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GameStop launches Casual online store

GameStop has recently announced that their online Casual Store has gone live featuring digital downloads of just about every casual PC game you could think of. And, to celebrate its launch, GameStop is offering 50% off on select downloads with the full list made viewable, here.

Games featured in GameStop’s Casual store include Plants Vs. Zombies, Peggle, Roller Coaster Tycoon, etc. Additionally, GameStop will host over 800 casual game trials that you can download free of charge.

Rumble Fighter European open beta live

The European open beta for Rumble Fighter has gone live today, as hosted by OGPlanet. The game is described as a “casual fighting multiplayer online game“. By the way, it’s also free. Players who reach level 5 within the beta period will receive an exclusive in-game item – The Ultimate Beta-fro of Awesomness. Sounds enticing.

The game itself has very low system requirements and looks pretty fun, so there’s no real excuse not to try it out. Right now, the publisher is not offering any premium cash services, so if you want to take advantage of the game in its most balanced form, now is the time.

For American gamers, the game is already out of its beta stage and can be downloaded over at the North American Rumble Fighter site.

Fishing Master World Tour Game Review–Calm and Frantic By Turns

Once, long ago, I discovered the glory of a certain sports game, then on the Playstation 2.  It was Hot Shots Golf, and it became one of my personal favorite relaxation games.  I’d line up my shots, consider angles, and then take my shots, one right after another, on beautiful courses to the sounds of birds and the occasional insect.  After a while, I never thought I’d find a game like that again, until I found Fishing Master World Tour on the Wii.

The plot–and yes, there’s a plot, which actually elevates this one a couple notches–puts you as a young fisherman (in the generic sense–you can be a fisherwoman if the mood so strikes) who’s gone venturing out with his pet dog (or her pet dog, or either of theirs’ pet cat) to become the world’s greatest–a Fishing Master.  And of course, the only way to be a master of anything is by going forth and doing it repeatedly.  If you want to be a Pokemon Master you have to catch a load of pokemon.  But if you want to be a Fishing Master, you’ve got to catch a lot of fish.  Along with plenty of other stuff, including the keys to the boat that’ll be carrying you around the world.  You’ll play various tournaments all over the world, and engage in various quests besides.

The Wii, as you’ve probably already figured out, is pretty much tailor-made for any kind of fishing game.  With its motion capture technology and lower emphasis on graphics, it’s perfect for the kind of gameplay that fishing games require.  You can pull back on the Wiimote to cast, and the nunchuk makes for an excellent rapid-reel system.  The combination of a perfect rod controller and a perfect reel controller, plus a solid overall environment that doesn’t need a whole lot of graphic processing capability–how much computing power do you need to portray a lake with some fish?  They’ve been doing that since back before the PS1, so even the Wii can’t flub this job.

Granted, it’s a fishing game.  More specifically, it’s JUST a fishing game.  All you do is fish.  You’ll cast your line out and you’ll let it sit until you get a bite.  You’ll have the option of selecting various baits, as well as regular chances to upgrade your rods.  But no matter how many fancy bells and whistles are ever attached, at the end of the day it’s still just throw line, catch fish, repeat.

This brings me back nicely to my original point, that this may well be the best chill game I’ve played since Hot Shots Golf.  You cast your line, you catch fish.  But the fish will FIGHT.  And when you get that fight, you’ll really be in for a fight, snapping your rod back and forth to tire out the fish so you can reel it in.  It’s unusually frantic for a game like this, in fact, it’s almost out of place.  But it fits, in its way–that’s what real fishing is.  Long periods of calm punctuated by a fish fighting for its life against nearly impossible odds.

There will still be, however, plenty of long periods of calm, and staring at that bobber, waiting for a fish to strike can be downright reflective.  Relaxing.  And just enough to make Fishing Master: World Tour one of my favorite chill games.

My Sims Party Game Review–Like A Freshman Kegger

Now, you may be asking yourself at this very moment why I would compare a purely nonoffensive game like My Sims Party (now available on, not surprisingly, the Wii) to a high school drinking party?  Well, I actually just told you why, but let me elaborate.  See, a freshman kegger, a high school drinking party, has about as much chance of getting actual alcohol as, say, Dick Cheney has of being elected president.  It would require an incredible intersection of events–extremely permissive parents, an understanding elder relative who didn’t fear anything less than extremely permissive parents, outright bribery–to actually happen, so the result you’re left with is a party that promises to be a lot more than it actually is.

This is, of course, exactly the case with My Sims Party, a game that promises to be a whole lot more than it actually is but seems unable to deliver.

The plot is pretty simple, as is generally the case for Sims games of any stripe–you’ve moved to a new town, which you get to name (I called mine Steveland, because it’s so very plausible and sounds almost exactly like Cleveland, only with two letters changed).  The tourism board of this little town is desperate for a way to keep residents in the town, working and contributing to the tax base–and of course is always looking to bring in more people–thus they’ve hit on the idea of the Festival.  The town regularly (at least once a month from the look of it) declares a holiday and puts on a tournament of various minigames, including running luggage from one side of a hotel lobby to another, dancing at a night club, scooping up to-order ice cream cones and making pizzas.   This all will, of course, be accomplished by doing various things with your Wiimote.

All of this sounds fun enough on the surface–we’ve played a literal slew of games like this already–but the big problem with this one isn’t the cutesy-poo characters or the repetition or the fact that most of the “games” at this Festival look like a way for the townspeople to get free labor out of us, but rather that the controls are seriously malfunctioning.  When I went to rock out at the dance club, they assured me that all I’d have to do is “shake my Wiimote”, which sounds a lot dirtier than it actually is, but when the time came to do the shaking, it refused to accept my commands no matter which direction or how hard i shook the Wiimote.  Worse yet, it wouldn’t even accept simple button press commands.  Scooping the ice cream cones was also not an easy thing as my scoop would frequently overshoot the particular flavor of ice cream I was after.

So that’s why the comparison, and that’s why I can’t recommend this game at all.  Sure, it looks like it’d be a lot of fun.  it even sounds like a party.  But when you get there and discover that the promised keg is nowhere to be had and the game barely recognizes that you even have a Wiimote, there’s just not that much point in sticking around.

Let’s Tap Game Review–Let’s Not And Say We Did

I know I’m coming down awfully hard on today’s title, but I assure you it’s with good reason.  I’m going to preface the remarks today by saying, unequivocally:  Sega, thank you for taking chances.  These chances don’t always work out, as is the case with Let’s Tap for the Wii, but still–I’m glad you took the chance all the same.

Basically, Let’s Tap is a collection of five smaller games all controlled by the same method: setting your Wiimote down on a box, preferably a tissue box or some similar cardboard box and tapping on the box.  Yes, that’s right–in this game, you will almost never touch your Wiimote.  You’ll play games like Tap Runner (where you compete in a four-man foot race by tapping on the box your Wiimote rests upon with various degrees of pressure), Rhythm Tap (where you’ll tap out a series of rhythms in time with on-screen indicators), Silent Blocks (where you’ll remove blocks from a stack in a bid to lower an item stacked on top of them to the ground), Bubble Voyager (where you move a space-suited character through a series of obstacles) and Visualizer (which isn’t so much a game as it is a way to play around with the tapping system to make various special effects).

I’m somewhat at a loss by this game.  There’s no storyline here–it’s almost as if Sega were making a demo reel for some greater application to be announced later. I admit that the concept is unique enough–I definitely don’t remember the last time I played a game that literally required that I never touch my controller–but I’m just slightly dismayed by the results it yielded.  Sure, this game is fun, but not for very long.  There’s just so little TO it that it can’t produce much in the way of a fun factor.  All you do is tap, tap, tap a box over and over and over and over again for little or no clear reason.  And when you smack a box a couple hundred times with your hand or fingers in rapid succession, chances are you’re going to be left with a sore arm and not much else to show for it.

In fact, after playing a round of Let’s Tap, I’m left with a whole lot more questions than answers.  Why did they even bother with this game?  There’s so very little to it that it’s almost not worth playing, except as some kind of precursor, some kind of training implement to a future game.  And it could definitely be interesting–think about a version of Missile Command where you fire missiles by PRESSING A BUTTON corresponding to a tap on a box.  Especially if you were to use the Wiimote simultaneously to aim by turning the Wiimote slightly to the left or right to adjust an aiming reticle before firing.  That’d be awesome.

But I’m getting away from the point here–the point being that Let’s Tap, by itself, is really not much of a game.  It may represent a greater game to come, but for right now, Let’s Tap should better be titled Let’s Avoid This Piece of Crap And Get On With Our Lives.

Hell’s Kitchen Game Review–Another Game That Shouldn’t Be Fun

When I first got my hands on a copy of Hell’s Kitchen for the Wii, I was pretty convinced that there was no way this could be entertaining.  I mean, for crying out loud, you ever see that show?  It’s just some British guy screaming profanity for an hour while other people cook.  And yet, somehow, despite all reason and good common sense, this game is unaccountably fun.  There’s no two ways about it; Hell’s Kitchen is fun, but it probably shouldn’t be.

Basically, in Hell’s Kitchen, much like the show you take on the role of an aspiring chef in the none too tender mercies of Gordon Ramsay. You’ll manage a kitchen and a dining room, seating patrons, taking orders, preparing and detailing food to be served.  Actually, you’ll just tell a waiter what to do by pointing and clicking with your Wiimote.   Everything you’ll do, from mixing ingredients to clearing dishes, is done by pointing and clicking the Wiimote.

You may be wondering how such a game could be on the Wii in the first place, let alone merely rated T, because as anyone who’s actually seen the show knows watching it on network TV ends up with it sounding like a Morse code tutorial as designed by someone on a whole lot of meth.  But they actually managed to pull it off by A. continuing the grand tradition of bleeping out any and all of Ramsay’s profane dialogue and B. making the game itself little more than a casual computer game knockoff with licensing bonuses.  Playing Hell’s Kitchen felt like nothing so much as a particularly deep episode of Diner Dash.

On the one hand, a casual game like Diner Dash is pretty well suited to the Wii’s admittedly inferior graphics capabiliities and control scheme that focuses on the point and click.  Adding on a license like Hell’s Kitchen actually boosts the credibility of things a bit, and gives it a connection to something people are already familiar with.  There’s also a really interesting strategy element here that bears mentioning–dishes are all made differently, and you may have three or four dishes to process per table.  Thus, you’ll have to figure out which ingredients you need, and in which order you need them.  You may need, for example, two eggs, three fruits and two grains.  If you’re smart you’ll already have one of each pre-made before you even start.  But then you’ll have to start preparing ingredients on the fly, seeing which dishes will take longest to prepare and taking advantage of the time lag to prepare the other ingredients.  Plus you’ll have to do the whole thing on the fly under a time limit.

See what I mean?  Despite the fact that this game is fairly simple there’s a lot of different permutations involved here, and getting your head around all of them can be downright difficult.  That dichotomy is actually kind of weird, and adds to the fun factor.  This game shouldn’t be this complex.  Or this entertaining.  And yet, it is.  There’s an odd sort of compulsion to this game that makes you long to jam your success in Ramsay’s smirking little maw and make it all the way to master chef.

And you’ll get the chance to do exactly that here. Even better, you’ll get actual recipes that you can try if you’re desperate to make an incredibly complex dish (seriously, there’s a recipe for a salad that requires BLANCHING vegetables.  I took one look at it and said, no, I think I’ll just cut some lettuce.).  But the key thing is, Hell’s Kitchen is a hell of a game.

Elebits Game Review–Deranged Plot, Weirder Play

I have to hand it to the Wii, I really do, because this is the system that seems bound and determined to, at all costs, take CHANCES.  They will do the strangest things for little or no more reason than THEY CAN.  And the perfect evidence of that concept is found in a little game from Konami called Elebits, out now for the Nintendo Wii.

See, this game may have one of the most insane plots EVER.  A vaguely earthlike society–I say this because there are some sheer impossibilities going on here–has advanced to about twentieth-century technology because they discovered electricity a long time ago.  Nothing odd there, except their electricity doesn’t come from wind or solar or coal.  This society gets its electricity thanks to a race of tiny little creatures called Elebits, which fell to the planet’s surface on a giant lightning bolt.  The people of the planet promptly enslaved the Elebits by jamming them into their appliances and using their electrical power to run their blenders and heaters and computers and whatnot.  Oh, sure, the game SAYS that the people and Elebits were FRIENDS, but I don’t buy a word of it.  After all, who’s coming out ahead in that little arrangement?  It sure isn’t the Elebits.

But anyway–you’ll be playing an eight year old kid of such spectacular shortsightedness that he wishes the Elebits didn’t exist, throwing the planet into a pitch black barbarism just so his Elebit-researcher parents would spend more time with him.  It’s about the time he actually articulates that wish that the entire town goes dark.  The Elebits are asleep on the job, and its up to you, armed with your dad’s capture gun, to tear the house apart in search of the Elebits so you can get them back to work and watch your favorite TV show.

See what I mean?  This game couldn’t be more deranged if you were required to wear the Wiimote like a hat.

You’ll be blundering around your house, using your “capture gun“, which is basically a portable tractor beam that apparently doesn’t require Elebit power to work at the lowest levels, to lift things and shake things and throw things around so you can find those lazy little bastards and return them to their electrical enslavement.

This is actually fairly entertaining, at least for a while, until you start getting into narrow rooms and get hampered by a “breakage limit” in which you’re suddenly no longer allowed to smash things open in search of Elebits.  I call that a cheat, myself–I was gleefully throwing potted plants around the room without consequence and now, all of a sudden, I break open that vase to look for Elebits and it’s game over?  Screw that, says I, with all the emphasis it deserves.

But still, Elebits is absolutely a departure from literally everything that came before it.  I can’t think of anything even vaguely resembling a parallel on this one and it shows.  This is a fun game that does start getting in its own way after a while, but there’s still fun enough in this one to make it a solid rental, if nothing else.

EA showcases Need for Speed: NITRO

If you’re looking for a super realistic racing game, this isn’t the one. The game you’re looking for is Need for Speed: Shift. If, however you are looking for a casual racer for the Wii and/or Nintendo DS, Need for Speed: NITRO may be just for you.

All we have to go by at this point are some screenshots for both consoles and from the looks of it, they look like exactly what you’d expect from a Wii or DS title; lackluster visual. OK so the gameplay might be there but a racing game without bangin’ graphics just isn’t for me.

You can check out some more screenshots, including ones from the Nintendo DS version, thanks to Kotaku, here.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Game Review–Not What I Had In Mind

I admit, that while on Kongregate, I found a game that turned out to be a whole lot different from what I expected.  When you walk in on a game that calls itself Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (WTF for those of you who don’t know radio lingo), you don’t exactly know what to expect out of it.  So when I got a mild Space Invaders clone, I was somewhat relieved if a bit disappointed.

In Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the White House is under attack, and you’ll take command of what might be a tank and what might be a column to fire random blobs at threats that fall from the sky, everything from paratroopers to UFOs to bombs and all the way up to enormous cruise missiles.  You’ll go up in rank for every wave you survive (I personally got as high as major), and every enemy you miss adds to your threat level, which will end the game upon reaching a certain height.
Certain things could have improved the game vastly–different weapons, various other threats besides the standard four that I’ve already listed, even a way to lower the threat level as you proceed would’ve made for a deeper gameplay experience.  But no, we’re stuck with a fairly bare-bones shooter that doesn’t bring in a whole lot of fun.

It’s not exactly a bit of long term fun, but I don’t necessarily regret giving it a try.  I’d likely never go back so I really can’t recommend it, but if you do feel like giving it a try, you might not be terribly disappointed.