Wii Reviews

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.

Good comedy is all about showmanship. A great comedian can make you laugh without saying a word, while a bad one will find it hard to elicit the merest hint of a chuckle, even if he’s managed to get his hands on Bob Monkhouse’s Big Book of Jokes. That’s the problem with Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space (aka Season 2) – or the Wii port at least. The jokes may be (mostly) excellent, but they’re delivered in a stuttering routine that would result in even the best comedian being booed off stage.

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.

The great trouble with a lot of SNK games is that due to the exorbitant cost of the Neo Geo consoles and cartridges, pretty much no one got a chance to play them when they first came out. It’s only now, through downloads and retro compilations like this one, that many of us are getting our first taste – and for many titles (such as the uber-bland King of Fighters) it’s just come a little bit too late.

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...

Gaming communities needn’t always involve internet cables and subscriptions. Though the days of frequent sofa-gatherings are almost over, they’re not entirely extinct, and so our Community monocle comes to pass over the third annual Scene It game; a multiplayer-centric film quiz surprisingly defiant in its lack of online play.

Yes, this is Scene It again, but not as we like it.