NPD has released its November numbers and, for the first time in quite some time, they’re actually surprising and interesting. Historically, October is when the holiday shopping season begins to pick up steam, but the sales numbers traditionally skyrocket in November; a great November is crucial for a strong finish for the year. This year’s had definite winners, losers, and systems that simply held their ground, so let’s take a look and see what we can turn up. READ MORE
December 2008
Gamers can now mutate Fallout 3 in any way they want as Bethesda has released the official modding toolkit.
The Garden of Eden Creation Kit, released yesterday, allows users to “create, modify and edit any data” for the PC version of the game, according to its official description. Bethesda has also set up a G.E.C.K. wiki to provide help and tutorials, which users can edit, update and expand.
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Rhythm and music games have overtaken the party game scene and are now the dominant force in the living room. These games have traditionally required dedication and lots of practice to enjoy; screw up badly enough and you or your band gets booed off the stage. Nintendo made Wii Music to make music games more accessible.
Wii Music aims to bridge the gap for gamers wanting to experience the thrill of a musical simulation without the burden of the practice. This is done by eliminating large guitar and drum controllers and utilizing the Wii remote and nunchuk as the only items needed to enjoy the game. To accomplish this, the musical experience changes from one where timing is important to one where the focus is based merely around feeling the rhythm of the music. In Wii Music you effectively play “air guitar” and the music follows your movements. Shake the remote fast and the music speeds up, slow down your movements and the music follows. It’s a novel concept really in that you are in control of the music as opposed to attempting to recreate the song as it was recorded. This places you into the role of the artist, creating music as you go.
Wii Music has 3 main gameplay modes: Lessons, Jams, and Games. Lessons teach you the basics of Wii Music and how each of the 4 control scheme types control different types of instruments. Jams allow you to either Improv the music as you go or play either Quick or Custom jams. There are 3 available Games to play including Mii Maestro where you take on the role of a conductor. Handbell Harmony is a game that focuses on playing a song using handbells and this game does focus on perfect timing to achieve a high score. Pitch Perfect is a nifty little game that tests your ability to match pitches or place notes in different orders.
If you own Wii Fit or have a balance board, you can also take advantage of drum mode that also includes its own Lessons and Jam modes. The drums take a lot longer to learn to play compared to the other instruments.
Veterans of games like Rock Band or Guitar Hero will find Wii Music to be a complete waste of time. It just doesn’t pack the level of difficulty that those games provide. Where Wii Music shines is for the younger audience. Younger gamers will enjoy seeing their Mii recreate the music based on their movements.
Wii Music really didn’t strike a chord with me. I found it to be largely underwhelming as a whole. The games were entertaining, but short lived. The Jam mode was a novelty and became boring after a song or two. That said, my 4-year-old did enjoy playing Jam mode quite a bit. I don’t think Nintendo will win over any fans of other music rhythm games, but there is a good chance that Wii Music will act as a gateway game for younger gamers that may have not been exposed to other titles in this genre. Save your money unless you’ve got kids and even then, you might want to borrow or rent this one first.
Plays Like: Rock Band with no instruments
Pros: Good for kids
Cons: Gets boring fast
ESRB: E for everyone
Traditionally the PC has been the main vehicle for real-time strategy games due to the sheer amount of command options due to controll limitations, but with the addition of voice commands, Tom Clancy’s Endwar attempts to show that the console can be home to similarly complex and engrossing strategy experiences; surprisingly, it succeeds, and while it may not surpass the PC’s greatest, it holds its own.
As with all Clancy games, Endwar takes places in the near future. The United States, a unified Europe, and Russia vie for world supremacy until the launch of a U.S. space station attempts to tip the balance, but the destruction of the station by a group of terrorists instigates the beginning of World War III. Merely a façade for the game, the story is bypassed almost completely to focus on the gameplay, so don’t expect any thrilling turn of events or interesting personas to be present here. But dropping the ball on the story does not carry over to the gameplay which is as solid as they come for real-time strategy games.
You take control of up to twelve individual units as you attempt to clear the map of your enemies. Using a basic rock-paper-scissor decision process you can order units to attack, and backup others or call in reinforcements. While this may not seem like much, when dealing with so many units on a large map it gets extremely complex very fast. Troop balancing is the name of the game as you are constantly challenged to focus on several different areas all at once, while the enemy AI does not let up on you. Here is where the voice command either makes or breaks your experience.
Using a headset, the voice recognition of Endwar does an extremely good job registering commands and simplifying gameplay to manageable levels. It is possible to play without the headset but the controls can’t keep up with the constantly changing situations and you will find yourself behind the power curve. This is especially the case should you take your game online to multiplayer mode, where anyone with a headset and half a brain will completely cream a controller-only foe.
The single player campaign is really a tutorial for going online; multiplayer is where all the action and challenge is. You can face off single player versus single player or more interesting are the 24 hour battles that you can drop in and out of. Either way if you aren’t playing with the voice commands, you are going to lose. Period.
Endwar is a great real-time strategy game that doesn’t pull any punches with its gameplay, even though it appears on a console. Graphics and especially sound help give a sense of urgency to a very complex title that should excite console fanatics who have been waiting for a decent RTS to call their own.
Review Score: 4/5
Plays Like: Complex real-time strategy based in the near-future
PROS: Highly complex, superbly executed and visually stunning
CONS: Complex for the common player and it is a significantly different play style without voice command capability
Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (DotNW) is a rarity among RPGs in that it is a true follow-up to a previous title, in this case the GameCube’s best-selling Tales of Symphonia (ToS). Like Square-Enix’s better-known Final Fantasy series, Namco-Bandai’s Tales series is usually comprised of stand-alone games that share several features, themes and maybe even the same world, but are otherwise unrelated to each other and can be enjoyed on their own merits. DotNW does not feature that luxury; your enjoyment of this new Wii offering will largely depend on whether or not you played, finished, and enjoyed its GameCube predecessor.
DotNW picks up roughly two years after the conclusion of ToS. After a thousand years of separation, the two worlds of Sylvarant and Tethe’alla have been reunited and a new World Tree has sprouted to keep things under control. While that might have sounded good on paper, in reality that sort of massive ecological shift is going to have both environmental and political ramifications, which is basically where DotNW picks up. Following a horrific event referred to as “the Blood Purge”, timid and apologetic Emil Castagnier is raised by his aunt and uncle in the rebuilt city of Luin. Thanks to several factors that are frankly out of his control, Emil is the source of much scorn in the town, having no friends; even his family doesn’t want much to do with him. One day he encounters a mysterious man known as Richter who gives him some gruff advise and the mantra “Courage is the magic that turns dreams into reality,” inspiring Emil to investigate a strange howling in the dried-up lake bed. It is there that he runs into a young woman named Marta Lualdi (DotNW’s other main character; very much the Colette to Emil’s Lloyd) along with Tenebrae, a Centurian of a mysterious force known as Ratatosk.
A lot of DotNW plays similary to ToS; for instance, most locations (and their BGMs) are seemingly taken directly from the original title, with only a few changes here and there, mostly cutting off once-accessible areas. Many of the dungeons — and a few of their puzzles — are also lifted straight from the previous chapter. This is somewhat excusable given the shared world and storyline, but at times it can feel lazy. Combat is also largely identical, although DotNW has added the ability for free-roaming movement where previous iterations restricted you to mostly two dimensions; the drawback here is that any hit you receive while doing to is registered as a critical, so mind your environment. You can also assign up to eight shortcuts for Artes using the D-Pad and some light waggle, which is an impressive gain over ToS’s mere two; what is lost in exchange is the ability to pre-set multiple tactical AI strategies and swap them on the fly, although I found that it was rarely productive to take any character off “Attack Freely” in DotNW.
DotNW’s most distinguishing feature is the ability to form pacts with the monsters you defeat, almost Pokémon-style. You accomplish this by using elemental Artes to manipulate the Field Gauge, although that’s easier said than done in most cases. You can have up to four monsters in your active party, with the rest kept in reserve via the Katz Guild. Monsters can be great aids in combat, as they gain levels quickly and can have their stats powered up by feeding and evolving them along the way, but they are a double-edged sword. Unless you’re actually expected to lose a combat for storyline purposes, you get the Game Over screen when all of your non-monster characters are KO’d or turned to stone; the more monsters you have in your party, the easier it is for you to lose this way — especially at those times when you only have Emil in your party.
Everything else is standard Tales-issue. Synthesizing new items, earning Grade for any New Game+ you might attempt, the eight elements of mana, borrowing elements of Norse mythology (you have probably never heard so many grown adults use the word “Ginnungagap” in serious conversation as you will in the later stages of DotNW), prejudice against half-elves (although this takes something of a back seat to bigger problems this time around), the Sorcerer’s Ring (now with Wii Remote pointing capabilities for easier aiming), cooking (this time to raise your befriended monsters rather than for healing purposes), character-developing “skits”… you name it, it’s probably here.
For good or ill, DotNW is simply another Tales game. As one of the briefest RPGs around — mostly due to the elimination of tedious overworld travel — it will only ask about 30 to 40 hours of your time to finish, with the usual RPG array of optional side-quests, hidden goodies, and other completionist fodder; ToS, by comparison, took upwards of 60 over its two discs. As If you enjoyed Tales of Symphonia and want a follow-up adventure in the same world with the same characters plus a couple of new ones, then Dawn of the New World should provide you with a much-needed dose of solid RPG action on the Wii. If you didn’t enjoy ToS or the Tales series in general, then steer clear of this one, too.
ESRB: T for Alcohol Reference, Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, and Suggestive Themes; despite both protagonists being only 16, a lot of complex issues are dealt with throughout the game. It stops just short of any sort of graphic, M-rated content, but this is definitely high school territory at the very least.
Pros: A successful, if streamlined, follow-up to an established storyline; solid writing and acting, with the unique combat interface of the Tales series
Cons: As a sequel, a lot of recycled content; forming monster pacts is fidgety at best due to the limited influence you have over what your AI-controlled partners do during combat
Plays like: Other Namco Bandai “Tales” games
