Reviews – Page 89 – Games Asylum

Wolfenstein 3D

If you’re thinking that releasing Wolfenstein 3D on Xbox Live Arcade after both Doom and Duke Nuke’em 3D is a backwards way of doing things then you’d be right. Activision haven’t even bothered to tidy up the visuals, which is a bit of a cheek seeing that both the 3DO and Atari Jaguar versions had …

Namco Museum Virtual Arcade

Retro, Reviews

No matter how much horsepower a console has you can guarantee on two things – somebody will release Tetris on it and Namco will bring out a collection of their ancient arcade hits. There are already been three Tetris games on Xbox 360 – Tetris Plus, Tetris Splash and Tetris Evolution – so if my assumption is to go by then Namco Museum Virtual Arcade is long overdue.

This is a very peculiar collection and for a good number of reasons. Fore mostly it’s the first Xbox 360 game to have a total of 1800 GamerPoints straight out of the box, with reason being that in addition to 25 arcade games there’s nine Xbox Live Arcade games present each with 200 points a piece. Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, New Rally X, Xevious and Dig Dug are just simple arcade ports while Pac-Man: CE, Galaga Legions and Mr. Driller Online are jazzed up re-makes.

UFC 2009: Undisputed

Reviews

The ultimate part of Ultimate Fighting Championship rings true – it takes the best parts of wrestling, kickboxing, muay thai and judo and does away with most of their rules. In fact, the only real rule is that you can’t fight like a sissy, punching below the belt, biting, scratching and pulling hair. That’ll be me out of the octagon ring in less than 10 seconds, then.

It’s in a gamer’s nature to skip past tutorials but it’s worth playing through the one that appears at the start. Success depends on knowing how to reverse attacks, get out of grapples and perform takedowns and submissions. Getting out of a submission involves wildly rotating the right analogue stick – I’m sure that a lot of joypads are going to have a few years knocked off their life expectancy because of this.

Ninja Blade

Reviews

Japanese developer FromSoftware made a smart move by deciding to make this Xbox 360 ninja-based brawler. The simple reason being that ninja games are popular on both sides of the world. But let’s face it, any game that lets you smack a giant spider in the gob with a wrecking ball, or crush a mutated woman who has snakes for arms with a steam roller, is bound to sell better than the likes of Ninety Nine Nights and A-Train HX.

Comparisons with Ninja Gaiden II are to be expected. It’s so incredibly similar to Tecmo’s slightly lacking slasher though that with a few nips and tucks it could easily be passed off for a third Ninja Gaiden instalment. Lead character Ken (who Capcom had a hand in designing) has a near identical skill set to Ninja Gaiden’s Ryu, capable of running up and along walls, casting Ninjutsu magic spells and dodging attacks. Other similarities – enemies leave orbs behind that can be used to upgrade swords, the levels are the same length (around an hour each) and Ken can carry weapons the size of small countries without hassle.

Trivial Pursuit

Reviews

I don’t know about you, but I usually associate Trivial Pursuit with either snobby dinner parties or dull Christmas Day afternoons. Amazingly, then, EA has managed to change my stance by delivering this surprisingly stylish and fun to play console iteration. The commentator is pleasingly random too: â€œYou got that question wrong, no goldfish flavoured ice lolly for you this time!â€

The main reason it’s entertaining is because the questions are up to date and relevant to us Brits. There’s stuff about UK bands, TV shows and football teams while modern questions consist of events in last year’s Olympics and films released in the last few months. Some questions give you pictures to choose from, others ask you to stick a pin on a map or point to a country. The majority though are multiple choice, so even if you don’t know the answer there’s still a 25% chance of getting it right.

Peggle

Reviews

Popcap’s newest edition to Xbox Live Arcade is akin to a cheese sandwich – simple but pleasing. With a cannon and ten shiny balls at your disposal, simply destroy sixteen orange pegs that have been randomly placed on the screen. With bonuses, power-ups and extra balls available for proficient pegglers (as Shakespeare once didn’t write) it’s just as satisfying as a cheese sandwich too.

Lux-Pain

Reviews

With a name like Lux-Pain, Rising Star’s latest DS endeavour could entail just about anything. Well, you wouldn’t be able to get away with calling a kid’s game Lux-Pain but it’s a name that would definitely suffice for a beat’em up or a shoot’em up. It’s neither of those though – it’s an incredibly text heavy anime-influenced adventure game, not dissimilar to the Phoenix Wright series.

Lead character Atsuki is a telepathy-blessed detective out to find the source of a parasitic virus infecting Japanese citizens. It kicks off with an investigation on a crime scene where a man who tortures animals has been laying dead for weeks, before moving onto a Japanese high school where the kids have been committing suicide. Grim stuff, then.

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust

Reviews

Activision dropped this after merging with Vivendi on the grounds that they only wanted games in their portfolio that they could make sequels out of. What’s ironic about saying this is that Box Office Bust is the 11th game in the Leisure Suit Larry series. Not that it actually bares any resemblance to Larry’s original 2D point-and-click adventure games. In fact, it doesn’t actually bare any resemblances to any decent game you care to think of.

House of the Dead: Overkill

Reviews

It’s hard to imagine a more successful game, if you judge success by the extent to which the developers achieved what they set out to do. I am of course assuming that I know what the developers set out to do. But in this case I think that’s safe: make an unreasonably entertaining light gun game.

Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon

Reviews

If you give a man a plough and a bag of seeds instead of a loaf of bread he can feed himself for months. Give a man a fishing rod instead of a fish and he can catch his own food. Give a man a copy of Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon to review and he’ll wonder where several hours have gone. Not all of it was enjoyable, mind you.

Like the previous Harvest Moon games, tolling away on a patch of raggedy land to create a fertile farm full of fruit and fortune is rewarding. The town has plenty of shops to spend your sweat-covered cash on while the townsfolk themselves are a curious bunch, often mid-conversation as you enter their homes and happy to let you eavesdrop. If watering and sowing crops starts getting laborious then you can also pick up a rod and go fishing.

Populous DS

Reviews

EA asked Japanese developer Genki to bring Populous to the DS for the Japanese market, but have ditched it by the wayside for the western world, leaving Rising Star to pick up the pieces. I don’t know about you, but my warning bells always ring when a publisher won’t even touch one of their own games. It’s like a parent trying to disown an ugly child.

Genki aren’t to blame for the shunning though – this is a decent conversion. The problem is that it’s a decent conversion of a twenty year old game. Back in 1989 (the same year as the original Sim City and Prince of Persia were released, incidentally) this was top stuff. In today’s world though it both looks and feels incredibly dated. Having a tiny three-inch playing area doesn’t exactly help either. It may have been what the PC original was blessed with but there’s no need for it now.

XG Blast

Reviews

Right. This is basically Geometry Wars. But that doesn’t make it bad. In fact, it makes it largely good. So: 2D, shoot in any direction, while moving in any direction. The d-pad obviously controls movement, and because this is a Nintendo DS game, you can choose to use the stylus to direct your fire instead …

Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection

Retro, Reviews

It’ll be a cold day in Hull – sorry, Hell – when Nintendo releases a 16-bit retro collection of this magnitude. So, let’s use this review as a means to honour Sega for not being as stingy as Nintendo are with their primitive pixels. All together now: hip, hip, hooray!

SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1

Reviews

One of the biggest joys of rummaging around a retro collection is the feeling of nostalgia, with previous Sega, Midway and Capcom collections bringing back fond memories of the 16-bit era. And when arcades weren’t full of fruit machines. Personally speaking I didn’t get the same buzz from this 16-strong collection. The NeoGeo was one of those mysterious consoles only seen in the likes of Mean Machines and CVG, with games costing more than the console itself. As such, this was more of a SNK history lesson than a trip back to the past. Rose tinted specs, anybody?

World of Goo

Reviews

The problem with WiiWare – apart from Nintendo’s lack of quality control – is that many titles appear on the download service with a barely a whisper. World of Goo has had more publicity than most, but it’s still a shame that a game this good is going to go largely undownloaded. Which isn’t a real word.

Playing like a gooey mixture of LocoRoco and Lemmings, the idea is to guide goo balls safely to an exit pipe by constructing bridges, towers and so on out of the titular blobs. Physics play a big part – build a tower without a firm base and it’ll topple over, while bridges require supports and can’t be too top-heavy. While you build, white flying blobs appear that can be used to skip back in time briefly if you mess up, and there’s also the chance to skip levels entirely if they’re causing too much hassle. The mystical â€˜sign painter’ also gives hints during levels. Whoever could he be?

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