This is a fantastic week if you love Nintendo, with excellent third and first-party releases aplenty for the Wii and DS. What are the highlights this week? What rocks, and what tanked? Let's read on.... remember, all Metacritic and Gamerankings aggregate scores are subject to change as new reviews go up!
The underrated Fire Emblem series is one of the grandaddies of tactical strategy gaming as we know it, and its Wii iteration, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn gets some rave reviews in print. Standing at 82% at GameRankings nd 83% at Metacritic, it looks like this week's winner... even if IGN knocks it for feeling too much like a GameCube game and 1up justly bemoans the return of the useless Laguz. Note that Radiant Dawn is a direct sequel to Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance for the GameCube, and you should probably play both games in order. Convenient how the Wii is backwards-compatible with GameCube games, eh? Even if you aren't worried about missing out on the story, a Path of Radiance save unlocks some goodies in Radiant Dawn (like stat boosts for certain characters) that are very difficult or outright impossible to come by otherwise.
Ontamarama is an amazing DS rhythm game find from ever-prowling localizer Atlus, and it probably won't get even half the sales it deserves (heck, Metacritic doesn't even have a rating for it yet!). It's clocking in at 80% at Gamerankings, though, and here's hoping that score stays high. With some charming graphics and quirky gameplay that's a lot like Elite Beat Agents without being too similar, Ontamarama is the kind of game that makes any system better just by existing. Deeko sums up what's awesome about the game, while Nintendo World Report offers some valid criticisms worth considering. All I know is, I'm heading out to pick this one up once there's more spending money in my pocket.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare takes half of an unexpected third place, on the strength of one lone review that Gamerankings is tracking and Metacritic isn't. That one review, from IGN, is so generally excellent that I'm willing to take the man's word for it. Still, I find myself wondering who the heck the audience for a game like this is. FPS fans aren't interested in shrimpy scaled-down versions of their favorite genre, and DS fans don't seem the type to take interest in FPS that aren't Metroid branded.
The other half of the third-place tie, not too surprisingly, is LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga. These games did well both critically and in sales terms, and the 78% from GameRankings and 76% from Metacritic sum up the quirky, gentle platforming that makes up LEGO Star Wars's mildly inexplicable appeal. Both Eurogamer and GameSpot do a great job of breaking down the pros and cons of this collection.
Rounding out the pack, we have a surprisingly weak showing for Square-Enix's Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker. Although this title was hot enough in Japan to outstrip Nintendo's ability to manufacture the carts, it's only charting 75% at Metacritic and 76% at Gamerankings. It's hard to figure out why, since the reviews are uniformly positive, and then mysteriously attached to "eh" scores. Of course, I'm still struggling to complete a review of this title for another outlet... as much as I loved the import and love what I've played, going more than two or three hours with this game keeps putting me to sleep. Not exactly the feeling you want from a video game, is it?
Another poor showing is Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, sitting at a miserable 67% at GameRankings and 68% at MetaCritic. This is either incredibly surprising or not very surprising at all depending on your opinion of Sonic Team right now, and probably won't slow sales down one bit. GameSpot has nothing good to say, while 1up gives it credit for being a good party game (if little else). IGN is pretty positive, but even their score probably falls short of what most fans wanted to see. For the record, I was pretty underwhelmed when I played this one, so I'll probably be waiting for Brawl to scratch my team-up itch.
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