I recently took a look at Konami’s upcoming games for 2009. While most game publishers underserve the Wii, the majority of Konami’s games were either Wii exclusives or were available on all platforms, Wii included. The most notable exception was Saw, an intriguing survival horror game based on the movie which is coming out for pretty much everything except the Wii sometime in October.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is Konami’s other survival horror game, and is interesting enough to merit a full game preview. I have trepidations about the direction the developers are going, but I certainly hope it’s a big hit, since a survival horror hit might encourage Nintendo to finally release Fatal Frame IV to America. Shattered Memories is scheduled for an October release.
Walk It Out is an exercise game for kids in which you walk in time to a song, either on a dance pad, the balance board or by carrying the nunchuk in your pocket. As you walk, you can use the remote to click on floating disks that make things appear nearby like trees or furniture. I couldn’t help but notice that the game seemed to have utterly no purpose. It didn’t seem to matter if you walked or not, you could stop and just click on things, and really, nothing I clicked on resulted in anything interesting. But when I asked the PR flack what earthly reason anyone would have to want to play the game, she seemed confused by the question, as though it had never been asked before.
Did all the other game journalists who saw this game really fail to ask this question? What other question could you possibly have? It has no challenge and offers no interesting rewards. It may simply be that the PR flack isn’t privy to the ultimate plans for the game, and that some sort of gameplay or some compelling reason to play will be introduced eventually, but at the moment, I have to consider Walk It Out about the most pointless thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
Pop’n Music is a simple rhythm game for the Wii in which indicators tell you which direction to fling your remote. An animal is at a panel pushing buttons in time with the music, and you have to make him push the right button by shoving the remote or nunchuk out or down, or flicking both inward. I had difficulty getting the nunchuk to read my hand motions, but I’m told if you’re left-handed you have trouble with the remote and no trouble with the nunchuk, so that seems to just be a matter of practice. It feels like Dance Dance Revolution using hands instead of feet. I don’t have a strong opinion on this one way or the other right now, and will reserve judgment until it ships this fall.
Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party 3 doesn’t look to be a lot different from the game that preceded it, but it does have an interesting balance board mode in which you alternate between shaking the remote and nunchuk or shoving your hips in the specified direction. The game was a little better at registering side to side movement than forward and back, but in my brief time with the game I managed to get it working (it’s really more about your feet than your hips). I’m also told DDR is introducing a new workout mode, which is strange since I’m pretty sure the previous game had a workout mode. Perhaps this one is more comprehensive? Time will tell.
Tornado Outbreak is a game in which the player controls a tornado wreaking havoc on the countryside. As you suck up people and cars and houses you get bigger and bigger and thus are able to suck up bigger things. The idea is reminiscent of Katamari Damacy. But while your look changed in Damacy depending on what you picked up, in Outbreak you just become bigger. The level I played was a tutorial level which had no real challenge and was actually quite dull, but hopefully the later levels offer more fun by the time it ships on September 15th.
Karaoke Revolution seems like it should have more to the name than that. After all, that’s the name of a game that came out five years ago for a number of platforms. Be that as it may, if you’ve played any game in the Karaoke Revolution series you’ll know what to expect from this one, which doesn’t appear to break any new ground. The songs are all originals, rather than covers, and the game includes a few Jackson Five songs that Konami licensed before Michael died, which works out well for the game. The KR games have always been fun, so I expect this one to be no exception when it comes out in November.
