EA had three games to offer Nintendo systems this year, including one highly anticipated return.
The first Nintendo title I saw at the rather extravagant EA booth was the newest title in the MySims franchise, MySims Sky Heroes. The game purports to be a sort of “my first fighter plane” title, with a fairly simple control scheme; Z accelerates, C decelerates, and the Control Stick steers. From my experience, it was very easy to get into, and I needed virtually no adjustment when I first got my hands dirty with a race.
The game’s two modes are racing and dogfighting, either in story mode or in a quick play mode. The racing mode is fairly self-explanatory; you need to get to the finish line before the other racers, making sure to pass through gates, though you can also use powerups to assault others or defend yourself. Dogfighting is equally self-explanatory; packing standard missiles and a machine gun, or picking up other powerups, you try to shoot down your opponents.
The gameplay is fun, and quite easy to get into, but the difficulty at this point is fairly ridiculous; the assistant producer was on hand and acknowledged this, and they hope to bring the difficulty down to a more acceptable level prior to the game’s launch. If they do, this game could work rather well for younger players; it’s easy to get into, and it’s got a great presentation to it, with lots of action and plenty of things exploding. The game is slated for release later this year.
From the EA Sports line was the Wii version of Madden 11, which has a few changes to it. They’ve added a 5 vs. 5 mode, for players who want a quicker game; with only a few downs to get a touchdown, and some simple play selection, the game goes much faster. For the regular game, though, there have been modifications as well, notably with play calling. Others have made note of the new Gameflow system, which eliminates the process altogether, allowing the game to decide the best play for the job; as someone who knows next to nothing about football plays, the system was welcome to that extent, though at some point I felt a bit more like I was just following instructions as opposed to properly playing the game.
The motion controls have some variety as well. You can elect to do “gesture-based” or “point-and-play”; gesture-based is the standard motion controls that EA has introduced since Madden 07, while point-and-play just uses the IR pointer to select a player to throw the ball to without motion controls, which I didn’t feel was quite as intuitive or engaging. If you do go with gesture controls, you can choose to simplify things with Arcade mode, which only has you doing a simple throw to pass the ball.
The game seems to be trying to be more and more accessible, and it seems to be doing a pretty good job of it, so this may be the entry to choose if you haven’t gotten into Madden yet; besides that, though, football is football, and EA hasn’t done anything to break the formula this time around, as far as I could tell. Not being a big football guy, though, I might not be knowledgeable enough to say for certain.
The last title was my most anticipated one, the return of NBA Jam. The demo being shown had two-on-two play only, but it still managed to be the most intense game I played at the EA booth. The game moves very quickly, with the ball constantly changing sides and getting dunked by ridiculously spectacular dunks with the characters jumping twenty feet in the air. The controls are pretty simple; lift the remote to jump, lower it again to throw or dunk. Turbo, passing and shoving are all controlled by single buttons on the controller.
The first thing that I noted was that my CPU partner was an insufferable jerk, constantly shoving the ball out of my opponent’s hands as soon as they got it. The second thing I noticed was that the dunk mechanisms were a little bit off, according to the other players around me; it did seem somewhat randomized whether or not a player would dunk, and I’m not sure if it was intentional. Despite the original control gripe (which included not knowing what the controls were, as the demo stations didn’t say), everyone playing seemed to get into it and have a good time, and the game definitely has a lot of energy to it. It feels like there’s a bit of fine-tuning left, but I’d say it’s safe to get pumped up for NBA Jam.
Stay tuned to NintendoGal.com for more E3 impressions.
