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Here's some short reviews of the last few Wii games I've bought for my personal collection. Enjoy! Well, except for Heatseeker, which you should lay down and avoid. For the record, the Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam piece is edited from my personal LiveJournal, the ID for which you couldn't pay me enough to give you. Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam This definitely isn't like the rest of the games in the Tony Hawk's franchise. Imagine some of the trappings of Tony Hawk games tied to SSX, the snowboarding franchise, and you'll be on the right track. You can play Tony (or one of a number of other generic fictional characters with varying personalities and performance statistics.. another idea taken from SSX) and run through a number of different events set in various areas to build up points (to increase your skater's rating and unlock more difficult and varied events and locations), and to unlock different boards, skating videos and the like. The game itself uses just the Wiimote on its side - you hold it like a classic NES controller, but tilt it left or right to steer your skater, use the 2 button to crouch and ollie, the 1 button for tricks (or the d-pad) and use the d-pad to attack pedestrians or other skaters. All the events are fairly short, only a few minutes play, but I don't really see this as a disadvantage at least in the short to medium term, as the stages are quite intricate and repeated plays will allow you to find shortcuts, discover score increasing opportunties and improve times.
 The event types are straightforward races, smash as many pedestrians as you can, pass through as many slalom gates as you can and tricking to get as high a score as possible. Each ranking has a number of these different events in the various areas, more of which are unlocked as you progress. You can grind rails, do wall rides, ollie-based flip and grab tricks, a lot of the things you could do in the previous games, but they're far more simplified - mashing 1 and 2 or 2 and the d-pad while making sure you're steering in the right direction will serve you reasonably. Perhaps you'll do even better if you try and do it sensibly, but I was having fun for over an hour just mashing mindlessly. Doing enough tricks builds up a boost meter (hmm, yet another SSX idea), which you can waggle the remote to use. Waggling is also the way you recover from crashes. The controls are decent - when you start a new game, you go through a multi chapter tutorial that teaches you each of the basics - steering, ollies, tricks and grinding - and once I'd completed these, I was good to go. In some races, I'd get caught on corners near tunnels or buildings, but I never felt that was bad design - just bad aim. I should've been steering good ol' Tony properly. One particularly annoying aspect - before each event, Tony or one of the other characters will be asked a question or give a short speech. A few of them are faintly amusing, but most will have you jabbing the - button to skip them. Hell, I'm sure they're fairly finite, although I didn't notice them repeat through an hour's play. The graphics and sound are great, with a pseudo-cartoon look for Tony et al rather than an attempt at realism. It doesn't look HD photorealistic amazing OMGWTFBBQ like you'd expect of the PS3, but I thought it looked just fine, and cranked along at decent speed too. The soundtrack is typically varied as we've come to expect from Tony Hawk games.. from Iron Maiden to the Bucketheads. There's even a Maiden music video on there, metal fans. Eledees/Elebits Hey kids, would you like a first person shooter interface using the gravity gun from Half Life 2 to explore relatively complex environments mixed into a Pikmin-esque porridge of sugary goodness? Well, have I got news for you! Elebits in Japan and the US, or Eledees in Europe/PAL territories, is a Konami game wherein you live in a world where all the electricity is generated by these cutesy creatures called Elebits (or Eledees), and "one day, a sudden lightning storm strikes and the Eledees begin to act strangely and go into hiding. It's up to you and your trusty Capture Gun to search anywhere and everywhere to capture them all." (from the back of the box). I couldn't even bring myself to paraphrase the frankly ridiculous plot, because it makes about as much sense as a DVD player's manual and is half as important to its functionality.
 Once you've worked your way through the extensive but useful and important tutorial mode at the beginning of the game, which introduces you to pretty much every aspect of gameplay, you're unleashed on a house, your house, which you must clear room by room of Elebits, using some of them to power lighting and various other devices, which in turn will release Power Elebits that will upgrade the power of your Capture Gun, which will allow you to move heavier objects, which will allow you to find more Elebits. And so it goes. Each area of the house, that is to say, each level, has a time limit and various goals you must meet - essentially to find a certain amount of Elebits, and in some areas, to keep the noise below a certain level (meaning you can't just randomly thrash around the furniture.. you have to be a bit more subtle while still being mindful of the time limit). The controls are pretty straightforward - analog stick on the nunchuck to move around the room, Wiimote as a pointer for the Capture Gun (with target reticule onscreen) and trigger to fire the gun. When you want to open doors or cupboards, you click on them and twist the Wiimote, which is a nice touch, and can be done with simple gestures. Be careful not to yank too hard, though, or the door will bounce shut again - something I did quite often, being the clumsy oaf I am. It's a lot of fun, Eledees. Perhaps there might be some long term issues with replayability, but the complexity of the environments, the ability to unlock freeplay modes, and the even better facility to create and share levels over wi-fi, not to mention the two player mode, all add up to value for money. Wario Ware Smooth Moves If you're not familiar with the Wario Ware franchise by now, you should hang your head in shame and turn in your Nintendo fandom credentials. Wario Ware titles are compilations of massive amounts of minigames, most of which only last for a few seconds, and practically all of which are fun on some level. There have been Wario Ware games for GBA, DS, GameCube and now the Wii. What does the Wii version bring to the table? If you said "motion sensing controls", you'd be on the mark, wouldn't you? Smooth Moves uses the Wii Remote, or as the manual refers to it, the Form Baton, for all the games. Each microgame (of which there are over 200, according to the packaging - I haven't quite unlocked them all yet) uses a particular form, or method to play. Before each microgame you get a brief screen displaying the form type to use so you can prepare yourself, and for the first time each form is introduced, there's a picture of the stance/method required and a particularly amusing voice over describing it. The forms include various positions, such as holding the Wiimote against your nose like an elephant's trunk, holding it to your side to be drawn like a samurai sword, balancing it on your palm as if it was a plate, holding it like a handlebar, like a fishing rod, etc etc.. There are quite a few different forms, most of which seem to work pretty well.. especially if you play it the way the manual recommends, standing in front of the TV, and not lazily lying on your couch like a certain reviewer I could mention.
 What kind of minigames are there? Twisting a maze around to make a ball drop, keeping a little man balanced on a ball, slashing barrels samurai style, driving a car along a windy road filled with obstacles, you name it, it's there. 200 is an awful lot of microgames, baby. Also, as you progress, you unlock individual stand alone games you can play - the first of which, for example, is a clone of "Devilish". For those who aren't familiar, the screen scrolls up and you have to keep a ball in play, bouncing it off blocks to remove them from the path of your paddle so you can continue to bounce the ball upward. It's a fun game.. while we're on the topic, you should go and get "Devilish" for Nintendo DS, assuming you have one of those crazy things - most people do, judging by its sales figures. Perhaps the only thing you can really fault Smooth Moves for is its difficulty level. A seasoned gamer will hose through everything in a couple of hours.. but then, the target audience for Wario Ware games in general, and this one in particular, definitely isn't the seasoned gamer. If you'd like a lot of laughs with your friends, want to recommend something that's fun, not too taxing, and just as enjoyable to watch as to play, you can't go wrong with Smooth Moves. There's not exactly a shortage of minigame style compilations for Wii, but this one is the best of a fair to middling bunch, the amusement value of screaming rabbids in that Rayman game notwithstanding. Heatseeker How many of you out there are fans of self destructive behaviour? Ever known that doing something is a bad idea, that you'll end up worse off afterward, that little good will come of it, but you can't help yourself anyway? Something inside just says "yeah, screw it" and off you go? Guess what I did at the game store the other week? Yes, I bought Heatseeker. In my defence, I used credit from a bunch of crappy N64 games to do so, but still.. I bought Heatseeker. I really wanted to like this game, I really did. When I first heard about it and saw various screenshots, it sounded great, like a cross between the Ace Combat series on PS2 and the Burnout franchise, without the wanky pseudo-cool EA-ism added to it. Later, when I saw it was coming out for PlayStation2 as well as the Wii, my heart sank a little. As you may or may not have noticed, the Wii is being plagued with a number of PS2 ports.. things like Prince of Persia and Medal of Honour. Sure, nice enough idea adding the Wii controls and introducing these games to a new audience, but is it really worth almost double the price of the PS2 version to play with Wii controls, and enjoy graphics that're barely enhanced if at all? It is if you're using credit from crappy N64 games, I suppose. Here's hoping that Manhunt 2 reverses the trend and ends up a Wii game with a PS2 port, if you get what I mean.
 Two paragraphs and one sentence barely describing the game - talk about the new games journalism. Heatseeker is a flight combat game where you fly various missions - and the various missions are in turn varied. Bomb attacking boats, shoot down squads of attack helicopters, achieve bonus objectives, it's all there. Each mission isn't overly long, but there's also checkpoints within them, so you won't be going through too much pain. Having said that, however, practically all the checkpoints seem to be set just before cut scenes. Was that really necessary, Codemasters? It's not like the player is going to forget the two minutes worth of objectives in the 20 seconds it takes to die and click on "restart from checkpoint". Maybe if it was a NASCAR game you'd expect that level of stupidity. "Hey kids, remember to turn left a lot! Press the button to go fast!" As I mentioned before, I wanted to like this game, but I just can't - the Wii controls are initially kind of cool and seem to work, but soon after an initial bit of novelty, you begin to notice the faults. It's pretty easy to lose control for a second or two and end up sending the plane way off course (or straight into the drink) trying to regain control, and that's something that happened frequently to me. Did I mention a game or two back how I'm a clumsy oaf? It's the kiss of death for Wii controls on a game if your thought is "This'd be so much easier with a regular controller". Unfortunately for Heatseeker, I can't even recommend the PS2 version in place of the Wii release. Aside from an "impact cam" feature - where the game pulls you out of concentrating on aiming at targets to show you a clip of a missile hitting a plane, and the plane going boom - remember me mentioning Burnout? There's very little here that wasn't done better already by a number of releases of "Ace Combat" on PS2. If you have to have Heatseeker, make sure you trade in a bunch of crappy N64 wrestling or racing games for it. Don't use real money, whatever you do.
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