Boy, since jumping in video games is a lot of fun, it’s gotta be really great to play a whole game that lets you just jump, jump, jump all the way to Heaven! Ducking? Pshhhhh. Shooting? Lame. Variety? Pass. All we want is that sweet, sweet jumping! These and other idiotic statements must have been scrawled down during some malformed focus group of imbeciles when the developers of Ah! Heaven were doing preliminary planning for their amazingly boring platformer.
If you have fond memories of lazy Saturdays taking turns with a friend’s Game & Watch, the possibilities for recreating those experiences have been pretty sparse in the last decade. Today, the primary way to get your hands on LCD-style games is through Nintendo’s own Game & Watch collections for the DS and, strangely, in this summer’s Deadlight on XBLA. Outside of those cases, though, the LCD game is essentially dead. Or so it seemed, until Retro Pocket swooped onto DSiWare and packed several Saturday afternoons’ worth of LCD-style games into a package that will have some peering over the top of their sunglasses to take in something so rad.
Can you remember being at the arcade and spying a strange Franken-cabinet offering a game you’d never seen before? Perhaps a black spray-painted Pac-Man with a generic marquee above the screen with a name you’d never heard of and would never remember. You peered into the screen despite the bland trappings and ended up spending a wonderful afternoon trying to conquer a B-tier action game you would quickly forget. This is certainly not an experience Cinemax was trying to recreate with Commando: Steel Disaster, but it’s what they’ve done and I love them for it.
The trend of retro style games the last several years is something I can normally support, at least when game makers actually figure out how to capture what made old games so great. 99Seconds tries to harness the magic that kept early gamers rolling quarters into cabinets, constantly vying to get their name in the top ten. Although 99Seconds appears to be on to something at first, spending time with the game reveals that there is no real hook and it fails to instill the desire to wear your thumb raw for the sake of a high score.
In Paul’s Shooting Adventure 2, there are large bees that throw dog piles at you. Yes, the kind of dog piles you are thinking of: poop. It’s an appropriate weapon for a game that could double as lawn fertilizer.
Today, Nintendo made available two new Club Nintendo awards, each clocking in at 150 coins. Both Art Academy: First Semester and Mario Party 2 are now available for redemption until the end of the month, February 29. The two titles supplant last month's four choices, which included The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Dr. Mario Online Rx, Dr. Mario Express, and Kirby's Dream Land.
Nintendo didn’t have the most even release schedule in 2011. A year that could be characterized as lacking in terms of software releases was capped off by a small barrage of marquee releases in the form of Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7 and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
It took us a long time to finally get the Club Nintendo rewards program on this side of the globe, and some people would say that the American version of CN gets the short end of the stick. That changes today, as it seems that Club Nintendo U.S. has put up some actual games that you can redeem your coins for, as well as some other loot.
I don’t know about you all, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been so glad that it’s Friday. It’s been a long week, I must admit, but now that we’re at the end of it I get to spend some time writing my favorite bi-weekly column. That’s right kiddies; it’s time for another exciting installment of Missing in Action!