After Nintendo’s press conference, I headed right to the Los Angeles Convention Center for my first appointment, which was with Namco Bandai. They had three Nintendo offerings on display this year: Pac-Man and Galaga Dimensions for Nintendo 3DS, and Power Rangers Samurai and Go Vacation for Wii, the latter of which was also playable at the Nintendo booth.
Pac-Man and Galaga Dimensions is a collection of games from Pac-Man and Galaga, as one might expect. The two original arcade titles are included, along with Pac-Man Championship Edition and Galaga Legions, two recent remakes that appeared as downloadable titles on Xbox Live Arcade. The centerpieces of the package, however, are two new titles that take advantage of the new features of the 3DS: Pac-Man Tilt and Galaga 3D Impact.
Pac-Man Tilt is a platformer with a bit of a pinball influence to it. Pac-Man runs along a brightly-colored neon world, navigating plateaus and platforms, as well as pinball flippers that can send him skyward if you are skilled enough. The game’s title comes from its tilt mechanic, which is one of the ways you’ll navigate Pac-Man around this world; if you tilt your 3DS, the titular character will start pitching forward, and eventually will curl up and start rolling. You’ll need to use this mechanic in order to make it past some of the enemies and obstacles, as Pac-Man becomes rather damaging as he rolls. It might have been because I was bad at it, but the game seemed to move fairly slow in general; it could sometimes take several tries to get a movement correct, but even if I was doing well I was never able to get the gameplay going very quickly. It was also a bit difficult to tell why the tilting was necessary from a gameplay perspective, when you can still walk around normally with the Circle Pad. If the game were entirely tilt controlled, I think it would have been a great benefit to the title.
The Galaga title, Galaga 3D Impact, seemed to take a lot of inspiration from the Face Raiders 3DS pack-in. Your character flies along a track on some celestial body, and Galaga bug-style enemies will fly at and around you; in order to aim at them, you’ll need to turn yourself and the 3DS system to get them in your sights. The tilt mechanic works very well, similar to Face Raiders, but you get a better sense of excitement by speeding through space. I’m not sure how the game escalates in difficulty, as I didn’t get much time with it, but the gameplay as seen seems quite solid. It’s good to see developers taking advantage of the special features of the 3DS.
Power Rangers Samurai was a very straightforward game from what I played; it’s very uncomplicated, and designed to appeal to the younger fans of the currently airing Power Rangers television series. You play as one of the five Power Rangers, using your Wii Remote to paint out a kanji character that lets your character transform; you then are set upon a fairly linear world to defeat the numerous enemies that appear, and that’s pretty much the gist of the entire game that I was able to see. The controls are simple as well, with weak attack, strong attack, super attack (limited by an energy meter), jump and guard being pretty much the entirety of what’s used; there are some combos available as well, but I had a bit of trouble getting these to register for the most part.
When I say linear, I mean it, too. The game is a constant movement from one enemy-filled area to the next, sort of like Turtles in Time converted into 3D. There are some minor branching paths where extra health is stationed, but the game doesn’t exactly offer a wide variety of gameplay options. Battles aren’t particularly difficult, either; anything that you can’t kill by mashing the attack button, you can usually wipe out with one of your enormous super attacks. What the game has is done well, but it just doesn’t have much. The game seems to be of the opinion that games for children need to be heavily watered down, which any life-long gamer knows is a ridiculous notion. Perhaps the later parts of the game scale up in difficulty, but what I was shown at the show wasn’t horribly promising.
The other Wii title, Go Vacation, is a mini-game collection that offers the player a large number of games and sport events, including a number that are not commonly found in sporting titles, like snowball battling or surfing. The game is based in a large vacation area with four different resorts, each one corresponding to a different season; for example, you’ll be surfing in the summer resort, and ski jumping in the winter resort. You navigate these resorts using motion controls that I never managed to get a hold of, and hopefully steer your character toward one of the events instead of into a wall, repeatedly.
The game apparently contains over 50 different mini-games, and each of them have different controls, which can be a mixture of motion- and button-controlled. Fortunately, while navigating the overworld was a pain, most of the mini-games control rather well; I was quickly able to get a grip on throwing snowballs and managed to defeat the demonstrator there, though he easily trumped me in the surfing game. Namco is quite proud of the variety available in Go Vacation, most notably the less-common sports that are not often found in compilation titles like this one, and the games I saw there (snowball fighting, surfing, and ski jumping) seemed to fit the bill, generally. The mini-games aren’t exactly packed with strategy, but with so many available this is probably to the game’s benefit. While there are some complaints (I’m pretty sure I mentioned the overworld), the meat of the game looks well constructed, and I think it could be a good family buy when it is released later this year.
Stay tuned to Nintendo Gal for more impressions from this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo!
