A Quick Look at Some Upcoming Wii Games from Capcom and D3

I went to a joint preview of games from Capcom and D3 Publisher and checked out their Wii games. I wrote a full preview for Dead Rising, since there's a fair amount of anticipation regarding it, but for the rest I'll just take a moment to dash off my impressions.

D3 Publisher

Onechanbara

In this game you run around as a bikini-clad young woman around slicing up zombies. There are a good number of zombies and it's somewhat amusing to see them get cut in half. The game is very fond of blood; periodically your sword gets so caked with blood that you have to do a special move to slough it off, and if you kill enough zombies your sexy avatar will become so drenched in blood that it puts her into a rage, at which point she will be much more deadly but will also continuously lose health until you find some place to wash her off. (For a game this lurid, one would expect the washing to be done in a sexy shower scene, but no such luck.)

Onechanbara is one of these offbeat Japanese games that don't normally make it to the U.S. The last one of these D3 published was Earth Defense Force 2017, in which you go around killing giant ants and the like. Onechanbara had a similar feel from the little I played, cheap, entertaining for a while but not something likely to keep you playing for all that long.

Ben 10: Alien Force

I played a little of the previous Ben 10 game, Protector of the Earth, and got bored pretty quickly. I'm hoping Alien Force will prove more satisfying. The controls were fluid, battle seems generally diverting and a few mild puzzles are said to round out the experience. My feeling is this one will be a bit better than the last one, but I don't know if it will be enough to hold my attention or not.

Coraline

Based on some upcoming stop-motion movie, this looks like the sort of middling, kid-oriented action adventure game that almost always results from these sorts of movies. I'll be surprised if this one has much staying power.

Family Party: 30 Great Games

When I saw this one I moaned, "not another mini-game collection." But Family Party actually looks pretty promising. In one game you cross a bridge while fellow players throw things at you to slow you down, in another you walk across a weaving platform. The game is set for four players, and when I played it with two D3 PR guys the game gave us a forth CPU-controlled character. He was painfully incompetent in the game, and I'm worried that without friends the game might not offer enough challenge, but I'm still looking forward to this one.

Capcom

Neopets Puzzle Adventure
Developed by Infinite Interactive, Neopets attempts to do for Reversi what the same developer's Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords did for match-3 games; take a simple but addicting casual game and turn it into a deep strategy game. It was hard to tell how successful that would be from the little I saw of the game, but based on the success of Puzzle Quest I'd say this one is worth watching out for.

Dead Rising
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