I know the gallery isn’t looking too special at the moment, this is a post to assure you that the gallery will be changing soon.

I am currently developing a new home for it which will make it look nice and pretty which will hopefullly allow me to showcase my work a bit more gracefully. Don’t expect anything marvelous, it will be a nice and simple piece of work and I will hopefully get it uploaded before the end of next week. This is all depending on how I progress with my Play 2 Create unit.

Signing Off

Dave

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Wii Rant

The Wii is currently having a bad run when it comes to any game of a non-party genre. I keep finding myself playing on a friend’s X-box 360 and thinking “why hasn’t the Wii got such interesting and deep games”. I am aware that it is not as powerful as it’s two competetors but that is no excuse to allow party games to sour a console that has the potential for so much more.

One problem I think plagues the Wii is the abuse of it’s control system. Games such as Metroid Prime 3, Red Steel and even Legend of Zelda require you to keep the Wiimote pointed at the screen for a majority of the time, doing this I find my wrist gets cramped from holding the Wiimote in such an awkward position so I have to keep pausing the game to shake my wrists off, also entirely upon motion controls is bound to end up in gestures being misread and the wrong action being performed, usually resulting in some loud comments being shouted about someones mother. Do not get me wrong, having motion controls is fun in most cases but unresponsiveness is one of the key obstacles that game developers need to overcome.

R ant Over - on to the Game!

In No More Heroes you control a middle aged, arrogant pervert called Travis Touchdown, his main hobbies include watching anime and wrestling. One day he buys a beam katana off an Internet auction site and proceeds to brutally murder people in the hope of becoming the number one ranked assassin in the USA.

Level Design

One of the main problems No More Heroes has is the free roaming environment between missions, it is very bland with not much activity going on, it’s only real purpose is to serve as an annoying trek between missions to various places. To the designers credit they did include a collecting mission in the free roam environment though it looks like it was just slapped on to try and give the game more depth.

When you get to enter assasination missions you have to drive to the location and then you are dropped into a linear map, where you follow the classic, murder henchmen along a single route until you meet boss and kill him. The stages themselves aren’t particularly pretty to look at except some of the boss fights which have some nice looks to them but nothing more really.

The whole game has a retro style to it and I suppose that the level design compliments that with quite retro level design, but if this was intentional or not is another thing entirely. Overall I  feel they could have pushed the level design a little bit more, come on guys! the Wii can do more!

Story

At face value the story would not seem too in depth, however its the little things in the story that really bring it to life, I personally think the dialogue in this game easily the best I have seen on the Wii so far, it contains plenty of slapstick humour and a lot of swearing! whilst accurately portraying the characters personalities, it really is a joy to listen to.

The game has a very anime style to it but before you commence about too many JRPG’s clogging up the market, I have to say this particular style is a breath of fresh air for the genre, a lot of the comedy has been important from anime (e.g. Travis stepping on mines repeatedly which did make me smirk) however the graphics seem to have a direct link to western retro gaming culture as well as comic books, it truly is a great fusion of eastern and western visuals.

This game seems to have taken a new approach to the whole east meets west genre and some may find this quite a relief to see such a different game grace the genre, and there are those that will hate every thing about the game to the point where they begin to secrete liquid hate.

Control

This is where at would rant at unresponsive motion controls but I can’t! this game actually has the best control scheme I have seen to date for the Wii, the game developers seem to have realised to pitfalls of motion controls and havent based the entire scheme upon it, instead oh waving the wii remote to hack opponents the user only needs to press A. Most of the time the only controls you need is the ‘A’ button and the nunchuck, this makes the game so much more comfortable to play and there is no point in the game when you need to point at the screen.

Ther are some points in the game where motion control is needed, the most common being changing in stances and dealing deathblows. There are two different combat stances, high and low. High stance attacks are more powerful but are more direct which is useful for one on one fights, Low stance attacks are the opposite, they affect an area but deal less damage. You raise your Wiimote to enter high stance and lower it to enter low stance. This very basic gesture makes it easy to change mid combo and pull of some good combos. Deathblows occour when you reduce an enemies health to 0, the screen slows down and you are given a arroe in which you ned to wave your Wiimote in that direction to pull off a lovely finishing move that to be honest, never gets old.

Thisis a game that appears to have nailed the Wii remote controls, mixing both functionality with the involvement of taking peoples heads off in a single stroke. It makes me happy to see a game which takes a logical standpoint to motion controls.

Conclusion

No More Heroes is a game that will either draw you in with its funny dialogue and brilliant control/combat scheme, or repulse you with it’s ugly and lifeless level design. It’s that simple really, this game stands as a testement to nintendo’s policy of gameplay over graphics, I also believe in this which is why this game has really charmed me, I know I havent really gone into too much detail with the combat system of which I so highly praised but to be honest you really need to experience it as I am about to do now as I load up my Wii now.

Signing Off

Dave

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