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Review by Christopher Coleman |
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Dispatches This month, you get two reviews for the price of one column! I'm all about value, readers. Some of the games I've been playing lately are, I believe, worthy of wider attention. Perhaps some of the four or five of you who read this might be inspired to seek these games out yourselves.
Starfox Assault
When this initially came out, it got middling to mildly positive reviews in the press, and I was still trying to get the taste of Starfox Adventures out of my mouth, so I didn't pay much attention. Recently, however, I saw the game cheap, and cheap is the magic word, so I decided to give it a try. Low expectations can often be rewarded, folks: it's a lot of fun. For those of you who aren't familiar, Starfox is one of Nintendo's franchises with a number of anthropomorphic creatures forming a space faring team of adventurers out to do the right thing, protect good from evil and collect powerups with abandon. There's a talking fox, a bird man, a creepy frog thing and.. well, you get the point. Originally out on SNES as a rather impressive FX cart with polygon graphics, the series has presented itself on the GameCube and DS since - I'm sure a Wii game is in development in Japan as we speak. The core gameplay of the series has been flying around blowing stuff up, in a third person view.. also, generally speaking, you need to take care of your wingmen, too. Starfox Assault is gorgeous - admittedly I was playing it in 480p on my Wii, but.. wow. It's got highly polished presentation, excellent character models, fast frame rate, all that crap. I was marvelling while playing it, it really is a far way from the early days of the GameCube, and a sign of what could've been done with the power of the console if it had been more popular than it was. The gameplay itself is divided into missions, with at least some variation in play. The first mission is a traditional shooter set in space, with you protecting your wingmen, blasting waves of fighters and capitol ships, then a boss fight. The actual movement is more or less on rails.. you can move around to an extent on the screen, but you're being pulled along a set path - ala Starblade or the many other FMVesque shooters of the early 90s. Fortunately, the wingmen (and occasional bad guys) talking to you and the gorgeous scenery will keep you from getting too upset about that, at least the first few times through. Later missions involve Fox on foot, third person perspective, blasting away, or jumping into a Landmaster vehicle, with the ability to hover in the air. I can heartily recommend this at a reasonable price, but in all honesty, it may not hold up to repeated plays.. get it cheap and you'll be very pleased. If nothing else, it's about 87.42% better than StarFox Adventures. I used science to figure that out.
Doom RPG
I believe this has been available for some time in the US, but it's only recently become available on Telstra's network here in Australia. A friend of mine who tests cell phone games for a living recommended it to me, and being the trusting soul that I am, I downloaded it. $AUS7 well spent, in this writer's humble opinion. On the surface of it, turning Doom into a turn based role playing game might sound crazy, but it's very well implemented, and the genre entirely suits cell phone gaming. Using a keypad for controlling a game on a cellphone doesn't really lend itself to fast paced action games, unless you've got some kind of crazy mutant hand with super reflexes and stamina. Doom RPG has a somewhat similar scenario to the original first person shooter games - something bad has happened on a UAC moonbase, and you, the marine, are sent in to sort it out. There's a central hub, called Junction, and various areas full of creatures to kill (as far as I can recall, all the creatures from the original game, complete with creditable graphics and a couple frames of animation), keys to collect and the occasional puzzle to solve. Nothing too complex, though, on the order of "find the terminal that tells you the code for door X" or "talk to guy A to find out how to get guy B to get codes from a computer so you can open doors C, D and E".
Your character can level up as you gain experience points, and as well as all the traditional weapons from the original game (which you need to find as you progress, as well as marshall limited ammunition supplies for), you get an axe and a fire extinguisher. Some sections of the base are ablaze, and some doors are jammed. You can do damage with these, too, but obviously not as much as with a pistol or other weapon. Different creatures are damaged more by different weapons. The game has a first person perspective, and each time you move, you've passed another turn. It's possible to skip turns as well, if you want to, say, wait for a demon to walk in front of you so you can blast it with a shotgun. There's an automap system which records where you've been, and it's possible to find a complete map at certain terminals in each area. The game moves at quite a clip - if you hold down the movement button, the speed belies the turn based nature, and if you're too impatient for that, you can even move directly on the map screen.. although I wouldn't recommend it if you haven't already cleared an area of Hell's minions. Good fun, and a decent sense of humour to it, too.. watch out for an "Office Space" reference and some rather amusing civilian comments when you talk to them here and there. I totally recommend this game to you if you can get it on your phone and provider - here it cost me $AUS7, which is about $US5. A bargain at that price, I've already had a few hours gameplay out of it, and I'm barely halfway through.
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