Tag Archives: Gamecube

Wario World

514DEMK6TTLSo, part of the problem with reviewing video games is that my system requires me to be finished consuming the item in question. Having quit definitely counts, but it’s harder to tell when I won’t really be playing a game anymore, as opposed to if I get sick of a movie or a book.

Sadly, this excuse will fit a lot better on the following review, because I knew I didn’t like Wario World within the first fifteen minutes. I was playing it back in mid-October, at my parents’ house. I expected it to be pretty good, what with finding Wario to be a fairly amusing character in the Mario Bros./Donkey Kong Nintendoverse, and especially due to the brilliant WarioWare, released at the same time for the Gameboy. Alas, sheer lameness lay ahead.

I got off to a great start by not realizing that the initial area was mostly just the menu of places to go, not actually part of the real game. So, poor introduction, check. Then, after I finally did work out where to go to play the game, it turned out not to be 3D after all. I mean, I like sidescrollers just fine, but it’s not what I saw coming here. (Technically, there are three dimensions, but while right/left and up/down are fully articulated, forward/backward is about ten feet wide.)

And the gameplay itself just really wasn’t much of a much. The puzzles were somewhat interesting, but I found one of them to be unsolvable during the first world, and the first world is supposed to be about getting up to speed, not about not being able to do stuff. I bought it used, so no instruction book. This could indicate that some special move I wasn’t aware of could have helped me, but frankly, that’s still bad design. Games these days are supposed to tell you how to use the buttons as you go, because there are too damned many of them to learn all at the start.

The long and short of it is that the problems I encountered were mostly due to missing info and poorly managed expectations. Still, though, most games I expected to like going in would hold my interest long enough to get through the rough patches, or at least make me want to explore online for whatever info I needed to be able to play. This one did not, and when googling isn’t worth the effort, that’s just a flat-out failure.

Pikmin 2

I wasn’t really impressed by Pikmin when it was first being advertised, but a guy at work loaned it to me, so I played it through. Turned out to be a lot of fun. Solidly in the real-time strategy genre, but disguised to look like a kid’s game. And better than most of them, because you have much more solid control over your troops than in Starcraft, say. But, it was also pretty quick, done within a week, so I gave it back and never got a copy myself. Fun is fine and all, but short is lame.

Except! Sometime in the past 3-4 years since then, my game practices have turned around, and I run out of patience pretty quickly now. (I have some fears about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in this same vein, as the reviews make it appear to be bigger than ever. And I didn’t quite finish Vice City.) So, when Pikmin 2 came out earlier this month, I leapt on it.

The gameplay is essentially identical. You run the little guys around killing big scary monsters (well, okay, ladybugs and frogs, mostly) and bypassing geographic obstacles in order to collect shiny objects that can be sold as artifacts on your home planet, thereby getting your shipping company out of hock. You’re limited to a set time per day, and must leave at night. On top of the strategy of building up the right forces for each task, the monsters will regenerate after a few days and the geography will too after a few more, so there’s the added strategy layer of how many days to stay in each area.

Changes to play include an unlimited number of days to play, randomly generated caves to explore, and two main characters to control the Pikmin, instead of just one. The first one doesn’t change play a lot; sure, you have time to be thoughtful and unhurried, but you pretty much had that during the first game. The caves aren’t as random as the literature would have you believe. Each one has the same treasures and creatures in the same order. The only difference is the layout of where these are placed on any given cave level.

Where the game shines is in the multiple player aspect. I’ve only played by myself, so all I can see is the glimmer of how useful two minds able to control two groups independently would be. The ability to control two groups on sequence is great, though. You can start a group on a task, then move back to another. It’s also a lot harder to accidentally leave any Pikmin behind. Also, I’m blathering, because this will be non-sensical to someone who hasn’t at least seen the first game. My point is, this is a boon to the strategic element game that cannot be overemphasized.

The rest of where the game shines is in the game world itself. It’s genuinely fun to watch and read everything that goes by. Fun enough that when I made a big flub on Day 10, I restarted and didn’t resent it. Fun enough that despite having played the end credits about an hour ago, I’m likely to pick up the controller and finish exploring every nook of the game that I can find, later today and over the next several.

Everything has a downside, of course. This one is in the save-game structure. You can choose to save at the end of every day, which is fine. You can’t have multiple save files, which is lame, but acceptable. (Technically, you can have up to three. This is designed for multiple players at the same time, but you can do copies and get up to three that way, if you really wanted to expend the effort.) The game auto-saves when you enter a cave and when you move on to each successive floor, which is terrible. You can auto-save or you can limit the number of save files, but doing both is ridiculous. This is why I had to go back and restart 10 game-days in, incidentally.

In any case, that’s not a game ruining flaw, and I would recommend either of these games to any Gamecube owner. It’s not quite good enough to buy a system for, though. Luckily, there are multiple Zelda and Metroid games released / planned over the next year to satisfy that issue.