MONDOmagazine

By Curtis Westman

Every year, tens of thousands of video gaming press and fans convene in one single, sweaty venue to ogle scantily-clad models and discuss videogames. Well, until last year. This was, of course, the Electronic Entertainment Expo — E3 for short. E3 had gained a reputation in recent years (likely due to the rise in blue-collar reporting in the form of blogs. Oops) for becoming a forum for fanboys and fangirls instead of the mainstream press and industry event it was meant to attract. So they scaled back the event to be more of an industry event and less of a ‘medium’ event. Fewer fans, more private meetings, fewer games, more savings for developers, and less booth babes. No more week-long waits for a megaton announcement from the Big Three of console gaming, no more staying up nights to watch streaming video of business executives trying to appeal to the masses. Well, kind of.

The biggest difference this year was that there was less video gaming news. What was announced was mediocre, paling in comparison to the excitement of recent years and mostly focusing on software we already knew was coming out. Part of the reason for that is we are now thick into the next generation console war, whereas in the past two years new consoles were announced. That said, it’s worth mentioning some of the highlights from each of the Big Three’s conferences.

Nintendo

Nintendo had the most prolific showing, though the festivities were lackluster compared with last year’s on-stage Wii Tennis party. Arguably not the most exciting announcements of the festival, Nintendo’s are the easiest to mention without a video-feed.

NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams

Just over a decade ago, the Sega Saturn was released to lukewarm reviews. There were few games that took advantage of the new 3D capabilities, and none that really took advantage of its hardware. Few that is, except for one game, released by Sonic Team in an attempt to jumpstart a new franchise. This game was NiGHTS into Dreams… , an innovative adventure through a lush, colourful 3D world. The game was like nothing anyone had seen before — to some, a bad thing, but to others, a fantastic new direction. It sold poorly. Despite what many look back upon as ingenious gameplay, the game borrowed too much from the arcade to convince gamers that it was a new experience, and looking for the same kind of stuff as they had been playing in the arcade, NiGHTS left a poor taste in their mouths. We believed it would never get a sequel. Until now.

NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams is a direct sequel for the Nintendo Wii, making full use of the motion-sensitive controls. The trailer is, for the lack of a better word, flamboyant, but such is NiGHTS. Whether or not it succeeds financially is one thing, but it’s guaranteed to at least strike awe into the hearts of some.

Nintendo Wii Balance Board

Mario and everything-else-important creator Shigueru Miyamoto was again at the event, this time demonstrating his new creation, WiiFit — similar to WiiSports and Brain Training, WiiFit is supposedly a way for people to train their bodies with their videogame console. The new hardware is just wacky; the Wii Balance Board is what amounts to an electronic bathmat. How it controls is somewhat mysterious, but we know that through pressure-sensitivity, standing on the board will affect the on-screen action. Miyamoto mentioned that its obvious use after WiiFit was played out was a snowboarding game.

Releases

After almost a year of waiting, finally at least two of the games we were told were launch-window have been given definite release dates:
Smash Brothers Brawl – December 3rd, 2007
Super Mario Galaxy – November 3rd, 2007

Sony Playstation

Sony’s conference was much more software-driven, and executives tried as hard as possible to keep from mentioning dwindling sales numbers and instead spin positive on the future releases for the most powerful console of the next generation. Though software was their main goal, nothing was more interesting than their announcement of a new SKU for the PS3 lineup. The 60GB model out now has dropped in price only nine months into its life cycle, to a point of $499 USD. To some, a $100 drop isn’t enough to warrant a purchase — to others, it’s an invitation to buy Sony’s new 80GB model, priced at $599 with Motorstorm bundled.

Frankly, it’s a little strange that Sony isn’t really dropping the price as giving more for what they’re charging. 20GB more. Hurray?

Take it with a grain of salt, but Sony Computer Entertainment of Europe president David Reeves says that it’s just the next step in phasing out the 60GB model completely. He also said the PS3 would release in Europe before it did in North America though, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Killzone 2

In 2005, before the PS3 had even been released, Sony showed footage of what they said was real-time PS3 gameplay from an upcoming game sequel, Killzone 2. It was stunning and fake. Fans were quick to call out Sony on using pre-rendered graphics in place of gameplay footage, a fact that was later confirmed by several media blogging outlets. Killzone’s first sequel was released not on PS3, but on PSP, and to mediocre reviews. Now though, Sony has released footage of actual gameplay footage from the new PS3 installment of Killzone… strangely enough, titled Killzone 2.

I’m not a fan of FPS games, generally, but I have to give credit where it’s due, and this game looks beautifully rendered. Gameplay seems boring and generic, but goddamn is it ever pretty.

Microsoft Xbox 360

The Microsoft conference was slow. There was a lot of hype about games we were already expecting and not much else. The major announcement was that the 360 consoles would be coming in new colours. Army green, as well as pink and light blue have been announced as upcoming swathes. Among upcoming games for the console gaming market leader are Assassin’s Creed, Rock Band, the forthcoming Halo 3, the beautiful Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, and a curious trailer for a new The Simpsons game, of which not much is known.

Here is hoping that next year’s expo is more like the circus of yesteryear, when Hideo Kojima oil wrestled Hironobu Sakaguchi for killer app supremacy. Oh, wait. That was just my dream. My sweet, precious dream.

By By Curtis Westman

Korean business market grinds to a halt

Blizzard announced last weekend that the wet dream of over a million zealous RTS gamers is about to be vindicated with the advent of the sequel to one of the most popular franchises in the history of PC gaming — Starcraft 2. Rumours over the past months that the sequel would either never arrive or would be another World of Warcraft MMO clone in the Starcraft universe have accordingly been forgotten, as gameplay footage from Blizzard’s Worldwide International gaming convention show what is essentially Starcraft on steroids.

For three days after the announcement, Korean business suffered huge losses as workers failed to show up for work, catatonic in front of their computers, awestruck at the news.

And why wouldn’t they be? This is huge news for gaming. This is like the release of Duke Nukem Forever. On schedule AND living up to its hype. This is like the second coming of Christ — nobody ever thought it would happen and here it is after only God knows how many years. Centuries from now, archaeologists are going to dig up big stone tablets detailing the coming of Starcraft the 2nd, and are going to think it refers to some magnanimous king that liberated slaves and miraculously brought Protoss together with Terrans — Zerg and cats living together; mass hysteria!

They’re going to think we were such nerds.

Virtual Console Picks

The Wii’s Virtual Console feature lets us play older games from a multitude of systems on a single machine — similar to X-Box Live or, well, I would say the PS Network, but I feel dirty making that comparison — and every week there are more additions. I figured that I might as well explain the games this week so maybe people know what to avoid. After all, we don’t all have subscriptions to Nintendo Power. Oh, god, please kill me. I’m such a geek

This week’s offerings:

Donkey Kong Country 2: Okay, so this one time Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of the Mario and Zelda franchises) said that the Donkey Kong Country series was proof that American gamers would buy any piece of trash as long as it looked half decent. Apparently he was right. American audiences really lapped up the trilogy. To its credit, it has a lot of fun bits, and isn’t a bad side-scroller all told. It’s a bit slow, I admit, but the atmosphere is pure bananas (get it!?) which more than makes up for that.

Blazing Lazers: I’m a little biased with this game because I was one of the few North Americans who owned a Turbo Grafx 16, and loved the hell out of it. Blazing Lazers is a great shooter with a lot of charm. The music is fun and exciting and the power-ups are all pretty decent in their own right. Just because they misspelled lasers doesn’t mean it’s a poor game. It just means they’re poor spellers.

Streets of Rage 2: This series is beat-’em-up gold. With a friend playing co-op, Streets of Rage 2 is some of the most fun gaming I’ve had in a long time, simply because of its hectic nature and the fact that you’re beating the hell out of everyone. Nothing is more satisfying than picking up a discarded iron pipe and knocking the sense out of some fat guy with it. And sometimes, Owen, since friendly fire is forced, and you can accidentally beat the hell out of your partner as well. Oops.

By By Curtis Westman

While Alex is busy working on this month’s tribute to TV, it’s up to me to fill in as the purveyor of videogame news. Or, at least, the guy who reads the videogame news and mocks it.

Calling All Cars is uhh… finally released… I guess…

David Jaffe’s hectic, fast-paced arcade throwback has finally been released, despite the controversy surrounding it being a PSN exclusive (PSN is Playstation’s equivalent of Xbox Live). Jaffe, you might remember (but probably don’t), is the director of the first God of War, a fact he’d like you never to forget — after all, he directed the first God of War. Quickly, though, he’s learning that he can’t ride out that wave forever, and after Gamespot reviewed his new offering at a meagre 6.7/10, he practically had a nervous breakdown on his website. “The nice thing about having a blog,” he contended, “is I can review the reviews! :)” Well, Mr. Jaffe, the nice thing about writing for an online magazine is that I can review the reviews of the reviews.

And I give your review of the reviews a 6.7/10.

Halo 3 breaks the internet

The Halo 3 public beta was released on Wednesday night, and god damn. Since Bungie and Microsoft decided to package an invitation to the beta test with every copy of Crackdown sold for the 360, thousands and thousands of people hurried to download it all at the same time. To give you an idea of how excited these people were to download the beta test software, over the course of twenty-four hours, The Halo 3 Beta Thread on the NeoGAF boards jumped about 135 pages, or 6500 posts. Beyond that, the Bungie servers were so clogged that downloads were chugging along at a snail’s pace, enough so that they’ve extended the beta to make up for the lost gaming time.

It’s probably for the best, considering how World of Warcraft players react every week when the servers are down for a scheduled maintenance, Bungie taking the hint and making up a few hours of lost time will likely result in a lot less bitching.

Oh, who am I kidding, it’s the internet. They’ll find a way. Pacifying the online community is like trying to tame fire and keep it as a pet.

Nintendo has seduced Canada

The NPD Group’s released sales numbers for April 2007 show that Canadians really love Nintendo. According to the sales charts, “more than 63% of total hardware sales” were Nintendo products. Furthermore, one of every two consoles purchased in Canada between April 8th and May 5th was a Wii and 77% of the portable gaming market was dominated by Nintendo — in some kind of strange twist of fate, we’ve become the new Japanese gaming market. (Editor’s Note: If you’ll take a gander at the Canadian flag and the Nintendo logo you’ll note they are the same color. Coincidence? I think not. Discuss conspiracies amongst yourselves).

We don’t just love Nintendo, we’re attached to Nintendo in an unhealthy way. We’re downright codependent. In fact, even if Nintendo got drunk and beat us every single night, our torn nightgowns barely covering the bruises on our arms from where Nintendo’s massive, powerful hands held us down, well, by God, we’d still curl up into bed with them at night. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play with my Wii and then sob uncontrollably in a ball on the floor of the shower.

Sony still selling games?

Sony Computer Entertainment held its “Sony Gamers Day 2007″ (which, inexplicably, lasted for three days) this week, and it would appear as if they’re still selling videogames. Among the newly announced offerings: SOCOM: Confrontation and High Velocity Bowling, a PSN exclusive that will take advantage of the Sixaxis’s “unique” motion sensing controls. Honestly, I’m less surprised that Sony is still making videogames and more surprised that it took them three days to announce this stuff. They could’ve come out and said “Three items: 1) Sony Computer Entertainment still exists, 2) SOCOM for PS3, and 3) A game called High Velocity Bowling. Questions? Here’s some footage from Nintendo’s conference at E3 last year. It should answer all of them.” And then they could have a midget wrestle a crocodile on stage while a one-legged vet chewed the head off of a three-legged chicken, videotape it, and call it a PS3 commercial.

Naw, I’m just kidding, I love the Playstation.

Well, Metal Gear Solid at least.

Square-Enix automatically makes another hundred million

Last week, Square-Enix held a massive party — again, in what seems like an attempt to make up for the lack of an E3 show this year — and announced what appears to be a pretty solid lineup for the next year. Rumours of Final Fantasy IV getting the DS treatment its predecessor received are drifting around the internet, which makes me very happy. Beyond that, an expansion for Final Fantasy XI, the online MMO offering from SE has been announced, with new missions and areas to explore. Gameplay footage of Dragon Quest: Swords for the Wii look impressive as all Hell, as well.

But let’s be serious: it’s Square-Enix. They could announce a turn-based poop and make millions. I’m surprised they didn’t get money thrown at them just for talking about their products. They could’ve staged a little sketch with a Cloud cosplayer and a Squall cosplayer making out, and they’d just be showered with dollar bills and panties from internet fangirls the world over. Square-Enix is honestly like the Bowie of gaming companies. Everybody loves them. And people who don’t are wrong and lame.

Developed by Capcom
Published by Capcom

By Curtis Westman

A hush falls over the dimmed courtroom. My client stands accused of that most foul of crimes — murder. And not just any murder; the defendant is charged with murder in the degree of zero. That’s right. She allegedly killed a man while channeling the spirit of his dead associate.

She walked into my life a year ago, and made herself nice and comfortable. Now I’m paying the price.

Sweat beads on my forehead and my hands tremble. The prosecution delivers its evidence via its sole material witness, a bumbling gumshoe by the name of Gumshoe. Dick Gumshoe. We’ve had run-ins in the past, none of them pleasant. I shoot daggers with my eyes. Somehow, he fires back a ham sandwich with his. He holds up the murder weapon, a dusty black revolver with fingerprints all over it, as if my client had been in a serious relationship with the barrel.

Suddenly, it strikes me.

I bang my fists on the desk and interrupt the detective mid-sentence with a maddening war-cry: “OBJECTION!“

And to think, it’s only Phoenix Wright’s second year in court. Last year, Capcom published the critically acclaimed first installment of the series, entitled Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. The game was a port from the Japanese GBA version, Gyakuten Saiban (roughly, ‘Turnabout Trial’). The basis of the oddly unique title was simply to solve court cases as a hot new defense attorney. It sounds boring. It’s not. This year, Capcom ported the sequel to the DS, and the same flare for both humour and drama is present in Phoenix Wright’s latest adventure, Justice for All.

I won’t get too much into story out of fear of giving anything away, but needless to say, not only is it well-written with several twists, but most of the plot points actually feed into the unfolding drama of Phoenix’s life, much like the first game. The antagonist is a prosecutor by the name of Von Karma; fans of the first game will recognize her as the daughter of the daunting prosecutor from the final cases of Ace Attorney, and she’s just as tough. Sadly, she is especially tough to get into bed.

The game’s mechanics are straightforward. Gameplay consists of two segments: the courtroom, and the investigation. The investigation involves traveling to crime scenes and other areas of the city, as well as interrogating people who might turn out to be surprise witnesses, pumping them for information. Generally, this isn’t all that exciting, but it serves to extend the story between courtroom segments, which are the real meat of the game. It’s in the courtroom where you get to show off your skills as an attorney, cross-examining witnesses and presenting evidence to refute their shoddy testimonies. You have a health bar, and each time you make a mistake, it’s lowered by a certain amount — when it reaches zero, your client is pronounced guilty on the spot. If only the O.J. Simpson case had worked that way.

The game is not for everyone, unfortunately. The slow pacing of the adventure and the cute anime style of the graphics will turn off a lot of people. So if you’re one of those people I wouldn’t recommend this particular title.

Since it’s really just a port and translation of a Japanese game, some of the localization is a little off. There are also a significant amount of spelling and grammatical errors in the dialogue that could easily have been corrected. Compared with the humour and writing quality of the first game, Justice for All seems a little lax in just how tight everything is tied together. That said, the first game is incredibly tough to live up to — and this title has much of what made Ace Attorney so great.

If you liked Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, you’ll definitely like Justice for All, and you’ll be pleased to note that the translation of Gyakuten Saiban 3 is already underway. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to return to pumping information for my upcoming case.

Published by Nintendo
Developed by Nintendo

By Curtis Westman

The story has always been simple but engrossing: Princess Zelda has been kidnapped by the evil Ganondorf, and it’s up to a young boy named Link to save her. This scenario has repeated itself over and over. But after twenty years and a dozen games later, the series remains in high demand.

It has now been over two months since The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was simultaneously released with the Wii launch that compounded excitement and had everybody in the gaming community talking. Even though the game was released a month later on the Gamecube as well, news of highly touted Wii-exclusive control options created a substantial hype around the game that would finally let fans actually swing a sword as if in Link’s hands. But was it worth it?

At first glance, Twilight Princess is simply beautiful. Though graphically, the title is just a port from the Gamecube version, the Wii disc offers a true 16:9 widescreen output, much like the majority of DVD movies, which delivers the epic cinematic experience a Zelda game deserves.

One major thing that sets this new installment apart from previous titles is thatTwilight Princess is the first Zelda game in which Link does not start the game as a young boy, but rather as a teenager. Overall, this makes the tone much darker – and the storyline definitely cements this new direction. Rather than a quest to save the Princess and thus the world, Twilight Princess begins with the world already in ruin outside of Link’s quaint little village. After the children of the town are kidnapped by monsters, Link finds himself trapped in a dungeon in a strange world of darkness, and what’s worse, he’s been transformed into a wolf.

The gameplay is fairly varied as a result of the transformations between wolf and human, and new items that have never before been featured in the series make an appearance, adding to the sense of discovery that made The Legend of Zelda so intriguing in the beginning. The Wii controls are interesting, but feel much like an afterthought (unsurprisingly, because they were), and often it feels as if certain maneuvers would be much easier to perform by a button-press, and not a motion sensitive gesture. This might be a side effect of learning a new control system in general, though, because as the game progresses, it definitely becomes more instinctive.

As far as difficulty goes, this is standard Zelda fare. New gamers will have no problem getting used to the universe and game mechanics, and while the game will challenge them, it won’t be off-putting and frustrating. For experienced gamers, however, Twilight Princess rarely presents situations you’ll have to attempt more than once. That said, there are several side-quests and mini-games that will offer a more complete game play experience. Furthermore, the length of the story and the number of dungeons are enough to keep anyone occupied for quite a while – from start to finish, that is, around 40 hours of game play.

Overall, though there are some flaws in control and ease of play, this is definitely one of the best games of 2006, and undoubtedly the best Legend of Zelda game to date. It’ll be hard for Nintendo to top, but word has it that they’re already on the way to developing a truly native Wii Zelda. With any luck, they’ll continue to provide the kind of updates to the series that both hearken back to the mechanics of the original games and simultaneously innovate those mechanics, and the series will continue to sell out in stores all over the world.