Ever since they noticed that the Wii remote is good at pointing and clicking, The Adventure Company have been determined to shovel as many lame PC ports as possible into our game shops. The latest, Safecracker, is precisely the sort of flat, pre-rendered rubbish we’re used to, but with some surprisingly hardcore puzzling squished on top.
Well, this is nuts. It’s part interactive manga, part dating sim and part hardcore turn-based scrapper with mechs. It’s set in an alternative ’20s New York where the city’s guardian angels are called the New York Combat Revue, a group of female mech pilots who perform in nightly Broadway musicals at the Little Lips Theatre.
Considering that the last time Sam and Max appeared in a full game computers were steam-powered and/or made from mammoth pelt, it’s a little funny to see them adventuring away so happily on the thoroughly modern Wii. Not that it isn’t an obvious match: a point and click adventure on a console made to point and click.
Man alive, does Samba De Amigo seem fun. From the gorgeous full-motion video opener to the Borat sound-a-like that yelps over the menus, there are few experiences as welcoming on Wii.
A lot of people think Omega Force don’t innovate with their long-running Dynasty Warriors/Samurai Warriors games, but that isn’t strictly true – they just innovate at a glacial pace that only vampires and giant tortoises can keep up with. Trust us, by 2861 we’re going to see the true sequel to 1997’s Dynasty Warriors… and the only ones left to appreciate it will be sparkly bloodsuckers, Galapagos reptiles and, probably, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Face it: the man’s clearly not human.
In the meantime, we have to make do with this: a game that is, to all intents and purposes, identical to everything else Omega Force have cranked out over the last decade. Sure, there are a few new modes and fresh faces, but if you’ve played (‘enjoyed’ isn’t the right word) any of the previous Warriors games, you know exactly what to expect: lots of running, lots of stabbing and not a lot in between...
Appropriately, you can play Sexy Poker one-handed. We used the spare hand to repeatedly punch ourselves in the head, but you can use it however you wish. The fact that this is an excruciatingly awful and embarrassing game is not entirely surprising – anything with the word ‘sexy’ in the title usually is – but it even manages to get the ‘poker’ bit wrong.
Get the tissues ready, because this is a semi-tragedy. Shaun White Skateboarding is a partly a bad game, but it’s painfully close to being a good one. The fatal flaw is one option. One mystifyingly absent option. Controlling your skater can be done with the balance board or a Wii remote and Nunchuk combo, and most sane gamers are likely to plump for the latter. Movement’s handled by the analogue stick (so far so good) and grinding is dependent on twisting the point of the remote, which works well enough. But jumping is mapped to an upwards flick of your wrist, and stunts depend on you to tilt the remote at the same time. It’s a city-sized disaster...
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