Namco Bandai had a number of games that looked pretty sweet this year. Dead to Rights: Retribution for the Xbox 360, Tekken 6 for Xbox 360 and PS3 and Soul Caliber: Broken Destiny for the PSP were all at the show. Unfortunately, their lineup for the Wii was not nearly as exciting.
The first game they showed me was We Cheer 2. I’m not familiar with the first We Cheer game, but apparently it did well enough to warrant a sequel despite the negative reviews I found online. From what I can tell, We Cheer 2 is a vast improvement suffering from few of the problems that plagued the original. The guy demonstrating the game energetically worked through an entire song doing the full dance motions and cheerfully showing off the game’s mechanics. It looked like a rhythm dance game that used directional arrows onscreen to show movements that players replicate while holding a Wii remote in each hand. It seemed like fun, but being terribly shy I declined to embarrass myself by actually playing the game on the show floor.
The next game I saw was Active Life: Extreme Challenge. This time, instead of moving the arms around, Active Life provides a floor mat controller similar to the classic DDR pad, but with two up buttons and two down buttons as well as a left and right. I think the two center spaces for your feet are also buttons, but I’m not sure. The mat is used similarly to the way you would use a DDR pad in a game other than DDR: like a regular controller you stand on. The result looked like fun, but failed to accurately recreate the sports they were depicting. For instance, skateboarding in Active Life would not make me any better at skateboarding in real life any more than Guitar Hero makes you good at real guitar. Of course, that’s not a bad thing at all. Instead, the game focuses on being a good game without concerning itself with being to realistic. I still declined to play it, though.
I did play the next game I was shown. Food Network: Cook or be Cooked actually piqued my interest since one of the first games I got for the Wii was Cooking Mama and I was curious about the competition. Also, I’ve heard that Nintendo Gal really likes the Food Network and their games, especially the ones with Gordon Ramsay. The goal of Cook or be Cooked is that after playing through the 30 recipes in the game you should be able to go into your kitchen and cook them for real. Unfortunately, the realism in the game actually detracted a bit from the game. Though the game was interesting, everything looked so much like a regular kitchen that I just felt like the game had no pizzazz. If I wanted a game to teach me cooking, Personal Trainer: Cooking for the DS would be a better choice since it is basically an interactive cookbook that reads itself aloud and responds to voice commands. Nice try, Food Network, but I just don’t see this as going very far. Cook or be Cooked was well prepared, but lacks flavor.
Finally, I got a few minutes to play Dragonball: Revenge of King Picolo. After three games that really tried hard to catch the casual gamer’s attention, Dragonball was a breath of fresh air. This is a fairly simple sidescrolling kung-fu adventure starring our favorite monkey hero Son Goku. To play this game, the Wii remote is turned sideways NES-style and only a few basic functions are required. The version of the game I played was still in Japanese, but I thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless. I was sad to walk away from it when I had to go to another appointment. That was a lot of fun.
