Looky Touchy Recommends

I've barely just started this site, but already it's time for a break. I'm going to take a tiny vacation from molesting games and ogling at screen shots to spend some time with family and do a bit of bill-paying work. During this brief intermission feel free to check out the shining examples of gaming goodness that earned a Looky Touchy recommendation (in no particular order).

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
Animal Crossing: Wild World
Cloud
Mario Kart: DS
Infected
Wario Ware: Twisted
The Warriors
Guitar Hero
Shadow of the Colossus
Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee
We Love Katamari
Trauma Center: Under the Knife

You'll notice that this short list is heavy on handheld games and completely devoid of Xbox 360 titles. I have Project Gotham Racing 3, Kameo: Elements of Power and Perfect Dark Zero lubed up and ready for some fierce touching, but no Xbox 360 to play them on. Thanks for the throbbing set of gamer blue balls, Microsoft. Next year this list will be much longer and feature a wider array of games representing all platforms. That's my promise to you.

Watch this space for a year-end list of my personal top ten of 2005, which will include more than a couple games not yet covered on this site. Until then, be safe and have fun.

Late to the Party: Advent Rising

Platform: Xbox
Manufacturer: Majesco
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Retail

Advent Rising, a suspiciously Halo-esque sci-fi actioner, has been gathering dust on my game shelf for most of 2004. The game was a commercial failure for Majesco, who sought to enter the big leagues of AAA publishers with this title and Psychonauts -- a vastly superior game that too sold miserably. Advent Rising's primary problem is that it feels terribly derivative, despite (or perhaps because of) writing from sci-fi author Orson Scott Card. The symphonic soundtrack is in contstant state of agitation, continually reminding you how intense, exhilhirating and cinematic the game is supposed to be feel. In reality the gameplay feels merely adequate. The player can chose to play in first-person ala Halo or fight in third-person with a twitchy lock-on. Neither way feels 100% right. The best thing that Advent Rising has going for it is that the push of the narrative briskly moves the story from one unique setting to the next. Problem is, I was always thinking, "maybe action I find in this next place will be a little more compelling." It never was.

Blue Dragon

Platform: Xbox 360
Manufacturer: Microsoft
Review Type: Looky
Version: Trailer/Magazine Scans



Blue Dragon is part of Microsoft's contingency plan for the Xbox 360. The contingency being that nobody in Japan would want their console. Check. The plan? Hire Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to make games specifically for their console. Smart plan. Blue Dragon, is just one of the games Sakaguchi's new studio Mist Walker has in the works. The other planned for the Xbox 360 is the more realistic looking Lost Odyssey. But this game interests me more, because of the character design by Akira Toriyama -- the mangaka behind Dragon Ball. The unique juxtoposition of hyper-real envirnonments and anime styled characters should make for a visually intriguing. And dig the game's logo. It looks like the kind of hand-drawn type of title design you'd see on the cover of a pencil and paper roll playing game in the mid '80s. These guys have the otaku crowd dead in their sights.

Trailer here.
Scans here.

Late to the Party: The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

Platform: GameBoy Advance
Manufacturer: Nintendo
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Retail

As the year ends, I quite frequently find myself touching games that somehow evaded my clutches. Here's my strategy; Around November, before my birthday and the impending holiday, I add games like The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap to my Amazon wishlist and pray that friends and family will do the right right thing. This year I scored nearly every game I asked for and have been peppering impressions of them on this site alongside reviews of titles I score from game publishers. Not surprisingly, many of these after-the-fact games wind up being outstanding. They ought to be, really. These are widely admired games that have been on my radar for some time, but for whatever reason didn't make the cut.

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is a fantastic game, even when judged against the other great games on my wish list. As I play through this lovely and imaginative 2D adventure, I'm struck by how well-refined this take on The Legend of Zelda is. It's as if the creators took every great idea cooked up for the series over the past twenty years and expertly threw them into one package. Not satisfied to just compile and boil down the simple sword-swinging and dungeon crawling, they add a handfull of wholly new concepts, such as Link's ability to shrink to a pint-sized Minish.

As we speak a debate rages on The Gaming Age Forums between the luddite proponants of 2D and the immersion hungry adherants of 3D gaming. I'll admit, nostalgia does fuel my near instant love for a simple, arguably archaic game like The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. But there's nothing wrong with looking back. Just as The White Stripes build their music on a foundation of blues and garage, contemporary developers can make great games that are simultaneously a throwback to simpler times and gripping post-modern retelling.

Recommended

Top Spin

Platform: PlayStation 2
Manufacturer: 2K Sports
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Retail

These days custom character creation is about as common as an Old Navy ensemble. Why is it, then, that very few of the games I love offer the feature? Narrative games like Shadow of the Colossus and The Legend of Zelda are locked down, as they should be, with one character. Even World of Warcraft offers only the most minimal selection of facial features and hair styles. Could deep customization be the last resort of the hopelessly mediocre game? Take Top Spin for example. It's a completely workable tennis sim with simple controls that peel away into layers of complexity. It's got none of the spark or spot-on responsiveness of Virtua Tennis -- the gold standard as far as I'm concerened.

Top Spin's character customization did pass the test I always like to perform when cooking up a new avatar. The system is very capable of creating a "pretty" character. Quite often the face tweaking slider bars and color selectors in games only serve to make virtual chicks look more and more like a transsexual. When the random settings generated by Top Spin presented my player with a horribly disfigured and broken nose, I figured I was in for more of the same. But a bit of digital fine tuning allowed me to make my own tennis pro inadvertantly forged from the DNA of Franka Potente and, oddly enough, Laura Foy.

I need to get out more.

Age of Empires: Age of Kings

Platform: Nintendo DS
Manufacturer: Majesco
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Preview Build

Intelligent Systems made me devotee of turn-based strategy with their Advance Wars series. The three games, which I've poured countless hours into, are the measuring stick by which I judge all similar games. Age of Empires: Age of Kings is intriguing in it's adaptation of real-time staples such as resource gathering, research and building, into the one-move-at-a-time mold. I don't really care for the amount of micro-management required by real-time strategy games, so I take this "downgrade" as a welcome change. My one wish for this game is that they'd used the iconic, tapestry-style art of the game's menus and story for the actual battlefield. The more "realistic" sprites they've created for the isometric game board tend to blend in with the buildings they occupy and the other units they're around, making it harder to quickly read the lay of the battlefield. I'm doubtful that this port will be able to conquer Advance Wars or Fire Emblem, but it's certainly going to make a nice companion to them in my growing DS library.

Snoopy vs. The Red Baron

Platform: PC, PlayStation 2, PSP, Xbox
Manufacturer: Namco
Review Type: Looky
Version: Screenshot


It should be noted, before people start getting their panties in a bunch, that Snoopy vs. The Red Baron isn't the first crappy game based on Charles Schultz's beloved characters. As far as crass commercialization goes, Sparky already sold the kids out with ads for Dolly Madison and MetLife insurance, so this post-humous liscencing deal isn't likely to cause even the slightest grave rolling. And while we're at it, please note that in strips and animated specials Snoopy quite frequently fantasized about violent air battles with his imaginary arch nemesis The Red Baron. Now that we've gotten all that out the way, the game will probably still suck. Watch for Snoopy vs. The Red Baron to hit bargain bins sometime in 2006.

Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse

Platform: Xbox
Manufacturer: Aspyr
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Retail

Mining laughs from retro kitch isn't as easy as pointing and laughing at poodle skirts and crew cuts. It takes nuance to properly skewer the naiviete of bygone eras. See any old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or the underappreciated gem The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra to see how it's done. Earlier this year Destroy All Humans fell flat on its grey, glassy-eyed face by casting its lead alien as a foul-mouthed, wisecracker. Developer Pandemic slapped the trite character into a Grand Theft Auto clone and called it a day, evenutally scoring a movie deal from their patently unoriginal IP.

Stubbs the Zombie fails by missing another golden opportunity. Stubbs is the reanimated corpse of a Depression-era salesman, awoken from death in the prosperous '50s . But rather than unleash the walking dead on the suburbs of Leave it to Beaver, developer Wideload squanders the setting. Instead, the game takes place in a retro-futuristic utopia -- a setting that hits upon the strengths of the game's ex-Bungie developers. Rather than serve as a sharp social satire that sees a survivor of a nation's leanest years gorge himself on the fat of post-war America, Stubbs the Zombie takes aim at the sitting duck of sci-fi, mostly for the convenience of finding in-game corellaries to already proven Halo game mechanics. From the Warthog-inspired vehicles to Stubbs' slow burning gut grenades weapons almost every feature feels swiped from Bungie's flagship shooter. And that's the game's saving grace: the combat is fun. Gorging on victims, tearing arms from sockets and posessing the living via an Evil Dead-inspired dismembered hand are all a blast.

But is a little social commentary too much to ask? The zombie horror genre was built on such insight. White Zombie explored the Hatian myth of the rich using voodoo to enslave the poor and Night of the Living Dead tapped into cold war paranoia. Even George Romero's latest, Land of the Dead, took the time to ask, "just who are these zombies and what do they want?" Stubbs seems only motivated to chase skirt. Are the brains behind Stubbs the Zombie really that worm eaten?

Cloud

Platform: PC
Manufacturer: USC School of Cinema and Television
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Download



Many naysayers will tell you that every possible video game genre has already been invented. And then games like Katarmai Damacy, and now Cloud, come along and remind us that there's a whole world of possibility outside of first person shooters and real time strategies.

I'd be shocked if the name Hayao Miyazaki didn't come up at least once during the inception of this imaginative airborne adventure. From the organic, hand-crafted look of introductory storyline to the game's flying protagonist it's fairly obvious that the animator's influence -- particularly key moments from Spirited Away -- loomed large.

Cloud is a student made game and comes to you as a free download from the Interactive Media Division of USC's film school.

Download here.

Recommended

Not Games: Silent Hill

Platform: Theaters
Manufacturer: TriStar Pictures
Review Type: Looky
Version: Teaser Trailer


Eventually somebody's gonna get the game-based movie right. Things are looking better and better for Halo, with a script by 28 Days Later scribe Alex Garland and Peter Jackson in the producer's chair. But that movie's still years away and it's beginning to look like Roger Avary and director Christophe Gans (of the costume drama meets martial art-powered lycanthrope tale Brotherhood of the Wolf) are trying their best to blur the lines between their film and its source material. This early teaser, with its moody atmosphere and purposefully obscured look, could easily be confused for a Silent Hill game clip. If the film captures the surrreal, sometimes Lynch-ian feel of Konami's survival horror series they'll have scored one for the good guys. Getting moviegoers to show up and sit through a flick as obtuse as the games will be their next challenge.

Silent Hill Teaser Trailer

Animal Crossing: Wild World

Platform: Nintendo DS
Publisher: Nintendo
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Retail

Ever hear the word "delightful" to describe a video game? Well, you have now. Animal Crossing: Wild World is just that -- a silly, engrossing and all around pleasant DS diversion that makes great improvements to the series by milking the DS's unique capabilities. Designing your own patterns and writing letters are now a snap thanks to the stylus and touchscreen.

And playing online with friends is much easier than in Mario Kart DS. Again, friends are registered via shared codes, but hooking up with online buddies is made much more probable by the ability to leave your town gate open while you go about your business. An open gate is a sort of flag, letting people know that your town is accepting visitors. Being able to play while flagged substantially increases the chances of meeting up with another Animal Crossing player. The first time I opened the gates to my town, Lunchton, two players from the Gaming Age Forums almost immediately stopped by to chat, meet my animals and trade fruit.

Stopping a minute to reflect, between trips to Tom Nook's shop, I've only got a couple quibbles. The online friends list is far too small; I've already maxed out my roster after two days of play. Nintendo may have underestimated how organized players would be. Considering the rabid online communities that formed around the GameCube game, they should have erred on the side of caution, allowing for at least twice as many friends.

And as much as I love returning to this world, it's very evident that Animal Crossing: Wild World is less a sequel than a third refinement of a proven formula (the game was first seen in Japan on the Nintendo 64). Sure, more than enough new stuff has been added to make the familiar game feel fresh again. But my imagination reels with the possibilities of a ground-up reinvention and next generation expansion of the Animal Crossing concept.

Wouldn't an Animal Metropolis as fast and detailed as San Andreas or Liberty City be fresh?

Recommended

Rumble Roses XX

Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Konami
Review Type: Looky
Version: Screenshots


There's nothing wrong with a little titillation, so long as everyone's on the same page. Shoehorning a Barbie-shaped heroine with a supernatural cup size into a storyline that calls for a more Earthbound female lead is always pushing it. But women's wrestling? Who are we fooling? The more tawdry the better. Seeing a game with this level of fan service makes me wonder; what would Russ Meyer have done were he the lead developer of a video game? Probably something pretty darn close to Rumble Roses XX, only he'd cast a couple of mooks to suffer punishment from his starlets and spend a little more time outside the ring trying to earn those Xes.

Mario Kart DS

Platform: Nintendo DS
Publisher: Nintendo
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Retail

The Nintendo DS has enjoyed a steady stream of solid games in the past few months. Advance Wars: Dual Strike nailed the strategy nerd demographic and Nintendogs delivered a breezy and fun pet sim for the casual crowd. Mario Kart DS is the first Nintendo DS game for everybody.

The biggest strength of the Mario Kart series has been its accessibility. Anybody with even the most rudimentary knowledge of video games can play. And almost anybody can win. This detail sticks in the craw of some gamers -- who hate the idea of losing a race. But this is the genius of Mario Kart. The game's wide array of weapons, from banana peels to the dreaded "Blue Turtle Shell" (a homing missile that takes out the first place racer in a massive explosion), are all about evening the playing field. Everybody has a shot at first place, even if you're not the greatest racer. And it's this chaos that makes playing Mario Kart DS so damn fun.

Mario Kart DS really shines when played against human opponents via Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection. Don't bother trying to play with friends over the internet, unless you make a specific play date. There's just not enough room on your friends list to build a large enough roster of people to randomly hook up with. The best way to play is against "Worldwide" opponents, which sees you matched against other racers. There's always someone playing.

Mario Kart DS is the first game that every Nintendo DS owner should have, no matter what kind of gamer they are. It's that good. And because its so good, it only serves to further underline the Nintendo DS's urgent need for a redesign. After hours of racing, the handheld's poorly positioned and all-around ill-conceived d-pad has really done a number on my thumb.

Recommended

Aeon Flux

Platform: PlayStation 2
Publisher: Majesco
Review Type: Touchy
Version: Retail

Aeon Flux, the game, was available to reviews long before the film, which opens today with absolutely no advance critic's screenings. Thanks to the free ticket that comes inside the game's packaging I'll soon have the dubious honor of determining just how bad Karyn Kusama's sophomore directing effort really is.

Majesco's pass at the franchise is a workable blending of Prince of Persia-style combat and Metroid Prime-influenced rolling ball puzzles. Oscar winner Charlize Theron provides her voice to the affair, but has few opportunities to ply her craft with any real force. You tell me how you'd wring emotion from the corny action catch phrase, "Roll out!"

In pixels the "realistic" Aeon Flux pales when compared to the stylistic flourish of Peter Chung's animated shorts. The game's opening cut scene starts on the oringinal animation; the angular heroine leaps in swift, controrted acrobatics cooly icing dozens of masked soldiers. We smash cut to 3D and see the Charlize Theron character model finish the job, spraying gunfire with outstretched arms. Limp bodies fall in a waterfall of destruction. I get the feeling that this new, supposedly more real, interpretation of Aeon is supposed to get me pumped. Instead, seeing the hand-drawn heroine replaced makes me feel the same way I felt when Nintendo unveiled the new Link; nostalgic and a little old. Just what I needed; another reason to feel like a crotchety old dude.