DRAW: No More Heroes

Let me set a record straight here. I was a very early supporter of the Wii. From the start, I had a feeling that it would become incredibly succesful, or at least a level far greater than the Gamecube could ever hope to achieve. All of this of course would be dependent on the game publishers. Aside from the Nintendo branded games, most Wii games can be considered, crap.

That said, having previously owned a Wii, one of the greatest games on that console is No More Heroes. Developed by Grasshopper Studios and director Suda 51, otherwise known as Goichi Suda, No More Heroes throws you head on into the role of Travis Touchdown, an arrogant Otaku who finds himself out of money. To solve that, he takes on an assasination gig. He buys a lightsaber-esque weapon online and goes for the kill, decapitating his target known only as Helter Skelter. Blood pours in Tarantino fasion from Skelters neck in a wonderfully pleasant cel-shaded style.

And thats just the opening cinematic.


Meet Travis, he's your average beam katana wielding, Otaku assasin.

No More Heroes shot for simplicity, comboed with easy to learn Wii controls this game became an unlikely winner amongst the garbage that gets put out daily on the Wii. If you've ever played Killer7, then you can expect the weirdness to arise, but not nearly on the same level as Killer7. Theres a decent amount of comedy, I could easily see this as being some sort of late night anime on adult swim.

Using your lightsaber is one of the most awesome feelings on the Wii. You press a button to swing, and when an enemy's health bar is almost depleted, or at the end of a combo attack, an arrow appears on screen. Swing the remote in the direction of the arrow and you'll do an execution style attack, sending blood and humoursly enough gold coins everywhere.

The meat of this game however lies in it's boss fights. These fights can be tough depending on which boss and what difficulty you play on. Ultimately you'll use similar strategies on them all, but they're really fun regardless of that.

You can easily complete the game within 10-14 hours, but you love every second of it and vague story surrouding the Assasins and the level of entertainment from the boss fights keeps you engaged and wanting more.

This is honestly one of the best games you can pick up on the Wii, and on the cheap by now. No More Heroes however did fall into some pitfalls, and the ones it fell into arent exactly forgiveable.

When you're not doing one of the 11 assasination missions, you'll be stuck in a "sandbox" world where the game attempts to recreate some of the fun that GTA brought to the table. You can't run over people, you can't be chased by cops and the things you can do in the sandbox are few and far between. You'll do odd jobs in between your killing sprees to earn money to enter the next mission. But it grows tedious and boring very quickly.

Secondly, the map is horrible. The developers went with a kind of 8-bit background tone because Travis loves the old school video games, so they decided style the map like that. God dammit i'm not kidding here, that map is almost utterly useless. If you can understand what everything is, not get lost, and see the little orange dots scattered around then your brain should be removed, studied, then put into a medical journal. This map is so bad it's completely inexcuseable. But you get by, because the sandbox isn't very big anyways.

If you can find this game on the cheap then I highly recommend it, it'll be worth the low price. Hell I paid the full 50 for it when it came out and i'm satisfied with that purchase (unlike that Dirge of Cerberus purchase....F@#*)

So, we're giving No More Heroes a Draw. We'll have another go at it when the sequel gets out.

Pokemon Needs Some Fresh Inspiration

The Pokemon formula remains relatively unchanged

I recently read on Kotaku that Nintendo is already hard (or not very hard) at work on Pokemon: Soul Silver and Heart Gold, Nintendo DS ports of the Gold and Silver games released on the Gameboy Color back in 2o00.

Of course this is a grand idea, considering the amount of money these games made, and considering how much money the Pokemon franchise continues to amount. Any gamer that grew up with Pokemon, like myself, has likely played most of the core Pokemon releases, and realizes one thing.

Not only has it been done before, but now it's just boring.

Nintendo has had it's technique down since the original releases of Red and Blue: The only way to catch em all is to buy every version. With this technique comes the mentality of making minimal changes to the system because lets be honest, it's gonna make money no matter what right?

This may have flown back in the days when the Nintendo 64 and Playstation were prominent, but these days gamers need content, fresh and lots of it. Sequels or the next game in series doubly so, because if you've made a succesful first game into a brand new IP, then your audience expects that much more from the second. With the economy down, gamers really need to be persuaded to throw down the cash for a game.

I'm using Pokemon for this example because it's the most obvious example out there. If Nintendo really wants to make a big buck on their future titles, then they need to revamp the system because every game after Ruby and Sapphire has just been boring. Go ahead and argue with me all you want, but even you know that after you beat the Elite 4 and whatnot, you don't really feel like doing much else.

Obviously Nintendo has made attempts to expand on the franchise in new ways; none of which have been incredibly succesful, or not nearly as much as the Gameboy and DS releases.

What I think Nintendo needs to do is make a new pokemon fresh for Wii. Take basic mechanics of Super Smash Brothers, take the camera away from the side scroller view and put it in third person perspective, similar to the Kingdom Hearts camera. For your fights you control a Pokemon, and I don't mean like in those shitty Stadium games, you can actually CONTROL the monster. Let them use an assortment of moves, don't just limit it to 4, and map a bunch of moves to different button schemes.

From there, expand the Pokemon world, flesh it out and make it BIG. Because thats what Pokemon was back then was BIG. Can you imagine an Oblivion sized Pokemon game? Fill that mother with all kinds of creative content and I GUARANTEE it will be a massive hit.

Lets just hope Nintendo reads this...what I think it's great idea.