Sometimes there’s a real downside to writing about Wii games.  Like I said in the headline, they defy any real or simple description.  It’s hard to tell what exactly is going on sometimes.  They can even be downright confusing.  That’s definitely the case with Wario Ware: Smooth Moves.

Long, long ago, civilization was infested with these things called “form batons”, mystical objects that contained vast power and ostensibly controlled a race of tiny humanoids if the hieroglyphs are to be believed.  Anyway, one day, Nintendo‘s biggest anti-hero and treasure hunter extraordinaire Wario was sitting in his chair at home, sucking down cake and donuts and suchlike when one of those tiny humanoids from the hieroglyphs abducts Wario’s snacks.  Naturally, Wario can’t stand for such nonsense, and thus he chases after the tiny humanoid to recover his snacks.  What he finds instead is one of the legendary form batons.  Thus, Wario will join a whole cast of motley characters, including a dog and cat taxi driving team, two inveterate gamers, a cheerleader, an inventor and a witch with her pet demon familiar in a series of slice of life-style vignettes as they go about their lives.

You, meanwhile, will have to accomplish a series of tasks in rapid succession, accomplished by doing various things with your Wiimote.  You’ll hold it like a waiter holding a tray, like a remote control, up in front of your nose like an elephant with its trunk, and on top of your head like a mohawk to do any of a number of things, including driving a car, picking up trash with a remote controlled robot, picking your nose, and scrubbing a cow’s ass.  No, seriously.  You’re going to do all that and even less savory tasks.  Frankly, I was amazed enough to find myself working my Wiimote into a position where I could ram a finger up a polygonal nose on a polygonal face, but when I started running a scrub brush over a cow’s rump roast, well, that just did it for me.  I had nothing to say.

The graphics are, of course, last generation weak, but the biggest problem with Wario Ware: Smooth Moves is also the biggest joy–the controls.  Several times I found myself about to start a game and I was left totally unaware of what to actually DO.  Oh, sure, I knew how to HOLD the Wiimote–they make that perfectly clear from the second you start a game–but I didn’t always know what to do from there.  Did I swing to the left?  The right?  When do I pick up?  And most unaccountably of all, why won’t the Wiimote acknowledge ANYTHING I do, no matter what direction I move?  This didn’t happen often, but when it did, it really spoiled the game.

I have to admit that I enjoyed this game.  I liked the rapid switching of games, and how at higher speeds it could be tough to keep up.  There was some challenge involved here–it was no walkover.  It took me two, even three times to get through some stages.

All things considered, this is definitely a game to get your hands on and wrap some smooth moves around.

Seeing as how me and the Big N parted company back around the Gamecube era (as in, I had one, but after a couple weeks I took it to the local Gamestop and traded the sucker in on an Xbox because, as far as I could tell, Nintendo would not put out a game for anyone over the age of twelve), I never really got the opportunity to take a stab at the Mario Party line.  Thusly, my first exposure to the Mario Party series was this one right here, Mario Party 8 for the Wii.

Yes, it’s true–the game that amounts to little more than a board game wherein mini-games are played to decide who wins and who loses has reached its eighth iteration with this one.  And, plotwise, that’s really all you do.  You’ll play, generally in a four player environment with computer players to make up the slack as needed when humans aren’t on hand (if it’s just you, you’ll play against a trio of computer players), a series of board games.  You’ll punch a dice cube above your head when it’s your turn, then you’ll proceed the correct number of spaces along the board, at which point you’ll receive rewards or punishments based on the rules and then proceed onto the next mini-game, and you’ll repeat for a certain number of turns.

Yes, it’s a little bit monotonous. No one ever said this sucker was going to be the kind of thing you’d ever mistake for high art.  Or low art.  Or any other kind of art, come to think of it.  There’s nothing really resembling a storyline here–in fact, the only thing that keeps Mario Party 8 from being nothing more than a second-rate collection of mini-games is that it’s actually a FIRST-rate collection of mini-games.  I admit that, when I played this, I had more than my share of fun, for about the first half-hour or so.  After that first half-hour, however, that’s when the boredom settled in.  It only started grating, though, and every time a new mini-game came up, the boredom lessened significantly.

Now, there’s a lot of appeal in a game like this.  Indeed, with three or more friends around this sucker’s probably incredible fun.  Even with one extra buddy in tow, Mario Party 8 could easily be a great time.  But if you’re playing this one by yourself, the limits of the fun are sorely strained.  In fact, the appeal in playing this one in single player mode is fairly well limited to the number of new mini-game experiences you can have.  Once you’ve played through all the different games, and all the different boards, and won all the various prizes you’re able to win, you might as well just unplug your Wiimote and take that sucker back to the store, because you’ve just done everything you could ever possibly do with this game.

Mario Party 8 isn’t the kind of game you can give a simple yea-or-nay review to.  It has a series of very specific applications that, if your intended use doesn’t fit them, will limit your enjoyment of this game by limiting its usefulness.  If you need a game to play with friends or as a short-term rental, then yes, absolutely, Mario Party 8 will do the job nicely.  The game is called Mario Party for a reason–take the hint.

The Wii, it becomes more and more clear to me, is a thoroughly Japanese system.  Where the PS3 and the Xbox 360 might play games that have big involved storylines or lots of explosions and sociopathic destruction in general, much like American cinema in general, the Wii has the games that are the most out of left field.  I say this having watched several dozen Japanese movies and, in many cases, being positively baffled by what I watch.  Don’t believe me?  Go get a copy of Crazy Lips some time and see if that end sequence makes your eyes pop too.  But I digress.  Once again, I’ve found a Wii game that steadfastly refuses all known conventions in favor it its own sheer bizarrity.  That game, specifically, is Help Wanted.

In Help Wanted, you play a young man, or a young lady, whichever, who has a serious problem.  Their grandfather has discovered that an enormous meteor is heading straight for Earth and will destroy all life as we know it unless it can, somehow, be stopped.  But rather than call the police or the government or something, the old codger instead looks to his grandkids to—get this—take a series of odd jobs so that they can save enough money to buy various things from a series of home shopping networks that they can use to attack the meteor.

No, seriously.

That’s the entire plot of Help Wanted—the world can only be saved by cheap child labor.  Not that these kids’ labor is exactly cheap; many of the jobs you take on can net you as much as a hundred bucks a day or more.  And while you’re earning that money, you can spend it with a series of home shopping channels for new uniforms (allowing you to unlock new jobs), trophies of your previous jobs (which increase the amount of “shopping points” you get), support items (which make your jobs easier) and stuff to affect the meteor, either delaying its arrival or causing damage to it which will eventually make it break up and no longer pose a threat to Earth.

You’ll rapidly find, as you play Help Wanted, that there are some jobs you enjoy more than others, and some jobs you’re better at than others, and some jobs you just plain old can’t stand, just like in real life.  I, for example, found I was a positively crackerjack fisherman and action hero.  You may well discover a gift for babysitting and teaching, two things that some say aren’t that far removed.  But the key thing here is, there’s a lot to do and a lot of different THINGS to do.  Nothing really has a chance to get old or stale because you can switch to something completely different almost at will.

Sure, the graphics are a little low-end, as is the standard with the Wii, where its games are ported to the Playstation TWO rather than the three.  Sure, the characters couldn’t be much more chibi and cutesy.  But there’s a lot of humor here, and some of the cut scenes are a riot.  Consider the dog that runs away because he’s tired of playing the villain in the younger siblings’ games.  Upon his return, he’s given a special treat—a makeover and upgrade to hero.  This is not where the strangeness ends, but rather, is merely the beginning.

There’s a lot to like about this game—its constant variety and a soupcon of comedy besides—but I’ll caution you that it really is just another collection of mini games.  But this seems to be working out fairly well for the Wii.  And you should be fairly entertained by the whole thing too.

I was starting to think that the Wii was nothing but a dumping ground for massive party game packs of mini games, and then something happened to change my entire perspective.  It’s called The House of the Dead: Overkill, and it’s a whole lot more fun than I ever expected.

See, The House of the Dead: Overkill plays like a massive collection of seventies drive-in movies unified by one basic script.  You play as Agent G, aided and abetted by Detective Washington and a stripper with the unlikely name of Varla Guns, all after a madman with chemically driven plans for global conquest via an army of mutant humans and animals.  Most of the mutated humans in question look almost EXACTLY like zombies.  You’ll be chasing said madman, Papa Caesar by name, through a series of nightmarish challenges, including clearing out a plantation house of zombies, blasting your way through a prison, hospital, and carnival of the dead, and taking on horrific bloated monstrosities in a swamp.

Seriously, there’s probably enough basic fodder here to make a dozen or more direct to video splatter flicks, and they probably wouldn’t be half bad, either.  Carny alone would give me the galloping creepsies, and there have already been some pretty solid zombie prison movies.  Even The Asylum could do one right back in the day when they weren’t churning out sad retreads of blockbusters one right after the next.

The graphics are appropriately splattery, and the voice acting just screams seventies drive-in, in fact, the level of profanity in this game was probably approaching unnecessarily high levels but that’s nothing adults can’t handle.  But where this game really got me was in terms of sheer gameplay.  The Wiimote is surprisingly well placed to handle shooter games—all I could think while playing was that the Wii desperately needed a Star Trek-themed shooter. I believe that the Wiimote would make an excellent hand phaser.

Of course, there’s a down side to all this, too—if you’re not into splatter flicks and blasting zombies then you’re not going to get anything out of this game.  I happen to fall into both those categories, both loving watching other people blast zombies and doing the blasting of said zombies myself.  This game is tailor-made for people like me, but if you don’t happen to fall into the category of a horror enthusiast then it’s not going to be the game for you.  All you’ll do in this game is shoot zombies with a variety of weapons.

Speaking of which, I loved the variety of weapons in this game.  I further loved that they were upgradeable based on level performance, which provided the infusion of cash necessary to have my hardware tricked out and to get my shotgun and assault rifle and whatnot up to their highest levels.  I do somewhat resent that combo scoring seemed to be affected by my use of an automatic weapon, but this was a minor irritant at best and certainly didn’t get in the way of the game’s sheer blistering fun factor.

The House of the Dead: Overkill should provide plenty of fun and plenty of action.  Better, it’ll do that in a shooter package that doesn’t depend on you hovering above a gun barrel for once.  Excellent, smooth gameplay and fun dialogue make this one one to pick up if you’ve got even the slightest horror buff tendency.

I think it’s safe to say that almost everybody who’s reading this has played Uno at some point.  Personally, I grew up on Uno, and I think I learned just a bit of my numbers and colors before school even started by virtue of regular Uno games with my folks.

And for you fellow Uno fans out there, there’s a brand new Uno experience on Xbox Live Arcade, yours for a mere eight hundred Microsoft points–Uno Rush.

This time, in Uno Rush, you’re dealt a hand outright, and you can take the equivalent of several Uno turns all at once by virtue of matching up numbers, colors and symbols in advance to form a run.  You’ll have the standard command cards, too, like Draw Four, Wild, Draw Two, Skip and Reverse, but you’ll also get the new command card Shuffle, which causes an opponents well-planned hand to suddenly randomize, possibly causing the player to lose a run.

I liked this game, really–sure, playing by yourself isn’t a whole lot of fun, but as a party game or an online title this one will shine.  Look for a LOT of people to pick this one up, and for it to be a great social game.

You might think that writing a review of Monopoly would easily be regarded as a total waste of time.  It’s not like everybody reading this hasn’t played it in one format or another for the better than fifty years that it’s been in existence, right?  Well, maybe not EVERYBODY reading this—there’s always those one or two folks who’ll surprise you that haven’t gotten around to Monopoly yet.

But this review isn’t JUST for them.  Because the recent release of Monopoly on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, among others, has new and interesting features that bear discussing.  First, you may well be amazed to learn that there have been over a DOZEN different releases of Monopoly to home game systems.  The game features multiple boards, including futuristic properties, the original classic, a board devoted entirely to sugary treats and another exclusively comprised of types of cheese.  You’d never believe that you could build a hotel on Roquefort and charge a hundred bucks to take possession of it.  I guess that’s just the kind of thing Monopoly’s always been—whether you were out to buy Baltic Avenue, Times Square, or the Death Star, it was always about the possibilities.  Certain “house rules” variants are also in play, allowing you to somewhat tailor your Monopoly experience.

Oh, and even more interesting, this version of Monopoly includes a version called The Richest.  The Richest is actually a fairly complex game played without cash.  Instead, players engage in a series of minigames that allows them to determine how many of their tokens are placed on the Monopoly board.  If the property you land on is unclaimed, you take possession.  If the property is owned, you must hand over one of your properties in exchange, or possibly more if the property is part of a monopoly or if it’s been developed.  The winner is the person with the highest value land portfolio at the end of a set number of rounds.

Monopoly is always fun for a few minutes, and the addition of this new mode adds to the replay value.  This is probably even more fun as a party game, but it’s not without its flaws.  Yes, it’s just Monopoly.  That’s it.  New versions aside, you’re not going to get much in the way of innovation here.  And worse yet, unless I missed it, there aren’t any online capabilities with this game.  How on earth can you NOT be able to play Monopoly online?  Isn’t that part of why we invented the Internet in the first place?  So we can play obscure board games with people in other lands?

Someone get Al Gore on the phone!

Anyway…it’s true.  This is Monopoly in all its glory.  New versions add to the fun, but the original is still the best.  There’s absolutely no reason why you wouldn’t enjoy five or ten minutes with this virtually any time you loaded it into your system of choice.  Chances are this won’t keep you up all night or playing for hours or desperate for another Red Bull to keep you sufficiently jacked up to play, but still—there’s plenty of fun to be had here.  Sure, it would’ve been better if I could’ve made it a party game any time I wanted by hooking up the broadband…but you can’t have everything, I guess.

It’s good to see that Sega is still taking things too far for their own good, and a perfect example of this is its recent title The Club, a game that shows you you can never be too rich or too homicidal.

Basically, The Club is a lot like Twisted Metal, only without useless things like cars or clever backstories.  The Club is an illegal underground deathmatch in which thugs and scoundrels from all walks of life are given access to large weapons and set loose inside abandoned settings filled with random people with guns, where they will be told to run around like lunatics and increase each other’s body weight by systematically injecting as much lead as possible into each other’s skin, to be repeated until the subjects are dead.  Just kidding–they’ll be told to shoot each other. A lot.

That’s it. That’s the entire game.  You run through about eight different maps with one of eight different avatars and you blast things.  Oh, sure, you’ll do your blasting in different WAYS sometimes–some levels won’t allow you to move past a set area marked with traffic cones and chalk outlines lest the “micro-explosives” you’ve been implanted with detonate.  Sometimes you’ll be running laps of a circuit, trying to string together sufficient kills to keep your It’s all about two important things, you see–moving fast and shooting stuff.

READ ON »