Summary: Pretty and worth looking at a little longer but very annoying and cliché.
In an effort to move through my Game Fly queue more quickly and accomplish something while I’m at it, I’ve decided (at gem’s suggestion) to write reviews of games after having played them for fifteen minutes each! First up is Steambot Chronicles for the PS2, published by Atlus and developed by Irem Software Engineering.
The game has some rather bland graphics for the general world, but the characters are done in a nice looking cell shading. The tutorial begins with some pirates finding two young children (teens?) stowed away, one of them being you. The captain offers to teach you to pilot Trotmobiles, and if you can do so correctly, she’ll let you stay and join. The tutorial was really boring. They go through steps just to teach you that it uses the two sticks for tank controls. Then it goes through some more steps to teach you that R2 jumps and L2 boosts. I figured out that R1 causes me to punch (or do something that looks like punching). I skipped the boosting tutorial because it seems my L2 is broken. Shortly after I gave up and quit the tutorial. It was very boring.
The game starts with a short quiz about how you’d respond to particular scenarios. I’m guessing this determines your personality. They were interesting and short at only three questions. Next your character wakes up on a beach unable to remember anything, and a young woman finds him. There are some dialog choices and a little bit of running around before you get a Trotmobile again.
Every time you run up to something you can interact with, an icon appears on the screen. After you press the X button, there’s some lag before a menu pops up asking what you want to do. Usually there’s just “do whatever you wanted to do” and “cancel.” Can’t the game assume I want to open the door if I walked up and pressed X? Why would I want to open a menu and then click cancel? There’s lag before every choice, menu, and dialog. Also, doing anything changes to a very small segment in which control is taken away from the player. Of course, there’s lag before these as well. The voice acting is not very good, but it’s not so horrible as to make me mute my television. Also, the game has the annoying feature that so many jrpgs do of making loud splashing noises when I run through water, crunching noises when I run through grass, and shuffling noises when I run through dirt. Worst of all, there are cicadas making noises constantly. What the hell is wrong with Japanese people putting these in anime and games?
And that was about fifteen minutes into the game. So, what did I think of it? The story seems pretty generic. I’m a young guy found by a pretty girl (so far called Pretty Girl) who can’t remember his past. How pathetically cliché. Despite the fact that the graphics have bits of ugly 3Dness, I like the cell shading a lot. The audio is very annoying, but I kind of like the talking in a bad voice acting kind of way. The characters have a tendency to do some sliding while running (common in older games especially), and I wish the camera would look left when I press left rather than look right. I haven’t reached any sort of combat yet at all or level system (if there is one). The game interests me enough to make me want to continue playing it at least until I see combat. If I don’t get a chance to tonight, I’ll still hold on to the game for a few more days. That said, if I don’t get to it by the end of the week, I’m sending it back anyways.

Space Deadbeef is a horizontal shoot ’em up for the iPhone. This is one of the few games that shows that the iPhone can definitely be a gaming platform. From the moment I saw the title screen at the beginning before the menu appeared, I knew I was going to enjoy this game. The graphics are superb, the music is nice, and there wasn’t any slowdown when I played it on my classic (non-3G) iPhone.
The levels scroll horizontally while your ship stays on the left side of the screen. You can only move your ship vertically. When you touch the screen, your ship moves in that direction. If you touch the top right corner, your ship will move straight up (because it always stays on the left). When you touch an enemy, one of your missiles will lock-on. You only have a limited number of missiles that can lock-on at a time. You can lock on to multiple enemies, and you can lock on to strong enemies multiple times. When you lift your finger, your missiles fire. You can also touch your own ship to charge up a more powerful shot.
At the end of the game, which will only take most gamers a few minutes to get to on their first play, there’s a boss fight. After beating that boss, the game restarts on a higher difficulty. So far, I’ve made it to difficulty 6. The game keeps track of your current score, high score, your current difficulty, and your number of deaths. I don’t know if there’s a limit on difficulties, but if there is, I doubt I’ll see it.
Space Deadbeef really caters to scrolling shooter fans. The little details are great, such as the “WARNING” text that appears when the boss is incoming, and the way that the text slides on and off screen. The sound effects are nice, when you die, the game zooms in on your ship exploding. It’s a very fun experience.
Apple lists Yuji Yasuhara as the developer¹, who is also responsible for Omega Boost, a 3D shooter for the Sony Playstation, and Panzer Dragoon II: Zwei for the Sega Saturn². It apparently wasn’t chance that the game seemed made for shoot ’em up fans! Because the game is so short, I can only hope that Space Deadbeef is acting as a demo for a future that’s longer and has more levels! However, don’t let the game’s length deter you from you playing it. It’s definitely worth any gamer’s time who likes shoot ’em ups; plus, as a free game it’s definitely worth it!

I unexpectedly got to sit down with Wii Music over the holidays. I was very excited. It was a new Nintendo-developed game (by EAD Software Group 2, according to Wikipedia, who was responsible for Animal Crossing, Wii Sports, Wii Sports Resort, and Wii Play), which is enough to get me at least interested. Second, I loved Mario Paint, and Wii Music seemed more like Mario Paint than Rock Band.
I sat down with two other people, one of whom had played before, and set out to jam! You get to choose a song and a venue, and then each player can choose a section, such as melody, harmony, percussion, etc. Then you can pick your instrument. I decided on the standing bass. The bass part is always intriguing, and the standing bass just called to me! Four characters in the bottom right keep time by lighting up, one at a time, for each note.
As far as I could tell, if each player plays a note when told, the song will come out sounding as expected. That’s not any fun though, so we tried improvising. I wasn’t sure if using the nunchuck or buttons did anything when playing my instrument, but I later found that it caused the cat suit (which “plays” meow sounds) to jump around. Each note’s pitch is set, so all you really get to control is when you’d like to play a note. It came out sounding horrible.
My young cousin really enjoyed playing it. I definitely did not enjoy it. As a multiplayer game, it fails completely. As a singe player endeavor, it might be a bit better. You can play each part one at a time, adding all six different sections to create a whole composition. Given some slow thought alone, something good might come out of it! I don’t know though because I didn’t get a chance to sit down alone with it. I do know that I’m very disappointed in the game. If you can’t control the pitch of the note, there’s no chance of anyone being able to create a particular tune they have in their head. They might create something interesting, but it’ll be chance, trial, and error.
I really wanted to enjoy Wii Music because I wanted to know that Nintendo still developed great games. In fact, I know the way I talked about what the experience might be like alone was biased. I still want to like the game, but I really did not. I’d love to see a mode or future game in which you can pick the instrument or sound and the pitch of the notes. The Wii’s current audience would love a game similar to the music creator in Mario Paint. When that game comes out, I’ll play it. I’ll sit this game out.