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stretched? This is not to say that it's completely hideous - I've certainly seen less attractive generic corridors in shades of brown and grey, and more indistinctly generic creature designs in shades of brown, but . . . wow, did I mention all the brown? The "alien syndrome" referred to in the title must have something to do with colour blindness.
The game is another variant on the console Baldur's Gate idea - essentially a dungeon crawler where you build up experience and collect items of various power and utility. The Wii version has a few minigames to make things (at least briefly) interesting. You have to play a minigame to increase your character's stats when you encounter DNA mixing machines, involving blasting away bad germs and dragging new capabilities to your DNA strands - it's fun, at least once you work out how to do it, and for the first few times after that. A somewhat similar minigame is used for unlocking chests - place beacons to attract nanites to corrupted parts of locks and energize them while zapping bad germs with nunchuck motions. Integration of the Wii controls into the standard gameplay itself isn't too bad - the ability to move with the analog stick and aim your projectile/laser/flame/whatever weapons with the Wiimote is nice and works well, but angling the camera can be dodgy with nunchuck motions, and the hand to hand combat is a bit aggravating.
I bought this from an eBay auction for about half what it normally goes for in stores here, and I have to admit I'm not exactly sitting around thinking how awesome I am for owning it. Still, my loyalty to favoured arcade games of the past and Sega in particular demands that I check these kinds of things out - just learn from my example, instead of the hard way. Don't waste your time unless it's in the $10 bin, or you really, really love dungeon crawlers that do practically nothing new or interesting beyond a couple minigames - and if you have a Wii and aren't bored of minigames yet, you should watch more American TV or listen to some nu-metal, as you're obviously easily pleased and scared of innovation.
Star Trek: Conquest
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If I had a nickel for every Star Trek game that's come out since "Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator" and earlier, I could probably afford to design a half decent one. "Star Trek: Conquest" at first glance looks a bit crap - generic cover (complete with typo on the back of the PAL case, how encouraging), simplistic graphics, no cut scenes or fancy Trek fluff. After playing it for 5 or 10 minutes, I was ready to write it off, but I persevered, and discovered it's actually reasonably entertaining.
Turn based strategic war games aren't infinitely common nowadays, and I've been wanting to play a new one for some time now - I also am not a fan of huge complexity, so I'm often put off by many of the "classics" in the genre. However, Conquest seems to hit the spot. It's simplistic enough that you don't have to think too hard (or monitor a thousand things at once), the interface is very straightforward, and it has enough
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complexity to keep it interesting and at least somewhat challenging.
Once you've chosen one of the races (Federation, Klingon, Breen, Cardassian or Romulan, each with their own ships, special weapons and specific advantages and disadvantages - speed, strength, fleet captain expertise), you're confronted with a single screen map. Each system is connected by one or more paths to other systems. Yes, it struck me as silly the first time I played it too, but it adds to the strategic element - being able to simply warp anywhere you like would make it too open ended - although perhaps they should have thought of that and not tacked a Star Trek licence onto this game. You start with your race's home planet, which you have to maintain control of to be able to build new fleets. You start with one fleet, and can make two more. Only three fleets? Yep. There's also only three ship types and three fleet captains per race, too - what's with all the threes? Each captain has a different advantage - good at defence, movement or attack with appropriate performance bonuses.
Each star system you capture will have a random encounter at it (Borg, Ferengi and Xindi all make appearances) until it's captured, and once a system is captured, you can build one of two kinds of starbase, one of two kinds of building (mining for more resources or research for more advancements and superweapon charging) and optionally, defensive weapons.
Advancement and superweapons? Each race can build three of a group of superweapons that have various effects including damaging everything at a solar system, breaking links to a planet or freezing a planet temporarily - the more science stations you have, the faster this recharges. Resources are used to build your ships and buildings - different races have different costs for different ships and buildings, naturally. The advancements you get are a list of different items for each race including reducing the cost of ships or buildings, increasing effectiveness of weapons, defence or ship performance, etc. These can be upgraded three times each, and you have a fairly extensive list, so it keeps things interesting - I did actually notice a difference as upgrades were applied.
The battles themselves? There's three options - you can simply auto-complete the battles, you can "sim" them, where you get to watch little phasers and torpedoes fly across the screen between your guys and their guys while listening to amusing (but quickly repetitive) subspace chatter, or you can go into arcade mode. Arcade mode is a bit lame to be honest - you control one of the ships in your fleet using the nunchuck to turn and accelerate or decelerate, and the Wiimote to aim and fire. Each ship has layers of shields around it and a health bar, and you have to take them out before they take you out. Losing the ship you're controlling bounces you into the next most powerful ship in your fleet until you're out or you've won. It's essentially a really simplistic version of the combat in the "Starfleet Command" series on PC if you're familiar with that game.
As mentioned earlier, there's not a lot of gravy in the game - no celebrity voices, no clips or FMV. About all you get is tiny thumbnails of characters from various episodes of various series (in the TNG era) who represent the fleet captains, and some admittedly excellent music and sound effects. The game supports Dolby surround, so that's a nice touch.
The lack of multiplayer really takes this out of the "recommended" pile and slaps it firmly in the middle of the "maybe" section. If you're after a quick bout of cheap strategy and you can still stand the Star Trek setting after the flogging it's taken the last 10 years or so, then knock yourself out. Fortunately, it's a budget release, so it shouldn't be too expensive. Hell, give it a little longer and it'll no doubt hit bargain bins - that'd be the best time to strike.
Wing Island
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Wing Island is a horribly mediocre flight game. You can't call it a simulation, as it's got a very, very simplistic flight model/control set. This isn't necessarily a bad thing if implemented well and used for entertainment's sake, but Wing Island.. Ah, Wing Island. It falls short. I can't say I wasn't warned, either. This was one of the games that piqued my interest at launch, but even then, I had a feeling that it would end up one of the first launch bombs, one of the first games to go cheap quickly. I never actually got around to picking it up until recently, over a year later, when a reasonable opportunity presented itself - hell, wouldn't you trade Wii Far Cry for practically anything else, safe in the knowledge that things couldn't get worse?
Perhaps I should start with the positives - there's surprisingly little brown, the music's cheery and the Charlie-Brown's-teacher-speak never fails to impress. Also, there's a rather cool minigame where you have a giant sphere of balloons and must fight against the AI or another player to fly through as many as possible in a time limit.
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The bad bits? The main storyline. Have you ever played Pilot Wings on SNES or N64? It's an attempt to encroach on that millieu, but unfortunately unsuccessfully so. The first couple missions I played involved dropping crates on targets, dropping nets on cows, and dropping fire retardant on a burning forest. The next mission after that was dropping the DVD back into the case, turning the Wii off, and returning to the ongoing, doomed quest for modern porn involving women without tattoos. It's easy enough to control the plane (or planes) with the Wiimote, but the things you do are just so humdrum. If you must get a flight simulation for Wii, get Blazing Angels, otherwise I'd suggest you keep hoping for Wii Pilot Wings from Nintendo. Also, if you're French, please hold your breath while you wait.
"(or planes)"? Yes, you can control more than one in some missions - a formation, although it's essentially the same as flying a single plane, just with less direct control over the other planes. You use different motions to go in different formations. A v-shape for better turning, a straight line for speed, a plus formation for .. variety? Who knows. Surely you didn't expect me to pay attention. All I know is that it made it an extra 7% more interesting than if you flew one plane constantly.. which, if you use science, isn't really all that much.
The most bitter disappointment of all? You can't do Immelman loops. The fact I don't know what they are and just remember the term from the manual to "Chuck Yeager's Air Combat" is immaterial. Well, second most bitter - the first would be when I looked down in the shower this morning to discover those pills from Czechoslovakia didn't work.
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