GameTap - Recent Reviews

Iron Man (PS3, Xbox 360)

Wed, 07 May 2008 23:00:00 GMT

A perspective of how bad Iron Man is: I would almost rather have the game be about a cleaning service employee charged with the delicate task of taking wrinkles out of $500 shirts. It’d probably be more fun than this shallow mess that reeks of the tried-and-true approach of cashing in with minimal effort. In fact, the only real highlight of the entire Iron Man experience is Robert Downey Jr., who didn’t completely phone in his voice work and ends up doing an admirable job of attempting to recreate his onscreen persona. And, I suppose some credit should be given for not screwing up the actual character of Iron Man, who comes equipped with the ability to fly and shoot repulsor rays from his hands.

And that’s what you’ll be doing a lot of while visiting several exciting locations ranging from generic-looking desert area to generic-looking ice area--there's even a generic-looking city thrown in for good measure. That might be making it sound more fun than it actually is because while the thought of zooming around as Iron Man and blowing stuff up with lasers sounds awesome, it doesn’t really pan out that way in the game. Instead, most of the action is relegated to hovering around a designated target or standing in place and shooting at the target (whichever strategy you prefer) until it’s destroyed. And you have to do this dozens of times over before being presented with another set of targets that requires the same strategy. Then you go to the next level and perform nearly the same objectives but against a different backdrop. Aside from a boss battle here and there, there’s little to no variety in the mission structure, and there’s certainly nothing in this game that makes you feel like Iron Man rather than some ordinary guy with a jetpack, helmet, and assault rifle.

However, I don’t think The Rocketeer would be able to withstand the obscenely screwy difficulty curve in the game, which features helicopters that can take Iron Man down with three or four missiles. Sure, Iron Man has the ability to catch a missile and throw it back at a target--but that’s not too helpful when there are eight missiles coming straight for you. Even with countermeasures, it’s nearly impossible to dodge them, and when you do manage to avoid one, three more are coming at you from the opposite side of the level. And since catching missiles is so spotty to begin with, the ability might as well not even be there.

Speed Racer (Wii)

Wed, 07 May 2008 00:55:00 GMT

Speed Racer's revved up for a revival. The modern remake of the 1960s, futuristic car racing anime is getting the full treatment this year thanks to a movie (by the Wachowski Bros. of Matrix fame, no less), a new cartoon show on Nicktoons, and a video game.

The movie and the video game are the most closely related. They're both set in Speed's hometown, Cosmopolis ("where car culture is the culture"), and all the cars as well as three of the racing stadiums are lifted from the film. Other movie connections include the voices of the stars: Emile Hirsh (Speed Racer), Matthew Fox (Racer X), and Christina Ricci (Trixie).

Additionally, one of the first things that strikes you about the game is the environment's electric, candy-coated color scheme. The eye-catching design is also drawn from the film, and matched with the roller-coaster-from-hell track designs, it makes every stadium look like a surreal amusement park. But after that the connections get hazy. The game's set one year after the events of the movie; however, there isn't really a running narrative through the game per se to make a story all that important.

Speed Racer the game is all about supersonic racing, and it doesn't deviate from that roadway. On the stadium tracks, Speed Racer keeps things pretty straightforward. You drive with the Wii remote only, and you can use the Wii wheel if you've got one. The wheel makes Speed a little bit easier to drive, but unlike Mario Kart Wii, where the wheel is a distinct advantage, this game's more forgiving to remote-only driving since there aren't a lot of tight turns, sequential jumps, or screwy obstacles on the track. You also can't drive off the tracks, either. But that doesn't mean you can't be knocked over a roadside edge to explode in a blaze of multicolor fireworks.

You start out driving against 12 AI racers, but as you advance through the World Racing League, you can eventually find yourself pitted against 20 other cars. There are no weapons, but every driver is a practioner of the venerable art of Car-Fu.

Boom Blox (Wii)

Tue, 06 May 2008 23:55:00 GMT

When it was announced back in 2005 that Steven Spielberg would be partnering up with EA to create three new video game franchises, the general assumption was that these new games would be big, cinematic affairs. After all, this is the director who brought the movie world Jaws, Indiana Jones, War of the Worlds—heck, Spielberg’s own Saving Private Ryan was a direct inspiration for EA’s Medal of Honor franchise.

So it’s fair to say the revelation that the first joint venture would be a puzzle game for the Wii was a bit unexpected, although it makes more sense when you consider that Spielberg has several kids and is interested in games that the whole family can play together. And Boom Blox is definitely a game aimed at the whole family, from the colorful animated graphics to the E rating.

Fortunately, it’s a game that’s actually fun for the whole family to play. While the goals for various puzzle types range from keeping certain kinds of blocks intact to disassembling block structures to saving or assisting various creatures scattered amidst levels, the basic concept boils down to problem-solving with blocks. The physics in the game are really impressive, particularly when you get to the Jenga-like challenges, where pulling one block out can cause the rest of the stack to teeter precariously.

Puzzles challenge a wide range of abilities, from reflexes to dexterity to smarts. The gold/silver/bronze system of passing each level means that if your only goal is zipping through the entire game, you should have no trouble; alternatively, if you’re looking for more of a challenge, you can shoot to ace each level and unlock more rewards.

Boom Blox is also one of the few games out there that is actually as much fun whether you’re playing solo or with a friend. Individual players can tackle explore mode, which has you making your way through a series of challenges that take advantage of the various special block types, or adventure mode, which puts you in thematic environments while facing off against a combination of puzzle types. There’s also a robust level editor where you can create your own levels from scratch, which can then be saved and shared with friends. Multiplayer challenges come in both competitive and cooperative varieties; some of the most fun I had was working through the cooperative levels as we strategized together about which block should be the next target.

Wild Earth: African Safari (Wii)

Fri, 02 May 2008 23:30:00 GMT

Could this be a sign of the Apocalypse? While it's not about cheetahs lying down with African hunting dogs, here's a video game that kids might actually be able to use to do their homework.

Wild Earth: African Safari is a little rugged, but it does a noteworthy job of presenting a ton of facts and figures about 30 African animals without sounding too dry or too corny. It's best suited for kids, but adults are guaranteed to learn a thing or two as well. Safari also enables you to trek around with the beasts in a respectable representation of their habitat, the Serengeti National Park.

The game casts you as a photojournalist on assignment in Africa. You're providing the illustrations for a series of animal slideshows, which requires you to take 11 photo safaris into the park. Two guides work with you, and they provide running educational dialogue and commentary about the flora and fauna you see. Photo assignments require anywhere from 30 to 50 photos, so there's plenty of things to do and a broad range of subject matter to research. Sometimes you're shooting pix from a jeep or a helicopter, too.

African Safari functions like a first-person shooter, although you're using a camera. The jumpy FPS view has its own little adventures and is one of the game's drawbacks. You play the game by using the nunchuk to move around and zoom the camera in and out and the remote to look around and snap photographs. Keeping the view stable requires a steady hand, because the sensitive remote can be skittish. In fact, if you should decide to take a break and lay the remote down, the cam spirals around like a killer bee coming in for a crash landing. Oddly, after one such pit stop, the cam even decided to take off on its own: You could steer, you just couldn't stop.

But with practice and patience, you can rein in the game cam. Then, African Safari settles in to do a good job of turning the savanna into a nicely detailed open world environment. Although you have to capture all the assigned photos to complete levels, you can pretty much explore anywhere you want to go.

Mario Kart Wii (Wii)

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

When it comes to motor vehicles, the Japanese know how to put together a dependable set of wheels. For cars it's Toyota, for karts it's Nintendo. Mario Kart Wii doesn't stray far from the beaten track, but it has enough going to dazzle first-time MK drivers and a few new upgrades to challenge the long-time Karters, too.

Mario Kart comes bundled with the Wii Wheel. At first glance it seems like just a holder for the remote, but once you get used to it, it's actually pretty fun. Plus, when using the remote to drive without the Wheel, you tend to oversteer horribly through tight turns. The Wheel's extra millimeters of surface area seem to help keep your turn radius under control. Of course, Mario Kart supports every other Wii controller configuration, including the GameCube's, too.

Wheel aside, MK Wii has all the standard options down pat with a few upgrades that are sort of a mixed bag. The racing is spread over 32 tracks, 16 from previous Karts and 16 brand new. It would be nearly impossible to hit everyone's favorites, but this is a good list. This time the field of racers on the track has been inflated to 12, and for the first time you can ride motorcycles as well karts.

The bikes bring a welcome change of pace by addING unique handling characteristics and strategy to the standard issue Mario Karting. They are also a part of an overall uptick in the game's difficulty level.

The skill classifications remain the same--50cc, 100cc, and 150cc--but with bikes-only in 100cc, and bikes and karts mixing it up in the most difficult setting, 150cc. The 50cc stage is a breeze, but you're going to need that warm-up and experience later on. The bikes require a steady hand, and you really get the sensation of trying to maintain balance with the two-wheelers, especially in tight turns, along narrow strips of road, and whenever you have to make a pinpoint landing after catching some air. They're also lighter than the karts, so any rider can muscle you around, and bruisers like Wario and Donkey Kong can really send you flying.

Battle of the Bands (Wii)

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s a rule of American business that any raging success launches a trend, as people attempt to replicate the success of the first. Guitar Hero set off a wave of rhythm game hysteria, and Battle of the Bands is the latest one to join the pack.

Battle of the Bands doesn’t have a fancy peripheral; instead its gimmick is to let you choose different types of band sounds (Latin, rock, country, marching band, hip-hop), which then dictates how the songs sound when you play. In each round, you battle against a band of another sound, and the goal is to try and perform well enough that your version of the song is the one playing rather than the rival’s.

It’s a pretty neat little trick, actually—it’s funny hearing well-known songs in different styles, and the versions can be pretty clever. For example, the Latin band sings everything in Spanish—except if the lyrics are supposed to be in Spanish (such as in Una Maz Cerveza), in which case they sing in English. It’s also a great way to deal with the whole issue of having covers instead of original artists. The song selection is pretty good as well, covering a wide range of eras and styles, from funk classics like Jungle Boogie to hair-band faves like Photograph, from bluegrass tunes like Man of Constant Sorrow to recent hits like Feel Good Inc.

The World Ends With You (DS)

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

If you’ve been on the Internet for any decent amount of time, you probably know that there are a lot of blogs out there with people discussing how much they hate life, how having friends is stupid, and how everyone is ignorant to the real inner-workings of the universe. Nothing ever seems to go right and when it does, the other shoe drops and the woe is me business comes back. The World Ends With You--an action-RPG from Square Enix--echoes these same sentiments and even goes so far as to make them a major aspect of the game’s overall story arc, with characters that are either distrustful of each other or generally aren’t what they seem. Indeed, even the title itself suggests that the world is limited to what you do, and opening up to people and different experiences is the only way to expand it. And while it all seems a little hokey or emo (as the kids call it these days) at first, The World Ends With You is actually one of the most interesting and gratifying experiences I’ve had with an RPG in years.

The game begins with an introduction to the game’s lead character Neku, who awakes in the busy streets of Shibuya, Japan, not really knowing how he got there or even what he’s supposed to be doing. All he does know is that he just wishes everyone in the very crowded intersection would just disappear, but what he doesn’t realize is that he’s the one who has disappeared--thrown into an alternate world where the only way to survive is to complete a seven-day, seven-mission game where monsters, called noise, lurk and where the enforcers of the game’s rules, called reapers, are constantly giving out smaller missions to complete before the single mission for the day can be finished. The catch is that the only people who can generally see Neku wandering about the streets of Shibuya are reapers and other players in the game. The public can’t see him and they don’t know that there’s even a game going on. However, they still play a huge role because of Neku’s ability to scan their thoughts, which often reveals that even the most ordinary people play an important role (inadvertently) in the game.

Fans of the Matrix may think all of this sounds a little familiar, and the concept of having a lead character with amnesia isn’t the most original idea either, but The World Ends With You does such an excellent job of fleshing out this alternate reality and providing so many interesting plot developments (which includes plenty of twists and turns) that you won’t really care.

You will more than likely care, however, that some of the action can get repetitive thanks to walls that block passage into certain parts of Shibuya. These walls are guarded by reapers who give you specific objectives in order to pass. These objectives can range from buying a specific bowl of ramen and bringing it back to the reaper or using Neku’s scanning ability to rid the entire area of noise. Sometimes you’ll even be forced to take a quiz that tests your knowledge about one of the numerous clothing stores (where you can buy a variety of threads to improve your hit points, attack damage, and defense) in the area. Any of these mini-missions alone is pretty easy to complete within seconds, but near the middle of the game where these mini-objectives tend to clump up, it slows down the action in a fetch-quest sort of manner and can get a little annoying. To be fair, some of that annoyance also comes from quickly wanting to see how the next little bit of the story unfolds.

Target: Terror (Wii)

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Target: Terror is a messy little throwback of a shooting game, a slab of arcade retro on white bread with a thick slice of cheese. As you play it, you find yourself thinking that you and your buds could make a better game next Saturday afternoon. And that's just the way Konami planned it...hopefully, because any other explanation is just too horrible to contemplate.

Leviathan Games gets the credit for shoveling this Wii version from the original arcade code created by Raw Thrills in 2003. It's hard to imagine that two years post 9/11, after the Homeland Security Act was passed into law, and even after the Office of Homeland Security was created that this homespun terrorists send-up was blissfully swallowing tokens in arcades across America. Maybe there was something cathartic about it at the time, but don't expect to recoup your money here.

On all levels Target: Terror qualifies as a blast from the past. It was originally a rail shooter gun game in full-motion video, and it's now been recast as a Remote-only shoot-em-up for the Wii. Your adversaries/ human targets look like they were outfitted by one of those cheap costume emporiums that pop up in abandoned bank buildings a few weeks before Halloween. And the FMV with the funky costumes is hilarious.

Playing it for laughs and snickers, the game's visuals do an absurdist take (whether intentionally or unintentionally) on terrorist imagery lifted from the headlines. There's a woman who looks like a glam version of Tanya (a.k.a. Patty Hearst) from the S.L.A. There's a guy channeling that drawing of the Unabomber in a hoodie. There's a flabby guy in a cheap-looking knit sweat suit. There's another guy who could be a flasher except he's wearing a dynamite vest. Oh, yes, and there's some random Asians in knit caps, too. It's like someone at a ski mask convention said, "Hey, everybody, let's make a terrorist game. Meet back here in 30 minutes dressed like one…and wear sunglasses."

NBA Ballers: Chosen One (Xbox 360, PS3)

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

NBA Ballers: Chosen One is a battle game. Think Street Fighter meets the NBA, and that's where the game is in its element. Only difference is, instead of a combo leading to Melo punching some dude in the face then running for his life, there are super moves where you get the ball bounced off your head then watch as your opponent break dances on your back as you hunch over in pain. This is the type of trash-talking move the game is built around, and when playing against a friend, the constant back-and-forth of combos, self-alley-oops, and these Shut 'Em Down super moves will provide hours of good times. It's when you're friends go home, however, that you start to see the real weaknesses of the game.

First off, the game's story mode is a bit of a mess and really has a bunch of holes in terms of actually giving you any kind of story to follow. Yeah, yeah, you've been picked to play in this tournament against the NBA's elite where you have the shot to be anointed the NBA's next Chosen One. We've heard it all before, but at least if the storyline was updated after every game, even with some simple text, it might make a bit more sense. Instead, you go from one-on-one to one-on-one-on-one to two-on-two teaming with Marcus Camby with no real reason given other than he is now your partner. That's fine if Camby then follows me through the story or offers to be my designated driver, but next time I play two-on-two, my partner is Amare. Why? Nobody knows. But that's not even where things go south, as there are games of one-on-one-on-one against the computer where there are no clears and no takeouts. That means that after every hoop, you just hang out under the basket, grab the ball and jam it back down. What ends up happening is a headache-inducing cluster around the rim and some really uninspired AI as you watch guys like T-Mac throw up these weak lobs toward the hoop that continuously get batted. To make matters worse, it's as if no time or thought went into the two-on-two games. It's like they just wanted to mention the mode exists on the back of the box; you can pretty much shake your man and dunk every time down the court as there is little to no help on defense.

Other oddities include players occasionally flying through the backboard, times when an offensive Shut 'Em Down super move is shown (like D-Wade making a move off the dribble), when the player featured was actually on defense, the fact that players constantly shoot with the wrong hand, and some of the dribble animations looking a bit robotic, especially when ballers dribble with the wrong hand while driving. And don't even get me started about this bizarre roster that leaves out players like Deron Williams and Monta Ellis, instead sticking us with three Knicks (none named David Lee), not to mention guys like Telfair and Ridnour making the cut. Ridiculous.

The thing is, the game is so much fun when you get back to its original element of "I'm better than you and I can prove it" that when you get past all of these faults, what you find is a game that still draws you back for more. Why? One word: competition. And with Chosen One, the Ballers series really steps it up by placing the combo system into a fastest finger game where a button flashes on screen and if the dribbler hits it first, he pulls a move, then goes for number two. Hit the button first again, and try for move three. But if the defender hits the button first, he knocks the ball loose and the combo is over. In addition, with the combos also come score modifiers, so if you're able to bust a serious combo in your opponent's face and hit the shot, you might be looking at something like a 3 point scoring bonus, and that's a killer when you're playing a game to 11.

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue (PS3)

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

There isn’t a question here of whether or not you should play Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. After all, it essentially gives you a chance to check out what Polyphony Digital has in store for the full Gran Turismo 5 experience, with six tracks (12 if you count varying layouts), around 60 cars, and online play with up to 16 players. There is a question, however, if all this content--which amounts to more than a demo but far less than a full game--is worth $40. If you’re a hardcore fan of the series and generally like driving simulations, then it’s probably a no-brainer, but for everyone else, it’s not an easy question to answer.

If you’re in the latter category, you should know that one thing GT5 Prologue does really well is ease you into the entire experience. The meat of the single-player experience is divided into three classes of events--A, B, and C--and since you have to start in the C class (which is relegated to relatively low-end cars), you won’t have much trouble doing well in a race right off the bat. The difficulty within these class challenges (there are 10 for each class) also scales pretty well, meaning that by the time you race on one of the more challenging tracks, such as Suzuka, you should have the basics on how to drive decently nailed down. It wasn’t until I reached some of the B and A class series of challenges that I started getting into that mode of thought where any single mistake was unacceptable and that I should start the race over and do better instead of trying to finish below third place. And the great thing about Gran Turismo is that this never feels frustrating per se; rather, it almost feels rewarding in the sense that I’m learning to become a better driver and learning the intricacies of the track every time I mess up.

But regardless of your skill level, most won’t have any trouble plowing through the 30 challenges in less than a day (if you’re already familiar with Gran Turismo and its gameplay mechanics) or perhaps two or more if you’re new to the series. The only reason--other then to perfect your driving skills--to revisit these challenges is to earn money that you can use to buy the expensive high-end cars included in the game, but by the time you plow through the last of the A-class challenges, you’re more than likely to have that dream machine already in your garage--unless it’s the Ferrari F2007, which costs a mere 2,000,000 credits.