Wii: I'm surprising impressed with Super Mario Galaxy, TombRaider Anniversary.
I’ve spent a little bit of time with some new wii games, and I’m surprisingly impressed. When the wii first came out, most of the games available on the wii were little more than tech demos. Sure, Zelda looked good, but the rest of the games looked pretty bad in my estimation. Rayman Raving Ravids made use of 2D Sprites in some sections for goodness sake, I thought we outgrew sprites in 3D games back in the 90s. Anyways, I’ve played a few new games this past weekend, Super Mario Galaxy and Tomb Raider: Anniversary, and these games look great, better than I ever expected on the wii. I have some newfound respect for the wii hardware after playing these games.
First off, I don’t know how Nintendo pulls it off, but almost every flagship mario game ends up being a MUST PLAY game, from Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 1-3, World, Mario 64, Sunshine, New Super Mario Bros, and now Galaxy, Nintendo manages to reinvent the mario genre again and again and make it the best game you’ve played all year. Galaxy is no exception. Despite a completely unbelievable plot, (what mario game does have a believeable plot? Mushroom Kingdom? jumping on turtles… Tanooki suit???) Anyways, the shoddy plot is necessary to land mario into space, which is the core of Galaxy’s new gameplay mechanics based on globes with centers of gravity rather than the 3d planes we have seen since mario64. This game somehow meshes together perfectly and is just plain FUN! The graphics are great, seamless and beautiful.
Next up, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, I’ve played both Legend and Anniversary on the PC, and I’m going to go out on a ledge here and claim that Tomb Raider on the wii, is the best platform to play this game period. I was entirely surprised at the graphics this game was capable on the wii. I was expecting shoddy graphics like the PSP or even worse…. DS versions of the game have. I was pleasantly surprised, I daresay that if you played the PC version at 480p resolution, the wii version would look just as good. Where tombraider on the wii really shines though is in the control scheme and special wii additions. I have played this game on the PC with an xbox 360 controller, and it works good, but aiming with the guns has never been very easy or accurate with that control scheme. Congrats to the developers who ported this game to the wii because it works great. I was shooting enemies with greater ease than ever before. The wii version also includes minigames exclusive to the wii, which are intergrated in the game as to not be intrusive to gameplay. The system works well and I would recommend this game on the wii over any other platform, (unless you are all about the eye-candy, in that case get it on the PC)
Can’t wait to see what the next generation of wii games brings. (Smash Bros here I come!)
