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Frankenreview: Skate It (Wii)
Posted by Mike Fahey at 5:00 AM on November 28, 2008
Combine a sport that requires you to shift your body weight atop a board and a peripheral that requires you to do the same and you've got a match made in heaven, right?
That's what EA is hoping for with Skate It, the Nintendo Wii iteration of their Skate series of skateboarding games. Taking the gameplay of the original and adding support for the Nintendo Wii Balance Board controller, EA had the chance to create the most realistic skateboarding experience to ever come to a home gaming console. Let's ask the assembled video game critics of the world how that all turned out.
After a string of disappointing titles, Eidos handed development of Lara Croft's Tomb Raider games over to Crystal Dynamics, and she's been a changed woman ever since.
There's nothing quite as terrifying as hordes of hungry, screaming, mindless undead, roaming the streets in search of human flesh. Survival horror has known this for ages, yet most have failed to realise the key to truly horrifying zombie movies - togetherness. True zombie horror is taken from the way groups of humans deal with desperate situations, rather than the monsters themselves.
They said it couldn't be done. Actually what they really said was it shouldn't be done, followed by several what the hell were they thinkings, but Midway went and did it anyway. Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe is a concept that frightened and confused quite a few people in the gaming community, but as new footage and details trickled out the concept slowly began to grow on us. Soon we found ourselves looking forward to beating up Sonya Blade with Wonder Woman, or Batman with Scorpion. It might not be so bad, right?
The original Gears of War hit the Xbox 360 like a freight train, bowling over critics and fans alike with it's gritty graphics, rough characters, and run, gun, and hide gameplay that seems to have taken over the shooter genre these days. Cliff Bleszinski's baby even managed to give Microsoft's golden boy Master Chief a run for his money, easily sharing a spot with the Halo series among the must-have titles for the system.
When the PlayStation 3 began shipping back in November of 2006, there was really only one must-have game for the console, and that was Insomniac's ambitious first-person shooter, Resistance: Fall of Man. The best title at launch remains one of the best games on the console to date. Only one game due out this holiday season has a hope of stealing the sci-fi FPS crown on the console, and that's it's sequel, Resistance 2.
Sega drove a sketchy tank onto the rather barren field of PlayStation 3 RPGs with Valkyria Chronicles, the turn-based strategy affair that's been turning heads ever since the Japanese debut trailer 
As the 2007 Game Developers Conference approached in early January 2007, many folks in the game industry were unsure what to make of Sony's PlayStation 3. Just a couple of months old, the console only had a handful of titles, most of them sub-par, and the promise of some bigger games down the line. Many new PS3 owners were losing hope, and then LittleBigPlanet happened. Media Molecule's baby, even in the brief look we got courtesy of Phil Harris and crew at the Sony GDC keynote, captured the imagination of not just the gaming public, but the entire industry, promising levels of interactivity and user-created content unheard of for a console title.
After kicking off the plastic instrument craze in 2005 with the very first Guitar Hero title, developer Harmonix went on to create two follow ups to the title before Activision's purchase of RedOctane and MTV's purchase of Harmonix resulted in the creation of two separate franchises. Activision's Guitar Hero III was more than a little overshadowed by the Harmonix-developed Rock Band, which upped the ante by including drums and a microphone for the total band experience. Activision's answer to that? Guitar Hero World Tour, which takes the same gameplay made popular by Rock Band and adds a little more functionality.
What happens when you take one of the most successful shooters of 2004, change the development teams, scrap the old settings, characters, and story lines, and even go as far as creating your own version of the original game's award-winning engine? You get Ubisoft's Far Cry 2, the story of one man's struggle to take down the warmongering arms dealer responsible for destabilising a large chunk of a fictional Central African state. Can the game stand on its own, or was swapping alien mutagens for malaria a monumentally bad idea? The game critics take sides after the jump.
