Today marks the launch of Nintendo’s new WiiWare game download service in Japan — and while I’ve neither the imported Wii nor the balls required to brave hundreds of thousands of fearless Final Fantasy fanboys scrambling to get their hands on My Life As A King, Game|Life has been kind enough to perform that service for us — and thanks to them we have impressions of a full seven games.
To buy or not to buy… that is the question come May 12, when WiiWare arrives in North America. So which titles should you spend the next two months waiting for, and which are better forgotten before they begin their ocean voyage?
The graphics are really pretty, the 80’s-style soundtrack is rocking, and the action feels awesome. But at 800 points or $8, I don’t know if Star Soldier R is worth it for anyone who isn’t a hardcore competitive shooter player. It’s the sort of thing you’d play at a competition, not the kind of thing you’d spend money for at home. I can see it getting very old very fast for casual players, as there are only the two stages.
At 1000 Wii Points ($10), Lonpos is one of the more expensive WiiWare titles, which is ironic insofar as it is pretty cheaply produced. It’s a 4:3, 480i puzzle game with really rough graphics, text, and interface. The goal [...] Fit the oddly-shaped puzzle pieces into the rectangle.
Angel’s Solitaire isn’t hard to describe. You’ve got the titular game, in which you make four rows of cards from Ace to Queen with similar colors, and can only move sequences of the same color around on the board.
There’s Klondike, which we know as Solitaire. And then there’s Tower Off, which we know as Freecell. There aren’t any Wiimote control methods as far as I can see — just traditional buttons-and-D-pad.
Epicenter Studios has crafted this heartwarming tale of a farmer whose animals seem to continually manage to break free of their pens. Isn’t that always the way? You’ve got to quickly construct new fences and make sure that animals are only fenced in with their own kind.
After each level, you’re ranked on how much time you took, how many lives you lost, how much fence you built, etc., and given a score. After five levels on the farm, our humble farmer takes off for what looks like Australia, where he’s penning in more exotic animals with wire fences. Clever.
I’ve got to play this one a bit more, I think, as it was pretty fun from my few minutes of experimentation. I’d say this is a lock for a U.S. release in May.
At 500 Wii Points or $5, Okiraku Ping-Pong is so far the best value of the WiiWare launch games.
Yes, Angel’s Solitaire is as cheap as this, but this is a bigger production. Okiraku Ping-Pong pushes the 40MB size limit for WiiWare. It’s a fully 3-D ping-pong game with four characters and three stages, plus three mini-games. Plus, it’s actually pretty fun.
Dr. Mario and Virus Extermination:
Nintendo’s big first-party launch title for WiiWare is a classic that they’ve brought to most all of their consoles: Dr. Mario.
It’s one of the more full-featured WiiWare titles. There’s the original falling-pills puzzle game that captured the Tetris crowd back in the 80’s. There’s online play, with friends or random people. And there’s a brand-new mode that uses the Wiimote pointer, called “Virus Extermination.”
I played online versus a random stranger, who purports to be a homely Japanese woman if you go by her Mii but really who can tell, and she beat the living crap out of me. Yep, it’s Dr. Mario alright.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King:
For your $15, you get a game far removed from the series’ action-RPG roots. It’s a Sims-like town simulation game where you, as a child-king, build a castle city from scratch. By adding buildings and inhabitants, then making sure they all pitch in and help you, you’ll turn a former ghost town into a thriving place to live.
It’s almost like Dragon Quest in reverse. At the beginning of the stereotypical RPG, your band of adventurers meets the King, who sends them off on a quest to enter the dungeons and slay monsters. In this game, you are the King, and you send your subjects off outside of the town into dungeons where they kill the monsters.
The graphics and music are up to Square Enix’s usual high standards, although the fact that the game doesn’t run in progressive scan mode is a bit disappointing. All in all, it seems like a fun little sim game for the casual set, if not quite what we’re used to from Final Fantasy.
And oh yes, before we forget — that $15 shelled out for Final Fantasy WiiWare? It’s only the beginning, as Nintendo has apparently opened the door to WiiWare microtransactions on top of individual game fees.
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