Steve Wiebe, the subject of the gaming documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, will be taking on Donkey Kong again, attempting to retake the high score record from arcade legend Billy Mitchell. The attempt, at this year’s E3, will take place June 2 and be broadcast by G4.
Have you seen The King of Kong? Some found it enjoyable, and others found it inaccurate. Let us know what you think in the comments.
Peggle is what every casual game wishes it could be – popular with the entire spectrum of gamers instead of just casual gamers who visit shockwave.com on their lunch break and play Bejeweled for free for 30 minutes. Peggle began life as a PC game, but after seeing a successful sequel it is available for DS and 360 as well. The 360 version is a straight port of the PC original (no Peggle Nights content here like you can find on the DS version, but it costs $20 less so it’s hard to complain) – good level design, interesting character abilities, and maddeningly difficult challenge courses.
Peggle is a bizarre cross of pachinko, pinball, and plinko (from The Price is Right). You begin a normal level with 10 shots, a field full of blue and orange pegs and bricks, and a bucket moving back and forth across the bottom of the screen. Clear all of the orange pegs and bricks to win the level, and if you manage to get the ball in the bucket you will earn an extra shot. Accumulating 25,000 and 50,000 points also nets you an additional shot. Character abilities are activated by hitting special green pegs or bricks and vary between each character. One will give you a dotted line guide (much more useful on 360 than on PC), while another will tweak your next shot for you. Other powers include multiball, pinball flippers, a fire ball that burns through pegs and bricks instead of bouncing, and transforming the extra ball bucket into an extra ball pyramid.
Adventure mode is really an elongated tutorial for challenge mode where you will be tasked with eliminating 45 orange pegs instead of 25, completing a board with only one shot, and beating the Peggle masters on all available difficulty levels. Adventure mode introduces you to the basic game mechanics and the scenarios in which each master is best suited for the job. Challenge mode allows you to play as whomever you want but makes up for that freedom by being especially difficult. In turn it makes up for being difficult by feeling much more rewarding to win.
Peggle has two multilayer types – duel and peg party. Duel can be played on a single console and consists of two players firing shots at the same field (if your buddy takes the first green special power peg it won’t be there for you to nab it next turn). The player with the most points at the end of the game wins. The game ends either when both players are out of shots or all of the orange pegs are cleared. The second multiplayer type is peg party. For no reason I can think of peg party can only be played via Xbox Live. Sure, over XBL all players can shoot simultaneously, but each player’s field is separate so waiting for friends on the couch to take their shot wouldn’t ruin the game type. A peg party is made up of two to four players. Each player chooses a peggle master and plays the level independently of his or her opponents. After each shot the scores are tallied so you can see who is winning, and after everybody clears the board or runs out of shots the game is over.
Peggle is simple but challenging, straight-forward but clever, and repetitive but fun. It is exactly what a good puzzle game is supposed to be, but after playing the PC version it is painfully obvious that analog sticks are not how this game was meant to be controlled. Peggle is best experienced with a decent mouse so that you’re absolutely sure where you’re aiming. The addition of peg party multiplayer isn’t enough to make the 360 Peggle’s standout platform. If you abhor sitting at the computer to play games or desperately need another version of peggle then the 360 version is a solid buy, and you’ll have a lot of fun with it – just don’t be surprised when you buy the game and its sequel again on PC next time Steam is running a sale.
Pros: Fun, challenging, additional multiplayer mode over PC original
Cons: Analog sticks aren’t as precise as a mouse, no Peggle Nights content
Plays Like: Peggle Dual Shot, Peggle (PC), Peggle Nights, Pachinko
ESRB: E for Everyone
Did you grow up on Mega Man and Bionic Commando? Do you think that most contemporary games are too easy? Then Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? is the game for you. You control a battalion of prinnies (the adorable penguin bombs from the Disgaea SRPGs on a PlayStation product near you) – 1,000 of them to be exact. You and your army of prinnies have 10 hours to gather the ingredients for Etna’s (your boss) ultimate dessert. Sure the story is flimsy, but it’s a serviceable excuse to run, jump, kill enemies, blow past checkpoints, and die repeatedly against end-of-level bosses.
Prinny features a lot of levels (36 to be exact), but you won’t be able to play all of them in a single play. At first this sounds like a downer, but what you’ve got is a 2D platformer with genuine replayability. It is possible to play Prinny six times without ever repeating a level. Prinny is by no stretch of the imagination an easy game, but it isn’t unfair either. It shares a unique quality with Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox. When I died I felt two things: 1) that it was my fault and 2) that I had learned something that I could use throughout the rest of the game. Prinny stands as a stark contrast to Mega Man 9 – another fiendishly difficult game. The difference between the two is that Mega Man 9 is consciously out to get you and it feels cheap more often than it feels difficult. Prinny, on the other hand, never feels cheap. It’s just hard, and that makes victory over the game’s giant bosses all the more satisfying.
So what keeps Prinny from feeling cheap? Well-placed checkpoints for one. These checkpoints serve to break up the levels logically and keep you from replaying large sections of a level you’ve already defeated. Second, you have 1,000 lives. It doesn’t sting quite so badly to miss a jump when you know you’ve got 800 d00ds in reserve. Prinny also manages to maintain a good difficulty curve – it just happens that the difficulty continues to go up further than you might expect. Like games of old, though, Prinny teaches you everything you need to know in order to complete the challenges presented to you.
Nippon Ichi also hit the ball out of the park graphically. This is bar none their finest PSP title, and if anything really shows that off it is the art. 3D backgrounds, intricate sprite-based enemies, and details unique to specific enemies, bosses, and your character all make Prinny a joy to look at while lamenting that missed jump or botched boss pattern. Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero is an amazing action platformer that hearkens back to days spent sitting on the living room with an NES pad in your hand, Bionic Commando on the television screen, and your friend alternately laughing at your failures and cheering you successes.
Any gamer with a PSP and a love of platformers should give Prinny a whirl. It’s full of great (and out there) characters, witty writing, and plenty of satisfying platforming. The great level design and non-linearity make it a must-buy game that you’ll play many times.
Pros: Challenging, appropriate difficulty ramp-up, fun characters, great checkpoint placement
Cons: Probably too difficult for those who didn’t cut their teeth on 8-bit platformers
Plays Like: Ninja Gaiden, Super Mario Bros.
ESRB: T
Big Bang Mini comes with plenty of soul and very little character—the art, the fireworks, the mechanics, the price, and the variety of modes give it plenty of life. After you spend time with it, though, it feels like going to a parade alone.
BBM is an easily accessible shoot’em-up—you control a spinning or pulsing orb or square or triangle that must avoid plenty of projectiles and falling debris. To attack, you flick the stylus as you would strike a match in the direction you wish to attack, each strike sending up one shot. However, if that shot doesn’t hit (or isn’t absorbed by a cloud or shield or whatever), it explodes like a firework, and the debris falls back down and could kill you. You must also use the stylus to move the ship out of the way, so you must either attack or evade, but never both.
The main arcade mode features 90 levels, organized into ten sets with different locations, enemies, techniques (one section lets you make bullet-absorbing vortexes), and boss stages.
It starts off as easy, fooling you into thinking you are skilled with your stylus, but the game will brutally crush anyone who doesn’t have a lot of experience playing games where you must dodge projectiles. Each level is short, but it takes only one hit before you fail. Some of the enemies spray showers of 20 projectiles at once.
There are other modes, such as a mission mode that comes with 25 preset achievement-style challenges, a versus mode that allows you to play against other players (one cartridge only) and a challenge mode where you can post your high score online. There is a secret mode and a relax mode to unlock—the relax mode puts on a fireworks show and music for you while you watch and can appreciate the art. You have to clear all 81 bonus stages to do that.
The games’ furor makes you miss its soul; I found Paris and Abyss particularly difficult and kept losing to sheep, paper airplanes, black cats, fish, and underwater mines. I am an advanced gamer, and it only took me about 5 hours to clear the arcade mode, but there was a lot of failure involved. It will be much more challenging for casual or non-aggressive players. It requires a volume of attempts and requires persistence more than it does strategy or puzzle-solving.
The controls are easily BBM’s strongest feature–they are flawless and superb, allowing the player to savor Big Bang Mini’s unique features.
Still, Big Bang Mini won’t be for everyone. It’s good for bite-sized gaming, it’s a nice challenge, and shmup fans will love the unique spins it takes, but if none of those are incentives, the challenge and strict dexterity requirements may drive you away.
ESRB: E for everyone. Fireworks and psychedelic hippies, clouds, and superheroes abound.
Plays like: a shmup where all movement and shots are directed by stylus
Pros: Superb controls, unique, challenging, variety of modes and challenges, and quirky, memorable beats
Cons: Highly challenging, unforgiving, somewhat short; the experience leaves you forgetting what happened when you’re done, which is something that is rare and undesirable
I don’t know how to label “my generation”, but it’s certain that someone in marketing has: Retro Game Challenge caters entirely to those spent a lot of time gaming in the 80s. If you don’t know what it was like, RGC will show you. If you do know what it’s like, there are plenty of laughs and subtle references to the era that will make you giddy with nostalgia.
In Retro Game Challenge, a crazy Japanese man sends you back to the 80s to be friends and play games with his former self so you can understand what it was like back in the days where you had to use printed manuals and magazines in order to succeed. In this game, you are playing as a kid playing video games. The entire time, you will hear your friend cheer you when you succeed and boo you (or the game) when you fail. At any time, you can pause the game and rush to the manual or magazines to use one of the cheat codes if you forget it. You can even write down notes in a blank notebook using the stylus.
So it’s all very literal. Your first game is a clone of Galaga called Cosmic Gate. Upon beating all the challenges, you then will play Haggle Man, a platformer. Throughout the game you can always go back and play one of the previous games, if you so desire. Two of them, the RPG Guadia Quest and the ultimate sequel, Robot Ninja Haggle Man 3, let you save the game within the game.
The games themselves are distinct. On the plus side, they are actually good and manage to improve on old formulas, which is a necessity considering the games are simple and patterned after games that are over 20 years old. Fortunately, the designers know their design history, so the games feel both old and new, letting you appreciate the game as a relic while understanding what it was like to anticipate and be excited for an 8-bit game.
On the downside, some of the games are repetitive. The two versions of Rally King are essentially the same (in order to make fun of an exclusive edition of Super Mario Bros. that was only released in Japan), Cosmic Gate is very simple, and the second Robot Ninja Haggle Man makes only minor improvements and features. The last two games, Guadia Quest and Robot Ninja Haggle Man 3, take quite a while to play through, but the game feels drawn out only from the challenges. If you were to sit down and just play through all the other games, it would only take a couple of hours, assuming you know how to play old-school games.
Retro Game Challenge is highly clever; it successfully melds past and present, and upon closer examination, it makes the sly commentary that with the exception of the Internet and online gameplay, very little about playing video games has really changed. But if you don’t really care for satire or commentary, or if you don’t miss or care about retro-gaming, Retro Game Challenge may not be for you. The game is one huge inside joke and half the fun is from getting that joke. If you don’t, though, you may feel unincluded and wanting to ditch the party.
ESRB: E for everyone. Extremely tame. The children of today probably can’t even tell what the images are supposed to represent in some parts.
Plays like: old but good 8-bit Nintendo games
Pros: Lots of hidden humor and metacommentary, games feel old and new at the same time, games are mostly better than the old ones they emulate. The magazines, manuals, and what your friend says are funny if you get them.
Cons: But the games still feel old, and some of them are repetitive and grinding and occasionally the challenge feels arbitrary. That arbitrary challenge and that grind are true to the way things were, yes, but would someone walk through the snow for miles just to see what it was like for his grandparents?
