A STRIKING WHITE van rolled into DU last week with a sneak peak into Nintendo’s “Non-Stop Nights of Nintendo,” a series of new games that are being released on a daily basis between now and December.
With over $140 million being pumped into advertising, Nintendo is targeting teens and college students.
Three games stand out. They are Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 0 and Phantasy Star Online. Samus Aerin is back in this brilliantly drawn chapter of the Metroid anthology. The plot is pretty standard, employing the typical “save the world by slaughtering everything that moves” solution. But what really stands out is the seamless interaction of the elements in each area:. If you walk through steam, your helmet fogs up slightly, the sound of a fire roaring rotates with your position and standing too close to a rocket explosion, hurts!. But if you’re looking to blow up everything in sight, no such luck. If it’s not meant to be moved or hurt, it won’t break.
Also, while the soundtrack recreates the surrounding environment, including mutants rasping and breathing, it is not too original.
As the hero/player, you have multiple choices of suits (armor), and several different weapons and charging schemes, and a really nice lock-on function, which makes up for almost non-existent targeting control. Each suit has a different viewing mode, and you will have to examine your world in order to learn valuable information, or simply how in the world to open a door. You also can morph into the classic “metroid ball” to maneuver through tight corridors, or just speed around to confuse your enemies, instead of simply dumping you into the game, and trying to frantically figure out which one of the seven buttons is “fire,” which is “morph” and which is “Get me the hell outta here!”
Metroid Prime offers an interactive tutorial, which teaches you how to use some important features and weapons, before stripping you down to your boxers and leaving you in at the starting gate. Any original 8-bit Nintendo fan, or even a 16-bit Super Nintendo owner, who enjoyed the original Metroid, will definitely enjoy this version and its promise of more than 80+ hours of game play, an unknown number of bosses, special areas, familiar weapons and brand new abilities. There’s even an endurable sound track.
Said Crystal Vernor, Nintendo representative, “I usually don’t like these (types of games), but I actually enjoyed playing Metroid (Prime). If not, I never would have bothered playing it more than an hour or so.”
The expected launch date is Nov. 18.
Another release is the prequel to a favorite, Resident Evil 0. Though the version that was here on campus was scripted in Japanese, the game was very easy to figure out since controls had not changed much since the original.
The new version takes place in the familiar Raccoon city before the S.T.A.R.S. bravo team was sent in, and stars Rebecca, the rookie cop from Resident Evil, and Billy, a felon on the run. This new Evil is unique in that the player controls all the characters at once using what is called “zapping.” This enables the player to switch at will between characters. Not that switching is necessarily a good thing. It can be very disorienting, and if a hero or two is forgotten and is permitted to die, the game’s over.
The scenes are well rendered, and the music is suitably eerie, but some of the annoyances are back. Primarily, there’s still that pesky camera angle that makes is almost impossible to look around some corners. It also , makes it very easy to get blindsided by something that the character sees, but the player can’t. Blind corners and turns also cause the player to get stuck on walls and chairs when escaping. This usually ends the game.
The game still likes the “door in a black void” screen for transitions between rooms, which can be irritating although it does add a bit of mystery to the plot, which can extend for more than 100 hours of playtime, depending upon the skill of the player. Another classic trait of the Resident Evil series, bad voice acting, is continued in the Japanese game.
Debuting in mid-November, this game is definitely a “must-have” for any Resident Evil fan. For anyone else who is looking for a cheap, engaging, occasionally scare-the-%^#*& out of you thrill, this game should be high on the Christmas wish list.
Phantasy Star Online is going to be the GameCubes’ first online multi-player game, though one player can still play it. Coming from Nintendo’s rival-turned-software producer, SEGA, this technology/candy-cane fantasy Role-Playing Game is somewhat disappointing for fans of the original Fantasy Star epic.
The characters themselves are physically very customizable, with almost mind-boggling options for size, color, garment, hair, face, hats and even shoes. Not to mention the typical options for starting classes, that include primarily fighting, summoning, or pure magic-hurling occupations.
There are plenty of new weapons, enemies, items, quests and worlds to explore, although the combat system can be a bit tricky for magic users at first. A player, who can’t figure out how to aim fireballs or select a different spell from the several layers of menus, won’t survive more than a few swipes of those nasty kitty-claws.
Switching to the inventory doesn’t pause the game, but the game becomes fairly simple to navigate once the player figures out the game controls and menus. Most of the characters lack the clear detail that should be rendered by the 6-12 millions of polygons per second that the GameCube is capable of. The landscape is plain and the voice-over acting is poor.
On the bright side, PSO can be played over the modem or via a broadband connection with up to four players simultaneously using the same machine via a quad-screen split view. There are also the Challenge and Battle modes.
With the Platinum GameCube ringing in at a competitive $149.95 (Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s Playstation 2 cost around $199.95), software running from $20 to $60, Nintendo’s contender boasts a wide selection of well designed games, with an ever-widening assortment of mature titles for the over-18 crowd, i.e. college students
