Party Game Sundays: Medieval Games

This past Sunday we only played one game, because I got caught up in trying to name every single Pokemon by looking at them. I missed around 60, which I think is pretty good considering there are over 700 of the critters now. As much as I know you enjoy hearing about my amazing performance that is not why we're here. It's been a few weeks, but we finally played an actual party game on Party Game Sunday. That game was Medieval Games for the Wii.

As the title suggests it takes place in Medieval times. In fact, it's basically a Medieval Mario Party. It's about as Medieval as you can get with language like "shaketh" and wildly varying voice acting talent. Just as in all party games you roll a die to move around what is essentially a game board. You land on spaces that have random events, or trigger mini games. When you start you pick one of three stories. All three stories have their own objectives, but in a surprise to me they are also actually stories.

In the first story some pigs have gone missing due to some mysterious force. The kingdom is searching for the pigs, but they are also competing in various games. By winning the games you gain coins, or a large treasure, which nets you even more coins. The person with the most coins at the end gets to judge a beauty contest that will decide who the prince is going to marry. In case you were wondering the prince's name is Beemish and that's awesome.

Shaketh the ye-olde Wii-mote!

Upon the completion of the first story we unlocked a second, which was based around a multi-kingdom tournament. Instead of getting coins you needed to be first place in the most tournaments by the end of the story. Each story is only a certain amount of turns or "days" and then it automatically ends. There was also a third, but we're going to be saving that for another time.

The thing that I liked most about the game was that it actually gave context for all of the mini-games. In front of each game there is a picture along with some scrolling text that tells you exactly why you're going to be playing that specific game. I think that's pretty awesome, because in any other game you get zero context and everything seems to be super random and dumb.

Play such Medieval classics as jousting!

The games themselves were actually pretty fun too. I came into this expecting everything to be garbage, because that's pretty much what most Wii games like this are. They're even worse when you add in motion control, but this is surprisingly good. As you'd expect there are all kinds of Medieval themed games. If you want to joust you can totally do that. Archery and laying siege on a castle are available as well. They're pretty much everything you'd expect, except for the one where you need to make sure you don't get attacked by a demonic squirrel. What the hell does that have to do with anything?

Overall it's actually a pretty well put together game. The main issue it has is that every time anything happens on the map the game stutters as it tries to pull things off of the disc. I'm pretty sure that problem was fixed midway through the PlayStation 1 era, but clearly not everyone figured out how to make seamless gameplay. It's an issue that mars what is otherwise a good game. According to the box art it won some type of parenting award. It would probably be a good game for kids, but as someone in their mid twenties I found it to be pretty good too. I actually hope we play this one again sometime.

     -Manny

Party Game Sundays: Tamagotchi Party On

After playing The Bachelor: The Video Game we needed another game to play. One of our choices was Tamagotchi Party On, which I knew almost nothing about. After reading the back of the box I knew that we had to play it. Also, the box art is incredible and very Japanese.

I guess Tamagotchis made some kind of resurgence recently, which was when this game was released. There may be some kind of television show now too, but I decided I didn't want to look to deep into it. So, the goal of Tamagotchi Party On is to become the president of Tamagotchi Planet. I know, it sounds awesome right? I'm happy to let you know that it's just as awesome as it sounds.

This box art is incredible!

As you probably expected you start by picking which Tamagotchi you want to play as. You only have four to choose from at the beginning, but each time you complete a full game you unlock another one. All the characters seem pretty cool. The next thing you choose is how many elections you want to have. The game estimates that each election will take 30 minutes. For some insane reason the game maxes out at 50 elections, which would take 25 whole hours! What's even more upsetting is that there will probably be a point in my life when I play 25 straight hours of Tamagotchi Party On. It would be awesome at first, but get boring relatively quickly.

We started off by playing one election, because we had no idea what was going to happen. You're dropped on a Mario Party-esque board. In order to move you roll a dice. At the beginning you can go to any one of Tamagotchi Planet's five exciting themed cities, however the game recommends you move towards the crown icon. When you reach the crown you give a campaign speech and get super popular. 

You always want to get to the crown.

So, the way you win Tamagotchi Planet's elections is by being the most popular. As you move around the board you can land on a variety of different spaces. There are two types of mini-games. One space lets you play what I assume are games you'd play on an actual Tamagotchi, where you only use the D-pad. These were actually my favorite, because they were super easy. The other mini-games are all fairly simple motion controlled games that repeat a lot. These games get you money and popularity points.

My favorite spaces to land on were event spaces. Your Tamagotchi is depicted in a very weird cartoon style. Something will happen and you'll either gain or lose popularity points. For example, I watched some Kindergartners and won 50 popularity points. My friend picked up trash in the park and only got 30, because watching kids is way more important than a clean park. 

I played as this baller.

I didn't win our 1 election round, but I did win all 3 elections in our second 3 election round. In the beginning I landed on a friend space, which lets you talk to another Tamagotchi character. The Tamagotchi in question was a rabbit scientist. He gave me over 100 popularity points and told me that I would win the election. He then declared that his predictions are never wrong. I'm inclined to believe that his predictions are right, because I did indeed with the election by quite a large margin.

The real reason I won though was because I figured out the secret to getting tons of popularity. To start you want to give the campaign speech, because it gives you 500 popularity points. Once the speech is given it moves locations so you can keep doing them. The other key thing is to upgrade your headquarters. If you get back to the starting point you can use some money to upgrade your headquarters. I don't want to be crude here, but the headquarters looks like it's half penis, half mushroom. When you upgrade it, by making it bigger or decorating it you earn more popularity points from playing mini-games. Normally playing a game perfectly will net you 100 popularity points, but I was banking 200, because I upgraded my HQ. It was a pretty sweet deal and I figured it out early enough to fly ahead. 

These Tamagotchi games are super fun.

Looking back on it now not a whole lot happens in Tamagotchi Party On. You watch events play out and play the same mini-games over and over again. There's something weirdly charming about it though. The music and characters are very charming. Everything is upbeat and colorful, and made me feel good inside. I felt even better when I became the president of Tamagotchi Planet.

     -Manny

Party Game Sundays: The Bachelor: The Video Game

There was a time in my life when I would have refused playing a video game based on the reality television show The Bachelor. Since that time has now passed I'm both happy and sad to tell you that this past Sunday I sat down to play The Bachelor: The Video Game with three other males in their mid twenties. We could have played as dudes going for the bachelorette, but that would have been slightly less funny.

I have never seen a full episode of The Bachelor, but I understand the premise. A bunch of ladies try to win the heart of an eligible bachelor by competing in challenges and going on dates. At some point the bachelor gives roses to the ladies he might want to be with and those who don't receive them are sent home. This concept actually makes a little bit of sense in a mini-game collection format.

Warner Bros. is only publishing the best games.

So initially this game seemed like it would be utter garbage, but instead it was only kind of crappy. You start by picking the lady you want to be. I picked the one wearing a hot sparkly dress. After you've picked who you want to be you have to choose which bachelor you want to pursue. In the beginning you only have one option and I definitely don't remember his name. I think it was Jason or something. So you pick a guy and then an episode. There are three episodes in a season, which ends with one lucky lady getting married!

In order to compete for the bachelor's heart you obviously need to play mini-games. This is where the game fell apart for me a bit. The game sets up a group date. One of them was ice skating. Sure, that's a reasonable group date. However, the mini-game related to the date involves you trying to make large hexagons without them being hit by some kind of ice ball. They didn't even try to have the games relate to the stupid plot.

I'm glad I didn't marry Jason. He seemed like a tool.

The mini-games are totally fine though. They actually controlled well and were fun in some cases. They weren't blowing my mind or anything, but they were alright. After each mini-game, depending on what place you finished in, you receive a certain amount of hearts. The person with the most hearts at the end of the episode gets to go on a single date with the bachelor. The other three players can try to sabotage them, but it's literally impossible. I'm not even kidding. The single person could fall asleep for a few minutes and still win the single date. They have to do the same thing as the other three people, but they have to do way less of it.

The single date holds the best part of the game. Prior to the impossible to sabotage mini-game you'll be treated to a shitty CG cutscene where the contestant gets sort of close to the bachelor almost like they're going to kiss. If the person wins the date, then the bachelor and the contestant kiss, or have some type of romantic moment. If they lose however, it's amazing. The bachelor will lose interest in some very jarring ways. In one scene he falls asleep when they're about to kiss and in another he suddenly decides to sprint away as fast as he can. I tried looking up some of these clips for you, but to my surprise no one on the internet ripped them for my viewing pleasure. There was a let's play, but I have better things to do than watch someone else play a middling game (at least right now).

This is the hottest image on the internet.

The fact that this game exists is amazing. I feel like the cross-section of people who watch The Bachelor and play terrible mini-game collections is very small. Yet somehow they actually got the real host of the television show to voice it. He does a pretty bad job, which is what I would have expected.

It's not really very fun, but it is certainly funny. If you want to see some of the least sexually arousing CG people of all time you should totally pick this gem up.

     -Manny

The Darkest of Souls

There are so many people who sing the praises of the Souls franchise. Up until a few months ago I truly could not comprehend why. I picked up a copy of Demon's Souls a few years ago and never got into it. I tried so hard, but I felt like the game was actively trying to make me dislike it. Yes, it's super hard, but normally that kind of thing doesn't make me give up on a game completely. For some reason I felt directionless and devoid of all hope, which is why some people like these games in the first place. Hoping that I was just not in the right mindset I tried to get into Demon's Souls multiple times. Each time I'd beat a boss or two and then completely lose interest. This is the reason I was never interested in Dark Souls, until now, that is.

I've been hearing the praise of Dark Souls since it came out. I even started watching people play it somewhat frequently to try and see if I could glean some kind of enjoyment out of it. I didn't really end up enjoying it at all though and would often not pay very close attention. Something clicked in my brain a few months ago though that made me want to try it out. People always talk about it as if it's some kind of rite of passage, which in some sense it is. It's a truly difficult game, but if you're willing to put in the time and figure it out the game's not nearly as impenetrable as people make it out to be. In a way me trying out Dark Souls was like me trying out Monster Hunter. I just had to know why everyone thought it was so great. Turns out, I think Dark Souls is great too.

The silver knight looks so cool!

Yes, the game is difficult, but not impossible. I think that people make Dark Souls' difficulty out to be much more than it actually is. I see it as delayed gratification. In most modern games you're killing something every few seconds, and powering up as you go along. People like fast paced games that make you feel powerful. Dark Souls isn't fast paced and really makes you work in order to truly feel powerful. Sure, you can eventually get strong weapons and armor, but those won't necessarily make the game any easier. In order to truly get better you need to learn the ins and outs of the game's clunky systems. You need to approach every encounter with caution, because even basic enemies can strike you down at a moment's notice. Your character's movements are slow, deliberate, and filled with animation priority. You don't get thrown constant power-ups in order to keep the endorphin stream to your brain going. Souls, the games currency and experience, need to be earned through hard fought battles. 

Dark Souls makes you take time to think. It makes you value what you have earned. When you fall in battle you lose your souls. As long as you don't die again before returning to where you died, you can reclaim them. However, if you do die before reaching the blood stain your corpse left behind they're gone forever. The first time I lost a ton of souls I was devastated, but it taught me to be much more careful. It's cool, because you actually learn lessons in Dark Souls. You actually have to adapt in order to continue on. In some cases though you just have to persevere. 

The super heavy Havel armor helped me through to the end.

I try my hardest not to get angry with video games, but sometimes I just can't help it. Mid-way through the game Dark Souls decides to throw two bosses at you simultaneously. Those two bosses are Ornstein and Smough. During that fight I was literally screaming obscenities at my television. My rage was palpable. Ornstein kept flying across the room and impaling me with his spear, while big Smough and his fat self butt slammed me all day long. I fought those two for hours on end, until finally I had killed them both. The elation I felt when those two were beaten cannot even be described. I had a strategy that I knew would work, because I could get so close to winning every time. I kept running straight back into the battle until I won, which as I mentioned took hours. Dark Souls is a game of both learning and perseverance and that makes it unique.

In a lot of ways Dark Souls reminds me of Monster Hunter. They both seem impenetrable from the outside, they both have communities filled with elitist assholes, they both have clunky systems, and they're both inexplicably popular. Monster Hunter is more of a Japanese thing, while Dark Souls has a huge following both here in America and Japan. There are so many obscure things in Dark Souls, but passionate fans have figured all of them out. The wikis out there for the game are very in depth and you can learn anything you could possibly ever need to know about the game.

Just seeing these two fills me with rage,

I'm writing this the day before Dark Souls 2 comes out. I'm going to be picking it up at midnight and diving right in. What's scary is that there's hardly any information about the game on the internet right now. It's also a very exciting thing. Playing through Dark Souls I needed a lot of information in order to understand what was going on in the beginning. Without that I probably wouldn't have kept going, because some of the things the game does seem obtuse just for the sake of being obtuse. Kindling at bonfires for example made no sense to me and the broken English describing it didn't exactly help. Going into Dark Souls 2 I will be carrying my basic knowledge, but if I get stuck I'm not necessarily going to be able to find help. Going through the game at the same time as the rest of the community will be a completely different experience than I had with the original Dark Souls and I couldn't be more excited. 

I understand now why people like this series. It makes you work for everything. Hell, it doesn't even really tell a story unless you really go searching for it. You can go through the entire game and have barely any clue why anything is happening. That's quite a ridiculous notion, but somehow it works. For a lot of people exploring an open world and defeating enemies is enough, which just goes to show how well put together the game truly is. 

The DLC is pretty good too.

As a person who plays quite a few video games I'm proud that I was able to see Dark Souls through to completion. It's crazy to me how popular the franchise has become and I hope that it continues on, because there's really not a whole lot else like it out there.

     -Manny

Game Time - February 2014

I've still been playing a whole lot of games. It's been getting harder and harder for me to narrow down this feature to three games every month. Now I tend to pick the games I've beaten if there are any, because they'll be the easiest ones to talk about.

This month I beat Lightning Returns, and Strider. I do have a lot to say about Lightning Returns, but not so much Strider. I've been finding recently that it's much easier to talk about games that I'm displeased with. When a game is mediocre, or just okay it's hard to quantify anything about it. Strider for example I liked, but it wasn't anything incredible.

I also played Bravely Default a lot, but I'm not super pleased with it. I have no doubt you want to hear all about these games, so we should get into it.

Bravely Default

Before Bravely Default came out I was so excited for it that I could barely contain myself. I played the demo for hours on end in order to get every single bonus I could. Now that I have the game I'm not as excited anymore. At first I really liked it, but I'm now at what seems to be the game's midpoint at about 30 hours in and I don't feel the magic anymore. I didn't like Final Fantasy V, but I was hoping that this new job changing game would be my cup of tea. It's just weird, because I really liked the demo.

The concept of changing jobs all the time is neat, and I really like getting new jobs and leveling them up. The game does so much right, so I don't really know why I've been down on it lately. I love leveling up, so the fact that I can level up characters and their jobs is a great thing. What's especially cool is that almost every aspect of Bravely Default's gameplay can be customized. It's truly a game that you can play the way you want. The way I play is by having the random encounters up 100%, so I basically get into a battle every few steps. Then when I need to heal I turn them off completely so I can go heal.

Getting into battles every few steps isn't as bad as it sounds.

The battles end up going by super fast, because you can make the battle speed crazy fast. You can turn off battle animations as well, so battles happen almost instantly if you set everything to auto battle. The battle system itself makes things pretty unique as well. Each turn you can either brave, default, or just act. Braving is like using a future turn on the current turn to attack multiple times in a row, up to four times. If you use four then you can't move for four turns. If you default though, you can save up turns while defending, so the penalty isn't as harsh.

The story of the game might actually be what's giving me pause. It's super generic. There are crystals and an evil is hurting them. You and your band of homies have to go around the world and restore them to their former glory while simultaneously fighting an evil empire. It's nothing to write home about. It also doesn't help that the game has had a huge difficulty spike for seemingly no reason at all. The first half of the game I was trouncing enemies, because I was so overleveled, which is how I tend to play RPGs like this. I didn't change the encounter rate or anything, but now bosses take forever to kill and normal enemies wipe out my party on a fairly regular basis. I just don't get it and it has really put a damper on the whole game for me. It doesn't help that people say the last few chapters of the game are horrible.

#BullshitCrystals

I don't know. I desperately want to like the game, but it's holding me back. I just need to keep bashing my head against it until it starts to click again or something.

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

I liked Final Fantasy XIII well enough. XIII-2 has an amazingly terrible story, but I liked the gameplay. I don't even know where to begin describing Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. For starters Final Fantasy XIII is just the subtitle, which seems straight up crazy. I guess it fits with the rest of the game, because the whole thing is bastshit insane!

Let's start off with the story. You play as Lightning. She has been chosen by the new god Bhunivelze as the savior. The world is ending in thirteen days and Lightning has to save people's souls in order to bring them to the new world. If she saves enough souls she will be able to be reunited with her sister Serah. For some reason her transformation into the savior has made her less human, so she''s kind of like a robot emotionally, except for when the game decides to forget that fact in almost every major cinematic. She gets to hang out with Hope, who god turned back into a kid on what seems to be a spaceship outside of time, but it's strongly implied it might actually be the moon...

The Arc might actually be the moon.

Oh yeah, also time has stopped. That means that all your favorite characters haven't aged at all in over a thousand years or something crazy like that. I can't think about this games story without getting actively upset by how stupid it is. The story of original Final Fantasy XIII wasn't spectacular, but in comparison to this it's the best thing ever written. The gameplay itself is super weird, but I liked it in some weird way.

You run around as Lightning in a kind of open world. There are four major hub areas to traverse, and each one has its own main quest to tackle. Lightning can run and even jump, which is kind of weird to get used to at first. Battles are fairly similar to how they were in the previous games, except that you have direct control over Lightning. You have three schema, each with a different outfit, weapon, and shield. Each schema has four attacks, that correspond to a face button on the controller. You still attack the enemy with magic moves to stagger them, and physical moves to retain the stagger you've done. Now it just feels like you have more control, because you can move Lightning and choose when you're going to to do an attack as opposed to putting in a string of commands.

If you ever wanted to see Lightning as a sexy cat lady, then this game is for you!

The battles are fun, but the way you save souls is not exactly what I'd call fun. It's where the game becomes a long series of fetch quests. You'll talk to a person and they'll be all upset, because they can't find their dog. You have to go around and find the dog, and then you get some stat upgrades and a terrible item. The only way you can level up is by completing these quests, so if you want to do the fun part of the game well you have to put up with all the stupid fetch quests. Battling doesn't get you anything other than money, items, and skills. Unsurprisingly you need a lot of those things in order to complete quests, so it's a never-ending cycle.

To me there was a huge disconnect in the game. The world is ending in a few days, but you have time to run around and do a bunch of bullshit. The game itself is on a timer, but it's super forgiving so it might as well not even be there. Eventually I ended up coming around on the fetch quests, because they kind of let me turn off my brain. By the time the game was almost over I was barely paying attention to it and watching things on the internet at the same time. I guess that's probably not a good thing for the game though. It was just so weird.

Strider

I think that Strider might be the best game I've talked about in this edition of Game Time. At the very least it's the one I had the most fun with. It starts off with Strider hang-gliding into the city and then you just have to play. There's no explanation or anything other than that you have to kill Grand Master Meio. It's pretty much your standard Metroidvania style game, but a little more action focused.

The action is fast paced and ridiculous. You can spam the attack button as fast as you can and Strider will whip his sword at a ridiculous rate. The combat isn't very nuanced, because you can pretty much spam the sword and jump around to beat every single boss in the game with very little trouble. The good thing is that the controls are very responsive and you feel legitimately powerful. It's like he's cutting through enemies as if they're butter, which is how it should be. He's a ridiculous cyber ninja.

This image is amazing.

As you advance in the game you get all kinds of powerups that make Strider even cooler. He can dash through the air, and double jump. My favorite thing is that you can change the color of his sword and scarf by using the d-pad. Each color has different powers. Red can deflect bullets, orange is explosive, blue is ice, and I don't remember what purple does off-hand. I tended to use explosive once I got it, because it was the easiest one to kill enemies with.

I wanted to find every single powerup in the game, but I couldn't after I beat it. For some reason it doesn't let you go back once you've beaten Grand Master Meio, which is a shame. I don't really have a whole lot to say about Strider, because it's pretty short and not a lot is going on. You play as Strider and cut down tons of robots. It was fun.

Is the next gen finally here?

Every time a new game gets announced and it's for the last generation of consoles along with the new ones I get upset. What's the point of having a next generation console if there are no exclusive games to play on it? The first party exclusives for the PS4 at launch were super lame, but that all changes in March. InFamous Second Son will finally be upon us. Every time I see gameplay I get excited. It looks like more InFamous, which is exactly what I want out of it. What makes me extra happy though is that it looks like a true next generation game. The graphics actually look like they wouldn't be possible on a PlayStation 3 and an Xbox 360 and that prospect excites me greatly. Maybe after this month I can finally stop complaining about the PS4 having no truly next gen games.

Other than InFamous I will definitely be playing Dark Souls 2. For the past two months I've been playing the original, which I just completed last night. That's one of the reasons this edition was so late. I'm trying to put my experience with the game into words and that will hopefully go up sometime this week.

I'm thinking about getting Yoshi's New Island for the 3DS as well, but the more advertising I see for it the less I want it. It's possible that Yoshi's Island for the SNES was a total fluke and Yoshi never deserves his own game again. That's probably kind of harsh, but it seems to be getting more true by the year.

Well, that's all I've got. See you next time

     -Manny

Party Game Sundays: Let's Tap

After playing the gem that was Cruise Ship Vacation Games I demanded that we play the game I had purchased for our Sunday shenanigans. Last week something made me recall the game Let's Tap, which for some reason SEGA published. When I looked it up on Amazon they had one copy left in stock for the hot hot sale price of $13.50, which I promptly bought. The entire concept of the game is that you set a Wii remote face down on a box and tap your fingers on the box. I knew that if it worked as intended it could be really cool, but figured that the much more likely alternative of it not working and sucking terribly would be the case.

Tap to make the crazy stick men move!

In a crazy turn of events tapping on a box to make a Wii remote vibrate works insanely well. I figured that it would suck, because almost all motion control involving a Wii remote is awful. I feel confident in saying that Let's Tap is one of the most fun games we've ever played on a Sunday evening. It's awesome slogan of "Tap into a new party experience" is actually quite fitting.

When you first boot up the game it demands that you set the Wii remote face down on a box so that you can play the tutorial. I, being a weirdo, brought two boxes with me to our Sunday gathering. One was from my wireless Logitech keyboard and the other was the box my Song of Fire and Ice book collection came in. Both of them actually worked very well, as did the board game boxes we had on hand. The tutorial has you tapping on the box in order to show you just what the hell it is you need to be doing.

Tapping the box lightly is what you want to do, because if you do it too hard the game pops up a message in the corner yelling at you for tapping too hard. You hardly need to tap at all in order for the game to recognize movement, which completely blew my mind. You even navigate the game's menus by tapping and then select an option by double tapping quickly.

Let's Tap has five modes, all of which can be played with up to four players. Tap Runner is the first mode and my personal favorite. Each player is a neon colored stick man, and they want to try and reach the goal first. Tapping lightly as fast as you can makes your character run. If you tap down hard you'll jump. The first few stages are fairly straightforward and have you jumping over hurdles, but as it progresses things get pretty crazy. Eventually there are boosts in the air that propel your character forwards and weird black holes that change your place on the map. This mode was definitely the most exciting. The way each stage is set up allows for crazy comebacks and insane photo finishes.

Tap Runner is probably the best mode.

Rhythm Tap is a rhythm based mode just as it sounds. It reminded me quite a bit of Taiko Drum Master. Notes run past on a line and you need to tap when they reach the center of your circle. It's the same concept as Guitar Hero and almost every rhythm game before it, but you're tapping on a cardboard box. There are 16 tracks to play through and they're appropriately crazy and Japanese. The major downside to the mode is that you're competing for score, but you can rapidly tap the box the entire time and it doesn't penalize you at all. When played normally though it's very fun. It's more challenging than most rhythm games though, because when your opponent is off beat you can hear it on their box and it totally screws with you.

Tap your finger to the hot beats of Let's Tap.

The other three modes aren't really anything special, but at least they're unique. Silent Blocks is a mix between Jenga and a match three game. Bubble Voyager is a multiplayer battle mode, where you tap the box to shoot missiles at your opponents. The final mode is by far the dumbest, which you might be able to guess from it's name of Visualizer. It's basically a windows media player visualizer, but when you tap the box something crazy happens on screen. This ended with us madly tapping for around ten minutes as I collapsed laughing from how stupid the whole scenario was.

While there are only two modes that are truly worth playing in Let's Tap I think I got my $13.50's worth out of it. I had a lot of fun and I'm almost certainly going to play this game again, which is not something I'd say about 90% of the games we've played so far during Party Game Sundays.

Let's Tap has an innovative way of using the Wii-remote and it actually works properly. It doesn't necessarily have a lot of content, but the content that it does have is super fun, or at the very least entertaining to try out once. If you have a spare cardboard box you should definitely consider giving Let's Tap a shot. It's a party game that doesn't suck!

Party Game Sundays: Cruise Ship Vacation Games

This week we had four hot new party games to choose from. Three of them my friend Matt purchased, and one I brought to the table. We decided that we'd play what we thought to be the worst, and then wash it down with another better game as a palette cleanser.

The game we decided would probably be the worst was Cruise Ship Vacation Games for the Wii. The name alone made me think it was awful, but the screenshots on the back of the box made me feel safe in my assumption. As you may have guessed Cruise Ship Vacation Games is a mini game collection. Unsurprisingly it takes place on a cruise ship. You choose from one of ten mini-games and compete with friends or against the CPU. It was published by Activision, but it doesn't seem as if it was originally one of their budget titles. It just wasn't good enough to sustain a price above $8 dollars.

This cruise is off the chain!

The best part of the entire game was the character select screen. We each got to choose a character from a pre-determined list. At first we were just picking based on looks, but then we realized that each person had a paragraph of back story. I chose a character because he looked like Cosmo Kramer of Seinfeld fame. Upon reading his back story I realized that he actually was supposed to look like Kramer.

"Tired of being the "weird neighbor" in his apartment building, he took the money he saved up selling plasma and left on a cruise. He hopes to meet new people, try new foods, and discover new hair care products."

Those are the exact words next to the character! They didn't even try and pretend that he wasn't a blatant ripoff of a popular sitcom character. From there the descriptions only got weirder. My personal favorite was for an animal loving girl.

"She enjoys cows, pigs, mice, squirrels, and bunnies. Her primary complaint about the cruise thus far has been the absence of cows, pigs, mice, squirrels, and bunnies. She thinks she might be starting to like ducks."

SHE THINKS SHE MIGHT BE STARTING TO LIKE DUCKS! I literally can't make this shit up. Why has she started to like ducks? I've never been on a cruise, but I'm pretty sure there aren't many ducks on the open ocean. Sadly after the character selection nothing of note really happened.

You choose one of the mini-games to play and then compete, which is just like every other mini-game collection out there. Most of the things are just generic mini-games that seem ripped straight out of other collections. Skiiball, mini-golf, rock climbing, shuffleboard, ping pong, and blackjack are just a few of the games you can play. They're all fairly competent, but they just aren't fun. Rock climbing was probably the best game, because it was somehow turned into a weird Bejeweled knockoff. In order to climb up colored rocks you had to match three colored gems in a row.

There really isn't a whole lot I want to say about Cruise Ship Vacation games, other than that it has a stupid premise. A game based entirely around games and attractions you'd find on a cruise ship is a dumb concept and it's still dumb in practice. The mini-games are all functional, but the game's biggest crime is that it's just boring. None of the mini-games got me very excited except for shuffleboard and that was only because I was trying as hard as possible not to get negative points. Check out the trailer below to find out how truly exciting it was to play Cruise Ship Vacation Games...

Sidenote: The game's case and trailer both claim that it supports Wii-motion plus, which is something that I cannot grasp. None of the mini-games have any super intense motion controls that need to be precise or anything, so I can't even imagine how using a motion plus would enhance the experience. 

     -Manny