2 Inches Of Fury

The wife played Where’s Waldo the other day on Wii.
I sat there watching her play it for a total of 3 or 4 minutes and that was more than enough information I needed to make an informative review on this. Sonja had been playing for an hour into it (keeping in mind it only took her 1.5 hours to finish the whole game).
Controls, gameplay…yeah whatever. If you’re looking for a story in this, Waldo is lost. And you have to find him. If you don’t, they will kill his wife, his sister, his dog, his arch enemy and his friend in the most gruesome way possible. Everyone. If you don’t find him. So go now and find Waldo.

The whole purpose is just like the books. Except this time, you have a time limit on how long you can take to find him and whatever else you are asked to identify in the picture. It will make a good tool to help identify crims if you’re ever involved in a hold up. Assuming those crims are either Waldo, Wilma, Wenda, Odlaw, Woof or Wizard Whiteboard.
But even an hour into the game, it was like just like this: “Hi there player. Where’s Waldo?”:

Oh shit, there you are. Almost didn’t see you there.

I know this is aimed at children but this shit is just ridiculous.

Rough words there, Gordo. My wife has been playing this game. Mostly due to her terrible taste in modern video games.
But do you see the above photo? It’s an ingame screenshot Gordon Ramsey in this game. Well, it’s supposed to be ol’ Gordo Ramsey. But you know what it really looks more like? A sex porridge of Clive Owen, Morrisey, Martin Clune and Vinnie Jones.

If all 4 men took their semen, made some kind of gay sex goulash and they produced an offspring? It would be Gordon Ramsey in this video game. ‘Cause it doesn’t really look like Gordo.
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North American Hunting Extravaganza
You shoot shit.
Shallow.
An inaccurate shot / Shitty controls. It was frustrating as shit to play because of it.
The graphics are boring.
The scenary looks the same.
No explanation on what any of the different areas mean in multiplayer mode.
Sound is shitty.
Complete lack of fun.

Game Party 2 / More Games Party
Plenty of games.
The ONLY game worth playing was beer pong. Without the beer.
The rest of these mini-games suck.
Controls suck shit out of my arsehole.
The graphics are boring.
The sound is forgettable.
If this is your idea of a party, your friends probably hate you.

Hasbro Family Game Night
Good controls.
Is an ok single player as well as an ok multiplayer game.
It takes classic games and presents them in a different way that ever before.
It takes classic games and presents them in a different way that ever before.
Lost my patience playing this game.
Party mode adds nothing.
Not really that many modes to keep me interested.

NASCAR Kart Racing
Surprisingly good. I was expecting same shitty game that cashes on the NASCAR label.
Good sense of speed.
Tonnes of fun.
Good courses.
Well designed controls.
Reasonable amount of characters and karts to choose from.
Reasonable amount of modes available.
But, let’s not get crazy here. There are a few let downs. It feels too simple to get anymore than an hour or two out of it at any one time unless you have a tonne of patience and have played all the better racing games.
Sound is silly and generic.
Menu design is meh.

Mario Party 8
Rediculous amounts of mini-games. Most of them are pretty fun.
Most of the boards are quite interesting and some even involve a little strategy with moving around the board.
The menu’s are pretty good. I wouldn’t expect anything less for Nintendo, though.
Sounds do an alright job and don’t detract from the fun we’re having.
Some games are less skill, more luck.
This is just like the other Mario Party games.
Lousy single player but, what do you expect? What kind of party is one you have by yourself?
There are parts of the game that are annoying that can be left out. For instance, when you get onto a square that takes you ahead 20 squares and you have a clip of say, a dolphin taking you the 20 steps, this happens EVERYTIME you land on the square instead of having the option to opt this shit out and have a quick game. Especially if you did something wrong and say, set the game for 30 turns making it seem like a game that is going forever.
It’s hard to sit through this game for anymore than 20 turns because everyone starts to lose interest. Even if there are mini games you haven’t played in that particular game before. Still not enough to generate enough interest to sit through them all.

Sometimes I am glad no one comes to visit my site.
I see so many arseholes take a review which, might have been reviewed negatively be someone’s favourite game and make it personal. And then retort with personal attacks, death threats, etc. And I can really do without such bullshit.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade
Some of the best graphics on any Wii game I have ever seen: beautiful art, detailed graphics. This game was REALLY made for the Wii.
Accurate, precise, well-thought out controls that benefit the game.
Good Story.
Interesting characters.
Unique style of play: It’s a platform with RPG elements which are in itself, detailed but not confusing.
Well paced. The learning curve is not so rediculous that I throw the control in a tanty. Starts off seemingly shallow but becomes far deeper when played for longer.
Boss fights are rediculously awesome. One boss (I won’t name names) took me an hour to finish. You are engrossed from start to finish in the fight.
Different fighting styles only adds further ways to play this game.
Great replayability.
And the most important aspect of ANY game: fun. Tonnes of fun.
The passages between fighting can sometimes be long and fighting at times can be samey samey. Still not enough to really deem it any less than 5 stars.

Other comments: They took out a button for jump and just used the up on the nunchuck. Never has this ever really worked for me as well as it did in this game. If they had made the jump a button, I think it would slightly hinder the game’s playability.

Boom Blox Party
You take a weapon and knock down blocks. Or destroy blocks to get gem blocks. Or destroy only red blocks leaving the blue blocks. What is not to like about such concepts?
Controls work well.
A shitload of modes.
It’s like sex: Plays better as a multiplayer but still enjoyable going solo.
A level creator.
A great sequel to a good game.
Fun…in doses.
We lost interest in the game after several hours. The thing is, this was a game we could definately come back to. But can be a bit much in one sitting.
I guess that can be a lack of depth, too.

Mercury Meltdown Revolution
For a game about moving mercury through a puzzle, you can telll the controls have been the focal point.
Addictive in the way that Angry Birds is an addictive game. But ya know…not as good.
Good learning curve even if the tutorial has a shitload of things to show you at first. The game plays out at a nice speed.
Not too easy, not too hard.
Good physics: When you run in to something, it behaves the exact way you think it should.
Strangely satisfying when you beat a level you’re having trouble with.
Graphics look like a budget design.
Deep as a scooner of beer. Which means you come back to it, sure. But, gets tired pretty quickly.
It’s like a heterosexual at a gay orgy: Shitty multiplayer.

Heavenly Guardian
Wow, this is harder than I thought for 2 stars. Has a retro look. I loved the screenshots of this game on IGN. My imagination pegged this game potentially more interesting than actual game.
Controls allow you to go in 8 directions. The design of the game is so poor, you expect more for something with this kind of layout. Even Commando from 1985 had 8 directions and it was more fun. The controls are pretty responsive, though.
You get points the further you go but they don’t mean anything.
Shit multiplayer. Then again, shit single player too.
Your weapon system sucks.
Uninteresting enemies.
The story is shit.
Was released on a previous generation’s console (PS2) and looks the same.
No replayability. Hey, I didn’t enjoy it the first time. I am not gunna come back to this piece of shit.
Unless it is free, it is not good value for money.
Sadly bland, boring shovelware.

Instead of boring the pants off you with detail, I am just gunna give the highlights. It’s less work on me and you don’t give a shit anyway.

Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles
Accurate Controls.
Still thoroughly enjoyable.
Don’t Need to know any of the other Resident Evils to enjoy the story.
Upgrade of weapons system works well.
Jarring camera angles makes life hard if you suffer from motion sickness not to mention aiming
As a first time RE player, this entire story was ridiculously cliched and predictable. No scares.

Cruisin’
Not as Bad as People Make it Out to be - still can be fun regardless on all of its problems for the brief hour you can be bothered playing it.
Graphically Glitchy as Fuck. Eg. The road splits into two. And if I hit the barrier separating the two, all of a sudden, I am about 10m down the road on a side it chose for me.
Generic music.
Multiplayer doesn’t make this game any better.
Fun for an hour. No replayability once you finished the game (after the hour it took for you to finish it even though it took me 2 and a bit hours ’cause I suck at games).
Lack of modes.
Other Comments: I thought Midway was a decent video game company. This certainly doesn’t do much to prove it. Consider this score to be very forgiving. If anything, the Wii has taught me that most of the video game companies that I once loved (Capcom, Sega, etc) are usually a bad sign of a Wii game. I’m slightly embarrassed of the score I gave it.

London Taxi: Rush Hour
Nothing.
Wait, no. There are worse games than this. Hard to imagine, right? Does that really justify a second tick? Probably not.
Plays out as a third rate crazy taxi.
Not Fun.
Traffic is frustrating to deal with.
Graphically lackluster.
Controls are responsive enough but there is still something about them I just don’t like.
When you run into anything, it acts like a wall that you can’t simply bulldoze no matter how fast you’re travelling. Eg. I drove through a bush hedge. But instead of going through it…BLAMMO! Stops you dead in your tracks.

F1 2009
Decent graphics for the Wii.
Accurate steering.
Accurate steering. Yes, I know it is here twice.
No soundtrack.
Where the FUCK is the fun?
Menu’s/Presentiation look dodgy.
Lacks personality.
Other Comments: After playing this for several hours today, this was the highs and lows of the game. It doesn’t excite me enough to make further comment on it.

Rooms: The Main Building
Perhaps not as bad you may have read elsewhere. If you ever have bothered to look elsewhere on what this game is like. If you can be bothered to own a Wii. It’s only the highest selling console of all time but as I review more games, it becomes abundantly clear that the only reason it sold well was a market to families and interactive games with a controller that only seems to work half of the time. Still, the layout is nothing like I have seen before. This is both a good thing (originality) and a bad thing (looks kinda ugly). All you have to do is shift the rooms around so you can progress to the next level and while that is pretty simple, they slowly introduce other items making it mostly pretty interesting. You have one way doors, keys, lit candles, etc which add to the complexity of these levels. It’s not boring if you are into puzzle games by any stretch of the imagation but don’t expect to be Woo’ed, either. The interesting layout and the need to beat the level I was on was the only thing keeping me going. It has those 90s visuals of where they record someone doing something and then just insert the live video into a real time game giving you a severely outdated look to the game. Games like Mad Dog McGee arcade games where someone comes out of nowhere, draws his gun and when you shoot him, he falls to the ground in such a lame pre-recorded manner, that every enemy is one of a selection of pre-recorded enemies. Your character is so small that you can’t really make out what he looks like but that doesn’t seem to matter too much. All you want to do is get your guy through the end door. When you finish a tower or hotel, you get a puzzle piece from the treasure chest. You have 4 puzzle pieces to collect in total. Would I come back to this game? Yeah, if I run out of other games and I have’t beaten the game which is hard to do in one sitting (there is 100 levels). The good thing is if you have a spare 20 minutes inbetween whatever, you can attempt a few levels instead of like most games spending that 20 minutes trying to get established before actually playing again. If you are looking at spending money on this title, I would suggest waiting until it can be bought as a budget title and you will get plenty of enjoyment out of it.

Megamind: Mega Team Unite
Another game of mini games. They break it up into scenes of a TV report on the news and how they can defeat the baddie of that of that particular level which is ingenious but is ultimately ANOTHER game of mini games. You start with the tutorial at a construction site and told everything about your character. I hate tutorials I can’t skip as I like to find out what it is my character can do by myself in-game and work out the finer details later when I get stuck. It uses the WiiRemote to aim and shoot at various items like health-ups along the way and to use one of your moves. The cut scenes and one or two of the games break the monotony. I never saw the movie so walking into this game is not a good start as I don’t know what to expect. Even if you don’t know the characters, it does not seem to hinder the experience at all. This time around, the enemies are a lot harder than previous platform fighting games like Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes. It’s not the most exciting game on the Wii but it is also not too bad. The controls work just fine with using a combination of nunchuck and WiiRemote. In a group setting, this is adds only just a bit to the single player mode but you work in one giant team against the baddies in a co-op mode where you can hurt each other (or in battle mode against a friend). Your selection of achievements do not mean shit in this game so the replayability isn’t very good although.

Monkey Mischief
I don’t like getting fisted. And this game is like getting fisted by the whole cast of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. They take some hopeless straight guy who can’t get his shit into order and have gay sex with him. I mean, I’ve never actually WATCHED an episode but that is what I think the show is about. The game is a series of mini games. None of them are fun. The controls work every now and again and they feature monkeys. Before I actually played one game, the music was a 5 second audio clip played over and over. It doesn’t sound so bad, but that 5 second sound clip is like the most annoying section of any of the many polkas done by Weird Al. And each section of the shitty looking menu is a different 5 second audio clip - equally as annoying as the last audio clip. The graphics are, at best, average. I played this in terms of how long I felt the need to play - not in minutes. I unlocked 5 games. I stopped there. Turned off the Wii and went upstairs to cry for a little while before I felt confident enough to play another game that I hope doesn’t suck as hard as this game did. The only reason this didn’t get a 1 is there are (believe it or not) worse games on the Wii console. So I want to put everything into perspective or else every game would ultimately be 1, 3 or 5 star games. You can pick 1 of 4 flavourless monkeys and the fact that they are monkeys adds absolutely nothing except tears. The load screens are silence with 4 poorly animated images of a monkey swinging on a tire. Imagine fun because that is as close you are gunna get with this game. The only way this game could be more fun is if they included Spank the Monkey in their next revision.

Sid Meier’s Pirates!
Meth isn’t nearly as addictive as this game. I was thinking about taking today off work just so I could get in another 12 hours of this game. There is so much involved in this game that even after 10 or so hours of playing this game I am not sure I still understand the entire mechanics of the game so I will tell you what I know. You’re a deckhand who gets sick of some guys shit. You fuck him up, take all of his stuff and now you’re a captain and you lead off with a small team of pirates to conquer the sea and fuck any other sovereign nation that you’re not apart of. The English are the easiest to play as they have tonnes of wealthy ports that can do plenty of trading and keeping you alive. The greatest thing about this game is the freedom you have to roam around as you like on the condition that you have plenty of food and your pirates are kept happy. I only just figured out the best of doing this is to ensure you have plenty of not just food but a nice even amount of sugar, spice, riches, etc. You are also always in battle with one of four sovereign nation’s - England, Spain, France or the Netherlands so you have to monitor that quite often as your allies can soon turn into enemies. English are the easiest to use as they plenty of wealthy ports around the map, the French being the hardest. The game is made up of mini games but they flow so smoothly that you don’t even realise. When you come across other ships, you can either sink them with your cannons or swordfight for ownership. You will find that same of the games do become repetitive after awhile which is ok because you can give it a break and when you come back to it, you get right back into it. Or you could stick it out and go after different mini games. When you rock up to a port, you can upgrade/fix your ship, get food/spice/sugar, go to the bar to get more info and employ pirates. And if you meet the govenor and he introduces you to his daughter, you can go dancing and she tells you stuff which is pretty important. So there is plenty of enjoyment to be had. There is one or two small things that could be improved: cut scenes could have been a bit more varied, the swordfighting controls could be a bit more accurate and be able to lift the limitation of more than 5 ships in your fleet. I want to have more men, more loot, more food and go out of control. It just gets to a point where you are so good and you have so much food, that you men are happy and you can be out to sea for years without needing to restock for food and that is really as far as you can go. When you have 4 treasure galleon’s at max capacity and war galleon fully decked out, it’s a shame I can’t take over more ships. There is tonnes of achieveables which has to be the first game on Wii I have played to date that I ACTUALLY care about them. There is also a quest that the PC never had which gives it depth in an already busy game. The amount of fun is plentiful and with one or two changes, this could have been a perfect game.

Luxor 3
Puzzle game where balls go down a predetermined path and if they get to the end, you’re fucked. To get rid of them, line up a colour combo. Now that the formalities are out of the way, this is an awesome game. Visually it is impressive for a puzzle game. When you do a colour combo, it throws these power-ups which allows you to destroy these balls. There are achievements and unlockables (for those that actually give a shit about this sort of stuff) but the levels are in abundance with bonus levels to split up the monotony. You can use Free Play to revisit any level unlocked in Adventure. And coins (which rain down from colour combos) can be spent to upgrade your power-ups and purchase new cannons. Apart from that, there isn’t a lot extra to comment on except every now and again if you do not point the remote directly at the sensor bar, it veers off to the right hand side.

Emergency Mayhem
Imagine a second rate crazy taxi. Wait, no. Third rate. Erm, maybe not that good. More like fourth rate. I have played this game for an hour. I am not getting that hour back. FUCK YOU EMERGENCY MAYHEM. Everything is based on time and instead of picking people up, you do mini games. But these mini games are not the quality well-thought out mini games like you would expect from say, the Mario Party series. The very first mini game was cut the right wire (like a bomb from a TV series) and the wires are pretty obvious which one to cut. But you have three different types of mini game depending on what kind of car you have: an ambulance, a fire truck, and a police car. Police car and fire truck are both a whole pile of average. The ambulance games CAN SUCK SHIT OUT OF MY ARSEHOLE. That is how I feel about these fiddley fucking shitty mini games. There was this one game where someone gets something stuck in their body (a bullet? or a nail?) and you use a magnet to get it out. WHAT KIND OF FUCKING HEALTH SERVICE ARE YOU RUNNING?
“Welcome to dodgy Pete’s backyard surgeries. I got this magnet to get out that bullet in your body. Hope you don’t have any fillings in your teeth that are sitting loosely or else you could lose them, too. I double as a dentist when I am not using magnets to fix ailments.”
The one thing I noticed is that you can play 3 or 4 mini games and they are all a piece of piss. And then you get 2 REALLY HARD mini games. And then you get another 2 easy mini games. And then it gets out of control again. WHAT THE FUCK? If this was a game where you went around and actually drove dumb pedestrians (which you can for a brief period before you run out of time) for hours at a time, then you might start to add an extra star or two onto this score.
Oh, and multiplayer doesn’t add shit. It still sucks. It just means you’re dragging someone else through the same shit as you’re experiencing.

SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1
16 games in one. Would be good if all of them were actually great titles. I prefer old(er) games myself but you have to draw a line between loving old school classic games of Mario, Sonic, Pacman, Double Dragon, Altered Beast, etc and then games you have never heard of for a good reason. If you ever owned a Neo Geo console in the first place, it would completely defeat the purpose of this package. The only additional thing are the unneccessary unlockables and there is nothing there (like an extra mini SNK bonus game or anything) worthy of buying this. The games play out in the exact same way they used to. And the thing is, the best game in this entire collection is Metal Slug. You know how much I love that game, right? Well, they include the first one in this package. It is reasonably redundant since they released the entire anthology in another package for the Wii. So, why bother with this? Well, you have other classic titles which are quite good, don’t get me wrong: Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury, Shock Troopers, Samurai Showdown and King of Fighters 94. And Samurai Showdown and KOF have their own releases of the entire series for the Wii as well. So if you want a taste of everything without delving into anything serious, this would be a great option. If you only bought this for KOF, Metal Slug or Samurai Showdown, you have just wasted your money. Baseball Stars 2, Burning Fight, King of the Monsters, Last Resort, Magician Lord, Neo Turf Masters, Sengoku, Super Sidekicks 3, Top Hunter and World Heroes are all at best ok. But mostly crap with a hint of shit. You might get an hour out of each one. And some of them might be an hour of laughter. On the basis you have never played this games before. Unless you paid full price for this bad boy, then you probably won’t want to milk each game for long. If you loved these games when they first came out, nothing has changed and you will still get your boner.

Samurai Shodown Anthology
VICTOLY! SNK had a fuckload of games just ready to be ported over to under-powered consoles like the Wii. And if that wasn’t the case, it certainly felt like it. The menu system is meh. I am not so worried about the menu system as I am the actual games. Using a WiiRemote in a “classic” format, is close enough to 100% as you can get. Graphics and gameplay have not changed during the port over. If you have not played these games before, they are simply 1-on-1 fighting games with interesting characters. Over the course of each of the games available, the fighting system changes quite a bit between the first and the last game. The games do progress and they get harder to control. More dedicated you are, the bigger the pay off with SamSho6. If you are a casual gamer, I don’t know why you would even think about trying to play these kinds of game. This entire series may have started out as a fighting game that is pretty easy to get into but as this anthology shows, they started to narrow their audience with each game. Improving on everything along the way with more characters, but making the combos harder than pressing kick repeatedly like Eddie Gordo in Tekken. It gives games like this more depth. The only thing that makes this game good is the fact that you get the entire series of Samurai Shodown (including IV which I have read was NOT released in the US) which makes me hard. This package offers very little in anything additional apart from the series. That should be enough though, shouldn’t it?

The King of Fighters Collection: The Orochi Saga
Read the Samurai Shodown Anthology review. +1. Except Orochi Saga lets gamers choose between King of Fighters ‘94, ‘95, ‘96, ‘97 and ‘98. Oh, and the menus are better in KOF than Samurai Showdown Anthology. The fighting geometrics change in each game like SamSho as well but don’t get me wrong: they are not the same fighting engine/style. I prefer the arcade style of fighter like KOF to SamSho but regardless, they are both top fighting games. The amount of characters in each given game is phenominal. A few of them feel and play the same but ultimately, it still retains the diversity between the characters.