Joystiq’s Coverage of Nintendo Media Summit
- Scribbled on May 24th, 2007 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Action, Casual Gaming, Game Genres, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Platformer, Previews, Shows and Events, Sports
Joystiq has exploded with hands-on previews of Nintendo DS and Wii games seen at the Nintendo Media Summit, with some positive impressions, and some negative. Following are brief excerpts from each game they’ve covered (so far), and click on each link to read the full previews. The games they’ve covered so far include:
One of the DS games on display at this week’s Nintendo Media Summit was Planet Puzzle League, the newest title from the developers of Tetris Attacks and Super Paper Mario. The game is a block-based puzzler along the lines of Bejeweled and Tetris and offers easy, accessible touch controls. You use the stylus to grab blocks and pull them left or right to lineup three blocks of the same color to make them disappear. Like many games of its ilk, the goal is to create chains and combos by lining up multiple sets of blocks at once. All the while as you do this, the game is constantly shoving more blocks up from the screen, forcing you to react quickly.
The mini-games all appeared to variations of older Mario Party games or of a very similar theme, though at the rate Mario Party games are released I guess thats not a huge surprise. Luckily, the magic of the Wiimote did allow them to mix things up a bit by including games like shaking up cans of soda until they burst or lassoing barrels off a platform. It was a fun enough title to play, and made good use of the controller, but it still managed to feel stale. Maybe it was the lack of friends around to play it with, or maybe after this long the series just needs a bit of a break. And of course, there is no online play.
Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (Wii):
The gameplay is focused on fast-paced small minigames that are meant to help you increase your mental capacities in one of five areas: Identify, Memorize, Analyze, Computer and Visualize. The game tracks your progress and gives you a diagram showing your strengths and weakness in the different categories. To improve a poor stat, you need to play games specific to that category. For example, if your Identify skill is low you could play Fast Focus, where you see a distorted image slowly be revealed. The point of the game is to correctly guess the subject of the picture as quickly as you can, using the Wiimote to select the answer from a provided list. Fast Focus was probably my favorite of the mini-games, but unfortunately I saw quite a few images repeat after only playing it for a bit. Kind of a bad sign for the longevity of that particular mini-game, but may have just been a fluke.
It turns out that The BIGS is almost an arcade game. Though the gameplay itself is fairly realistic feeling, concessions are made to make baseball more … fun. The developer showing off the game mentioned that baseball is kind of a boring game, but it has moments of extreme excitement. Homeruns, triple plays, stolen bases all grab your attention and make the game worthwhile. To this end, Blue Castle Games decided to increase the action in the game. You’re gonna get more home runs, you’re make more spectacular plays, and there are gonna be more ‘wow’ moments per game than you may see at your local ballpark. Also, as you pull off great plays you earn special points for moves that allow you to power up for a super powerful hit or save, ala NBA Street. Overall, it seemed like a great combination of realism and arcade fun, a rarity in sports games — especially baseball ones.
Probably the thing that impressed me the most about Boogie was the graphics; it had a really nice cel-shaded look to it, fantastic looking stages, and good animation. It was by far and away the best looking game at the show, with no other game except maybe Mario Strikers Charged coming anywhere close. The five different characters are well designed in a cartoony way and they all animate fantastically — a key detail for a dancing game. The stages themselves were fairly small, but the backgrounds were huge and detailed.
The cinematic was a high-energy movie featuring all the major Mario characters kicking ass on the soccer field in some form or another. The characters had an interesting art design, much more anime-esque than the normal Mario designs. One of the highlights of the opening cinematic was seeing all the special moves that each of the characters have, like Donkey Kong’s ability to smash the ground and knock everybody out around him. The developer pointed out that even though the opening movie was pre-rendered CG, all the moves are actual ones that the characters themselves have.
One of the immediate things that I noticed was that the hand-writing recognition has gotten way better. My writing is pretty horrible, so I was stoked to see that feature improved upon. The developers mentioned they put a lot of time into refining the recognition engine The minigames themselves were the variety of mathematical and word-based tests that you’d expect out of a Brain Age title but seemed a little more entertaining than the ones included in the previous game. The best part in my opinion though, had nothing to do with training your brain. As you complete tasks, you earn tickets that you can then use to play a Brain Age version of the NES classic, Dr. Mario. Now that’s what I call a reward!
Can the Wii stop the 3rd party shortage? Let us know.
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