Saturday, February 28, 2009

That's why you're still a kid.

It sucks, I'm getting sick. I can feel starting in my throat already, so in a couple days I'll be dead. It doesn't help that I'm sitting in the freezing cold basement writing this either, so you guys better enjoy it!

On Friday me and Cody both had the day off, so we figured we'd better take all our bottles, cans and juice cartons into the bottle depot. When we first moved in here we moved our empties with us and just put them in the basement. I even had a bunch of Diet Pepsi 12 packs bouncing around in my trunk since the move. The pile of empties was getting pretty huge, so we loaded up my car and took them in. If we had any more empties they wouldn't have fit in, there was a lot. At the bottle depot we took up an entire 12 foot table top with all our stuff. I thought we would get over $30 and Cody thought we might get $50, but we were both wrong because we got $73.50! I told you there were a lot of empties. I think we might go to the dollar store and stock up on food/candy. Cody wants some Fun Dip aka Lik-M-Aid.

Video games! On Thursday I went and bought some more Wii Points so I could download a new WiiWare game called Onslaught from Hudson Soft. WiiWare games are original games made for download and are capped with a 37MB file size. Most of the WiiWare games available are puzzle games, but Hudson made Onslaught a FPS. The game itself is a mixed bag with some really cool elements, but also with some crappy ones.

The single players campaign is pretty short and runs 13 missions which took me 3 hours to finish, but I replayed a couple levels and failed missions a few times before I finished the game. Missions will have you killing all enemies, getting from point A to point B in a time limit and defending your position from waves of enemies. The game had five difficulties and of course my first time I went through on Easy and now I'm playing through on Normal.

The controls are pretty good and I found throwing grenades to be easier and more accurate than other FPS games like Call of Duty: WAW and Medal of Honor: H2. Aim with your cursor and press the C button to pull the grenade pin then "throw" with the nunchuk. You can also carry four(!) guns with you and each gun is mapped to a direction on the D pad. Pressing Z and whipping the nunchuk will unlease your melee style laser whip, but there is no weapon melee. Some weapons also have a vehicle to drive that is mounted with dual chain guns. As you play through the levels you can find new weapons which are just more powerful versions of your standard starting weapons; an assualt rifle, machine gun, shotgun, and rocket launcher. I have a machine gun with a clip size of 200 and that is only the Level 2 gun. If you blast enemies at close range your screen with get splattered in green blood which will do damage to you, but by waving the nunchuk you can wipe it off.

Onslaught also features online play in co-op story mode and ranked play. When you play through story mode you get points for finishing the levels with kills/combos/health/time/etc. You can post your scores online against players from your region or the world to see how you stack up. I finished one level on Easy and I was #1 in the world!! When Cody came home I went to show him, but I had already been kicked down to #5, I was still #1 for my region( North America). I'm sure by now I'm lucky if I'm still in the top 30. The online co-op lets you and other players fight together to finish levels while the ranked matches have players battling to kill the most enemies and get the most points. You can kill the other players, but you lose points for that.

Since the file size is only 37MB some corners had to be cut and while I can live the sparse level design and graphics I wish the audio had been worked on more. There is no detail to the levels, they are pretty much all brown, no vegetation, rocks, water, but it's clean and I can live with it. I reminds me of old school PC games, so it's got the retro cheese factor going for it. As you kill enemies you can rack up combos from Good, Great, Excellent, Wonderful to Beautiful, but as you do a voice will say things like "Awesome!" and if you read anything about this game you'll hear "That's why you're just a kid." When you score a Good combo a guy will say "That's why you're just a kid." and you'll hear it many many times. Maybe because it is a Japanese made game, but I could do with the voice overs, a lady says one line that I can't even understand. My only other complaint is that your character moves so damn slow and if you are getting attacked from behind then turning around takes forever.

Overall, the game is super cheesy, but still kinda fun despite the graphics. It only costs $10 and is already better than some other full FPS titles out on the Wii. Check out the official website and be sure to watch awesome trailer which makes it look a lot more cooler than it actually is.

No comments: