genre: 2D Platformer
• Developer: Good-Feel, Ltd.
• Publisher: Nintendo
• Street Date: September 22, 2008

I'm still at a loss for why Nintendo didn't talk this game up at their press conference, or at least get it going on the show floor. It's probably the most brilliant thing they had at this year's E3, alongside Rhythm Heaven. If you did manage to get behind closed doors to see Wario Land in motion, then you saw a truly amazing evolution of the 2D platformer.

Shake It! Is a continuation of the Wario Land series that Nintendo apparently hadn't done much of anything with for about seven years now. The original titles were like Mario run through a dementia filter. The controls were up to Nintendo standards, but Wario's motivation was always pure greed and his goal to hoard up coins and treasures. He assaulted enemies with his aggressive moves like the dash and the butt-stomp, and was one of the earliest games I can recall that just forthrightly let you play as a (humorously) bad person.

What's so brilliant about Shake It! Is that it hasn't messed with the formula at all, just made it bigger and more beautiful for the Wii. Instead of pixel-sprites, Wario is now a hand-animated creation with almost disturbingly fluid movements. So are his enemies, too. The controls are still perfect (even the tilt-controls for tossing enemies), and the gimmicks are still in Wario's original mean-tempered spirit. You still hoard coins and treasures, a feat that gets harder as the game progresses. The enemy appears to be opposed to Wario only insofar as he and his minions eat gold, which directly contradicts Wario's basic goal of having a big pile of it to sleep on.

It's funny that as the 3D platformer becomes passe, the 2D platformer seems to be making a comeback. I only got to play one level of Wario Land on the Wii, but it was joyous and... well, perfect. In some ways, it feels like the Wii's answer to the retro shenanigans of the DS's New Super Mario Bros., and the game quality honestly seems to be on that level. I'm hoping Wario Land pleases retro game fans like me when it hits in a few months, but I also hope it introduces all the kids getting the Wii as their first system to how great a 2D platformer can be.

Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility

• Platform: Wii
• Genre: Simulation RPG
• Developer: Marvelous
• Publisher: Natsume
• Street Date: Summer 2008

The Harvest Moon series is one of the most ridiculously successful in gaming, but one the American gaming press doesn't seem to like talking about, or admitting that in fact lots of people buy even the lousy entries in the series.. It's true that the quality levels of each new set of Harvest Moon games fluctuate wildly, and the localization quality fluctuates roughly as much from game to game, but a really good Harvest Moon is something you can crawl into and play for hundreds of hours.

Tree of Tranquility, the first Wii Harvest Moon, looks like a truly exceptional game. It was actually present at last year's Santa Monica E3, in far rougher form. Seeing it this year, after a year of polish, was frankly amazing. This is a brightly-colored and engaging game with sharp graphics and a more polished localization than you might expect from playing the more-rushed DS titles.

In terms of depth, Tree of Tranquility pretty insane. The number of new features is ridiculous, and you can play as a male or female character (with a complete suite of marriage partners for both). You can raise bizarre animals like ostriches and silkworms, grow weird new crops, and unlock magic rainbows that take you to other islands. It also has its share of optional festival mini-games.

Tree of Tranquility does feature motion controls for basic farming, but they're blessedly optional. You can walk among your crops and take stuff out of the Shipping Box if you dropped it in. This is, basically, the sort of very polished and deep Harvest Moon experience that fans have been wanting to see for awhile, and it's nice to see that game appearing as a Wii exclusive.

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

• Platform: DS
• Genre: Action RPG
• Developer: Konami
• Publisher: Konami
• Street Date: October 2008

While Konami still struggles to make an acceptable 3D console Castlevania game, the 2D games on the GBA and later the DS have been content to carry on the legacy of the PlayStation's Symphony of the Night. Good music, complex power-up and equipment systems, great pixel art... not much to complain about it, really, or at least that's how things seemed.

The danger any long series of games produced in a similar styles faces is encroaching mediocrity. While Portrait of Ruin was a good game in a lot of ways, it also has some serious warts when viewed in hindsight. The overall game progression is similar to Dawn of Sorrow's for no particularly good reason, and tons of enemy sprites were reused while the overall animations seemed a bit simpler and more static. It wasn't an ugly game, but stopped being fun to look at much sooner than Dawn of Sorrow. It stopped being fun to play a lot sooner.

Order of Ecclesia seems to have been conceived almost purely to try and shake up the mediocrity threatening to take root in the DS Castlevania titles, and it seems to have done a good job of it. While some old sprites are back, a lot of them have been redrawn, and all of the new animations for our heroine Shanoa are meticulous wonders of pixel art animation. The bosses are gorgeous, her power effects only slightly less so, and watching her combo spells together is a wonder.

There's more that's a shake-up about the game than it's look, of course. That we're getting a female protagonist at all is significant, given Koji Igarashi's stated reticence toward creating such a character. The plotline has gone back to the 19th century, to address dangling plot threads regarding Richter Belmont that I had long since given up on. Wi-Fi item trading is back, perhaps the best element of Portrait, along with some sort of Wii connectivity. In short, Order of Ecclesia seems to be taking a good series and putting a bit more thought and polish into what that franchise does well. That's worth looking forward to.

Mega Man 9

• Platform: WiiWare
• Genre: 2D Platformer
• Developer: Capcom
• Publisher: Capcom
• Street Date: September 2008

It wasn't until this year's E3, talking to some other journalist friends, that I found Mega Man 9 was considered a "controversial" game. A lot of fans were already criticizing it as a simple-minded and lazy project, or expressing disappointment that Capcom wasn't making a modern 2D title with big flashy sprites instead.

To be honest, this kind of endears Mega Man 9 to me a little bit more. There's something punk rock, something Devo, about answering high fan expectations with "You know what, we're going to make a modern game using 8-bit technology basically because we can." Mega Man 9 takes the idea of video game development as a never-ending forward march of progress and gives it the middle finger simply by existing.

Maybe a game made on 8-bit technology really can be as fun as anything else Capcom's done with Mega Man lately. Maybe it can even be more fun. I'm convinced Mega Man 9 is a great game based on the time I spent playing it. I died constantly, but inched a little farther forward each time and found my progress satisfying. It was one of the few games I saw at the show that left me able to zone out and completely focus on what I was doing.

Now, people who want to say Capcom are just trying to make a lot of cash on the cheap may have a point here. Certainly, some of the sprites in the E3 demo levels looked pretty familiar, as did some of the puzzles. I'm willing to give Capcom the benefit of the doubt here, and assume this is a decision more about style than being cheap. Mega Man 9 plays so aggressively like the old games that there's no reason to believe it won't at least have the same depth and replay value. Any game that manages that for a mere $10 is worth looking forward to.

• << prev
• next >>