Tag Archives: Videogames

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.

Review: GoldenEye 007: Reloaded – Eurocom Developments – 360

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Sooo.. like a great many now-old people, I played the original GoldenEye 007 back on the N64 in the day, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I think I finished the SP campaign at least twice, and also put in a lot of Multiplayer time with my friends of the day, sneaking around the complexes and stealing a glance at their quadrant of the screen.

I skipped the PS2/XBox era remake/reimagining/re-whatever, Rogue Agent, because, well, frankly, shooters were pretty shitty on the last generation of consoles if you had access to a PC. These days, they’re acceptable, and in rare cases, better. Which brings us to GoldenEye Reloaded 2011 edition.

Goldeneye reloaded 2011.png

Now, this iteration of the game is clearly superior to the PC version, since there’s not actually any PC version. See what I did there? Anyway, as a shooter, this one fits thoroughly in the “not too bad” category, alongside other decent-but-not-amazing shooters as Resistance: Fall of Man, and.. well, probably some other ok but forgettable games I’ve played, enjoyed mildly, then put aside and forgotten existed.

I’m not going to give away the story, but it’s essentially an updated/rewritten version of the original film, with Daniel Craig’s mug in place of Brosnan’s, and Judi Dench’s voice as M (who she actually played back in the original film of GoldenEye in 1995)

Basically, the shooting action is CoD-lite. The weapon selection is decent, with a variety of modern weapons all given generic renames, and with somewhat random attachments slapped on, such as ACOG, Reflex sights, red-dot laser, silencers and grenade launchers. I enjoyed the shooting to a degree, though the game suffers a little from almost requiring quickscoping, but maybe that’s a broader limitation of console shooters. The tank level pays homage to the original and the film, and is nothing special but not terrible either. It’s not on rails, at least!

Graphically the game is decent, but nowhere near cutting edge. I’m not that much of a graphics whore anyway, so I don’t mind things not looking amazing as long as they’re good or solid. It pretty much did what it says on the box.

There are some flaws and annoyances. The side missions are sometimes a little vague, and also repetitive (hack/take photos of macguffins with your smartphone), and the “collectable” do jour in this game are silly looking “Janus” faces hidden in places like the undersides of shelves.

The game seemed to have a decent length for a modern shooter, though I couldn’t tell you how long in hours, since I tended to play this in short bursts a couple of times a week at best over a month or so, though when I finished it I was certainly glad to have done so – so much longer and I’d have gotten a bit bored with the whole thing. I understand the Wii version is slightly longer in the final stages, but then, you’d be playing a shooter on the Wii, and no-one wants that, do they?

GoldenEye 007: Reloaded Image

Everybody do the Robot.

The game’s final sequences are a little challenging, but they’re the annoying kind of difficult rather than the fun or rewarding kind, most of which just need you to figure out where to stand/run or in the final parts, memorise the boring QTE-Lite. Shit, if you’re going to QTE me to get through an animated sequence, just let me watch the cinema without needing to look out for when to press “LT”.

The Multiplayer. Does it rank up there with the classic gameplay of the original N64 game? Well, honestly, I didn’t try it. I don’t have a Live Gold sub active right now, and in these days of CoD and Battlefield ruling the multiplayer roost, along with your Halos, while every other shooter gets a shitty MP-mode tacked onto it by the marketing department who thinks it’s a necessary bullet-point for the box – which no-one ever plays, it would probably be a wasteland devoid of players and a waste of time. Especially now, a full year, almost to the day since the thing was released.

Overall, GoldenEye 007: Reloaded is a decent shooter. It’s not a bad game by any means, but it’s not amazing by a long shot. I picked it up from the bargain bin, and had a decent time’s worth from it. I doubt I’ll go back and play through it again (the pile of unplayed stuff is too big) nor do I think I’ll bother looking at the MP. Having said all that, I don’t regret buying or playing through it. If you see it around and feel like a Bond-themed kill-em-up, you could do a lot worse.

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Verdict: Bargain Bin.