Nintendo Roundup Page 3

02 Jul 2009 at 10:33:54 by Tim McDonald

Sin and Punishment 2 (Wiiware)

Treasure, as a company, is aptly named. Gunstar Heroes! Radiant Silvergun! Ikaruga! Bangai-O! And, yes, Sin and Punishment.

Sin and Punishment 2 has a lot to live up to with a pedigree like that, but it's looking promising so far. At first glance, it's just another rail shooter, but it's not – control over your character as he or she proceeds along the pre-set rails, letting you dodge shots and obstacles, makes it far more akin to a side-scrolling shoot 'em up. At times, the sheer amount of carnage makes it resemble a bullet hell game, albeit without the punishing difficulty.

You move your character around with the nunchuk and shoot with the Wiimote, which is a control system that works fantastically for a game like this. There are hundreds of enemies on screen at any given time, although many aren't a danger: they simply fly past, waiting to be shot. Bosses are plentiful, with a giant gryphon spewing an obscene amount of gunfire at you, or a hovering aircraft with soldiers leaping off and charging towards you. It's all very hectic, and very much good fun.

Style Savvy (DS)

On the Wii Sports Resort preview, I mentioned that it was vaguely embarrassing how much I enjoyed it. This is nowhere near the embarrassment that I somehow gravitated towards this much quicker, or – even worse – that I actually seemed to be good at it.

It's typical teen girl-gamer fare. You're employed in a fashion boutique, and people come in asking for clothes, which you promptly sell them. You act as a kind of personal shopper, with people demanding, say, a shirt for a dress event that evening. You can ask them to take a look at items three times, during which time you'll get a rough opinion of their thoughts. If you're confident, you can ask them to just try something on, and if they like it, they'll buy it. If they like it enough and you're quick enough, they'll potentially want something else.

It's very simple, and from the two customers on offer it was hard to tell how much of a game was there. It's also going to sell bucketloads, because it's a DS title marketed to young girls.

Wii Fit Plus (Wii)

Nintendo seems to be doing a new thing this year. The Wii was a technical powerhouse, albeit in a different way than in terms of pure brute graphics. It featured a new way of interacting with games, and this was the big selling point. What Nintendo is doing this year is making it more fun. That's not to say that the games we had before weren't, but Wii Fit's “games” should've always been in inverted commas. A few were entertaining for a little while, but they largely boiled down to a bit of a slog. Wii Fit Plus looks like it's actually made things entertaining.

It's not going to be competing for game time with something that's aimed squarely at entertainment, but the games I got to try were actually quite fun. One was a take on a game that was in the original Wii Fit, with you needing to adjust your balance to make coloured balls roll along a flat surface into the correctly coloured hole. Here, balls fly out of a chute at the top of the screen, and you adjust a horizontal set of bars to make them fall into the right chute. The angle of the Wiimote adjusts one set of bars, while your balance on the board adjusts the other. It's very much like rubbing your stomach while patting your head in the sense that you're leaning one way while tilting the Wiimote another, and frequently adjusting one while leaving the other in place.

A second game takes the prize for Wii Game Most Likely To Get You Committed To A Psychiatric Institution. Despite not using the Wiimote at all, you flap your arms like a panicked chicken as your attempt to land in the centre of a series of platforms to increase your time, so that you can get around the rest of the platforms and make it onto a boat. It's surprisingly fun, although most things that make you feel like an idiot are. Certainly not one to play in public, though.

Then there's a snowball fight that plays like Time Crisis with you leaning out of cover to take aim; a cycling event that lets you freely roam the island but kills your legs; a trundle on a Segway to pop balloons; a set of numbers around you that must be leaned into (well, bum-bashed or groin-thrusted, really) to add up to 10... the list goes on. And while it's still most likely a novelty, it's good to see that there's a lot more entertainment value here than in the original.

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