“As a pack-in title with the Nintendo Wii, Wii Sports is of excellent value; a game that’s likely to be booted up with any visitor that expresses an interest in the system for (at the very least) a quick game of tennis. However, all of the games except, arguably, golf, lack any real depth or longetivity, and even Nintendo’s training and fitness test segments add little to the package for the solo gamer. More worrying in the long term, however, is just how limited the use of the Wii remote is, with little more than waving the controller ever used. Only boxing seems to use any complex manipulation, and that is by far the clumsiest to control. Perhaps, much like with the Nintendo DS, developers need time to grow into the new control paradigm.”

Yes, it’s true; I used the word “paradigm” in a review. I may have before! This time I couldn’t help it; it just slipped out, I swear.

Also, I have a Wii. Yay! The conclusion to this review might seem a little negative, as I have had some good fun playing Wii Sports with my girlfriend, but it’s not even been a couple of weeks and I have little urge to play it (people will probably consider me dead inside when I say I’ve probably played more Gears of War in the past week than any of the first-party Wii titles.) I’ll be getting some third-party games sooner or later, though, and I’m intrigued to see how well they stack up.

“Back in the distant heyday of the Dreamcast, we should probably have seen the trouble on the horizon. Despite featuring a great selection of titles in general, Sega’s underappreciated box of wonders featured a mere two RPGs that anyone deemed worth talking about; Sega Overworks’ Skies of Arcadia, and Game Arts’ Grandia II.

I preferred Grandia II.”

Rather a big revelation, that, and one which probably loses me a lot of respect from certain types of people. But as I explain in the review, I’ll take the rubbish story and an excellent battle system of Grandia II over the sheer tedium of Skies of Arcadia’s random battles any day.

(I did love the characterisation of Skies of Arcadia with all my heart, however.)

Although I didn’t like Grandia III that much, I still have a save of it on my PS2 memory card. I delete the saves of most games that I don’t ever plan on playing anymore as soon as I’m done with them, but for some reason I’ve kept this one. I guess I was fonder of this than I let on; then again, the 6/10 I gave it seems entirely fair.

The memory that this game has a gut-wrenchingly awful Japanese pop song as its intro reminds me that I didn’t spend anywhere near enough time slagging off the ridiculous theme song of Phantasy Star Universe in my recent review, too.

“Sega studio Sonic Team’s original Phantasy Star Online, released on the sadly missed Dreamcast in 2000, was a revelation: the first true online multiplayer RPG on consoles. Effortless to play and set up even using the Dreamcast’s straining 56k modem, the title was free to play online and immensely popular. As the majority of the game was the online component, by the time the Gamecube port Phantasy Star Online: Episodes I&II appeared Sega had taken to charging a (not unsubstantial) $8.95 (U.S.) per month for online access.

But Phantasy Star Universe is a slap in the face to any true fan of the series.”

Oh Sonic Team, what has happened to you? Phantasy Star Online is horrible. Admittedly, I do spend a fair chunk of this review bitching about the lack of a free month of online play in the box (but seriously!) however the single player mode in this is so tedious in every respect as to actually be quite upsetting. I spent a significant portion of my time on Phantasy Star Online Ver. 2 on Dreamcast (I even bought a keyboard! Well, second hand for £2) and I had rather hoped this game would have been a nice return to form. Instead, all of the magic is missing. Oh well.

And if you can’t tell from the “reviewed on” text, I have an Xbox360 now. I am surprisingly impressed with the system, even though all I do with it is play Live Arcade. So… Hundreds of dollars to recognise Doom as “really quite good”, then. Still, I’m sure it’ll be worth it in the long run.

“Though the hottest gifts this holiday season are the latest videogame systems, the portable music player landscape is just as crowded with new contenders, including Apple’s latest iPod revisions, the Creative Zen V Plus, and Microsoft’s Zune.

A good set of headphone are a superb gift for the audiophile, and it’s with that in mind we tested two of the latest and most unique high end headphones on offer in Canada, Creative’s new Zen Aurvana In-Ear Earphones (SRP $149.99) and Logitech’s FreePulse Wireless Headphones (SRP $99.99).”

A headphones review! I’m sure many hi fi enthusiasts would scoff at this review, as it contains basically nothing in the way of technical details about the headphones, just, you know, how I feel about how they sound. But while I was researching headphones for my own general use a while ago I read more than enough reviews of headphones that contained no usable details about wearability or sound quality. I purchased the pair of Sennheiser PX-100s used in this review as a benchmark, and they’re still the headphones I’d recommend above all others, too.

“How unusual! Not a lot of festivals this week. Just the Indie Can Film Festival this weekend, and the Toronto Arab Film Festival starting on Wednesday.”

How strange it is to live in a city where two film festivals running in a week is “not a lot.” Also this week:

The Vice Guide to Travel: Review, Competition

Hmm. I don’t seem to have got a copy of Plan B in the mail for a very long time; have they just stopped sending them out to the writers, or what, I wonder? Still, I at least have a copy of this issue, which features only two small capsule reviews; Shadow of the Colossus and Super Princess Peach.

Shadows of the Colossus is pretty much the one game (other than perhaps 9:05, but that’s a different story) I would use in any discussion of “are games art?” The interactive form is the only one that can force the player into performing actions they’d rather not (such as murdering peaceful giants) for what may, or may not, be an important reason, rather than just watching a character go through the motions. Of course, whether that makes it art (or even disqualifies it) would be part of the debate.

Oh, and my review of Super Princess Peach takes a slightly different tact from my earlier Eurogamer review, claiming that the game accuses your mother of owning a vibrator at the end of the game. Peach’s quest is, after all, for an item called the Vibe Scepter, and if that doesn’t have a weird sexual undertone I don’t know what does.

You can pick up a copy of this as a back issue.

The second article I’ve written that references “The Game” (see my earlier piece on London Game Week 2004) this is a rather random opinion column, roughly based around the idea of viruses and memes; the idea that The Game is a very pure sort of meme somehow forms the basis of a discussion of Michael Jackson’s involvement with Sonic 3 and Introversion winning McNally Grand Prize in the 7th Annual Independent Games Festival Main Competition for Darwinia.

I’m pretty sure I wrote this piece very late at night, and even now reading it I have pretty much no idea what I’m on about. Still, I wrote a sidebar that I found personally very amusing; though I have no idea how well the humour translates.

You can download a PDF of this issue at the Game Reactor website.

“There is one nice touch in State of Emergency 2. During the introduction to the game, the name of the publisher and then the name of the development studio roll by as neon signs in the generic future-o-city of the game’s environment. It’s subtle enough that you could almost miss it, and shows that at least during one stage of development, real attention was paid. Sadly, that’s the only nice touch in State of Emergency 2. By then we’ve already seen a prostitute touting her services and heard the first in a long line of tedious expletives thrown about like swearing is going out of fashion.”

Ah yes; the review which sunk DC Studios’ Edinburgh operation. Yes, I personally was responsible for the redundancies of 29 Scottish people because I ripped into State of Emergency 2 so hard that no one bought it.

Frankly, if that were true, I’d be proud. State of Emergency 2 was some of the most soullessly trite, by-the-numbers guff I’ve ever had the misfortune to play.

An interesting aside: I actually lived for about 6 months in Glasgow with a guy who worked for DC Studios. To my memory, however, he quit long before I did this review. I actually checked the credits for his name; thankfully it wasn’t there!

“Nintendo of Canada exec Pierre-Paul Trépanier has told GamesIndustry.biz that the company is already raking in the cash following yesterday’s launch of the Wii.

‘We’re in the gaming business, and we have to make money from everything we sell – and we are making money from day one on the Wii.’”

I am not entirely sure that Pierre-Paul Trépanier would thank me for this article, but he did say everything I quoted him on, so that’s that. This piece is crossposted at Eurogamer, which is interesting, and people do seem to be laying into him (and Nintendo) a bit for being “arrogant”, but I don’t really see what the problem is. Pricing things to make a profit is what most companies do, isn’t it? If he’d said “We are making a profit on the Wii from day one, as we’ve used only South-East Asian child labour to make the systems” then, you know, I could understand.

“While the PS3 launch may have made headlines due to stock shortages and lengthy queues, the situation couldn’t have seemed more different for the launch of the Nintendo Wii just two days later.

However, on the streets the situation seemed entirely different, with the queues observed by GamesIndustry.biz at stores in downtown Toronto equalling those for PlayStation 3.”

More exciting launch coverage!

This time the Wii. I had to get up early on a Sunday morning for this. Who releases a console on a Sunday, eh?