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2K Sports to release NBA 2K10 Draft Combine

2K Sports has recently let us know that they will be releasing a pre-release character creation feature for NBA 2K10 entitled NBA 2K10 Draft Combine.

Essentially what this is is a series of mini-games that will allow take their created characters and run through different drills to boost their stats and prepare them for the actual game.

NBA 2K10 Draft Combine will be released over Xbox Live and PSN this September for 400 Microsoft Points or $5 respectively. The actual game, NBA 2K10, however will hit store shelves for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii and PC on October 6th of this year.

via Joystiq

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time Game Review–Better Than You’d Expect

‘ll be honest with you, folks–you know I always am, but this time I have to be particularly blunt about what I’m saying.  I always get a little freaked out whenever I hear about an RPG for Nintendo’s Wii.  There’s just something so very…not right…about the idea.  See, an RPG, in the commonly meant sense of the term, involves a huge production and graphical overload and a story that goes on and on for days or even weeks.  And when you think of the kind of systems that can handle such a venture, “the Wii” is generally about as far down the list as, say, “Colecovision”.

But even I can be wrong–savor the flavor, kids, because this doesn’t happen very often.  I tried Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time and got a pretty good surprise out of it.

As for the plot…wow.  On RPG Cliche Day–okay, on a young man’s sixteenth birthday, he oversleeps, gets up late and dashes off to his Coming Of Age Ceremony.  Yes, they even CALL it the Coming Of Age Ceremony.  I’m both amazed and horrified.  Anyway, after completing said ceremony, he returns to the village to discover that his best friend’s little sister has contracted some kind of mysterious illness that resembles nothing so much as radiation sickness.  No, really.  And it gets better.  So now, on his sixteenth birthday, the boy has to violate the laws of his village and actually LEAVE to go find medicine to heal the “crystal sickness”.

Yeah, you heard all of that right.  An opening jam packed with cliches leads to a little girl getting radiation sickness that, if she survives it, will actually mutate her into being a super-strong entity with rapid healing powers, which turns out to be the exact same disease the hero had, and then the hero will actually break the law to go fetch medicine but no one seems to care about the legal issues here at ALL.

This may well be the most predictable and yet the most ridiculous game plotline I’ve ever heard.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen so many tropes in one place, only to be followed up by a ridiculous series of plot holes sufficiently large to drive a herd of chocobo through.

And yet, the game play isn’t half bad.  You’ll get some mini-games in the middle of this full-blown series of adventures, and there’s plenty of variety to be had here.  Sure, it’s all a bit cookie-cutter and plain vanilla, but there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it.  It’s a fairly fun game, and with a little bit of excitement.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time isn’t exactly the greatest game ever, but it’s a far cry from the worst, too.  There’s reason enough to give it a try that it’ll make at least a decent rental, even if it won’t wind up taking over your life.  If you’ve got a yen for RPGs and a decent tolerance for half-baked plotlines, you’ll probably have a good time with this one.

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.

Wario Ware: Smooth Moves Game Review–Defies Any Easy Description

Sometimes there’s a real downside to writing about Wii games.  Like I said in the headline, they defy any real or simple description.  It’s hard to tell what exactly is going on sometimes.  They can even be downright confusing.  That’s definitely the case with Wario Ware: Smooth Moves.

Long, long ago, civilization was infested with these things called “form batons”, mystical objects that contained vast power and ostensibly controlled a race of tiny humanoids if the hieroglyphs are to be believed.  Anyway, one day, Nintendo’s biggest anti-hero and treasure hunter extraordinaire Wario was sitting in his chair at home, sucking down cake and donuts and suchlike when one of those tiny humanoids from the hieroglyphs abducts Wario’s snacks.  Naturally, Wario can’t stand for such nonsense, and thus he chases after the tiny humanoid to recover his snacks.  What he finds instead is one of the legendary form batons.  Thus, Wario will join a whole cast of motley characters, including a dog and cat taxi driving team, two inveterate gamers, a cheerleader, an inventor and a witch with her pet demon familiar in a series of slice of life-style vignettes as they go about their lives.

You, meanwhile, will have to accomplish a series of tasks in rapid succession, accomplished by doing various things with your Wiimote.  You’ll hold it like a waiter holding a tray, like a remote control, up in front of your nose like an elephant with its trunk, and on top of your head like a mohawk to do any of a number of things, including driving a car, picking up trash with a remote controlled robot, picking your nose, and scrubbing a cow’s ass.  No, seriously.  You’re going to do all that and even less savory tasks.  Frankly, I was amazed enough to find myself working my Wiimote into a position where I could ram a finger up a polygonal nose on a polygonal face, but when I started running a scrub brush over a cow’s rump roast, well, that just did it for me.  I had nothing to say.

The graphics are, of course, last generation weak, but the biggest problem with Wario Ware: Smooth Moves is also the biggest joy–the controls.  Several times I found myself about to start a game and I was left totally unaware of what to actually DO.  Oh, sure, I knew how to HOLD the Wiimote–they make that perfectly clear from the second you start a game–but I didn’t always know what to do from there.  Did I swing to the left?  The right?  When do I pick up?  And most unaccountably of all, why won’t the Wiimote acknowledge ANYTHING I do, no matter what direction I move?  This didn’t happen often, but when it did, it really spoiled the game.

I have to admit that I enjoyed this game.  I liked the rapid switching of games, and how at higher speeds it could be tough to keep up.  There was some challenge involved here–it was no walkover.  It took me two, even three times to get through some stages.

All things considered, this is definitely a game to get your hands on and wrap some smooth moves around.

Mario Party DS Site Finds The Internet

The Official Mario Party DS website is up, but unfortunately only the Japanese version is up at the moment, but expect an English equivalent to arrive some time soon. It’s being created by Hudson again, similar to Mario Party 8 for Wii. If you can’t wait, or similarly can’t read Japanese, then here’s a fansite to tide fans over until something more… English finds the internet. Either way, minigames + stylus = quite a lot of fun to look forward to.

Bubble Exploding Wii-Ware Game Revealed: Pop

Coming to WiiWare when it’s released early in 2008, beside Final Fantasy, Pokemon. and Dr Mario is Pop. What’s Pop? Take a small guess. *waits* You were close, it’s about popping bubbles. Developed by a new development company based in Sydney, Australia called Nnooo (pronounced “No”), Pop is about exploding bubbles at the press of a Wiimote button. Sounds easy, sounds accessible, sounds fun – at least for a while. Points are gained in combos, score multipliers, and bubbles of different worth.Other features include powerups, and the ability of up to four people will be able to play at one time. Time will tell how fun merely clicking on score bubbles will be, I’d imagine this game would be similar to a few seen in in Wii Play.Read(Pop)