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.

One downside: a Nerf video game is a contradiction. It’s not really a Nerf “game” until somebody’s caught one of those foam and rubber darts in the eye and gone crying home crying, doing that little fake limp despite having taken it to the face.

As if in response to this unspoken criticism, EA set up a mega-huge Nerf gun at the event right outside the demo hall for people to shoot. Early in the day, they were all militant about where you could point that thing – targets only, one person at the gun at a time, etc. But by the end of the day, after the PR peeps had a few drinks in them, some EA higher-ups (who shall go unnamed) aimed the gun at the bar and started taking pot shots at abandoned cocktail glasses. One guy managed to land a dart in a martini glass before the gun manager broke it up and started putting the huge apparatus away.

First up was My Sims because I got it confused with My Sims Kingdom. My Sims is already out on Wii but the upcoming PC release introduces new community features (like shared Gardens where you can hang out) and six new character NPCs that sort of (but not really) tie into My Sims Kingdom. My Sims on PC looked to be more user-friendly for the builders among you than it was on Wii (or maybe I say that because I’m a klutz with the Wii Remote) and I noticed that the terrain now has different elevations. Terraced garden, here I come.

After extricating myself from My Sims, I immediately tumbled into My Sims Kingdom. This is essentially the same as My Sims on the Wii – only there’s a plot and tons of RPG elements tossed in. It almost reminded me of Little King’s Story or My Life as a King – one of those cutesy RPGs with a twist. In this case, it’s the building gameplay. The whole story is that you’re customisable character graduates from lowly pig farmer to King’s Builder and are given a wand to go around the kingdom, building stuff and making things happen by talking to people. The kingdom is broken up into different islands, each with its own theme. We got to see the home base island where the king’s castle needed some bridge-building and later a space island where we got to build a rocket ship. Unicorns, fishing, and princess fill out the fantasy storyline and if you’re a kid, or a girl, or can swallow your testosterone long enough to play the game, it’ll probably charm you senseless for at least a couple of hours.

I hit a wall with My Sims Kingdom when I was told they weren’t ready to unveil Drama Island yet (damn!), so I moved on to SimCity Creator and had a tough choice to make: DS or Wii version? I opted for the DS demo and got a nice look at the Challenge Mode where you’ve got to play through the Ages to win. The guy running the demo took me from the Stone Age where people are incapable of using possessive pronouns through Ancient China with its awesome pagodas into Industrial Revolution Europe where we had to figure out where to put the oh-so-cancerous coal mines for the sake of electricity. The graphics were typical SimCity dull, but the promise of a “Future Age” after completing Challenge Mode had me wondering if there’d be teleporters and rockets and stuff…

I would have stuck around to see, but Challenge Mode would easily take the rest of the afternoon to complete, so I got up to dash to for another game before the demo hall closed when the guy running the Wii version called, “Wait, what about me?”

I’m a bleeding heart, despite my foul mouth, so I turned to the guy and said, “You’ve got three minutes.”

He jumped right in: “Curvy roads. Godzillas. Natural disasters.”

That got my attention. I’m the jerk who kills my pregnant sims, after all. “Show me.”

The roads were curvy, all right. And the graphics were head and shoulder over any SimCity game I’ve ever seen, even on PC. And sure enough, there were Godzilla-type monsters and natural disasters you could inflict on your city with the flick of the Wii Remote of the press of a button.

“Awesome.”

And before I realised it, they were closing down the hall and having last call at the bar. So at the very least, these games all hold true with a basic Sims property: they’re like black holes for time.

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.

So, to take out bad guys for good, you’ve got to switch to the block puzzle and move some things around to get rid of the bad guys. The amount of time you can spend puzzling is limited by a time gauge that can only be extended by making good matches and killing more bad guys in the adventure world. By connecting certain blocks in the puzzle, you can also earn bonuses to use in the adventure world, like freezing time, upgrading weapons or activating an invincible robot mode called Tea Time.

I’m really glad to see this kind of game coming from EA – it’s proof that they’re getting away from the sequel-spitting machine model of game making and it also proves that American publishers can come up with original IPs that don’t get all gimmicky with the motion controls. Seriously – you could play through the entire game without even using the stylus.

So keep an eye out for Henry Hattsworth, and if you catch anyone comparing it to Professor Layton, slug ‘em right in the jaw. For me.

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.

The character customisation stands out as the most complex – it hogged the limelight at the EA Showcase, even. How can you not like peg-legged snipers sporting bunny ears? You unlock even more options for your avatar’s appearance by going through missions to earn special items that work kind of like Achievements – because the whole community will see those bunny ears and know that you completed a mission to get them.

The community aspect of Battlefield Heroes also adds a whole other layer of depth. Ben Cousins, Executive Producer of the Battlefield franchise, explained that Heroes is as much a game as a web project. There are going to be friend lists, community boards and Facebook type apps for people to get into surrounding actual gameplay.

All of this goes live in winter (hopefully the 2008 side of it). Digital Illusions Studios CE has already started the closed beta phase with dev personnel and their families. This will go to a larger pool of core users in the fall and by winter, when (if) the game goes live, EA and DICE hope it will be the “world’s largest PC action game.”

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.

I got spanked at it when I tried it myself, but I was pleased that the controls handled pretty well. Dodging was what I did most, mashing A while moving the control stick in the direction I wanted to go. I was really getting killed until Executive Producer Jonathan Bunney finally bailed me out by showing me how to block, which also reflects spells. I redeemed myself in Potions – but that’s easy to do with such simple controls. The cauldron already has a potion in it and your job is to follow the instructions icons that hover to the right of it. Fan the mixture by moving the Wii Remote and Nunchuk up and down until it turns the right colour. The control vibrates in your hand when you’ve nailed the right shade. Point at an ingredient and hold A to pick it up and hold it over the cauldron; tilt your wrist to pour it in.

“The controls are very smooth,” said Mr. Bunney. “We don’t want to break anybody’s wrists.”

I completed the potion and got an A ranking, stepping back to let someone else go at it in Quidditch. Playing as Harry means you’ve got to play as the Seeker and find the Snitch – but there was a hint that you could unlock other characters to play (probably just for the Duelling, though). To win at Quidditch, you’ve got to fly after the Snitch, going through star-shaped hoops to gain speed bonuses as you hurtle along. Like the Potion and Duelling controls, Quidditch looked pretty smooth – with no frantic flailing or extreme flicking to get the on-screen action to occur.

While that was going on, Bunney informed me that this Harry Potter game was built around the Wii instead of the PS2 (like the last one). The Wii Remote looks like a wand, so it was a logical choice; and now that they’ve got the technology of the Wii down, things are looking a lot better for the Potter series.

Let’s hope it works out well for the other consoles.

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.