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.

LittleBigPlanet is a fun Playstation 3 platformer created by Media Molecule with a lot of character and a great vision. It was fun and stars a memorable character, Sackboy. The physics engine is something far above other 2D platforming games. However, the game suffers from bugs and physics that, while advanced, gives players less precise controls than they had over Mario back on the NES.
If you want to know how I feel about this game without taking the time to read my whole review, I can give a quick summary. LittleBigPlanet is a lot of fun and has a lot of nice ideas, but implements many of them very badly. The game was good but not amazing and revolutionary as it may have seemed. Sackboy is a cute, fun character. I could see him becoming a mascot for Sony, but I do not see him seriously competing with Mario or even Sonic. I really enjoyed LittleBigPlanet and will definitely purchase the sequel when it’s released; however, the game was far from astounding.
The first thing I noticed about the game is the developers took it seriously and respected it. The game starts with a sort of level you play through with the level itself consisting of photographs of the developers. As you play through this first level the major credits are shown. I like to see games do this at the beginning like films do because it shows that the development team is respected.
The graphics are very cute in this game. Sackboy, as is evident by his name, looks he was hand sewn like a sock monkey. The rest of the characters in the game look like card board cut-outs. The levels resemble a pop-up book, and are designed quite well. Levels are organized into different groups with each one sharing a common theme in all of its levels. Music in LittleBigPlanet is very nice and sets the tones of the levels well. Levels have a maximum of three levels of depth. This allows the game to play as a 2D game while still allowing Sackboy to move more “in” to the television or “out” of the television. If there are multiple depths where you’re trying to do something, the game will do its best to guess which depth you’re aiming for and move you into it, but this doesn’t always work so well.
The game starts as a relatively simple platformer, but later levels involve staying out of fire, carefully timed jumps, riding various vehicles, swinging, and jumping off of moving and spinning ground. Controlling Sackboy is relatively straightforward. The left stick moves him around. The X button causes him to jump and is pressure sensitive with harder pushes yielding higher jumps. The R1 button causes Sackboy to hold on to whatever’s in front of him or the ground.
You can dress up your Sackboy with costumes found throughout the game. You can also download additional costumes from the Playstation Network. Using stickers you also find in levels, you can customize your “pod,” which is basically he menu for picking modes and levels. Some of these items are found easily in levels while others are hidden in more difficult to reach places. Some of these places require two, three, or even four players. The game is a lot of fun to play multiplayer. You can play either local, online, or any combination to include four people in the fun! The only annoying thing about playing multiplayer is that its single screen instead of split screen. When two players are playing together and separate, the camera chooses on to follow. A number appears on screen near the location the other Sackboy was and begins to count down. If it reaches zero while that player is off screen, he or she dies. The camera also zooms so far back to allow all players to see their characters for as long as possible that everything seems far too small. This reminds of me four player battles in large levels in Super Smash Bros. I’d rather have the game show me a closer up view and simply be split screen. Despite this problem, playing with friends adds a lot of fun to LittleBigPlanet.
The physics engine allows for momentum to stay with your character as he or she jumps off of moving platforms. This is a lot of fun and of course is what makes the game different than most other games of its type. The main problem I had with the physics engine was that everything felt like it stayed in the air too long. My first description I could come up with was “floaty” for this problem. By this, I mean that things seem like they’re floating. Sackboy seems to stay in the air too long during his jumps, and objects don’t fall or move as fast as I’d like. Most likely this is how the designers wanted it so I couldn’t really call it a design flaw. However, Sackboy doesn’t jump immediately when you press the jump button either. Combining the lag of jumps with the floaty feeling leaves players with inadequate control of Sackboy. Carefully planned jumps over multiple pits with only narrow walkways in the middle that would be possible for skilled players in other platformer games such as Super Mario Bros. prove very difficult and annoying in LittleBigPlanet. The game can also cause you die unexpectedly. When something falls on you, you get squished and die. I expect this. However, I also expect that if there’s a small gap under something and I attempt to walk under it, the game should either allow me to walk under it or not allow Sackboy to fit. Sometimes, LittleBigPlanet will allow me to squeeze Sackboy under something simply by holding right on the control stick (in other words, I’m not trying to force him into a small place) causing Sackboy to walk into the gap and then suddenly die. There have been a couple times when I’ve died and have had no idea why the game decided that something should kill me. As I mentioned earlier, the game sometimes has problems understanding in which depth I want to be. Overall, I understand that the game can’t read my mind. Usually it does a good job of predicting, but sometimes I found myself wishing I could turn off this predictive behavior so I could have complete control over where I wanted Sackboy to move.
LittleBigPlanet has a good variety of levels. That said, the game can probably be finished in about six hours. What’s really cool about LittleBigPlanet (and what made me so excited for it) is that you can design your own levels and share them over the Playstation Network. Players have a lot of control over their levels and can design many interesting things. There are some flaws with this too though. While the level designing is intricate and great, finding levels is a lot harder. You can search by preset tags, but I’d really like to see some sort of search box. I had imagined LittleBigPlanet to be to its levels as Youtube is to videos. I would like to be able to type what I’m looking for into a search box and see a list of resulting levels that match my search. What I could actually do was search for “cool” and see levels that other people applied the “cool” tag too. This severely hurts and limits the game. I was very disappointed by this.
I did play some interesting levels though. First I played a level titled “Little Big Colossus.” As many of you can probably guess, this was styled after Shadow of the Colossus. It was a little buggy because I played it with a second player although it clearly stated that it was designed for a single player. This isn’t anything wrong with the game or the designed of that level for I could tell that the bugs would have been present if I played alone, and a warning was clearly visible. It was a lot of fun scaling a Colossus in LittleBigPlanet and bringing him down. Next I played a recreation of level 1-4 from the original Super Mario Bros. While not perfect, it was a lot of fun too! I played a level based on Ghostbusters complete with the Ecto-1, Slimer, and the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man. Again, this was quite fun. Finally, I played a game based on Pacman. My friend and I started at the bottom of a Pacman style maze and had to make it to the top to win. Unlike Pacman which allows to move in any direction just as easily as any other, this level proved to be a challenge because the maze is positioned vertically. I had to jump up shafts to move up the maze. The level even had ghosts run around that were electrified, killing Sackboy when touched. Sadly, Media Molecule has begun moderating the user created levels by deleting any level using a known intellectual property. This means that basically any level I had wanted to play would be deleted. I can understand why’d do this, but it still makes me sad.
All in all, I really liked the game. I’m looking forward to the sequel. Despite my fondness for the game, I was severely disappointed by it. While the game was fun, it could have been more. The level creation and sharing could have been amazing. It could have been something never before seen in a video game. LittleBigPlanet had the potential to allow players to make whatever they wanted in the game engine, similar to rom hacking or creating mods for PC games. This would have far made up for the errors of the game engine. However, lacking the awesome sharing it could have had brings LittleBigPlanet down from a revolutionary, truly amazing game to a great game, and the bugs brings it down farther to simply a good, fun game. If you have a Playstation 3 and enjoy platforming games, then I recommend you purchase this game. However, if you aren’t terribly fascinated by platformers or if you were considering purchasing a Playstation 3 to play LittleBigPlanet, think again.

Today (9/9) I played a new Bemani game by Konami called UBeat. It’s being location tested here in Irvine, CA at a Boomers. According to Wikipedia, it was released last month in Japan. Irvine gets the only two UBeat cabinets outside of Asia!

The first thing I noticed about it was, of course, the aesthetics of the unit. Being a music game, it had to have a light of glowing parts and lights, but it really did look pretty cool. It had a crisp, nice quality LCD screen to show your score and other information, and it had 16 LCD buttons arranged in a grid. As songs play, the LCD buttons play little ~1 second animations to the rhythm. You have to press the button at a particular point in the animation. You can choose from a few animations. I chose fireworks; When the firework reached the top of the button, you press it to see the firework explode. It’s a lot like DDR meets Whac-A-Mole, and it was a lot of fun!
The song list was pretty interesting. It had a good mix of songs that were already known in America and Japanese songs that I assume were from the Japanese version of the game. I played “Take on Me” by a-ha, “Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop)” by Scatman John, and “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People (because what heterosexual guy playing a Bemani game with his girlfriend watching can resist the Village People?). I was surprised and pleased to find Scatman John in the game; He’s an artist I really like.
The game displayed the name of the arcade and a player name although it was set to defaults. It looked like there was a way to store accounts or something similar but that the feature was not implemented. Like other Bemani games, each song had a different difficulty rating between one and ten, and the difficulty could be raised. In more complex songs, multiple panels lit up at the same time, requiring players to press multiple buttons with a single hand, often in rapid succession. The machine itself was very narrow and elegant looking. This is a plus because it means arcades can fit them in easier. From the interface, I think it supports up to four cabinets in local play. The small form factor means it’s more likely to see arcades actually buy four cabinets.
There were two cabinets here so multiplayer was an option although I didn’t try it. It looked like the cabinets were plugged into a router/hub, and when I checked online, I found out that you can play online as well. I’m not sure how that works though. Boomers was also location testing Dance Dance Revolution X, which I haven’t had a chance to try yet. I’m definitely going back this week to play UBeat some more and possibly try the new DDR. Here’s hoping UBeat catches on here in the states!

Mario Kart Wii is an excellent addition to the Mario Kart series. The core game is the same as always, but Nintendo has now added bikes, online play, more racers per game, team battle modes, and the Wii wheel. I don’t think I really have a favorite Mario Kart game because I like them all. This game seems to have a worse battle mode and so far iffy online play. However, the local racing is superb, and I look forward to spending many hours playing Mario Kart Wii!
The first thing new about this game is the Wii Wheel. It felt very odd at first but very quickly got more comfortable. When you go off jumps, you can shake the wheel to perform tricks for boosts. If the Wii Wheel isn’t your thing, you can use many other (any other) control scheme, however, the game keeps track of how often you use the Wii Wheel and displays it next to your name online when you’re using it.
Online play worked very well when I first got it home. As I waited for the previous match to end, I was allowed to watch. Then we played, and I noticed no lag. I only raced. I haven’t yet tried online battle mode. The next day when I tried, I couldn’t connect. I played online with my brother though. First, we traded Wii friend codes because Mario Kart Wii has a feature that uses the Wii system friend codes to trade Mario Kart Wii friend codes. However, even after we added each other, it wouldn’t confirm so we traded Mario Kart Wii friend codes. I entered his lobby, got kicked out, entered again, got kicked out, made my own lobby, and then he joined. I don’t think that was a connection issue; I think he was confused and closing it. We played a game and it worked very well. The next game disconnected in the middle, and then I couldn’t connect. At that point I gave up and quit. I’m hoping this was a fluke, but I’m not gonna keep my hopes up.
The bikes are more sensitive than the karts, but I think they’re better than the Karts because you can dodge things faster. The levels are cool and gorgeous. I’ve been very happy with them. My favorite stage so far is Coconut Mall. In it there are escalators going up and down. If you’re driving up you have to make sure to pick the correct escalator or you’ll be slowed down. Battle mode is now two teams of six (I think, but it might be eight). In balloon battle, after you lose all your balloons, you’re able to respawn. You can not be killed permanently. The other battle mode is coin runner. Coins are scattered throughout the stage, and the team with the most coins wins. You can knock coins out of enemies by striking them with items. While the battle mode used to be my favorite, it seems much more chaotic in Mario Kart Wii. I don’t like it as much.
There are four “licenses,” which function as save files. They physically show what medals you’ve received on which courses, and also keep track of all your other information. Besides being able to earn a bronze, silver, or gold cup, you also get a letter rank. Once you receive all stars, you get a star next to your name online. When you receive all two stars, you get two stars, and when you receive all triple stars, you get three starts. If you use the Wii Wheel enough, there will also be a golden Wii Wheel icon next to your name when you play online.
I’m gonna go play now.