Believe it or not, I saw this game back at E3. It was far and away one of my favorites of the show, but the fact that it lacked a title meant I couldn't actually write anything about it. Now that The Chase: Felix Meets Felicity has a name and an official trailer, I can finally tell you guys about what a cool little game it is!
Basically in The Chase, cute girl protag Felicity or cute guy Felix run around in levels doing the platformer thing-- beating up enemies, grabbing items, hitting checkpoints -- to try and impress their love interest (the other character). So simple, so brilliant-- is this one of the first action games for girls that isn't a total embarrassment? If it's as cool as the E3 demo I saw, it definitely is.
The Wii system library is a wasteland of great third-party titles that end up just not selling: Elebits, Zack & Wiki, Boom Blox. What's the problem? If you listen to Nintendo of America President ,Reggie Fils-Aime, the answer is apparently "all of those games are lousy and third-party publishers need to try harder." Yeah, he totally went there:
Speaking to Forbes, Fils-Aime conceded that the Wii hosts a range of third-party titles which, with a few exceptions, largely do not exemplify quality software for the platform. The reason for this, he says, is that certain developers and publishers still don't 'get' the Wii's design philosophy.
"I will be able to say our licensees 'get it' when their very best content is on our platform," he says. "And with very few exceptions today, that's not the case."
With Nintendo of America's head honcho making cracks like that about the efforts thus far, I have a hard imagining many more third-parties are going to want to invest in the Wii instead of the more lucrative 360, either. Seriously, just not a classy move in any way.
The old NES and SNES Tecmo Bowl games were so much fun that I liked them, and I don't think I've sat through a real football game in my entire life. They just had a fast-paced, arcade appeal that transcended really needing to know what you were supposed to be doing or why.
Football games have grown quite a bit more nuanced since then, to the point where I don't even try to understand Madden games without a developer at my shoulder explaining everything. You'd think there'd be a market for a simpler, arcadey alternative, and a lot of people with long memories got excited about Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff maybe being that game.
It seems like Tecmo has dropped the ball, or at least didn't get everything quite right this time. A 64% Metacritic average is very rarely attached to a game based on mass misunderstanding. The real question is what developet Polygon Magic botched, and if the game is still worth its while despite the fumbles. Let's take a look at the reviews and see what patterns emerge...
Animal Crossing: City Folk officially goes on sale this week, although I'm sure some of you reading this are going to have it already. This game proved quite controversial when I covered it back at E3, as some of the features people expected to be there... well, weren't. And this seems to be the big deciding factor in terms of whether or not you want City Folk: do you mind that it's pretty much the same thing as the prior DS and GameCube Animal Crossing games?
What's interesting is that no one is even attempting to argue that, no, City Folk really is a new and different Animal Crossing experience. I've yet to come across a professional or fan review that doesn't simply start with the premise that City Folk is entirely identical to the DS's Wild World, save for a handful of new features. What seems to decide whether or not a given person has any interest in City Folk is whether or not they think the new features are worth it.
I don't plan on buying or playing Animal Crossing: City Folk, since I figured out the hard way with Wild World that the game's structure is not for me. You're probably wondering, though, is City Folk a game for you? Read on and see if some reviews help you make up your mind.
Animal Crossing: City Folk
Most gamers, I think, have a certain Pavlovian reaction to the music from our favorite games. They remind us of fantastic moments in games past (and perhaps fantastic moments to come), and sometimes just hearing a song from a game is enough to get you totally psyched to play more. For Nintendo fans, game music becomes especially important thanks to the NES and Super NES. Both had sound chips that were, with a few exceptions, superior to most other things on the market at time of release.
The composers who wrung soundtracks out of those bleeps and bloops created a whole generation of chiptune addicts. This list is a tribute to what I think are some of the absolute greatest, most memorable video game songs ever produced by Nintendo hardware. To this day, they send chills down my spine and make me want to pick up a controller and go kill something made out of pixels. In some cases they're musically interesting in their own right, just for being able to squeeze compelling melodies out of hardware that's unimaginably primitive to the modern gamer.
If you noticed your Wii glowing blue last night, that's because an e-mail from Nintendo about Wii Menu Update 3.4 was downloading itself to your computer. Whether or not to run this firmware update is tricky to figure out.
The main reason why you want it is is that the 3.4 Update finally fixes the Wii's really screwed up SD card drivers. Reports are floating around of huge games, hundreds of blocks in size, now being transferable to SD card in roughly thirty seconds. Disc read speeds are also significantly improved, and USB keyboard support is available in the Mii Channel.
The main reason why you don't want 3.4 is that installing it involves agreeing to a new Terms of Service agreement, and 3.4 is also designed to break homebrew. One of the things it does is look for "altered save games", (i.e., the Twilight Hack) and delete them. The new ToS also means you have to let Nintendo to download patches and firmware updates to your Wii automatically, without giving your prior consent. It's inevitable that many of those patches are going to be designed purely to break homebrew.
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
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Want to see someone play Mega Man 9 really, really well? Check out the video above, where you can see Speed Demo Archive member Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk clear the game in less than 25 minutes with no lives lost. Purchased items include a mere single E-Tank and M-Tank. Satoryu believes a completion time less than 24 minutes is possible after running through a list of mistakes he felt were in the run, and I think he's right. In the meantime, this is great watching just to see what little tricks he uses that are worth incorporating into your own game.
Here, have some more delicious sales data to think about before we end our blogcast day. GameDaily has crunched recently-released NPD data and turned it into the handy-dandy graphic above, which seems to prove that Nintendo is unquestionably winning the console wars. The Wii moved ahead of the 360 in June and since has left the Xbox in the dust, sales-wise, despite Microsoft price cuts.
But is Nintendo really winning? Checking out the graph below suggests the situation is more complex than you might think. While Nintendo is leading bigtime on hardware sales, people who own Microsoft's Xbox 360 are buying tons more games per system - 94 million units total for Microsoft to Nintendo's 73 million. If you think over all the angles, then right now, I think you can only consider the console wars a dead Nintendo/Microsoft heat. There won't be a clear "winner" until more people per console are buying Wii games, or more people are buying 360s.
You haven't seen a lot of Wii Music coverage on this site, in part because I got called away for a big deadline... and in part because I seriously have no interest in buying or playing the thing. I don't hate it and would even recommend it as a gift for kids, but personally I've got better things to be playing.
Maybe I'm not alone in that feeling, either. While just about all of Nintendo's other Wii-branded titles debuted to huge sales, Nintendo stated to MTV Multiplayer that Wii Music's first two weeks of sales only moved about 66,000 copies.
Nintendo Vice President of Sales and Marketing Cammie Dunaway offers this explanation of Wii Music's sales performance, though it smacks of rationalization to me.
Were predicting that its going to be an evergreen title. And if you look at titles like Brain Age, its about the same as what Brain Age did during its first few weeks and went on to sell 2.5 million copies. Wii Fit certainly had a larger launch than that. But I think that people are starting to understand Wii Music.
Wii Music
The good news is, if you opted to buy the Wii version of Guitar Hero World Tour last month, you're not alone. Nearly 200,000 of the roughly 530,000 units of the game sold went to Wii owners, roughly as many as went to Xbox 360 owners. So guess what 360 owners are going to get that you aren't?
It seems that Guitar Hero World Tour's much-hyped exclusive Jimi Hendrix track pack DLC is not going to be coming to the Wii due to a very strange licensing restriction.
We learned about this technical limitation a few weeks back from Harmonix. The Wii version of Rock Band 23 will not feature price-reduced bundle packs because Nintendo does not allow duplicate content on the Wii Store.
In this case, licensing restrictions from Jimi Hendrixs people mean Activision Blizzard must offer the music as a track pack and not singles. The restriction, combined with Nintendos rules, mean Wii players wont see the music.
Lame. How many people wanted GHWT because they knew Hendrix DLC was coming, and that Wii would get DLC this time?
