A few months back everyone and their third-cousins were clamoring for the oncoming of Spore - supposedly the greatest video game of all time. This was a game that was supposed to revolutionize how people played and thought about games. The plot concept of Spore revolves around the player controlling an individual cell and leading that cell through continuous levels of sophistication, starting from evolution and ending with civilization and intergalactic conquest. The gameplay concept of Spore revolves around its own evolutionary process as well, in the form of continuous levels of sophisticated game genres, running from action/adventure to real-time strategy to a massive single-player online game (think MMO but without direct multiplayer online interaction). On top of that, Spore is highly supportive of user-generated content as players can personally customize the species they play on a multitude of levels and share these creatures with the Spore online universe. Overall, Spore is a game that is massive in scope and flexibility, which makes it easy to see why everyone was salivating over its release.

Well, the second coming… I mean, Spore, finally arrived this Friday and unexpectedly the reviews have not been quite as knockout as the initial hype would have suggested. Okay, that is a bit of an overstatement because Spore’s ratings are certainly very high (it received a 91% from PC Gamer, 8.8/10.0 from IGN, and 8.0/10.0 from Gamespot). The reason why I say Spore has not lived up to its hype is because while a majority of game reviewers are still in awe over the game’s scope (due to its genre traversing makeup and its endless pit of user-generated content), they have come to acknowledge that the game does have its flaws as well. And it seems that the predominant culprit is gameplay. That’s right: Gameplay.

Apparently Spore is not a very challenging game. According to both IGN and the New York Times, the game tends to be very repetitive and players can quickly lose interest. I think the New York Times put it best by making a distinction between a toy and a game - Spore being a toy, a means through which an individual can create and explore an imaginative world for entertainment, versus a game, a system of rules that allows an individual to create and explore challenging strategies to lead them to victory. And as the New York Times so elegantly put it, we all eventually throw our toys away, but certain games - think Chess, Poker - these are eternal. Unfortunately, somehow lost in developing the scope and glitz of Spore, Will Wright, the lead designer of the game, had forgotten about what actually makes a game a game.

Now I don’t mean to be overly critical of Spore. It was certainly a massive challenge for any team to create a game of this magnitude and when working with such a scope, its definitely easy to see how designers and developers can get lost in the scheme of things. But I’d like to point out that gameplay should always supercede scope on the priority scale for game creation. There is a good reason why tons of people still play Starcraft to this day while Pokemon has come and gone. It’s never about the quantity of fancy bells and whistles but the quality of them. Fortunately for Spore, its bells and whistles are still deemed to be quite fun. It’s just that it doesn’t seem like it will turn into the industry defining trophy that people originally thought it’d be.

-barry

PS: On a sidenote, I can’t wait for Starcraft 2 (lol!).

Ever since Blizzard Entertainment launched their latest gaming franchise, Starcraft, in 1998, it seems like they’ve run out of original ideas for games. Sure, I mean, Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 were pretty good, but do we really need yet another Diablo, and yet another Starcraft?

From a business perspective, I guess it is unwise to try and build anything from scratch when you already have several “cash cow” franchises. But what about the loyal fans (such as myself) who admired what was once the company’s exclusive ability to develop unique and epic games? It seems that Blizzard (Activision Blizzard, now), once so insistent upon creating original concepts for gameplay, has replaced its emphasis on innovation with an emphasis on making loads of easy cash. 

World of Warcraft (and future projects, such as Diablo 3 and Wrath of the Lich King) also appear to have lost all of the progressive and exciting new features from the older games in their respective series. This decline in quality is probably due to several key departments and individuals leaving Blizzard. For example, in June 2003, the core of Blizzard North (the creators of the Diablo franchise) left the company due to conflicts with Vivendi.

Other developers, too, went on to create their own companies out of a personal desire to work on something fresh and innovative. These were not small names, either: these were critical developers who left to found companies that produced such smash hits as Guild Wars, Hellgate: London, and God of War: Chains of Olympus.

Also, Diablo 3. In Diablo 2, Blizzard had brought the story to a fairly complete conclusion, as you had defeated the corrupted warrior from the first game, all the Prime Evils were destroyed, etc. However this time, in Diablo 3, Diablo comes back. On a comet.

Yes: on a comet. That doesn’t even make any freaking sense! It seems like they wanted to make a third Diablo game just so that they could call it “THE DIABLO TRILOGY!!“ 

So while many will be wondering what Blizzard’s “next-gen MMO” will be, I am fairly confident in my assessment of one thing: it’ll definitely begin with “World”, and end with “Craft”.

-hobo

The Wii Shop Channel has been updated today with some pretty exciting titles. For WiiWare, we have the title My Aquarium. For just 500 Wii Points, you can have your very own virtual aquarium on your Wii!

For the Virtual Console, we have Clu Clu Land, a puzzle game for the NES (which is, as usual, 500 Wii Points) as well as Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars for the SNES (800 Wii Points). I haven’t had a chance to try out the first two titles yet, but Legend of the Seven Stars was one of the greatest RPGs from the SNES era, and is definitely a must-own title for the Virtual Console. Be sure to check it out!

-dan

Helix

The Wii Shop Channel has been updated with a couple of interesting games this Monday, including Ys Books I & II, Samurai Showdown 2, and Helix. I’ve had a chance to try out Helix, and wanted to give my initial thoughts on the game.

Helix is a rhythm/dance fusion game in which the character displayed on the screen shows you what moves you have to perform with your Wii Remotes. Of course, accurate timing is the key to doing well, since you have a limited amount of time to perform each move.

The first thing you should know about Helix is that many of the moves require two separate Wii Remotes to perform. If you don’t have two Wii Remotes, you can still play the game, although about half of the moves you encounter will just be skipped over.

Unfortunately, I only have one Wii Remote, so my experience of the game is limited to the “one controller” mode. This usually isn’t too big a deal once you get used to it, although it can get a bit awkward during the more challenging stages. Additionally, left-hand movements (or right-hand movements, depending on the hand holding the Wii Remote) won’t count towards your combo, which may frustrate some of you familiar with other rhythm games, such as Dance Dance Revolution.

The game also has a very tight timing window. When first playing it, I thought the game just wasn’t very responsive. However, with some practice, I found it was mostly my horrendous sense of rhythm rather than some sort of problem with the game. There were some moves, though, even after playing for a bit, that felt “more difficult” to get the game to recognize. Now, it could just be that that my timing is still not perfect, but the fact that it is only certain moves leads me to conclude that it has more to do with the game than to do with me.

The biggest issue, however, is the game’s lack of musical variety. To be fair, I have only unlocked about half the songs in the game (about 14 out of the total 26), but each song I’ve unlocked has been a generic techno song. I know many people like working out to techno (myself included), but a rhythm game should have more variety than just one particular genre of music.

Like I said, though, I haven’t played through the whole game yet, and my views are bound to evolve the more I play. However, it seems as though this game is ultimately targeted at the gamer unsatisfied with the workout they get from WiiFit and who is looking for something that’ll definitely break them out in a sweat. But as a rhythm game, Helix fails to live up to either the DDR or the Guitar Hero/Rock Band standard, since both of those franchises offer a better song selection as well as accurate-to-the-tee responsiveness. Either way, at 1000 Wii Points, Helix is way less expensive than Rock Band, and way way waaaaaaay less expensive than a year’s worth of Tae Bo. For the price, it really doesn’t get better than this.

-dan

For the diehard Mega Man fans out there, I just wanted to post this freaking incredible video of Mega Man 2’s Wily’s Castle theme played on the piano and violin by two insanely talented Japanese guys.

DEAR GOD I’M CRYING ALL OVER MY POWERGLOVE SOMEBODY GET ME A TISSUE PRONTO!!

-dan

BusinessWeek has written a new article that gives readers a sneak peek as to how Blizzard Entertainment has stayed on top of the gaming industry for so long. It also outlines some of the details of the Blizzard-Activision merger. Check it out here:

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2008/id20080820_123140.htm

-dan

Megaman

In honor of Mega Man 9’s upcoming release, Capcom is letting us relive the old school gaming era with Mega Mans 1 and 2 for the Wii’s Virtual Console. Today I’ll be reviewing the first Mega Man. Mega Man is one of the defining titles of the old school gaming scene. Though not nearly as popular as later Mega Mans, this title helped define the gaming mechanics we all know and love from the later games.

There are several features of the original Mega Man that set it apart from the the other games in the series. The first thing you’ll notice is the awkward points system. Each enemy in the game will either drop a regular powerup (like in later games), or a points powerup. You can pick up these points powerups to increase your overall points, which is displayed prominently at the top of the screen. You also get points for destroying each of the bosses at the end of their corresponding stage. Ultimately, however, the points system turns out to be completely worthless since you lose ‘em all every time you get a game over (which will be crazy often).

Which brings me to my next point: the difficulty. HOLY CRAP THE DIFFICULTY. I mean, Mega Man 2 was pretty badass in terms of difficulty too, but this one just takes the cake. There are so many potential instant death areas in this game that it makes the casual Wii owner curl up into a fetal position and pray for intervention from the Wii Sports gods above. The amount of spikes and pits in this game is mind-boggling. Fans of the series may or may not be caught off-guard by these insta-death areas (since they’re pretty similar to later stages in the series), though there is one frustrating difference in this game: when you fall off a ledge, you fall fricking insanely fast. As in about ten times faster than you fall from just a regular jump. What the hell is that all about? Are there like gigantic freaking magnets all over the bottom of the screen, hidden from view or something? There’s nothing quite like getting hit with a projectile near the edge of a platform, blinking, and then seeing the Game Over screen when you open your eyes.

But even if you manage to avoid the instant deaths, the game isn’t really that much easier. Capcom hasn’t even introduced Energy Tanks to the series yet, meaning that, during boss fights, you can get hit maybe three or four times before you die a pitiful robot-death. What’s more is that boss weapons can damage you after the bosses themselves die, so you could be trying dozens of times to beat one particular boss, and then, when you destroy the bastard, you get hit with a stray projectile and subsequently die. You can’t even jump over these stray projectiles because Mega Man is fricking frozen for a couple of seconds after beating the boss. This means no ultra-satisfying “one bar of energy left” boss kills (that are possible later on in the series) because, if you only have one bar of energy left, you’re probably gonna get killed in the boss’ aftermath.

Perhaps the greatest challenge though is Wily’s castle. The first Wily boss requires impeccable reflexes or you’re dead before you can even touch him. Also, like later games in the series, you have to fight the original bosses again, but this game adds a sadistic twist: you have to fight four of them in a row (without any energy powerups in between!) and then fight Wily immediately afterwards. Who the hell thought that would be a good idea, huh Capcom?!

Surprisingly, though, Wily turns out to be a pretty wimpy version of his later incarnations, so despite the ridiculous challenge of the rest of the game, the final stage ends up feeling very anti-climactic and even a little incomplete. The ending doesn’t help either, with its much parodied, “Fight, Mega Man! For everlasting peace!”

Even with its many flaws, Mega Man is still one of the greatest games of the NES gaming era. Being the first title in the series, there was admittedly some ironing out to be done before achieving the winning formula we all know today. But even so, its combination of interesting enemies, unique weapons, and addictive gameplay more than make up for its shortcomings, and is well worth its price of 500 Wii Points. Overall, I give Mega Man 7.5 cheesy box-art illustrations out of 10.

-dan