wii u — Page 6

Star Fox Guard (Wii U): COMPLETED!

Posted on 22/05/2016 Written by deKay

Well Star Fox Guard wasn’t quite the game I was expecting. I had read it was a tower defence game, and it is, but what I didn’t know what that you have to manually activate and control the towers yourself!

In each level there’s a sort of maze, with a tower in the middle. Twelve camera turrets (which you can move about) are stationed around the maze, with all of the “feeds” shown on the TV. On the gamepad is a map of the area showing the current locations of the cameras and a radar of any enemies they’ve picked up. You tap on a camera here to make it the live camera on the TV, which you can then use to aim and shoot the baddies as they appear and head for your tower. If they reach it, it’s game over.

The baddie robots come in two classes – combat and chaos. Combat bots must be prevented from reaching the tower, whereas chaos bot try to disrupt your cameras by disabling, blocking, or even stealing them. It gets a bit frantic at times as you try to juggle all the attacks. Thankfully I had my daughter calling out the numbers of the cameras that bots appeared on!

After every three levels you get a new map, and after every three maps you get a boss level and then move onto another planet.

Star Fox Guard was quite short, but I’ve unlocked a load of extra missions now and there’s a mode where you can create a level for others to challenge (and of course, you can take on other people’s creations too) so there is still plenty to do. It’s a good game, and when I finished it I realised it sets itself up as the prequel to Star Fox Zero… which I also have!

Click to view slideshow.

The post Star Fox Guard (Wii U): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Star Fox Guard (Wii U): COMPLETED!

Posted on 22/05/2016 Written by deKay

After every three levels you get a new map, and after every three maps you get a boss level and then move onto another planet.

Click to view slideshow.

The post Star Fox Guard (Wii U): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Affordable Space Adventures (Wii U): COMPLETED!

Posted on 06/05/2016 Written by deKay

Affordable Space Adventures was, like Freedom Planet, another one of the recent Nintendo Humble Bundle games. It’s a game I’d intended to buy at some point anyway, but I just never got round to it.

Taking control of a tiny spaceship lost on a strange planet inhabited by long forgotten machines, you have to pilot around taking care not to get spotted, crushed, frozen or lasered. As your damaged ship starts to self-repair, additional systems come online, and eventually its fully functional with two different drive systems, a scanner, assorted types of landing gear and so on. Each on-board system generates noise, heat and/or electricity, and the machines you come across are variously sensitive to these, so you have to be careful which ones you activate, and how you use them.

This makes the game a bit more of a puzzle game than I was expecting. Tweaking power outputs and turning off unnecessary systems using the “heads-down display” on the Gamepad is genius, watching your outputs to ensure you can safely glide past a sentry or a mine undetected. Sometimes you need to coast along on minimal (or no!) power, other times you have to switch from your fuel engine to electric engine, or make use of your heat shutters to appear cooler to enemies. It’s very clever, really.

Later on, environmental hazards start playing havok with your ship’s computer, changing settings for you or completely disabling certain abilities, so you have to pay attention to your computer at all times.

It’s a beautiful looking game, and quite unlike anything else I’ve played. It’s hard to see how it would work properly on any system other than the Wii U (expect, perhaps the 3DS at a push), and it shows just what kind of thing can be done with Nintendo’s unusual hardware. It’s a shame more games don’t. There’s a multiplayer mode too, which is how the game was really designed to play, with up to three players taking over different aspects of the ship – a pilot, and engineer and a science officer – but I played through solo without too much difficulty. Apart from Level 37, the final section of which took over an hour’s worth of attempts. I scraped through eventually. Affordable Space Adventures is an essential game for any Wii U owner.

Click to view slideshow.

The post Affordable Space Adventures (Wii U): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Freedom Planet (Wii U): COMPLETED!

Posted on 02/05/2016 Written by deKay

Almost a year ago, I played the demo of Freedom Planet which was released with a million other Wii U demos as part of Nintendo’s E3 stuff. This is what I had to say about it then:

What looks like Sonic and sounds like Sonic but is terrible (like Sonic is now, I suppose)? Freedom Planet! Awful animation, screen juddering everywhere and all hopes and dreams of a possibly good Sonic game (even though it isn’t Sonic) up in smoke. Boo.

Numerous people have told me since that these animation and juddering issues aren’t in the PC version, and in fact, when the Wii U version came out, finally, I was told they’d gone there too.

They haven’t.

The screen still jerks around like the camera isn’t sure where it’s supposed to be. The animation is excellent in cutscenes and set pieces, but when you run round loops and up hills, the animation is really quite terrible – the sprite is rotated instead of redrawn, and it literally just looks like the sprite is being rotated. The physics are all wrong, and you’re able to run up vertical slopes (and upside down) without needing much momentum. The controls are unresponsive, especially the “dash” button which caused me to die numerous times as it didn’t activate. And yes, I did have enough power to do it.

It rips off Sonic so much, even though your main character Lilac is not really much like Sonic at all. Many of the levels are similar – there’s a Lava Reef Clone, an Aquatic Ruin Clone, a Death Egg Clone, a Flying Battery Clone – and there’s even a bit with what are remarkably similar to Chaos Emeralds. You loop like Sonic, there are springs and bumpers like in Sonic games, the music could easily have come from a Sonic game and the power-up “bubbles” are effectively clones of Sonic 3’s. One of them even sucks in rings-er-gems when you go near them. Marble Garden’s spinners are here too, and many of the enemies could well be lifted from various Sonic titles as well. The extra life sound effect is eerily familiar.

Click to view slideshow.

But. And this is a huge but. I really rather enjoyed it. Once you see past the Sonic bits, you realise that it a more than decent game in its own right. The levels are gorgeous and huge, and some aren’t Sonic-like – such as the shopping centre. The bosses too are pretty impressive, with normal character fights and massive several-screens-wide dragons and things. There’s a proper story too, which you have the option of completely skipping (I didn’t, as I thought it might separate it from Sonic a bit more – it does), with some mixed success voice acting and humour.

It was a pretty easy game overall, with almost all my lives lost on bosses, most of my deaths coming on the final boss, and most of them lost on the final boss’ final form. I’m pretty sure now I know how to defeat the bosses I’d be able to complete it on a single credit, so it isn’t too difficult.

I can’t completely commend Freedom Planet, as the animation and jerkiness does detract a little and the unresponsive controls are a crime, but I paid just over a pound for it, and it’s definitely worth more than that. I’m glad I gave it a chance as it surprised me, and if I’d just left it at the demo I’d never have realised there was a decent game there. Stupid demo.

Click to view slideshow.

The post Freedom Planet (Wii U): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Kirby and the Rainbow Paintbrush (Wii U): COMPLETED!

Posted on 05/03/2016 Written by deKay

After seeing the MechaKirby 3DS game on this week’s Nintendo Direct, I was reminded that I hadn’t finished Kirby and the Rainbow Paintbrush yet. I think, as is often the case, something else came along instead. Maybe Super Mario Maker? Or Lego Jurassic World. I can’t remember. Anyway!

In one sitting, with my daughter on Waddle-Dee duty, I completed the rest of the game. Which was all of worlds 3 to 7, as it turned out. Like pretty much all Kirby games, it was easy. A couple of tricky forced scroll levels caused a few deaths, but picking up extra lives was such a frequent occurrence that I had about 40 spare by the time I reached the end.

Along the way, as is so often the case with Nintendo platformers in particular, there was so much inventiveness to find. In a few stages, Kirby rides a gondola, with your rainbow rope acting as a “track” for it to hang from. In another, you have to escape from a gunship you’ve just triggered the auto-destruct on, and you’re given a map on which to draw your intended exit route. Near the end there’s a section where Kirby is split into two Kirbys, at first separate from each other (so you have to guide both to switches and out of danger), and then together, where you can hit one with the other to cause it to fire off at speed, ricocheting off everything and smashing through blocks. As soon as you’re used to one new mechanic in the game, it throws another at you, or combines two or three earlier ones. It definitely doesn’t let you get bored.

It’s odd, then, that the bosses are repeated with only minor differences. There are only eight in total, and three are used twice. They don’t even get harder. It’s only a small negative point, but for such a varied title it’s a bit out of place. Another niggle I have only happens when you’re playing co-op: periodically, a fight with a detatched hand will trigger. Kirby can’t defeat it as it tries to grab him and drag him off-screen (to his death), so Waddle-Dee has to do it. All I could do as Kirby was try to keep him away from the hand, and when invariably snatched, provide rainbow ropes for Waddle-Dee to reach the hand (if necessary) and smack it.

That aside, it’s a fun, gorgeous looking (everything is made from clay!) and inventive platformer. Exactly what you’d expect from Nintendo, really. It’s quite short, although collecting all the hidden treasure chests in each level and completing all the unlockable challenges will provide a great deal of extra length, but Kirby and the Rainbow Paintbrush clever and varied. And so, so pretty.

Click to view slideshow.

The post Kirby and the Rainbow Paintbrush (Wii U): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

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