SOTS Game Review – Spider-Man: Friend or Foe
 |
| PLATFORM |
| Xbox 360, Playstation 2, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, PC, Playstation Portable |
| DEVELOPER |
| Next Level Games Artificial Mind and Movement Beenox Studios |
| PUBLISHER |
| Activision |
| GENRE |
| Action/Adventure |
| # OF PLAYERS |
| 1-2 |
| Rating |
| E10+ |
| U.S. RELEASE DATE |
| October 2nd, 2007 |
| MSRP |
| $49.99 XBox 360 & Nintendo Wii $39.99 Playstaton 2 & PSP $29.99 Nintendo DS $19.99 PC |
Spider-Man Friend or Foe
OVERVIEW
Alien PHANTOMs have come to Earth and are wreaking havoc! It’s up to Spider-Man to stop them!
REVIEW
I’m going to cut to the chase here. This game is easy. Ridiculously easy. But that’s ok. Spider-Man Friend or Foe is rated E10+, and specifically geared towards kids. With that in mind, this game suddenly goes from overly simplistic to well put together.
The story is pretty straightforward. Spider-Man is ambushed by the Green Goblin, Sandman, Doc Ock, and Venom. After the New Goblin (Harry Osborne, I presume) makes a save and tries to even the odds, all six are attacked by some weird robots, and all are kidnapped by said robots except for Spider-Man, who is rescued by a S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. Nick Fury tells Spider-Man about the robots (PHANTOMs), what they are, and why they must be defeated, and sets Spider-Man loose on his first mission.
After a brief explanation, you are set loose in the operations center onboard the heli-carrier. This part I liked – it was simple, and small. One of the major weaknesses of games like X-Men Legends was the sprawling mission-hubs (something they improved a little in the second game) – there is no such issue here. You have various terminals for your missions, one terminal to select a side-kick, one for upgrades, one for in-game rewards, and one for game options. All right next to each other – no needless exploring and mindless talking needed. You get in, buy your upgrades, get your partner, and go.
Spider-Man and Black Cat team against some PHANTOMs
To start the game, Spider-Man can be paired with one of two “sidekicks,” Prowler or Silver Sable. As the game progresses, you encounter allies or face enemies who are being mind controlled by the PHANTOMs. The allies join you (are unlocked as available sidekicks) pretty well immediately, and the enemies will join you after you defeat them, and break the PHANTOMs mental control. The look of each of the characters is based on the movie design, and for those characters that never appeared in the movie, they are basically given their comic look with a little updated feel. Generally the characters look good. They are a little cartoony at times, but it fits the tone of the game. I couldn’t figure out why they made Black Cat so short though – but that was just the comic geek in me in revolt. There are two exclusive characters on the PSP version – Carnage and Electro, so there is that little perk if you own one of those systems.The mission levels are extremely straight-forward. You could almost call this game a sidescroller. The level’s map does twist and turn in three dimensions, but you have a very specific path to follow from the start of the level to the end, and you get attacked at certain parts of the level by groups of PHANTOMs. Simplistic, but mindless fun. It didn’t take me too long to realize that this game really was just an old-fashioned button mashing sidescroll, and I suddenly relaxed and started to have a lot better time. I had no idea that modern gaming had become more stressful!
Spider-Man battles a group of opponents
The controller configuration is pretty standard with attack, jump, and throw buttons. Pushing them in different combinations will yield different results. But you don’t need to worry about complicated button combinations to perform ultra-moves. As I said, this is a button masher, so you probably could get through this game using only simple attacks. Mixing it up a little can be fun though. Juggling enemies with Spider-Man’s webbing was easier than you might imagine, and it didn’t take long to feel comfortable rushing large groups of PHANTOMs. The control scheme of the various partners is identical – of course they each have different assets, so their attacks manifest differently. They also have differing speeds depending on who they are – bigger characters like Doc Ock move considerably slower than lighter allies like Iron Fist. It doesn’t have a huge impact on the game, but it is a noticeable difference.Throughout the game you gather tech tokens, which can be used to purchase upgrades in the heli-carrier. As with everything in this game, the upgrades are extremely simple. This is a good thing in this case – this is a button masher, so if there was an overly complicated upgrade system like there was in Legends 2, I probably would have put the game down. The upgrades don’t do a ton, and they definitely aren’t needed to beat the game, so for maximum fun it is better to just upgrade Spidey’s web attacks first before boosting the stats of your team members.
Tokens are also spent whenever you “die.” Now you can’t actually die in this game – if you are “killed” by an opponent, or fall off a building, you return to the board, and spend a few tech tokens automatically. Of course, if you don’t have tech tokens, you really don’t need to worry, you still come back. This takes a lot of the frustration out of the game, but it also takes some of the challenge out of it. Of course, I have to go back to the rating of this game, and remember this really is made for kids, and that kind of explains it. In many ways, this game reminds me of the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game: you die, pop back in right where you fell, and if you run out of lives, you can just pop another quarter in and keep going. Granted, you don’t have a limited number of lives in Spider-Man Friend or Foe, but the effect is the same. There is really nothing to stop you from just pushing forward until you reach the end of the game. Hardcore gamers might not like that, but casual and young gamers will really enjoy having a game where they won’t be penalized for being less skilled with the controller.
Of course, because this game is so well suited for casual gamers, that automatically makes it a good title to try out on the Wii, which I did. The game is pretty well the same on the Wii. The look isn’t any different, and surprisingly the controls aren’t really either. They try to make some use of the motion control, but thankfully they show tremendous restraint there. There is really only two times when you can ever use a motion control, and only one where it seems to really do anything. You have to shake the nunchuck in one player mode to switch the player you are using (if you are one-player), otherwise, swinging the nunchuck around is supposed to modify the kind of grapple attack you perform. It might do the latter – I had a hard time reproducing some attacks, but it seemed that the motion control wasn’t intended for precise move sequences, rather to modify what your character did based on your own natural motions with the controller. If the latter was 
intended, I have to take my hat off – that is exactly how the motion control should be used in a game like this.There are a few parts where you might be frustrated by the lack of a camera. But not very many. You don’t get to control the vantage point, but there isn’t really anywhere where you would need to. Yeah, there are a few places where you wish you could, but keeping in mind that this is basically a side-scroll, it is an easy limitation to get over.
BOTTOM LINE
This game might get old fast for hardcore gamers, but if you are up for a light button-masher, you will have a lot of fun with this game. It is especially good for casual gamers and very young players who can’t handle more difficult adventure games yet. It is ideally suited for two players, so bring a friend, but you can play it through solo with an AI teammate. Good, old fashioned, mindless fun – you don’t get that very often anymore.
Rating(out of 5):
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October 22, 2007
The Gamer’s Quagmire #53: Bastila Catches Kerrigan
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less.
by Jamison DeLorenzo
I managed to resist overreacting to the news of EA purchasing BioWare several weeks back. Part of me felt like I was betraying a long standing heritage of raising warning flags about EA, singing the praises of BioWare, and lamenting yet another game publisher being assimilated by the Borg. BioWare has brought an incredible source of joy to me and millions of other gamers. The news of them being purchased by Microsoft back in 2003 was scary enough.Looking at that last statement concerned me some. When Microsoft was looking to buy them way back the thought of the soul being drained from BioWare was enough to make me queasy. The company that churned out Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Knights of the Old Republic was going to the Evil Empire? BioWare did make a lot of games that only appeared on Microsoft OS’s, so from that standpoint I managed to hold back the fear (which leads to anger, and so on).
Soon we got a taste of Jade Empire and soon we will see Mass Effect. BioWare is one of my favorite publishing houses. In fact, I have consistent weekly debates with myself over whether Square/Enix or BioWare is my favorite. I have the badge and everything ready to bestow on the eventual winner. Making the decision is a painful process. It may not become as painful as finding a Wii in a local store, but you get the idea.
Anyway, the point of this is that any gamer that holds an affection, in some cases potentially a very unhealthy one, for a game company anything can cause the person to freak out. EA soaking up BioWare was enough to cause me to consider playing DDR last week. While that may not seem traumatic to you, I once wrote a nicely worded rant about DDR which prompted in my first series of hate mail as a web author (in other words – it was a proud day). As a gamer without much of a social life, losing BioWare is like losing a best friend. It does sound very pathetic and I accept that, but it is an accurate statement.
This week another rumor has surfaced that has forced my hand. I already knew about the upcoming sequels for Mass Effect (is anyone else highly disturbed by planned sequels to an original work that has not even been completed yet?) and the upcoming Dragon Age (which is described as the sequel to the Baldur’s Gate series), but now there are talks of an MMO whose backdrop is… get ready… KOTOR.
Forgetting for now that we already had an MMO with a Star Wars universe, we have to look at this game as fans of the franchise first. We, as fans, have been pining for a KOTOR 3 for a couple years now. We, as fans, have been lusting for a completed version of KOTOR 2. While the blame with that error does lie with LucasArts for forcing the game out the door before it was finished, we can find salvation in that Team Gizka is very close to a completed mod that will sew up the game the way it should have been (and if you did not know that SHAME ON YOU).
As a fan of dreaming of having a life, the last thing I need is thoughts of getting onto another online game. What does frighten me is that the franchise has been a godsend for me because the story has been phenomenal. Yes, it also has lightsabers, but the interactive dialogue and fluent story has made the franchise a legend in my book. I have yet to see this in any online game. I have yet to think about how this can translate well into an online game. Maybe there are powers that be that need to repair the emotional damage that was done with the last Star Wars MMO (thank you very little Sony), but I do not see how EA can be the ones to do that.
I am an overly cynical person. The trick is to convince myself that this current rumor will turn fact and BioWare will continue its amazing string of superb games like how Blizzard kept its string going with World of Warcraft. Maybe EA will be hands off like they have been with Will Wright’s studios and everything will work out. As a service to fans of BioWare, heed my advice when I tell you that you should pocket this rumor now and wait at least another year before considering the possibility that this could happen and that it might be good. If you don’t do this it will absolutely drive you insane. If you do not believe me consult your nearest StarCraft fan and ask them about their emotional rollercoaster ride over the last six years with that franchise.
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SOTS Game Review – Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
 |
| PLATFORM |
| PC |
| DEVELOPER |
| Splash Damage, id Software |
| PUBLISHER |
| Activision |
| GENRE |
| First Person Shooter |
| # OF PLAYERS |
| 1, with Online Multiplayer |
| Rating |
| T |
| U.S. RELEASE DATE |
| October 2nd, 2007 |
| MSRP |
| $49.99 |
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
OVERVIEW
The Strogg have arrived on Earth, and want to bleed it dry. It is up to the humans to stop them!
REVIEW
Seems like a ton of FPSs have arrived on the market at the same time, and with The Orange Box hitting at around the same time this one came out, you might wonder why I picked up Quake Wars first. Simple – I was already hooked on it.
Several weeks ago, a playable demo was made available for free, and I downloaded it with the intent of writing a quick and dirty review. Trouble was, whenever I thought about writing the review, I decided to play instead. Sure, we were playing the same level over and over again, but it was a great deal of fun. It also didn’t hurt that I knew other people who were already playing it – a good FPS is even more fun when you have people to play with, so on that note, this game fit the bill.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is kind of a mishmash of the old Castle Wolfenstein Enemy Territory game and previous incarnations of Quake. The gameplay is about the same as it was in the previous Enemy Territory game, only you can actually drive the vehicles, and the team make-ups are changed to reflect the Quake Universe instead of WWII Earth. Naturally, the technology is a little better in the way of graphics and map size, and there are bots, so you don’t have to worry about finding a server with a lot of players. Naturally, playing real people is far better, but the AI on the bots is good enough at any level that the game remains challenging (and you are not frustrated by your synthetic teammates).
The story is pretty much window dressing. You have the basic idea that the Strogg have invaded Earth and intend to harvest its resources. You pick a side, pick a class, and you are set loose in the mission.
All of the missions are set up in a standard attack/defend arrangement. Either you are set to complete an objective (capture something, stop something, blow something up) or you are defending. The maps are fairly big, so throughout the course of the game some of your side-missions involve capturing forward spawn points and opening up alternate access routes which come into play as the lines push forward. This also allows the defenders to, in a sense, push back the enemy, and gives the offense new lines of attack. This and the placement of powerful vehicles really encourages varied defensive strategies and helps to keep the game from getting too repetitive.
Overall, the control scheme is very good. There is a bit of a learning curve because there is a lot you can do – so much so that console FPS players might be put off when picking this game up on the PC for the first time (there are planned versions in development for PS3 and XBOX360). The basics are easy enough – standard mouse/keyboard controls, but different tools and weapons have to be implemented different ways. It isn’t too difficult to figure out, and a few rounds of single player and you should have everything figured out. At least well enough to be competitive in a live game.
The vehicles are generally fun, but the control-scheme for the aircraft is a total mess. They are impossible for most average players to control effectively. I suppose if you spent a few hours practicing, you could actually use them in combat, but most gamers would rather spend their time doing something else. The air vehicles are better left in the hands of bots who seem to be able to control them with no difficulty (so don’t waste your time). The ground vehicles are varied and very useful. You have everything from 4-wheeled ATVs to Hum-Vees, tanks, and mechs, along with their alien counterparts. Some of the vehicles have a separate weapon turret allowing one player to drive, while the other fires a secondary weapon. This is especially useful for the humans when your mission involves moving the MCP (a giant armored vehicle armed with a tactical missile) to a launch point. Having other vehicles on hand to draw fire from Anti-Vehicle turrets and to provide cover for engineers trying to keep the MCP repaired makes for an intense and fun experience.
Graphics and sound – really, what can you say. There isn’t much about this game that makes it stand apart, but that can be a blessing in disguise. We have reached something of a pinnacle in effective graphic rendering (sure, we could get better, but would it really make any difference?), and the look of this game is about as good as it can get. The maps are detailed and logical, and have a decent flow to them. I can’t say that I was ever blown away by the landscape, but it was functional and varied. You know what mission you are on immediately upon entering the map, but the real focus is where it should be – killing your opponent.
There are a ton of weapons. And some of them take some getting used to. Some of the long-range weaponry like the sniper rifle and the rail gun have a serious kick to them, and the heavy weapons slow your run rate when selected, and have a long recharge time. There are a lot of miscellaneous tools, like summonable deployables, proximity mines, attack drones, hacking and repair tools, and even a tool that allows you to disguise yourself as a fallen enemy. The wide array of weapons and abilities really adds diversity to the different classes you can select. Each have a pretty unique role on the field, and while it can be frustrating sometimes to have to change your class because your team needs an engineer and there isn’t one on the field, the class variety encourages team play even more.
BOTTOM LINE
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is fun. That really is all you need to know about it. If you enjoy objective-based First Person Shooters, you will have a blast with this game. If you like more arena-style “just get as many kills as possible” shooters, this might not be the game for you, but if you ask me, Arena FPS games get boring real fast. I expect I will be playing this game for a long time before I get tired of it.
Rating(out of 5):
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October 15, 2007
The Gamer’s Quagmire #52: Pets, Guns, and Magic Wands
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less.
by Jamison DeLorenzo
If you ever want a truly enigmatic experience, at this point you just may need a video game vacation. It does sound quite cliché, but it does a great job at soothing the body, the mind, and the soul. The gaming aspect about such a trip is always interesting (otherwise, why are would you ever plan one?), but the best part is invariably a discussion about the gaming itself. If you have a good group of people who can philosophize about this for several hours, you have yourself a winner.Replaying the week in my head this morning while on the way to work (maybe daydreaming along with cell phones need to be outlawed in cars- can we do that?) forced me to link two concepts that I originally thought were completely unrelated. Think about the success of the current consoles and health of the PC gaming market. Nintendo struck a chord with the Wii that tons of people did not expect, and that is the way in which we interact with video games. No, I am not referring to smashing a controller against a wall when the CPU defeats you.
People like to point to the PC gaming market as the place where all the best cutting edge games go, but is that really true? If you think purely about graphical achievements then you would be right on because looking at the video arms race, even just with a small reference window of this past year, you will see a gigantic leap in video card power… processing power and power consumption (remember, puns are our friends). Perhaps we have gone too far with the 2 PCIe slot graphic cards that you can easily use to bludgeon someone to death. Aside from pure power, the last real innovation the PC gaming market brought to the table was the online RPG.
Consoles have been the stage for the biggest innovations within the last several years in gaming. Look at the success of the EyeToy, Wiimote, DS, and the DDR pad. The world’s most successful games have largely been the result of a combination of any of these innovations, and that is discounting the Guiter Hero guitar (I cannot think of a quick catchy name for it, hence its earlier omission). It is true that there are games that just work on their own steam, such as a blockbuster console release like Halo, but the way I see it the truth of the matter is that gamers are tired of the dual analog and the keyboard/mouse.
If you don’t believe that the interaction is the latest big idea in gaming then you are missing out on some important things. First you should look at the stock price of Nintendo over the last year. If you are one of those ‘numbers are boring’ people or just don’t feel like doing the research then all you need to know is that your investment would have tripled in the past year. This is far more than just Nintendo getting lucky at the race track.
I am in the camp of people that need some graphical innovation, so shiny things do easily distract me. Unfortunately, cost of development is a big barrier for many companies that want to make a lot of successful games. This was easy when the gaming industry was just getting started because all you had was one button, a joystick, and 8-bit graphics. Games like Tetris don’t succeed because of graphics- they succeed because they are easy to understand and play.
So what did Sony and Microsoft miss this time around? Multimedia and online play do have a market, so they have put very good systems together (minus alarming hardware issues). Video game consoles in the home was new to everyone in the 80’s, and when games have one button and a joystick everyone can get in on the action. Bring a controller with 10+ buttons in front of your parents now and many of them will be scared away. Did you really thought DDR and the Wii were successful because the games were good? Seriously?
This has been the argument from the Sony and Microsoft fanbots almost since the consoles were first announced and to an extent it still happens today. Look at the games that were coming out in the 80’s and honestly tell me how games with such a simple notion could ever succeed today. Adventure was a horribly cheesy game, but the technology was so new that people had a unique experience playing it. What is very strange is that the dragons guarding the keys in the game still scare me.
Fast forward to today. Look at the stylus and the DS. After two years of struggling, Nintendo has finally found the games that sell the system. What, did you think Nintendogs sold because it was a deep and interesting game? Part of the reason for the game’s success is because of the previous success of Tamagotchi, but it is also one of the first video game translations of it. DDR is a sweeping success because everyone understands dancing to music. Girls will generally run away screaming from complicated controllers (almost as though you are trying to solicit a date), but throw down a pad where you can dance to modern music and they’ll have fun all day long. Put a guitar in the hands of people who are not used to it and they will be entertained for hours on end. Put a light gun in someone’s hand and they will be happy to shoot at anything that pops onto the screen. Put a magic wand in front of someone and they will do whatever they can (including embedding it in the TV, but that isn’t recommended).
The next time you catch yourself defending your PC for gaming because your graphics are always better or your keyboard and mouse will never be beaten you need to ask yourself when you became a dinosaur. Gaming innovation is now in the hands of new controllers, and any developer that does not seriously take this into consideration is going to endanger themselves with possible extinction.
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SOTS Game Review – MySims
 |
| PLATFORM |
| Nintendo Wii |
| DEVELOPER |
| EA Redwood Shores |
| PUBLISHER |
| Electronic Arts |
| GENRE |
| Life Simulation |
| # OF PLAYERS |
| 1 |
| Rating |
| E |
| U.S. RELEASE DATE |
| September 18th, 2007 |
| MSRP |
| $49.99 |
MySims
OVERVIEW
The Sims’s town is rundown, and the mayor needs you to fix it! Build houses and furniture to help the town grow and prosper again.
REVIEW
This was one of the recent batch Wii releases I was most looking forward to. The Sims was a game I have enjoyed in the past, but I found that it emulated life a little too much for my liking. The Sims were often extremely needy, especially socially, and the time needed to have your Sims working made it so that you were frantically trying to establish relationships. I felt a little less emphasis on “needs” might be good. Boy was I wrong.
The differences between MySims and a classic Sims game are apparent off the bat. The whole look of the game has been transformed into that cutesy anime style that Nintendo often gets grief for from serious gamers. I didn’t view this as a drawback in this game however, and I still don’t think it hurt it. The characters were very distinct and had personality, which is way more than you can say for classic Sims, where the personality is pretty well limited to the cloths on their back.
If you pick this game up, I hope you like to build. And I mean really like to build. Because that is pretty much all you are going to do.
When you fire up the game, the first things you do are the usual – design your character, name your town, etc. The character generation was really lacking. The design choices are rudimentary and not very diverse. It would have been far better if this game would have allowed you to use your Mii instead of designing a poor-man’s version.
After naming your town and designing your character, you visit the town and talk to the mayor who explains to you that the town is run down and almost deserted. In order to restore the town to its former glory, they need someone who can use essences. As you might imagine, that person is you!
Mayor Rosalyn first takes you to your house. Much to her embarrassment, it hasn’t been built yet! So it is up to you to design your house.
As this is your first exposure to house-building, you would expect there to be a much more involved tutorial. Sadly, you are mostly on your own here. You are presented with all the basic building parts, and just set loose after some rudimentary instruction. I built an entire house out of these generic parts before I even realized that if you clicked the arrows on the sides, there were more pages with much more varied pieces. If you take the time to paint your house, you get a hint of what essences can do. The problem is, since they still aren’t explained to you at all, you are left to figure out on your own what their significance is, and how the “scale” applies to the game.
After being tasked with finding some essences (4 apples, in this case), you are shown to your workshop, where you will build various furniture items for inside the houses. And, naturally, this has not been built yet either! After this arduous task, you are asked to build Mayor Rosalyn a podium.
At this point, I gave up. I was well into an hour on this game with all the building, and I was bored to tears. But, wanting to give an honest review of the game, I pressed on and sat down for another session. It had to get better! There had to be something worth sticking with this game for! So after another hour or so, I finally realized – I should have put it down for good the first time.
Building is all there is to this game. And the building isn’t even fun. The control-scheme is unwieldy and the panel is laid out poorly. Instead of having a nice side-bar with your building blocks, they are scattered on the ground in front of your plot. So when you zoom in to see the details of the building you are constructing, the pieces move off the screen. If you want a new piece or to try something different, you have to zoom all the way back out and back in again. The same holds true for the item crafting – but it has even more problems. The blocks can’t be resized like they could be in the house-building, and you have a really limited number of shapes and sizes at your disposal. The game does highlight in green the pieces you can use to fit the pattern, but that doesn’t help you figure out what piece is supposed to go where sometimes. You are “encouraged” to build your design outside the pattern, making things more individual, I suppose. But you don’t get any perks for this, and rarely does the item look any better with your own personal touches (still blocky as ever), so it really just ends up being a shortcut.
So after all this building, you eventually earn a star for your town, which allows you to go to the hotel and invite visiting Sims to move in. Which requires you to build them a house, and complete building tasks for them, which earns you more stars which leads to more building and more new Sims and more building and… ARGH!
One of the best parts of the classic Sims games was the interactions. You met people, had relationships, and had different outcomes based on the relationship choices you made. This was balanced by your Sim’s own needs, the needs of your “friends,” and the design elements of your house. The reward for doing well was a complex and almost interesting virtual life that was unique to your game, and which would be very difficult to duplicate.
MySims is hardly The Sims at all. It is like they took all the worst parts of Animal Crossing, enhanced them, and slapped a Sims label on it. The game isn’t diverse at all. If you played this game through two times, it is entirely probable that you will end up with two identical games. Unless you tried really hard.
The Simspeak is annoying here. Instead of serving as the primary mode of communication, you get to listen to a track in Simspeak, then you are given speech windows to read what is said! While this is necessary to get tasks, it makes the Simspeak totally worthless. You can have your Sim communicate with another on a more basic level, but the choices you have are much more limited than you might see in a regular Sims game. “Be Nice” and “Be Mean” just don’t cover much. And since your relationships don’t matter too much, the only real reason to do this is to get essences. So you get to waste more time being nice and being mean, watching the same Simspeak cut-scenes, and wasting more time flattering or abusing the townsfolk to get building materials. And since your actions have almost no consequences, it all becomes tedious rather quickly.
The game jerks. A lot. You will be walking along minding your own business, and suddenly you will freeze. I can only assume this is where the game is loading. It happens all the time, and it doesn’t take long to get annoying. Especially when paired up with all the other load-time in this game coming in and out of buildings, and going in and out of the build screen. The graphic environment is nice – but the jerkiness really makes it difficult to enjoy.
BOTTOM LINE
Don’t buy this game. Well, if you are the type of person that enjoys building in a video game, rent this game, and if you like it, it will be worth the money to purchase.
This game is the first major disappointment for the Wii. This was a game that I was really looking forward to, and I was totally shocked when I discovered how horrible it was. Everything that was ever great about The Sims is missing, and in its place some of the worst elements of Animal Crossing to fill in the gaps.
There is a totally different version for the DS which is set in a vacation resort, where it is your job to lure in tourists. I didn’t get a chance to play that, but from the reviews, it does seem to be a better game. The building elements are there, but the addition of minigames would make this version a whole lot better. Why they opted to include those in the DS version and not the Wii version is a mystery to me.
Rating(out of 5):
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