Let us be honest with each other. Little King's Story looks cute and friendly and childlike, with colorful graphics and a classical soundtrack. It is a trap.
The further I get into this game, the weirder it gets, on several levels. Your adorable, childlike king, who has stumbled across a magic crown that entitles him to rule the backwater kingdom of Alpoko, is on a mission to unite the entire world under his rule. His ruthless ambition is stopped by nothing; not the neighboring nations' military superiority, not basic common sense, and certainly not being surrounded on all sides by hungry monsters. He thinks he should rule the world, so damn it, he will, and the game is so damned cute that it's easy to miss that the protagonist is a monster.
Little King's Story is like Baby's First Machiavelli. I'm having a very strange kind of fun with it.
For those of you who signed up with the US version of Club Nintendo, and have been able to get all of your games registered, your diligence is going to pay off. Nintendo recently announced that those who are of Elite Status will be receiving notification from the company about being eligible for special prizes during the month of July.
Unfortunately, Nintendo went on to say that it might take longer for those prizes to actually go out. They promised it would be “before the end of the calendar year” but you still may have to wait several months.
While what is going to be offered as these prizes has not been revealed yet, Club Nintendo of Japan Elite Members were treated to special items like a gold-plated Mario Kart Wii wheel, a Club Nintendo 2009 calendar, and a plush Mario hat. It is likely that US members will receive the same prizes, but we will keep an eye out to be sure.
Nintendo of America has recently announced that those who have reached Elite Status on Club Nintendo will be receiving special rewards sometime this year. What time will they be released and what form will these rewards take?
Ah, summer. A time where kids play in little plastic pools with rubber ducks, water guns and get temporary tattoos on their arms at parties. They also play video games and, as the sweltering dog days of summer loom on the horizon, GameStop has decided to try and cash in on these different summer activities.
To that end, the company has decided to offer some… unique special bundles that combine things you do outside during the summer, with the Wii to do things inside with.
There is also a Mario & Sonic Olympic Games Bundle, but that’s just a Wii and a game. Why would you want that when you could get a water gun or a rubber duck?!
Some very... unique bundles for the Wii are being offered at GameStop. Are they worth any attention or are they just more oddly gimmicky than bundles usually are?
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles was a moderate success on the Wii. It was able to capture the feel of the Resident Evil series’ zombie blasting and incredibly cheesy dialogue, and abridge it into a bite-sized, rail shooter form.
Now the sequel to that game, The Darkside Chronicles, has released a new trailer. It is decidedly playing up the scare factor, like any horror movie trailer would, yet it still shows the dialogue is of a decidedly cheesy nature. RE fans are probably used to that by now.
A new trailer for the upcoming Wii Rail Shooter, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, has been released. Will it make the game look more favorable to audiences or is it... kinda cheesy?
For those of you who still have working SNES’ along with working Super Game Boy adaptors, you may find the above item interesting.
It is called The Super Game Boy Commander and it is a controller stylized to resemble the bottom half of the original Game Boy design. It even has the little grooves under the buttons to simulate the feel of the Game Boy’s speaker and the buttons are situated so there is no need for shoulder ones.
If you have an SNES and Super Game Boy, and have been waiting for years to hold a controller like the original Game Boy again, then you are in luck. NCSX is selling new ones for retro-controller fans, who may want to buy them just for being an oddly unique thing in the SNES’ and Game Boy’s histories.
Unusual third-party controllers from the 16-Bit era pop up now and again but this one has a twist. It is a third-party controller designed for a peripheral for the SNES.
For those who have despaired over the lack of Mature-rated games on the Wii, take heart. Sega has not yet given up the fight and claims that they are profitable enough in the long run, to justify making more.
According to the MD of Sega’s European development team, Gary Dunn, the key may be due to the games selling better when their prices drop. When speaking of how the record-setting-for-curse-wordsHouse of the Dead: Overkill, was profitable for them, Gary explained:
"Whilst it had a rather sharp tail at full price, they do bubble away at a lower price point for a long time. You get your money back and a bit on full price, but over the years, if we do the final product return on investment, profits come from the lower price point."
Even when Mature-rated titles fail to meet sales expectations at all, such as with MadWorld, Dunn was still happy to take the risk. He also indicated that Sega is willing to take more in the future:
"You have to push boundaries and explore. I think whilst MadWorld commercially didn't sell what we were expecting I wouldn't say it's game over for mature Wii titles from Sega.
So are the keys for the success of Mature games on the Wii the willingness to experiment, combined with the patience to look at long-term sales? A lot of games are written off as failures if they do not sell at full-price in the first few weeks, but price drops exist for a reason. Perhaps, for the Wii audience, they need more time and a more affordable price, to decide giving an M-Rated game a try.
While initial sales may say that trying to do M-Rated games on the Wii is a fools endeavor, Sega is not so fast to give up. Do they have a plan to justify bringing more Mature games to the Wii's line-up?
I almost said that WiiWare has picked up a lot of steam lately, but that almost seemed like I was trying for a pun with Hudson's new Water Warfare. Instead, I'll just say that a lot of games are coming out. Dammit.
Hudson's probably out in front of this week's releases. Onslaught got them a lot of attention for being able to pull off an FPS on WiiWare, and now they're doing it again with the kid-friendly squirt-gun shooter Water Warfare. It really is some kind of Platonic ideal of the Nintendo game; it's got the gameplay you'd expect, right down to dual-wielding and weapon pick-ups, but it's bright, colorful, and nobody dies. (Of course, the fact that they flash several times and disappear does make it look like some kind of Wicked Witch of the West deathmatch.)
Agetec is back again this week with another budget title, Silver Star Reversi. If you're like me and the official download blurb means nothing to you, Reversi is the original name of the board game that was released in North America as Othello. 500 Wii Points gets you a reasonably accurate recreation of the board game with some odd-looking computer opponents. (Interesting side note: the Wikipedia page on Reversi makes sure to note just how much better computers are at the game than people. Prepare to die, meat creature.)
Finally, Natsume is bringing an inexpensive Reel Fishing game to WiiWare. I suspect this is one of those series with a strong invisible player base; the average hardcore gamer has never even met somebody who likes fishing games, unless they're using the controller to play Soul Calibur, but somebody buys them.
Meanwhile, on the Virtual Console, Sega reopens the box marked "Master System" with Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa; I like Kotaku's description of it as a "cute 'em up." Interestingly, the Master System version of this game actually came first, so for once, we're not getting some kind of watered-down eight-bit port of an arcade game.
Oh, and the DSi gets Sudoku.
This week's press release is available after the jump.
Gee, I'd like to talk about SimEarth with you guys, but I'm still figuring out how to play it.
With a couple of these old-school strategy games that have popped up on the Virtual Console, like Koei's Historical Simulation series, playing them is like finding a cool old PC game at a garage sale sans manual. It's awesome to look at and there's probably a pretty good game buried somewhere within that abstracted layer of arcana, but it's going to take a lot of work before you can get anywhere. Playing SimEarth really teaches me how to appreciate modern strategy games' tutorial modes.
There's definitely a lot of life in this title, though. Once you get over the admittedly enormous learning curve, you can develop your planet from one of several different starting points, all the way up to "modern-day 1992," and the game lasts for billions of years. It's got a lot to do, and it can actually teach you a few things along the way. For 800 Wii Points, you get a game that you could still be playing this time next year.
Sin and Punishment was one of the best-kept secrets on the N64. It never received a North American release until it was put out on the Virtual Console a while back, whereupon a whole lot of people who'd done some deeply unwise things to their Nintendo 64s got to feel a little silly.
Sin and Punishment 2 is a shooter from Treasure, and like the original game, it is set in a parallel universe where a post-apocalyptic city - I want to say it's Tokyo, but I may just be assuming that it is - is being invaded by aliens and the only way to defeat them is by being as ridiculously goddamned awesome as you possibly can. It is a game about detonating massive groups of aliens while dodging their return fire with your hover skateboard, or perhaps deflecting it with your laser sword.
Of course, it's not an easy game, but then, Treasure games usually aren't. If you're unfamiliar with the studio, they're responsible for handing out some truly memorable asskickings to the hardcore crowd over the last few years, such as Ikaruga, Gunstar Super Heroes, and (the exception to their usual trend of making challenging games) Wario World.
I got to play through a few minutes' worth of the game at E3, and it's pretty easy to start with. One of the new playable characters, Kachi, is the game's "easy mode"; she has a charge attack that allows you to lock onto multiple targets and blow them all away at once, which lets you focus most of your efforts on dodging their attacks. The stage takes the form of a running gun battle set in, over, and amidst the ruins of a city, leading up to a fight against what can only be described as a giant chicken.
It takes some guts to bring out a sequel to this game, particularly a sequel that's getting a full retail release; this is very much a hardcore twitch shooter, and you have to be pretty up on your gaming to know about the original game at all. Just the same, I enjoyed playing it, and I'm glad to see something like it coming back.
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