03.04.08
I See You Shiver With…
I had a pretty good rant about how nothing in stores was really grabbing my attention here in the last week before Wild ARMs XF Super Smash Bros. Brawl hits, but to be completely honest that all got completely shot to hell last night when a couple of new titles landed at my pad courtesy some store credit and Gamefly. So yeah, we’re going to lapse a little into gaming news here on the main site for this week, but I think I could be excused.
The first title is the surprising Ghost Squad (Wii). Now, I love gun games. I like to think I’m a fairly accurate shot with a plastic assault rifle, and believe it or not, but the Wii Zapper is (in my opinion) pretty much the only gun I really like in terms of the optional attachments. Granted, it does nothing functional or electrical to change the gameplay, but it just adds the right kind of heft to the experience. With a game like Ghost Squad, which is pretty much completely unchanged from its arcade incarnation, the Wii Zapper isn’t just a good idea, it should be standard. Seriously. If Nintendo had been smart, this would have been the pack-in game for the Zapper. Ghost Squad does a lot to enhance the experience itself, too, by having reasonably scaled difficulty and extremely simple controls. There’s only three freaking buttons! That’s all you need! Two at the most, if you’re like me and just keep your weapon on burst-fire all the time! With the Zapper, Ghost Squad is more or less arcade-perfect and therefore comes highly recommended by me. It’s still short, yeah, and there’s no penalty at all for continuing (they should at least reset your score, I mean, come on), but it’s a hell of a lot better and more fun than Umbrella Chronicles.
Now, I said that I liked gun games, and that certainly is true. But I also like card games. I would probably have been right at home in some gold-dust hovel in 1886, playing poker and shooting my six-gun. Well, for about five minutes, anyway, before I mouthed off and got myself shot. In the absence of my grisly Old West murder, I decided to pick up Culdcept Saga (360). I’d played the demo and was quite intrigued; the mechanics are pretty easy to pick up and I won the ‘tutorial’ battle (which, though it was identical to the demo, I had failed during the demo). The comparisons to Monopoly aren’t quite accurate; to reveal a slightly embarrassing secret, it actually is set up a bit like the Pokemon Trading Figure Game more than the venerable board game of Boardwalk. A player draws cards as in Magic: The Gathering, but has a pool of abstracted mana points to use to cast spells or lay creatures on spaces of the board that he or she lands on after rolling a die. When a player lands on an unoccupied space, he or she may play a creature there to claim the position, adding score to their total mana (a sort of mystical net worth which takes into account creatures and territory); to win a match, a player must have a set amount of total mana upon completing a lap around the board. If a player lands on an enemy-controlled space, however, he or she may choose to pay a toll to stay there or can elect to invade with a creature of his or her own, contesting the ownership of the space. There’s also rules about levelling up spaces, spell cards, and elements and suchlike but that’s really the basic gist of the game. Culdcept really doesn’t work as a real-world game because there’s too many variables to keep track of, but as a computer-aided board/card game it’s fantastically deep. I’ve added it to the backlog, to be sure, but I don’t see myself rushing through this one anytime soon– matches take a long amount of time and are really, really heavy investments in thought-process. I don’t think I can blaze through it without giving it pretty much a month to itself, but learning how to play is a good goal for the week.
I also have Blokus Portable (PSP) en route, if that didn’t get lost in the mail (seriously, it was supposed to have shipped the same day as Ghost Squad), but with that one I know what to expect, and I know I’ll be keeping unless it’s egregiously bad. One thing’s for certain, I’m going to be writing up a couple of very favorable reviews very soon.
Anyway. Sunday evening I ran into some stomach trouble; I’ll save you the protracted explanation and just say that I don’t think that I’ll be going to that Mongolian BBQ place anymore. Or if I do, I’ll have to remember the Pepto chaser. Ugh.
Tomorrow on the LJ I have the February Anime Report, and Thursday… well, I don’t know yet what I’ll be doing on Thursday, but I’ll have something. Probably ranting about Fullmetal Alchemist. Ciao, folks.