ea showcase 08

Nerf N-Strike – We Need More Games Like This

12:00PM Kotaku US Edition | Anybody remember the days of yore when you could go to an arcade and play Time Crisis? They might still do that in Japan, but here in the States, arcade shooters have sort of died a quiet death somewhere between those hideous orange guns for Time Crisis 5 and the Wii Zapper with its lame lineup of games. You might think Nerf N-Strike would be just one more nail in the coffin, but I’m pleased to report after my hands-on time that the game and its flashy controller that it is actually not made of suck. In fact, it’s almost the opposite of suck with it’s old school on-rails gameplay and simplistic graphics. If you liked the last Time Crisis or are looking for a bloodless version of it, Nerf just might be your thing. More »

Henry Hattsworth and the Puzzling Adventure – Sit On It, Layton

10:00AM Kotaku US Edition | The star of EA’s 08 Showcase is easily the underdog. Not much has been said about Henry Hattsworth and the release date remains firmly fixed in the far off haze of 2009; so I wasn’t expecting to see so much of such a cool game when I finally got my turn to try the dual screen adventure-puzzle hybrid. I get why I haven’t heard too much: the game is kind of hard to explain. It uses both screens at all times of the game – the upper is the adventure game where you’re Henry Hattsworth and you’ve got some bad guys to take out. The lower screen is the puzzle, a basic block-slider like Bejeweled. The screens are connected in that the enemies you take out up top fall into and become blocks in the puzzle on the bottom. If the block puzzle fills up because you’re too busy adventuring, the baddies climb out of the puzzle and back into the adventure world to attack you. More »

Battlefield Heroes – Battling The Stigma Of Battlefield

10:00AM Kotaku US Edition | Accessibility is the keyword for the Battlefield Heroes dev team and I’ve never been happier to hear it. I like my WWII shooters just fine, but they do start to feel a little stale after the fourth or fifth version; and it gets really hard to get into a series once the established fan base is dead-set on going after the blood of noobs in multiplayer. And now that Battlefield has gone back in time and to the future, where else can the series really go? To Toon Town, it looks like. And that’s not a bad move if the idea is to net the casual crowd and attract people who aren’t into any of the other Battlefields. Heroes aims to be for everyone with its charming, cartoon-y look, basic gameplay mechanics, and extensive online community support. Like Team Fortress 2, Battlefield Heroes will feature special abilities depending on what class of soldier you play (invisibility for snipers, whoo-hoo!) – but the similarities stop there. For one thing (and this is most important), it’s free to play. You’d think that’d count against the game in terms of depth and detail, but Heroes is actually way deeper than it’s cartoonish looks and $US 0 price tag lead people to believe. More »

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – Wii Impressions

9:40AM Kotaku US Edition | I made a name for myself in video games by savaging Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on DS. It was the most awful, most painful, most broken game I’ve ever endured and it’s my tendency to sneer at most movie-based video games anyway. So what did I expect from Half-Blood Prince on the Wii? Certainly not all the fun I had. The events demoed at EA’s Showcase were Potions class, Quidditch and Duelling. Before we got to try the game ourselves, we got to watch two cute EA kids go at it in Duelling. They shook the Remotes and mashed the A buttons and bobbed and weaved their heads in time with the motions on screen. Harry dodges Malfoy’s Stupify, Malfoy gets off a freezing spell that knocks Harry off his feet. Back and forth went the magic spells until Malfoy ran out of health icons and the Duel ended with Harry winning best two out of three. More »

Celebrity Sports Showdown Impressions

6:40AM Kotaku US Edition | I’ll be honest; I didn’t spend more than twenty minutes with this game. Can you blame me? It’s a hodgepodge of sports minigames with some celebrity likenesses slapped on. I played as Mia Hamm because Sugar Ray Leonard was taken and Fergie makes me physically ill. There’s a slew of sports to choose from – skiing, tubing, badminton, dodge ball… I faced off against the PR rep in a tubing race where the idea is to gather the most stars. The Wii motion controls worked fairly well. Jerk the remote up to jump and flick it down to slam your airborne tube onto a competitor and make him lose his stars. On a skiing level, PR totally destroyed me as we sped down the slopes, trying to do tricks whenever we caught a jump. The thing that has the most potential for drunk-fun are the rowing games. We played co-op on this level and each had to control a paddle by moving the Wiimote in a rowing motion while held sideways. I confess I blew it by dropping the remote twice. Nailing that synced rhythm with your partner is way harder than it looks even if you aren’t a klutz like me. The game ships in October. More »