Now that the year is ending, I thought I’d do a quick round up of games I neglected to review for one reason or another. Some of these games are good, and some are bad; what they have in common is that I didn’t play more than a couple of hours of any of them.
Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is a critically well received shooter that certainly deserved a review. Unfortunately, it came out around the time I started having severe repetitive motion issues with my hands that made it too painful to play games. When my hands got better I tried some more of this game, but realized that, very simply, this is the sort of game that causes repetitive motion injuries. It’s fast-paced, exciting and well made, but it requires so much quick button mashing that even now when I can play other games with a minimum of discomfort, half an hour of this one is as much as I can take. This is a good game, but it is not, alas, the game for me.
Scooby Doo: The Spooky Swamp is not a terrible game, but it is a remarkably half-assed one. The game’s subtitles, which you cannot turn off, don’t sync with the spoken dialogue, and the laugh track will play before a joke is finished. Everything in the game feels generic and players are given so many clues as to what to do next (mainly which character to use, since they all have different skills) that nothing can be justifiably referred to as a puzzle. It’s perfectly playable, but why bother? The only thing of note in the game is the cool opening credit sequence.
Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 is a little different from other Lego games like Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Star Wars. These games were a mix of simple action and simple puzzles. The games were easy kids games, yet they were lively and fun. Potter has the simple puzzles but lacks the action, for the most part, and the resulting game just feels a little static. Even though the combat was easy, it gave previous games a sense of urgency totally lacking in this one. I loved the funny opening cut scene of Harry receiving 100s of Hogwarts invites, but after that I quickly got bored.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 is a good, solid game that isn’t much different than Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, except you get a first person view of your swing when you hit the ball. This is the problem with sports games; once you’ve reviewed one, there may be nothing much to say about the next five.
Sakura Wars: So Long My Love is one of those peculiar Japanese games that don’t normally make it to the U.S. The game is a mix of the Japanese dating sim, in which you connect with people by saying the right thing from a list, and turn-based mech combat. Dating sims are really boring, but I kept slogging through the game for a long time because I wanted to see how the combat was. It seemed to take forever for the first action sequence in the game to appear, and when it did, I found it just as dull as the dating sim part. This got some good reviews, but I just cannot understand how people can stand to play it.
Super Monkey Ball: Step & Roll came out when I was having problems with my hands. Since it is a game played with the Balance Board, you would think I would have played it simply because it was the one game I could play comfortably. And yet, I kept putting it off. Partially this was due to the game’s middling reviews and partially because I really prefer playing games on the couch. But when I finally stood up and played Monkeyball, I thought it was pretty fun. I thought the reviews were unreasonably negative. I thought I would play more of it. But then I didn’t, because I was still lazy and also perhaps a bit depressed about my hand problems. But it really is a cute little game.
SmackDown vs. Raw 2011 is a very underwhelming game. The graphics are bad and the unintuitive controls are tossed at the player without benefit of a tutorial. The game has this backstage area to wander around in that seemed like a desperate, completely failed attempt to create an open world quality to the game. Backstage just turns out to be a place to interact with wrestlers notable for their horrible acting or picking really boring fights with those same wrestlers. Navigating backstage is horribly done. The in-the-ring wrestling is okay for a bit, but a couple hours of this and I was done for good.
Haunted House is a remake of some old game that has you wandering around a haunted house looking for stuff and avoiding monsters. This is mildly amusing for maybe half an hour after which it feels like a repetitive grind.
Madden NFL 11, like the previous entry, has no tutorial. I did get a PR flack to help me out after I couldn’t figure out the controls, but if you offer multiple control systems you should explain, at least in the manual and ideally in the game itself, what the differences are so players can decide which one they want. I am not big of football, and while I enjoyed the first Madden game for the Wii, which had a proper tutorial, I am not willing to try and figure out how to play the game on my own. Apparently though, since I complained about the same thing last year, EA is only interested in people who don’t want a tutorial.
Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1 is a 2D arcade platformer SEGA released a little before releasing their brilliant 3D Sonic Colors. Many critics wrote that this year there were two great Sonic games, but I wasn’t as enthusiastic about Sonic 4. The game is much more difficult than other Sonic games I’ve played, and often I found myself stuck; unsure what to do, or up against some ridiculously hard challenge, like a tightly timed jumping sequence involving playing cards. For me much of the fun of the Sonic games has always been their intense speed, making being stuck more aggravating in this game than in others.
Disney Guilty Party is a mystery party game that is a little like a video game version of the board game Clue. You travel from room to room collecting clues and then accuse a suspect. The game received very good reviews, and it is nicely done, but it’s a party game and unfortunately I don’t have the sort of friends who can be easily lured over with the promise of playing a Disney party game. I think Guilty Party is probably a lot of fun played with other people, but it’s really not a good game to play by yourself.
