Taking the new demo for a test drive. Pun intended.
After a long evening of dishwashing, laundry-doing, and paperwork-filling-outing, I finally got a chance to fire up my Xbox 360 yesterday to try out a demo for a game I've had my eye on for a few months now: Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.
I have to say that so far, that this game looks like it will be completely awesome.
For the uninitiated, Nuts & Bolts is a sequel of sorts to the original duo of 3D platform games for the N64. The first game in the series introduced the oddly-paired Banjo (the bear) and Kazooie (the bird in Banjo's backpack) and had players exploring a large non-linear 3D world collecting jigsaw pieces. The game played very similarly to other games of the period, like Mario 64, only with an added emphasis on story and humor. Banjo-Kazooie was a fun, ground-breaking experience, and won two awards at the 1999 Interactive Achievement Awards, for Console Action/Adventure and Art Direction. The original Banjo-Kazooie was released in 1998.
The second game, Banjo-Tooie (see what they did there?), followed two years later in 2000. And though the gameplay mechanic was not dramatically different from the first game, Tooie was met with great acclaim.
Ten years later, Nuts & Bolts has finally landed as a demo on Xbox Live, and the full game looms in the distance, only a week and a half away. I've been anxious to try this game out, as I've always enjoyed N64 era 3D platformers, and I've been wanting to check out the vehicle creation system Rare crafted.
Nuts & Bolts takes the classic platforming play of old and throws vehicles into the mix - vehicles that you design yourself. As you explore the world and complete tasks, you're given an ever-expanding arsenal of parts from which you can construct vehicles of all shapes, sizes, and utility. At any point in the game, you can enter the garage to edit your vehicle. You can save and load different designs you've already created and edit all to your hearts content. With the release of the final game, you'll also be able to send plans to friends, so they can cruise around their game in vehicles of your design.
I played Nuts & Bolts demo for about 45 minutes, and I had a very good time with it. Lots is included in the 1Gb+ sampling, and I'll probably spend some more time with it this weekend.
The graphics in this game are excellent. Rare never ceases to amaze me in their ability to create rich, living environments, and Nuts & Bolts is just another example of their mastery over this skill. The character animation is nice and smooth, and you really get the sense of a real world that the old N64 games just couldn't do. My only complaint about the graphics so far, and this is really more of a design issue overall, is that the informational cut-scenes that explain the story and how the game works are all done in the same way as the old games - with lots of text, and squawking heads next to them - and no spoken dialogue. This may change in the final version of the game, but I really would have liked to see Rare put their obvious talents in animation to use and give us fully animated cut-scenes with actual dialogue. Other than this single caveat though, the game is visually incredible, from the anthropomorphic characters roaming around town to vast rolling hills with roads and ramps, it's all very beautiful.
I was also impressed by the audible quality of the demo. The sound effects are varied and appropriate, and the goofy little sounds Banjo and Kazooie make as they traverse the world put a big smile on my face. The music in the game is especially good, and I was glad to see that Grant Kirkhope and Robin Beanland (responsible for Viva Piñata and Conker's Bad Fur Day respectively) were behind it, since I have enjoyed a lot of their past works.
Control in Nuts & Bolts was solid, and felt very familiar to the way the older games did while I was running around on foot. Vehicular controls are similar to most other 360 games you've played, using the analog should buttons for gas and brake, and the left and right sticks for direction and camera control. The vehicle I played around with felt a little slow, but since I was only playing the beginning stages of the game, and thus had the lowest power engine on my car, this seemed appropriate. Building cars was also a snap, and within only a few minutes I was jumping in and out of the garage, experimenting with all sorts of configurations. Anyone who's ever used built something with Legos before will feel right at home.
All in all, I came away from my initial run-through of the Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts demo very impressed. I was intrigued by the handful of screens and video that were released a few months ago but wasn't sure if the game would be very much fun or not. After having played the demo, I feel silly for having worried about this at all - Nuts & Bolts is looking to be a lot of fun, and I can only imagine how crazy the later part of the game will get as you gather more and more diverse parts for your vehicle crafting.
Jump on Xbox Live and try out the demo for yourself - if you go into it with an open mind, and looking for some genuine fun, you won't be disappointed. Let me know what you think if you do!
It's been a long time in the making, but Too Human is nearly here!
For those of you who aren't familiar with Too Human, it can be described fairly simply as a Diablo-ish dungeon/loot-dropping game, set in a futuristic Norse mythology-inspired world. You choose a character class at the outset and battle your way through hordes of enemies with swords, hammers, guns, and other weapons in order to collect experience points and gear, which you can use to upgrade your character, and ultimately unravel the game's plot.
To kick off E3, Silicon Knights released a demo of the game on the XBL network, and it's been available for about 3 days now. I went in with an open mind, and not expecting too much, and I was pleasantly surprised at the game. Beyond a few small quirks, Too Human is looking to be a fun little dungeon crawler that just might satisfy your lust for loot (at least, for a while) as we wait for Diablo 3 to come around.
Graphically, Too Human is good, but not quite on par with other games of similar style, like Gears of War. The characters and enemies are all very detailed, and the combat is filled with lots of neat effects, which serves to add some color to the sometimes bland palette of the indoor environments. There's even some nifty "organic" environments located in the area called 'cyberspace.' Too Human misses the mark in a few of the details though, most notably in animation. Honestly, things aren't animated all that bad, but the movements of characters, both during playable and cinematic sequences, can be a bit stiff at times - it's just not the graceful experience other games, again, like Gears of War, have lead me to expect from "next-gen" titles.
It's not all bad though, so as long as you aren't expecting something on par with the latest offerings of Pixar or Dreamworks, you should be fine. Overall, I'd say that in terms of graphics, Too Human falls somewhere between Halo 3 and Gears of War.
Unfortunately, I can't comment much on the sound for the game, because during the one opportunity I've had to play it so far, I wasn't able to turn up the volume very high. The voice acting didn't seem all that bad though, and the sound effects seemed spot-on.
Gameplay for Too Human was what you'd expect from a game like Diablo - there's hordes of enemies, lots of fighting, and various rewards that usually end up upgrading your character in some way. Occasionally you'll run into a sub-boss, which is a tougher variation of the other normal enemies you've already fought, and eventually, a bigger, badder (and usually larger) boss. The boss enemies drop the best loot, though all enemies have the potential to, and you'll find an assortment of weapons, armor, etc. Too Human also rewards players with experience points that can be used to spec your character down a certain line of the three branches of the skills tree, and you can also receive points that go towards crafting items and re-speccing your character, should you decide you want to take a different route.
I enjoyed the fact that Too Human employs an item-naming scheme similar to Diablo, where you find items whose names imply what they do (for instance, and not a real item at all, "Fred's Cardboard Sword of Major Justice"). It lent the game some familiarity, even though the items and descriptions were worlds apart from the medieval weaponry of Diablo and its ilk of competitors.
Another thing that I liked about Too Human was that, although the levels themselves were mostly very straightforward, there were certain points where you were required to enter "cyberspace" (an alternate world of sorts), and interact with items there that influence your path in the dungeon you're running through. These segments broke up the action in the dungeons nicely, and were a welcome reprieve from the dark corridors of the main dungeons.
As with any Diablo-type game though, you should expect some repetitiveness as far as fighting goes. If you're like me though, and you're always in it for the loot, you probably won't mind grinding hundreds of monsters for a chance at capturing a coveted item... even if only for bragging rights as you play co-op with a buddy.
At one time, I was one of the naysayers of Too Human - I thought that any game which has been in development for almost 10 years, and which kept jumping ship from platform to platform was pretty much doomed to mediocrity (or worse). Over the last few months, I've learned a bit more about Too Human and I got interested, and now, after playing the demo, I am seriously considering buying the game. I'm a fan of dungeon crawlers, and I in my time with the demo, my problems with its quirks were minimal; I found most of the emerging complaints of the game to be rather petty. No camera problems or horrible framerate issues here.
If the rest of the game turns out to be as good as the demo, I think Silicon Knights can count me among any new fans it might have accrued over the last week. I highly recommend you try out the demo if you've got an Xbox 360, and you're interested in this type of game. It might not be your cup of tea, but I think that if you give it a chance, you might just find something you like.
After having read about countless people playing with the Spore Creature Creator (and watching the number of creatures added to the online database jump by the thousands with each page refresh), I finally got a chance to try it out myself... and it's pretty fun!
I also made this goofy blue dragon.
I haven't had a chance to give this a really lengthy go-round, but from what I have played so far, it's intuitive, easy, and fun. Taking your creature for a test-drive as you develop him is awesome, and the features the team has built into the game for taking pictures, creating videos, animated avatars, etc. is great. I'm still going to reserve final judgment for the final release of the game, but just from this small taste, I think Spore is going to turn out great.
As with the Mii channel on Wii, half the fun will be to see what kind of creations people can make that resemble existing creatures. I've already seen a Murloc creature floating around, and it was a pretty damn good recreation.
Anyway, I'm going to get back to playing around with this, as well as working on my YYG Competition 3 entry - be sure to try out the Creature Creator though and let me know what you think!
This weekend I tried my hand at 6 Xbox Live Arcade games, and here's the lowdown on each one. Are any of them worth your time, or for that matter, your money? Read on to find out!
I kicked off my game demo bonanza with Assault Heroes - a top-down shooter that throws waves and waves of enemies at you as you progress from one place to another. As the name implies, this is the second game in the series, and this time the assault heroes are given a new locale, a few new vehicles to drive around in, and new enemies to dispose of.
For anyone who's played Geometry Wars (or the first Assault Heroes, for that matter), the controls will be easy to pick up. The left stick moves your character around while the right stick fires your weapon. You're given a single button for switching weapons, and a single button for entering and exiting vehicles. Play is a simple matter - fill your enemies with bullets while avoiding being filled with bullets yourself.
Visually, Assault Heroes 2 is a treat. There's oodles of bad guys, tanks, buggies, helicopters, explosions, and collapsing buildings, all on an exotic background of snow-covered mountains, rain forests, space, and more. Though it was, at times, slightly hard to follow all the action on my SDTV (and sitting about 10 feet away), I could usually follow my character and all the bullet tracers well enough. I don't think I would have had any troubles with this if I had been playing the game on my computer monitor.
I always kind of wanted to buy Assault Heroes, but since the game is best enjoyed with multiple players, and none of my friends seem to own it, I never did. I'm afraid that the same fate will befall Assault Heroes 2, but if you've got interested friends, I'd definitely recommend it.
Though I wouldn't call myself a Sudoku master yet, I do enjoy the logical challenge presented by the typical Sudoku puzzle, both on paper and in games. For those of you who haven't really gotten into the whole thing, here's a brief explanation.
A typical Sudoku puzzle is a grid of 9 squares by 9 squares, broken into 3 rows and 3 columns of 3 by 3 grids. Each 3 by 3 group and each row and column in the the overall puzzle can contain the numbers 1 through 9 only once. The puzzle has a few numbers inside it when you start, and from those, you use logic to determine where all the other numbers should go. It might sound a bit confusing at first, but it's easy to get into, and hard to quit!
Like most other games of the casual persuasion, Buku Sudoku is big on bling. The presentation, while not the greatest I've seen, is mostly strong. The game comes dressed in a variety of themes, and plays soft background music in the menus and while you play. In my first game, I found the song that the game defaulted to (a kind of Asian-ish thing) somewhat annoying, but the second wasn't so bad. The few themes I saw looked good, though you're probably going to be looking at Sudoku grid most of the time anyway.
Gameplay was just as you'd expect - you put numbers on the grid, and the game tells you if your input is correct. The controls in the game were passable, though I would have preferred a different way to change / enter numbers. I think I might just be spoiled by the touch-screen implementation in Brain Age (DS), though.
Overall, Buku Sudoku would be a good buy for someone looking for thousands of puzzles (and who really likes Sudoku). The demo didn't seem to have any major flaws, except a few flubs in presentation and control. I might purchase this someday when I've got nothing else to do, but for now, I'll continue working on the puzzles in Brain Age.
The best way I can describe TiQal is by likening it to Lumines - the two are essentially the same game. Puzzle pieces of various colors rise from the floor, and your job is to counter this by dropping similarly colored pieces to make groups of 4 (2 by 2), which are then wiped from the play field after a certain amount of time. You can score combos by adding to the stack of squares that are already marked for demolition, and the game is over if you let the stack get too high. The few differences between this game and Lumines include a more forgiving failure system, puzzle pieces that don't come in duo-colored squares, and a Mayan theme.
I liked TiQal's graphics, mostly. Some of the transitions between story and play areas were a bit dull (I don't really care for sliding large graphics on and off the screen), but the backdrops were vibrant and I liked the effects. My only squabbles were that block colors are sometimes a little too similar, resulting in a few accidental missed combos, and that the backgrounds are a little bright in some places, making it hard to discern what's going on in the play area. These problems may have been related to my viewing arrangement, but for a puzzle game, it's important to consider these things.
As a minor fan of Lumines, I felt TiQal was a decent enough game to borrow so heavily from the game. If I didn't own Lumines already, I might have been more interested in purchasing TiQal, as I liked the gameplay and the presentation (despite how over-done the whole Mayan theme thing is with casual games).
Probably the most stylish game I tried out on my Xbox Live Arcade trial weekend, Ikaruga is the anticipated shoot 'em up (SHMUP) direct from the Japanese arcade scene. This game is a great example of what you can get when you cross tried-and-true play mechanics with "next-gen" hardware, and like many current SHMUPS on the PC, you'll find yourself (and probably others) mesmerized by the action as you blast your way through the waves.
Ikaruga is cinematic and stylish at once, and everything has a very sharp, clean look to it. The backgrounds you fly over as you battle are breathtaking, and enemy ships will weave in and out of elements below you before making their way to the foreground. Ships and bullets are fun to look at and easy to distinguish. Even in playing the trial game, you really get the sense that the developers of Ikargua truly cared about making sure every last bit of the game was as polished as possible.
One unique twist that Ikaruga carries over similar games is the polarity system Treasure Co., Ltd. have employed. Each enemy you face, and all the bullets they fire, are of either red or blue polarity. You can change your ship's polarity at will, which allows you to absorb bullets of the same polarity and do extra damage to enemy ships of the opposite. This adds a very interesting depth to the game, whereas an impossibly navigable array of bullets can turn into a field of super-weapon in the blink of an eye. As would be expected, this also ads a bit to the learning curve, but once you get used to it, you're good to go.
I enjoyed the feel of the game, and the simple controls made it easy to get into. Controlling the ship with an analog joystick is a little strange after using a keyboard on PC SHMUPS, but I think I will get used to it.
I've not yet bought Ikaruga, but once I give the trial game a few more plays, I might just throw the MS points down and take the plunge. Ikaruga is one of the best (and only) Japanese shooter experiences you can find on the 360, and for fans of SHMUPS, it simply shouldn't be passed up.
Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One [Link]
Out of all the games I tried out this weekend, Penny Arcade Adventures is probably the one I spent the most amount of time with. It's also one of the larger games available on Xbox Live Arcade, as well as one of the most expensive (1600 MS Points, or $20). For those not deterred by the price, however, there's plenty of good fun to be had.
PAA follows the hijinks of the Penny Arcade web comic protagonists, Tycho and Gabe, as they romp through a 1920's era city named New Arcadia, kick robot butt, and attempt to solve the mystery behind the destruction of the town. The game employs a simple RPG style of play, where you move around the world via entering and exiting different panels (like a comic book), fights begin when you encounter monsters, and each character waits for action meters to fill up before he can attack, use items, or use a special ability. When you're in the overworld, you can smash garbage cans and chest to pick up special items, and as you play you collected experience points, which level your character and make him (or her) stronger.
Fans of the comic and newcomers to the series alike will find a lot to enjoy in PAA. The graphics are done in a comic-outlined style very reminiscent of the Penny Arcade comic (and other web comics in general, I'd say), the audio is good, the RPG elements are light, but still interesting, and the humor is great. It's really fun game to look at overall, and the production values that go into a more expensive Xbox live Arcade title are evident.
Right now I've got a few more games on deck than I like, so I'm holding off, but I'll definitely buy Penny Arcade Adventures at some point in the future. I like the RPG play, as well as the presentation of the game itself, with the cartoon graphics, comic-panel level design, etc. Though I'm not a regular Penny Arcade reader, I usually find the comics funny, and the humor Hothead Games has injected into the game is similar, which is definitely a plus.
It's slightly disappointing that, as harsh critics of the video game industry, the guys behind Penny Arcade couldn't have come up with a better overall game, but what's here seems solid enough to warrant a buy for me. If the episodic adventures get better as they progress, we should be in for some great times ahead with the PAA crew.
In an attempt to round out the multiplayer trivia options found on Xbox Live Arcade, Hidden Path Entertainment has unleashed Wits & Wagers, a game-show type game where you and a group of other players take a stab at answering questions, and then vote on the answer which seems closest to the truth. Expectedly, it's a test of both your wits and your wagering skills.
To be fair, I didn't spend as much time with Wits & Wagers as I probably should have to give it a decent write-up, but what I did get the chance to see was fun, though slightly dull. In order to make answers to trivia questions all conform to one type of answer (to make them easier to compare for wagering), each answer is numeric. Once the question is posed, players are given a short time to dial in a number by pressing up or down on the left stick, to indicate all sorts of data, from years, miles, weight, and more, all depending on the nature of the question. Answers are ordered from high to low, players place their bets, and the real answer is revealed. Points are awarded to the player who came closest to the correct answer without going over, and to the players who wagered wisely.
I was distracted by my girlfriend at the time (she was trying to get me to get up off the couch and go outside, I believe), so I wasn't able to concentrate much on the questions... I did have some fun with the avatar system though. Using one of the analog sticks, you can make your on-screen avatar throw it's arms and body around to dance, wilt, cheer, etc. Simple, and stupid - but fun, even with a group of computer players moving spastic around with me. I imagine this, along with the rest of the game, is a lot more fun playing online, with a group of friends.
Like Assault Heroes 2, I don't think I'd purchase Wits & Wagers unless I had a small throng of friends ready to buy and play along with me. It's got some neat quirks, but it all seems just a little too simple for me, unfortunately.
Final Thoughts
History has taught me to expect less from the offerings on Xbox Live Arcade, so even though there were a few games in this stack that didn't quite fit the bill, I'd say that overall, I was pleasantly surprised. There's definitely some good stuff up there (and they'll be easier to find once Microsoft starts de-listing underperforming games).
I'm not sure when I'll be doing another Arcade roundup, but I enjoyed this one and hope the next few weeks of games raise the bar in quality like these games have. Thanks for reading, and don't forget to try out some new games yourself!
