Ush's Videogames review thread!

I think you just had my issue with Zelda to a greater degree; I said the last half was weaker than the first half as it has nothing new to offer. Your limit was clearly much earlier than halfway. Did you like OoT?

As for Half-Life... it's not actually my favourite game of all time or anything. I'm not a big FPS man. But I do rememebr it having, at the time, the most entertaining approach to trying to make an FPS more than just endless run and gun violence... even if only a little bit more. It's hard to see what the fuss was about these days as subsequent games in the gentre tended to use roughly the same design. I'm also a sucker for 'alternative viewpoint' things like Opposing Force.

I am wondering what to do next. I've just abandoned "Little King's Story" not very far in- massively overrated. GTA on the DS, on the other hand, was pretty good.

Some more quick reviews

TALES OF PHANTASIA (GBA)

How dare a non-Square company try to make an RP!

I delved into the 'Tales of...' series as I heard a new one was being made for the Wii, which has been very RP starved. I understood most of these games are unconnected, but that the Wii one was the sequel to an earlier one which was in turn a far, far prequel to the very first one, Phantasia, This, in turn, had had a GBA release at some point, and so one ebay transaction later, I got into it!

Briefly, this tells the story of an unassuming young hero named Cress who gets caught up in great events beyond his normal understanding, and soon is drawn into the past in order to fight a time-travelling enemy named Dhaos who is oppressing people back then, only later to have to go into the future to stop the same enemy ruining things there too and... wait... isn't this mostly the plot of Chrono Trigger?

I don't know which came first but the similarities are pretty hefty. Regardless, ToP doesn't handle its time travel plot anywhere near as well. For a start, past, present (which you barely spend any time in) and future are stylistically identical, all in that typical 'magic with a hint of technology' fantasy style that is beloved, apparently. Secondly, the time travel plot serves no logical purpose other than being able to re-use the map with different town names. If the hero had been going to different countries instead of time zones, the game would have been identical.

In fact, the game plot is forgettable to the point where I have... pretty much forgotten it. You are doing a job on behalf of this big nature tree thing (it';s all named after Norse mythology for some reason), whilst Dhaos is from some other world whose world is dying due to some energy mis-match, and he wants to restore it by doing over this world. They try and put some moral question marks into the equation with the “Dhaos is only trying to save his planet” schtick, as if that excuses his attempted genocide. At the very end of the game, one of the characters in the party manages to come up with a solution that saves both worlds anyway, making the whole conflict seem spectacularly pointless (it's not as if it was done by anything learned on the way... she just... did it. Some mojo at the world tree and job done). The game does try and impress with its statements on racism against half-elves and by torching Cress' home village after some 5 minutes into the game (mind you, that's pretty standard hero motivation) but on the whole it feels like it is trying to say more than it is able.

However, the game is not a dead loss. The combat system is done in an arcade real-time style, with you having direct control over one member of the party and the others performing on auto (though you can specifically order them if need be). You learn various combos etc. by pressing the right buttons, controlling a swordsman by default. I actually found these battles entertaining and as you only had to worry about the control of one character, it made them far faster than in, say, Final Fantasy. Random battles are far more bearable when you can deal with them in seconds.

Other than that, standard RP stuff. Wonder around, fight stuff, kill stuff, get better equipment, kill more stuff, big boss, end. Not bad. Shame about the plot.

SCORE: 7/10

COMMENT: Standard RP fare, loses out for its dull-o-rama plot but gains it back for its relatively exciting take on beating monsters up

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TALES OF SYMPHONIA (GC)

Thousands of years before Phantasia, young swordsman Lloyd (two-weapon fighter this time) gets caught up with events out of his control. With his people oppressed by the evil Desians, he is thrown out of his village for resisting, but gets caught up with the pilgrimage of his female friend who is visiting several holy sites around the world, defeating guardians and puzzles in each one so that she may grow in summoning power in order to save the world. But wait! It turns out that her journey is actually part of a great conspiracy of control and... wait... isn't this mostly the plot of Final Fantasy X?

Yeah, I dunno what it is with these similarities but it really is quite striking. Anyway, I don't want to go into massive detail, but eventually it t turns out you are messing around with the destiny of two worlds that dimensionally overlap, and that the whole 'Chosen One' schtick is all a manipulation plot by some bad guy angelic beings (that bear a great resemblance to Dhaos) to control.. err... stuff... it was a while back and again, it ends up not being very interesting. The links to the original are in fact very slight, but enough for a fan to spot. At the end of it all, Lloyd unifies the two worlds into one, and at the centre of it all creates the world tree that is the centre of the plot in Phantasia. Ta-daa.

Other than that... well, the game uses cartoon-style cel shaded graphics that are rather nice, and a 3-d version of the action battle system from Phantasia (that can be played multi-player, which is pretty nifty), and it all moves along acceptably enough. Better still, it mostly does away with random battles, by having enemies appear on the map as... blobby things you can run into and fight only if you wish.

I did rather enjoy this game, it must be said. It's big, there are a lot of bad guys to kill a lot of plot which is pretty generic again but could be worse, there's a lot of voice acting, and the inevitable prima donna character Zalos has won the heart of many a fan girl, all the more so for being a complete ass. There is some minor plot development you can alter, and also the whole 'who will Lloyd fall in love with?' thing going on that you can also influence, and... yeah. It's a decent enough alternative take on the FF-dominated genre. Far fewer of the expansive cut scenes, I am afraid, although they did put suitable cartoon effort into the ones that are there

(Ironically enough, I never DID play the Wii sequel, as it got trashed at review. Oh well!)

SCORE: 8/10

COMMENT: Again, standard RPing stuff from the days of FFX, to which it has a suspicious similarity. The action style is fun, just the whole game is lacking that piece of magic to make it a great game rather than a fair one.

GOLDEN SUN (GBA)

Hmm, another one I worry about reviewing as this one has got such good press, and much anticipation about the upcoming 3rd game in the series on DS.

Ok, so... standard Rping time again, level up, kill stuff, etc. Back to an FF-style turn based battle system this time, but certainly one of the first things I noticed whilst playing was how fast and efficient it wa,s so it scores well there. Each of your characters is kinda locked into what they can do but that's alright, I still prefer that to the no-personality-at-all style of games like FFVII, where the characters are so customisable as to be completely interchangeable. Character advancment is mostly handled by the capturing and attachment to characters of 'Djinn', a process which is pretty well done.

You play Isaac, native of some important village place that champions the power of the four elements from which the powers of the characters come. A prequel section tells of how he loses his brother Felix in some kind of unexplained natural disaster, in fact caused by a raid on the nearby sacred Mount Aleph for its alchemical secrets.

The failed raiders return as the main storyline picks up- now accompanied by Felix, not dead but taken and raised by these powerful mercenaries instead. This time they breach the mountain's defences and force an intervening Isaac into giving over three of the four vital alchemical star thingies, which they then intend to take to their respective elemental towers around the world and unleash their power, or some such thing. The guardian of the elemental stars charges Isaac with going and stopping them. I'm abbreviating heavily here, of course.

So, you and your party go out after them, gaining badly needed power along the way. You are aided by the psychic powers you pick up, which allow you to manipulate game objects along the way, which is the game's major distinctive schtick. Basically you learn ways of pushing, pulling, lifting, swinging etc. various ingame objects which form puzzles to be solved either to advance in plot or get special items. It works... quite well but I am not as taken with it as some are. I eventually found the whole process rather tiresome.

The world map is nicely free of random encounters (with some very specific exceptions) but it is also free of... anything interesting at all, making walking across it an entirely tedious and pointless experience, especially as some journeys are lengthy and mazelike. This was one of the biggest negatives of the game for me. And the dialogue... sooo much pointlessly wordy dull dialogue...

The game in fact climaxes at only the second of the four lighthouses/towers, as you defeat the bad guy mercenaries but have failed to stop them activating the power of the two lighthouses so far, and apparently they have others still working on it all. The Guardian let it be known that if all four were opened, the world would end, or some such thing. Well, the story is picked up in the sequel.

This game was... ahh. It was ok. It's well put together but the whole experience seemed very uninspiring and much of it was tedium. I honestly cannot see what the fuss was about.

Sound was good though.

SCORE: 7/10

COMMENT: Fast paced and well-designed, especially for a handheld, But so generic in every other way it is almost painful.

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GOLDEN SUN 2 THE LOST AGE (GBA)

More of the above.

No, I mean it... this game has NOTHING new. Ok, although you can transfer your achievements over from the original (I had to do it via passcode, the most hideously dull thing I ever did as it was hundreds of characters log), you in fact play Felix this time as go along... ummm... well, Felix was kinda on the side of the bad guys in the original, though this time it tries to give him a sympathetic look, which I never bought for a single moment. I didn't give a shit about Felix at all and I found him an entirely unsympathetic character. You go around, kinda at the behest of others of the mercenary group from the original but kinda not, with those mercenaries keen to avenge their comrades killed by Isaac et al at the end of the first game... but kinda not. Motivation seems a bit vague.

This time the world map is much larger... to NO good effect. Just gives even more tedium of wandering around it getting bored for no gain. It irritated the crap out of me. Meanwhile, the game is morally irritating too, trying to make you sympathise with this bandit leader who you are forced to break out of jail even though I had not the slightest wish or desire for, him having launched murderous raids along the coast (his own society's need for materials very much NOT being an excuse).

In the end, I abandoned the game near the end. I met up with ym old party- only to be crashingly disappointed. The much more sympathetic Isaac is apparently easily defeated by the new bad guys, which sucks, and then it turns out that due to a faster levelling mechanic, my Felix party is more powerful than my Isaac one. That REALLY sucked. The the third kick to the crotch is when the game becomes freaking FELIX's game, with Isaac saying that we all work for him now, and Isaac's original quest to STOP the lighthouses being opened abandoned and replaced with trying to open them instead. This is presented as a plot twist, whereas in fact all it is is a virtually deus ex volte face rendering the whole vibe of the first game pointless/ This kind of thing REALLY pisses me off, and my motivation to finish the game died off shortly after.

So that was that. If you are not going to expand on the original game, at least put a brain into your plotline. Once again, the heaps of praise on these games baffles me.

SCORE: 6/10

COMMENT: Nothing new compared to the first, which was already deeply generic, and meanwhile managed to up the tedium and also be highly irritating to boot. Poor.

---

My suspicion with both of these games is that the praise has come from reviewers who are console RP super-fans and have lost perspective in their reviewing. It might please the super-fans who just want more and more of the same, RP-wise, but objectively speakng these games, especially the second, do not deserve the praise they got. All the basics of RPing are done well on a handheld paltform but... it takes more than that!

There is nothing in the gameplay (which is pretty good but not legendary, and extremely dull in parts), plot (never more than average and with that godawful reversal in the sequel) or even presentation (which is very good for a GBA game, but doesn't do anyhting out of the ordinary for an RP and has long attack animations etc.) that makes these games deserve a higher mark. With the second game having bored and irritated me to the point of abandonment, I feel counter-comment on these games is needed.

So with game 3 coming on the DS... they had better DO something with it! I've played The World Ends with You now... I know what CAN be done with RP games if you make an effort. There's no excuse for being so amazingly... uninspired.

Originally posted by Ushgarak
I think you just had my issue with Zelda to a greater degree; I said the last half was weaker than the first half as it has nothing new to offer. Your limit was clearly much earlier than halfway. Did you like OoT?

Loved OoT.

But, yes, I think you're right. I loved the first bit of the game. I actually got almost to the end of the game. I think Zant is the next boss up.

Originally posted by Ushgarak
As for Half-Life... it's not actually my favourite game of all time or anything. I'm not a big FPS man. But I do rememebr it having, at the time, the most entertaining approach to trying to make an FPS more than just endless run and gun violence... even if only a little bit more. It's hard to see what the fuss was about these days as subsequent games in the gentre tended to use roughly the same design. I'm also a sucker for 'alternative viewpoint' things like Opposing Force.

It certainly had quite a few gamers salivating. I didn't even know it was such a "big" game until a few years later when a couple of friends were shitting themselves while talking about.

I must speak on Golden Sun.

I came into GS with the experience of, really, zero RPGs behind me. Perhaps that influenced me as the whole game was a brand new sort of experience for me, but I've always considered the plot (not the actual writing, which was needlessly long and convoluted most of the time, but the plot concept) to be one of the two games' most inspiring attributes. The idea that you were actually doing the eventual villain's dirty work for much of the game, with the real heroes painted as bad guys, was something that completely blew me away at the time.

That might have worked if it had been paionted as a manipulation they had tricked you into doing.

But on the contrary, it was the mystical godlike guardian of the stones that entrusted the quest to stop the lighthouses being lit to Isaac.

Having it turn out that the guardian was, effectively, an idiot and the lighthouses had to be lit so you should have just let the evil mercenaries do their work... well, as I say, other than invalidating all you worked for in the (superior) first game, it's also just shoehorning a twist in for the sake of it. I've never liked that.

Originally posted by Ushgarak
Regardless, ToP doesn't handle its time travel plot anywhere near as well. For a start, past, present (which you barely spend any time in) and future are stylistically identical, all in that typical 'magic with a hint of technology' fantasy style that is beloved, apparently. Secondly, the time travel plot serves no logical purpose other than being able to re-use the map with different town names. If the hero had been going to different countries instead of time zones, the game would have been identical.

That's mainly because unlike Chrono Trigger, Tales of Phantasia was not a time travel centric game, and the emphasis in that regard was certainly not on the state of the different time periods, but rather the time travel element was being used as a device for the heroes to essentially stop Dhaos and thwart his plans from one time line to the next. Placing an emphasis on the different time periods and highlighting their differences would have only detracted from the underlying theme of the game.

The problem is, why introduce the time travel at all? What did it actually bring? The only justification for it is circular. All adding time travel to ToP did was confuse a plot that was already rather shaky (much of which was only explained in a Japanese only spin-off/sequel).

It's not a disaster but it does point to the game not feeling as smoothly constructed as some of its rivals. CT, by contrast, used its plot and setting to compliment the game experience perfectly. ToP's time travelling stuck out as... weird.

I think it was mainly used to add to the sense of adventure and scope of the protagonists' quest to stop Dhaos, although I agree it was a little bit unnecessary.

Still Tales of Phantasia remains one of my favorite games ever largely because of how great the gameplay was. It had in my opinion some of the best puzzle based dungeons in the genre with amazing battle mechanics to boot. I also think that its primary strength as far as storytelling is concerned, rather than having an at its core very original and complex plot like games such as Chrono Trigger or Xenogears, was the manner in which the storyline was presented and progressed. The rate at which you learn about the different characters and the mythology of the setting and the sheer timing behind everything kept me completely immersed in the storyline the entire time through.

DEAD SPACE: EXTRACTION (Wii)

One of the advantages of the DS being underpowered is that it makes it an ideal platform to return to game styles that don't need much power- i.e.. platformers, in the form of New Super Mario Bros and the Castlevania games.

When Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles came out for the Wii, to my mind it proved a similar premise on the Wii. Other than the obvious suitability of the Wii for lightgun games, the fact is that no-one makes lightgun games any more (at least not decently) in favour of the obvious advantages of fully controllable 3d worlds. If the Wii cannot match other consoles in direct 3d power, perhaps it can revisit older game types and get more out of them. Umbrella Chronicles was developed by an effective B-team from Capcom and the graphics (the textures, especially) were a little rough around the edges, but it was a much better game than many were expecting. If you hate light gun games, it's not going to change that, but it did a lot of things with the idea, and it had a whole lot of replay value as well.

So it is nice that someone else finally got on the bandwagon with this prequel to the System Shock-style (in tone if not gameplay) sci-fi 3d action game Dead Space on the 360 and PC- which I must admit, I never played, which gets me some funny looks. Doing this was a risk as the successful Umbrella Chronicles is soon to see its sequel released, and it was very possible that this would look a bit rubbish compared to its zombie cousin. Well, we'll see how Darkside Chronicles goes- and the vibe I am hearing is good- but to my mind this was a good game indeed that pushed still further what you can do with a lightgun game. It's also one of the most plot-based games I have ever seen on the Wii, which is good to see, so the worry now is that not enough people are buying it.

This is a truly ensemble game in that you do not play one character; your perspective shifts between different characters as the game plays out and who you are playing is in no way guaranteed to survive. The game doesn't aim to be more ambitious than going through the series of events on the Aegis VII colony and the giant mining ship in orbit around it that is the setting of the original. In this generic but reasonably constructed sci-fi mining environment, a mysterious artifact- possibly of alien origin, though this is disputed- known as the 'marker' is being removed form the surface of this mining world- possibly without genuine authorisation- for further study. Upon its removal, very bad things start to happen. At first, people start to go mad and kill themselves and/or each other, and then their bodies start to turn into so-called 'Necromorphs' that further the general destruction. From several points of view, you re-live the experience from the moment the marker is first removed, to the colony descending into chaos, to the doomed attempt to reach the orbiting ship for safety and possible escape back home. You fight a variety of mad humans and necromorphs along the way. Most of the necromorphs are pretty resistant to body or head shots, so the name of the game is severing limbs off of them until they are no longer a threat. Although there are military guns around, many of your weapons are in fact improvised out of mining or cutting tools to further this approach. Meanwhile, your characters are also succumbing to the madness so as well as the general shocks and scares of people going nuts and weird things eating everyone, you soon learn not to trust what you are seeing on-screen as you flail out at enemies- and possibly entire narrative sequences- that are not really there.

This is all done very effectively but if you played the original you may well have a point in saying that a. that's the same gameplay style as the original and b. you pretty much know the plot of what happened already. You know the colony isn't going to get saved, for example. And these are fair points, so is this really worth playing?

Well first of all, there is a place for prequel plots even when you know what is going to happen, and the general aura of desperation against inevitable doom is effectively done- as well as leaving a few tidbits for later sequels to the original.

Secondly- well, it comes down to whether you can enjoy the Dead Space style as a lightgun game rather than a full 3d movey-aroundy game. As I say above, if you hate that style you'll STILL hate it, even though it is better than Umbrella Chronicles. It is better for several reasons. First, the control scheme is better, if you can believe such a thing. This is mostly to do with a much better form of weapon selection, which I believe Darkside Chronicles has adopted also. Secondly, the game manages to squeeze a surprising amount of interactivity and so forth out of the system. With various weapons (with alternate fire activated by turning the Wii remote sideways- a brilliant idea and a good use of the remote), interaction with the environment via the A button, AND with the telekinesis integrated on the nunchuk, the game has three individual ways to interact with the world which are used to good effect in various boss-battles and zero-g sequences. It also uses the Wii remote for simple but effective hacking puzzles, done not under time pressure but under 'you are being attacked at the same time' pressure, a mechanic they do especially well in two-player mode as both players have to switch jobs regularly between fighting off bad guys and hotwiring a control panel. Thirdly, the lightgun perspective allows the game to go at its own pace and tell its story as it goes along. Whilst this might seem less ambitious than the kind of plot development that Half-Life championed, this precise control allows them to do a lot of things in telling a story. And in fact, this might be the true 'point' behind a lightgun game. My comments above about horsepower might not really pan out. Metroid Prime 3 was prettier than Umbrella Chronicles and was fully 3d. And the points in Extraction where you can look all around you actually make it pretty clear that this COULD have been a full 3d game if it had wanted to be. So really, this is all about style. They couldn't have told the story the way they wanted to if they had not done it like this, and I have a certain respect for that.

Talking of looks- this is one of the most graphically sophisticated games the Wii has seen- far better than Umbrella Chronicles. Whilst bearing in mind it is still a Wii, they've squeezed a heck of a lot out of it, and it normally runs at full speed as well. The sound is good and the voice acting- whilst in standard hokey sci-fi mode- is good stuff, and the entire presentational experience is a very neat package that I always like to see more of in games. Perhaps slightly surprisingly... it's not actually very scary. Sure, there are a few shocks, and it has its dark places (lit by shaking the remote to activate a gloworm) but whilst it creates a good atmosphere of tension and desperation, it's not actually creeping you out. Meanwhile, the game has a good amount of camera shake as your perspective becomes desperate- and in a welcome move, you can set in the options how much shake there is in case you find it offensive.

What it IS doing is talking a lot. This is a very narrative game, and not just from the text and voice logs left around (in another neat twist, the voice logs actually funnel their speech through the Wii remote, meaning that if you want to listen to them you have to hold it to your ear as you might be doing if you were actually there in the game). Some people might not like this- and in many ways they fulfil the definition of unskippable cutscene- but I have to say, I enjoyed it all.

It has a few other bonuses thrown in. It has one of the prequel comics (voice acted etc.) supplied with it. There is a good selection of bonus action-only shooty stages. It is fully co-op with another player (no plot explanation given for that- you just have another shooter, which is fair) in a drop-in, drop-out capacity. It has multiple difficulty levels for replay- though on first play through, I recommend putting it up as hard as possible, for this game is not a very hard one, and although you should get into double figures of play time, the main plot isn't huge. The bonus stages are an even more welcome addition in that respect.

So that's that. In the end, just a fancily dressed up light gun game. But all that fancy dressing is actually rather fun. More stuff like this on the Wii, please...

(Also... there are not many games where you are forced to hack your own hand off...)

CARDINAL SINS: Unskippable narrative parts probably can get annoying- though in honesty I never experienced such annoyance

SCORE: 8/10

COMMENT: In technical quality, gameplay and plot, better than Umbrella Chronicles. Good, casual action fun with a reasonable storyline attached- worth a look.

Meanwhile, your characters are also succumbing to the madness so as well as the general shocks and scares of people going nuts and weird things eating everyone, you soon learn not to trust what you are seeing on-screen as you flail out at enemies- and possibly entire narrative sequences- that are not really there.

...that is awesome.

I knew I was already very interested in the game, but there were some elements I wasn't aware of, now I want it even more. Thanks Ush.

Originally posted by Ushgarak

[b]
CARDINAL SINS: Unskippable narrative parts probably can get annoying- though in honesty I never experienced such annoyance

SCORE: 8/10

COMMENT: In technical quality, gameplay and plot, better than Umbrella Chronicles. Good, casual action fun with a reasonable storyline attached- worth a look. [/B]

I'm not sure a random 10 minute play gives a good appreciation of the strengths of the game.

I don't think ten minutes of play is even close to enough to judge anything in any game - except maybe the opening cutscene. And in some games, not even that!

Meh, I got bored with the long and slow narration. You can't even skip the cutscenes.
But I must admit, it's not to shabby for a Wii title.

Well, ok, sure. If you don't like story in your game, there's a lot of wasted time here.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA- SPIRIT TRACKS (DS)

This game snuck up on me somewhat. I remember anxiously awaiting the release of Phantom Hourglass, but in contrast I had pretty much ignored this one until it arrived through the mail from my retailer (I'd remembered to pre-order it, at least).

This seems odd for a Zelda release. Maybe it was because the promotional material hadn't really wowed me; Phantom Hourglass was good enough but two years have gone by and it did not look much new had been added. Anyway, I played through it over the Christmas period.

A sequel to Hourglass, in turn a sequel to Wind Waker, this sees things set 100 years after the Wind Waker continuity where it is evident that the promise from the end of the original has been realised, with a new Hyrule having been founded on lands to the north of the drowned original. The game is less directly connected in that you are not playing the same characters- rather their descendants- but ever so slightly more connected in continuity, as Phantom Hourglass was pretty much a sidestory, whilst this advances the overall Zelda plot a tiny tiny bit, if only in the first 5 minutes.

The game has a lot of the trappings of Zelda continuity in the re-built Hyrule- Link, Zelda, a Hyrule castle, Lost Woods, Gorons etc. but it all feels a bit sparse- fair in that it is a young kingdom, but still unsatisfying. It creates a new- and not very interesting- bad guy in the form of the demon king Malladus, defeated long ago by spirits etc. and locked up by means of a spirit tower powered by the titular spirit tracks all around the realm. These tracks are used as railways by the new Hyrulians.

One of the biggest problems here is that the plot is a re-hash of Phantom Hourglass, with the Spirit Tower replacing the giant dungeon of before and Malladius replacing Bellum, or whatever the PH bad guy was called. You have four quarters to the game world; you do a bit of the central dungeon to get access to each quarter, coming back to the tower each time to get more access, except you are riding around in a train instead of sailing in a boat. There are improvements- most notably in that you don't have to redo parts of the tower you have already done- and the game is probablty literally better (control improvements are welcomed, like double-tapping to roll), but I felt an enormous sense of doing the same thing all over again whilst playing through the game.

The train segments are pretty dull as well, and putting instant-death enemy trains to collide with along the way just made it dull AND annoying- you cannot get out of the way of the darn things if you are locked on the same rail, and coming to a stop by a station is clumsy enough that you can get killed by an enemy train trying to do it. There is a system of sidequests involving ferrying around passengers and cargo which have to be some of the most drawn-out and tedious tasks I have ever played. Poor.

The game also has an Ocarina-style music system. This has been done in an interesting fashion via a combination of the touch screen and blowing into the microphone (making it imposible to do in a noisy environment). However, the musc is all used so linearly and with so few songs, that in the end they just amount to fancy keys, and again having to play music when you found a spirit just so he could guive you something soon became very boring. Nothing interesting was done with this system.

All of which makes me sound like I have a real downer on this game. Well, that's not fair. The core of the game is still very good- general Zelda action-adventure. I still like the control scheme and a certain amount of effort has gone into the temples. The temples themselves are relatively short, whilst the spirit tower is larger. Too large, actually- my final visit to the spirit tower was covered with more tedium.

It is the central part of the game that works well. The rest is a mis-step. The start is dull- they try and bring you into the setting to experience it, but a handheld DS game cannot manage that sort of immersive atmosphere. There is no reason to depart from the formula of Link to the Past- get straight into it! And long before the end I was bored as well- I just felt I had already seen what the game had to offer. I already marked down Twilight Princess a little for running out of steam (ooh! Train pun!) at the halfway point, and I have to do so more here, because this game is a near-copy of the last one to start with.

The final boss battle was rather good though- dramatic and with plenty of invention, including a dual perspective end where you control Link on one screen and see what Zelda is seeing from another. One but that has you bouncing fireballs away from Zelda was FAR too long and repetitive, however, so even that was a little spoiled. Ah well.

So, not bad, but I am honestly underwhelmed. Also- fair enough on developing the franchise so Zelda is with you throughout the game, even if literally only in spirit. But their point made about the girl being brave enough to go with the guy in these modern days is kinda spoiled by having Zelda terrified of rats, even when she is inside a giant, indestructible, metal suit. So much for girl power.

CARDINAL SINS: Long, drawn-out and unavoidable transport sequences that add artificial length ot the game- artificial length is always a cardinal sin

SCORE: 7/10

COMMENT: Good at its heart, but with a bunch of irritations and not enough new to offer. The basic premise of such things is fading now.

METROID PRIME TRILOGY (WII)

A Quick Note

I've already reviewed these games separately, but I did want to make a comment. I was not tempted to buy this compilation but it made a convenient thing to ask for as a Christmas present when I was out of ideas.

(For those of you that do not know, this is just all three Prime games in one set, with the first two Gamecube entried updated for widescreen and the Wii remote control scheme from Corruption).

I guess I am more experienced at the game now, but I also turned the difficulty up for my play through Prime, and it was three years ago that I last did it. So the fact that my 'Metroid Rage' was far, FAR less than before can only be accounted for by one thing- the improved control scheme. Clearly the original Gamecube controls, despite trying hard, were utterly lacking.

Obviously the game doesn't help itself much for rage moments with badly placed save points and uskippable cut scenes, but in the end I barely died at all. Just goes to show how fundamental good control is.

Only one issue- they have tried hard, but when they introduced the Wii controls, Corruption didn't have a weapon select system, basically as there were not enough buttons to go around. Unfortunately, the frst two games DID have selectable weapons, and they have had to improvise the selection system. It works ok, but I lost count of the number of times I switched visor mode instead of weapon and vice-versa, which rarely happened first time through. So nothing is perfect.

(Oh, they've integrated the bonus system from Corruption into the first two games as well now, so you can achieve stuff to unlock extras. But gah! Why is the friend voucher system local region only? Nintnedo are always rubbish with international stuff- the mail system in FFIII didn't work across regions either. Booo...)

So, what can I say? it is a great value package and the originals are improved... but the chances are that if you are interested, you already played them all.