Monthly Archives: January 2013

Review: Wanted: Weapons of Fate – GRIN AB – 360

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Another mini-review today. A Micro-review, perhaps. Or even, just a simple warning…?

Watched the movie the other weekend. Played the game tonight (got them in a cheapish bundle months ago after reading reviews of the game).  A bad game of a below-average action film of a ?? comic.

Played it for half an hour? Maybe an hour?

  • Muddy green and brown-tinged graphics with high-contrast thrown over the top of it.
  • Shitty cover-shooter mechanics. As in, not “oh those shitty cover-shooters” but a truly shitty shit shit implementation of cover-shooter mechanics.
  • A muddled jumple of a story that’s even worse than the film’s story. Terrible/laughable attempts at creating dramatic tension. Even for a game.
  • Poor gunplay.
  • Too much pointless juvenile swearing for me to give it away as a gift to one of my students.
  • Looks like an XBox 1 title.
  • Reviews called it “competent” “decent” “7.3/10” “3.5/5”, etc.
  • They lied.

Shitty game tries to use style to hide it’s lack of substance. Fails at both.

I’ll give it another half an hour, or hour in case it magically becomes kind of alright. It won’t of course. Then it’s frisbee time for this piece of trash.

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Verdict: Avoid.

Update:

Had another quick play with it. Awful, awful game. By comparison it makes the movie look like Citizen Kane.

The movie was below average, but somewhat alright in a trashy, watch-once-and-forget action movie kind of way. This is just dire.

Review: Bomberman Land – Hudson Soft Company, Ltd. – Wii

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A Mini-review of an old game. Yay!
First up, let me say that I love Bomberman, and I’ve been a fan and enjoyed it for more than 10 years. Right back to when I used to have friends.

As I’m a fan of the game, I picked this one up as an impulse purchase, because, well, I own a Wii, and Bomberman is awesome. After some time, (more than a year) I’ve finally gotten around to giving it a whirl.

Now at this point, I’m simply going to cut to the chase. This game is a steaming pile of utter shit. Do not buy it, do not rent it. Not, under any circumstances. Here are a couple of reasons why:
1)   It took me over 10 minutes to get control of my character. Sure, I tried “Story Mode” thinking it would be similar to traditional story mode. Or possibly the awesome multiplayer story mode that my wife and I used to play in an arcade version of Bomberman years ago late at night in a dingy Chinatown arcade in the city – Instead, excepting a moment when I got to name my character – ANAL – I was locked in shitty shit shit badly written slow-moving non-skippable cutscenes for a little over 10 minutes. I’m not exaggerating. The only reason I sat through it is because I had bought the stupid game, and it was getting to the point where I already knew I’d never turn it on again. 

Oh god, please just let me play…


2)   Once in the game, I wasn’t actually in the game. I was in a lobby area, where I was supposed to talk to idiot NPC bombermen and go do training to buy “TP” to buy new clothes. WTF? I got into the first game, and guess what?

3)   It wasn’t actually Bomberman. It was a ripoff of Pang, only not nearly as well done or fun as Pang. And I liked Pang, too. When I got out, I was again stuck in a cutscene with more fucking Bombermen. At this point I turned the game off.

4)   In desperation to find a redeeming feature, I tried going straight into battle mode this time. It was okay, it was your usual Bomberman battle mode, but with sideways Wiimotes as the controllers, and an unpolished feel to the whole thing, which shouldn’t be considering they’ve been making the same fucking game for 10 or 15 years.

What. The. Fuck???

5)   Did I mention at all that despite my Wii being set for widescreen, the game is in 4:3. But not sidebarred, oh no. The game runs in glorious stretch-o-vision on widescreen TVs. Since the definition is so low on the Wii, it’s also presented in jaggy-o-vision.

6)   At this point I turned the game off. Forever.

I have a GC version of Bomberman that I picked up at some stage in the past and never played sitting next to my pile of stuff to look at, but after this piece of rancid shit, I’m scared to fire it up. I can’t believe this was developed by Hudson themselves, since it played like Bomberman as farmed out to some shitty 2-bit dev company.

So in closing. If you want to play Bomberman, avoid this piece of shit shovelware like the plague. Pick up the rather good version of Bomberman off XBLA (or PSN, if it’s available there as well), Or even better, fire up Super Bomberman 1 or 2 on the SNES, which might be jaggy on a big TV, but plays damned well.

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Verdict: Avoid. At all costs.