thewiirocks

@KnucklesSonic8 - I don't know if I count or not, but I'd go with Rebirth unless you REALLY want to save 500 points. The games are fairly similar, but Rebirth has better graphics and an online scoreboard. If you still can't stomach it, the next best option is Gradius III. A very nice version of Gradius for the SNES.

BTW, I finally tried Ranked mode. It's Corbie's dream mode! (j/k!) You've got three lives and no continues. When you're done, your score is tallied and saved. Otherwise it's exactly the same as the main mode.

@Rabspat - Wow, that's a rather convoluted config. But it works! Thanks for the tip!

Pff. Says you. Some of us happen to suck at shooters, no matter how much we love them to death.

As an aside, I swear this "Dr. Venom" pulled the Vic Viper's powerplant from an Oldsmobile Cutluss. Her acceleration curve is... shall we say... gutless?

You try Leaderboards yet?

Not yet. I want to finish playing first. One upside is that you have unlimited continues.

Starwolf_UK is on the money. Getting assets before you have the gameplay down is a difficult proposition. Not to mention that it's somewhat counterproductive. Back when I was working on my game Coverfire, I used assets from the old Commodore 64 game it was based on to fill the gaps while I worked out the basic engine.

Once the game reached a certain point of maturity, I replaced the assets and got the game done. No one ever saw the ripped assets except me.

@KnucklesSonic8 - Sorry you saw that. I was using two ticks for list marks without realizing that it was the code for making big text. I chopped it back to one tick mark almost immediately after I submitted, and that gave the formating I was looking for.

@lockelocke - 1 player is disappointing, but I'm afraid that Gradius was never known for two player action. Nintendo should really release Darius Twin on the VC. I'd love to play it with my boys.

@Ren - Your definition of "Shoot'Em Ups" as "guys running around" is flawed. Those are known as "Run and Gun" games. There's quite a bit of argument over whether or not they're a subset of shoot'em ups (i.e. spaceship shooters) or if they are their own sub-genre of shooters. Personally, I think they're in their own sub-genre, but that's just me.

Edit: I forgot to add - There is no autofire in Rebirth! That's just plain shameful. This isn't the days of the NES when everyone had a pad with a turbo switch. Nor is this an arcade where the buttons are designed to be smashed with repeated, full hand strokes. This is a home gamepad and my thumb is getting TIRED!!!

@Corbie - Laziness. There's absolutely no excuse for a SIDE SCROLLING SHOOTER to not properly fill the screen. But I digress.

I've managed to play the game. (Whoohoo!) Here are my initial impressions:

• Love the retro look. It's got an old-school arcade charm to it that's pleasant. The reason why I say "arcade" is that the effects go a bit beyond the SNES, yet the game is firmly rooted in the graphical capabilities of the late 80's/early 90's.
• Speaking of graphics, it's a bit upsetting that Rebirth didn't get more of a makeover. It looks great in the Youtube videos, but that's just because the video is so small. Scaled up to 480p on an HDTV, it looks... retro. Very, very, very retro. And pixellated. Which isn't a bad thing per se, but I don't think it's going to evoke the same sense of nostalgia as MegaMan 9. (Besides, MM9 looked WAY too good for the NES hardware it was supposedly emulating. )
• The sound has that NES-ish feel to it. The music is cleaner and rings clearly, but the attempt to evoke the classic bleeps and bloops of an inferior generation of sound hardware is a mixed blessing at best. I'm not turned off by it, nor am I particularly impressed with it. It's just there and it's noisy.
• The controls... are the classic Gradius controls. I forgot how bleeping SLOW the Vic Viper was. You can speed it up using power-ups, but the speed boost is not smooth. It becomes easy to misjudge your movement after a few power-ups. --
• This game is (like many shoot'em ups) HARD. But not in the "OMG, look at all the bullets I'm going to die" hard. More like the "I made a mistake, now all my power-ups are gone, I don't have enough firepower" hard.
• The confusing weapon selection thingy makes a comeback. If you're like me, figuring out the choice of power-ups BEFORE you play the game is rather confusing. I'm sure you'll figure something out, though.

All in all, I think this is a good game. But I think it could have been a lot better. At the very least, I would have liked to see a bit more modern flair to the graphics. I'm going to take a page from The Book of Corbie and give it a 7/10. I also predict that will be Corbie's score.

Corbie sez... they were called "shooters" back when we hung out in the arcades

That's fair enough. The term "Shoot'em Up" was a retcon of sorts. But that was only because the Shooter genre got so incredibly large that it was getting hard to clearly communicate what was meant by "shooter". When FPSes came along, everything went straight to heck.

(A pet peeve of mine is how the younger generation has started generically referring to FPSes as "shooters". While technically correct, it;s so ambiguous that it drives me up a wall!)

Methinks you doth complain too much. As shortened words go, shmup really isn't that bad. But I can refer to the games as "Shoot'em Ups" if it would make you feel better. It just doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely as "shmup".

ShhhhmmmuuuuP.

See how nice that sounds? Music to my ears.

I can't disagree with you on the issues with Gradius. I played Gradius III on the SNES back in the day, but it didn't particularly capture the imagination of myself or my siblings. We had WAY more fun with Darius Twin. I think those games helped promote a bit of personal snobbery where I believed that side-scrolling shmups... err... Shoot'em Ups were more fun than their vertical brethren.

@ Corbie - Lots of games are shooters, yet you don't review those. This one happens to be a shmup. Something for which I understand you have a lot of experience.

Let's hope it has online scoreboards in the US version. Then we can revive the competition we started over Star Soldier R.

Whoo hoo! The next Alex Kidd installment is out! ... Wait... I don't care about monkey boy. Why are we all excited again?

**Checks summary**

Omigosh! **faints**

Looks like a cross between 3D Login and a platform-based puzzle game. It could be interesting, I suppose. I guess we'll see.

I had a feeling Onslaught would grab a good spot. I'm actually surprised it didn't go higher!

BTW, did anyone else hear about A Boy and His Blob? Looks gorgeous, but I can't help but think it should be released for WiiWare.

> Now I know Wii can do lighting like that so why is no developer doing it.
The TEV system is a comparable, but fundamentally different technology from programmable shaders. 95% of the technological development in the industry has gone into the standard programmable shader technologies seen in NVidia and ATI cards.

This means that there's virtually no off-the-shelf solution available for the Wii. A developer who wants to create a game with awesome lighting effects has to roll his own. That can be a somewhat daunting prospect given the amount of time and effort that goes into engines like Doom3 and Unreal [whateverversiontheyareon].

My hope is that Quantum3 from High Voltage will help out here. The engine isn't quite the latest engine from Epic, but it does contain some nice dynamic lighting and texture effects. We can probably live without the shiny meat cubes and height-mapped textures.

>Q3A had curved surfaces, it's simply an LOD measure.
I wasn't referring to curved surfaces. I was referring to the pathways and the architecture. There's some very nice curves used to create impressive looking architecture like a spiral staircase with a vaulted ceiling. Such a pathway is mathematically easy to create, but provides impressive looking results.

> Pro-level texturing often involves parts of photos that get used as overlays,
Purely mathematical texturing predates photographic manipulation by quite a few years. Simply take a noise generator, attach a pseudo-random number generator, then adjust the parameters until you obtain the look you want. Wood, steel, marble, clouds and a variety of other surfaces are easy to create this way. Such noise generation is a very common step in texture creation (especially for ray tracers), even if artists don't always think of it that way. e.g. I can create brushed steel by inserting points of noise into a gray background, embossing them, then motion blurring them to create the look of a brush stroke. Or I can use the "plasma" filter (Perlin Noise) with a blue background and white filter to create realistic looking clouds. So on an so forth.

Manipulating photographs is often easier, but you pay for the ease of texture development with disk space. Which is a no-no for something like WiiWare. Ergo, the advantages of this scheme disappear due to the technical limitations of the platform.

> it's not going to be quick to replay a pro-level texture making process
No one said it was. Kkrieger takes quite a bit of time to unpack the textures while loading. As I said previously, it's a space/time tradeoff. You can save space in three dimensions by projecting the information out into the fourth. Generally speaking, the more savings in three dimensions, the more the cost in the fourth. This is somewhat offset by how FAST today's processors are. (Including the Wii.) In fact, real-time procedural is a very interesting method of making use of pixel shaders to do extremely expensive calculations on an as-needed basis. This is what Infinity does for planetary terrain. The GPUs of today often have exceptional computational power that is not always used to its fullest potential. Shifting the cost to the GPU can allow a game to create simple noise filters in real time (e.g. marble that never pixelates no matter how close you get) that offset some of the quality loss of a more professional texture OR "streaming" textures that are generated in the background to be used as needed. (The latter is the approach used by Infinity.)

The Wii's TEV units are very capable and should be capable of at least doing noise generated texturing. My memory is a bit fuzzy on the operating of the Wii's GPU, but I recall there was some sort of hard wiring into the framebuffer that made the latter option infeasible. So I'll grant there are some serious limitations to consider.

> [Procedural generation is] used for random variety but not for saving space.
Nonsense. It's very usable for both. RoboBlitz, for example, did EXACTLY what we're talking about. i.e. Used procedural generation to create a smaller download file for XBox Live. Just Cause used procedural generation to create a game world too massive to hand architect. Left 4 Dead uses procedurally generated events to give more depth to the narrative than could be hand written into the game. And those are just a few uses.

Of course, it would probably help if I better defined what "procedural generation" means. Very simply, procedural generation refers to ANYTHING generated programatically. If you've ever used circles, gradients, and boxes to "draw" a sprite, you've done procedural generation. If you've ever written a maze generation algorithm, you've done procedural generation. If you've ever created images from Photoshop filters, then you've done procedural generation.

The key for video games is to do this in both an interesting and useful manner. The first thing that programmers need to remember is that completely random scenes are ugly and boring. So instead, they need to add constraints. e.g. Let's say we're making levels for an FPS. We notice that we can divide the various portal segments into "hallway", "entranceway", "indoor arena", "pit", "exit", "courtyard arena", etc. We know that there needs to be an entrance, an exit, between 1-5 arenas, and a path through the level. Levels break up into types of "multilevel buildings", "single level buildings", "outdoor", etc. So we fire up our psuedo-random number generator and write an algo like this:

1. Generate a number modulo 4 + 1. This is the number of arenas.
2. For each arena, generate a number modulo NUM_ARENAS to identify the type.
3. Generate a number modulo NUM_LEVEL_TYPES to determine the level type.
4. If indoor level type, loop through the approximate portions of the "building" to be filled, pulling each arena from the list using a generated value. Continue until all arenas have been placed.
5. If outdoor level, place each area as a separate building using generated coordinates modulo level size. Collisions should be discarded and generated again.
6. If indoor level, generate hallways between arenas. Curved hallways can follow beizer paths.
7. If outdoor level, generate fencing and walls to assure a pathway from one arena to the next. (See maze algorithms.)
8. Attach an entrance point and exit point to the level. If more than one type of entrance point or exit point is available, generate a number to choose the space.
9. Tada!

The key here is the use of a psuedo-random number generator. Since PRNGs work off a specific seed, entire levels can be stored as something as small as a four byte number. The catch is that the dev team may spend some time running through permutations to find the levels they like best. Or they may tweak the parameters of the algorithm until they obtain results that fit their idea of how levels should be organized. In this way, the procedural generator unfolds a simple number into a very complex, yet usable structure.

I won't even try to describe an algo to create the interiors of the spaces, but it's similarly all about the algorithm and the constraints of the algorithm. Pre-fabbed pieces can be part of the generator to ensure a certain level of artistry.

> Well, if you want some form of space saving generation look at the
> NES, games like Zelda and Metroid didn't store full level maps, they
> only stored column codes and room codes that then resolved into
> different predefined batches of tiles.
You're describing a lookup table, not generated content. (Procedural generation would be an algorithm that generates such a lookup table, not the table itself.) Such games are easy to create procedural content for (e.g. look at Toe Jam & Earl), but don't always gain much for it. The tile designs were repetitive partly due to the memory constraints of the systems. When you're dealing with sprite hardware, you tend to have what's in ROM and that's it. Your RAM is a highly limited resource used only for game logic.

Of course, one could have included a special chip that generated ROM values, but one would have to question whether or not the hardware cost would be worth it. Especially when ROM chips fell in price as demand ramped up. For 2D data, lookup tables were sufficient for a one player game. Limiting the size of the game world was even preferable as players were often turned off by worlds in which they could easily get lost. There were a few examples of procedural generation from that era (e.g. The Sentinal), but programmers rarely felt that their tools were insufficient for their needs.

Getting back to how this relates to WiiWare, keep in mind that WiiWare has 40MB to work with. This is a heck of a lot more than the 96kb of kkrieger and a heck of a lot less than your average Wii FPS. A middle ground does exist whereby procedural content can be used to significantly reduce the size of a title without going to the extremes seen in tech demos like kkrieger. Thus my point is that the 40MB boundary is not as constraining as one might think. Don't even get me started on how much better developers can do on 2D image compression with only the most minor amount of dithering...

Apologies for writing a book here. I was trying to avoid going down that path by speaking in general terms, but... well... we got into the specifics.

"Amalgamation of photoshop filters" is not quite the right way to look at it, but it's close. Think of it more like having a record of every modification made to the image, then playing that back instead of having the final product on hand. Costly in time, but the space tradeoffs are tremendous. (This gets into information theory and how time is really another dimension of space, thus you can trade the two off, so on and so forth.)

Effectively, it's a matter of designing logic that produces the results you want. Whether it be a script, a pseudo-random number generator, Perlin noise, constructive solid geometry, or just a bit of fun math you cooked up in your head, it all comes back to bridging that gap between programming and artistry.

(Wavlet compression technology was partly an attempt to genericize some of the principles that makes procedural content so powerful, but I have yet to hear of the research bearing any practical results. )

Don't get me wrong. Procedural generation can be used for just about anything. Some uses are easier than others to develop. For example, you might notice that the stunning architecture of kkrieger works so well because it follows some rather natural mathematical forms. e.g. The spiral walkway. Generating levels like this is certainly feasible and not too tremendously difficult. Especially given how portals are used to clearly define areas in today's 3D engines. Even relatively simple texturing can be worked out by looking no further than your neighborhood ray tracer.

BigLord, I thought you might appreciate this:

http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger

It's a complete First Person Shooter on the order of Quake 3 (graphically, at least)... in only 96kb!

Of course, there's a variety of technical reasons why we don't see more "small" games like this. The procedural technology is older than sin, but it takes a great deal of time and programmers who know WTF they're doing. In this case, they happened to be demo programmers. (A very special breed indeed!)

The industry is moving toward more procedural content, but most of it is in an attempt to augment games rather than replace their existing artwork. (Which raises the question: is using expensive artists to create generic tile really a good use of their time?) WiiWare games could use the technology, but we'll see if it ever happens.

Another interesting game that uses procedural content is Infinity: Quest for Earth. Thanks to procedural content, they can fit an entire galaxy in the game. Complete with hundreds of billions of worlds, each which can be visited from orbit, all the way down to the surface with no transition artifacts! That right there is the power of procedural content.

@Bahamut ZERO - I was never a fan of true RPGs. I love Zelda and, but that's not a true RPG. (Even that took some convincing!) My sister used to play FF7 like mad back in the day. Honestly, the entire concept bored me to tears. I'm fully aware of the series' history and all the variations offered, but it just wasn't my cup of tea. Sorry.

BTW, GameTrailers has an excellent retrospective on the series if you haven't seen it yet. Much more fun than actually playing the games!

Sweet! This will probably be the first FF game I ever buy. (I'm a huge fan of Tower Defense in case you didn't notice. ) Thanks Toddr!

I'm confused. Everyone keeps mentioning that this is a new 2D FF, but the screenshots look a LOT like a Tower Defense clone. Is this an RPG or is it really a Tower Defense game? (Personally, I'd much prefer Tower Defense. If you thought "time sink" was a metaphor, you've never been to this website.)

@Popyman - No one has even come close to stretching the limits of the WiiWare service. Games like Onslaught, Mega Man 9, and World of Goo are excellent at pushing the boundaries, but the limits are still off on the horizon.

So why do so many devs complain then? The short answer is that complaining is easier than working within the limitations. Why do something different than you've done it before?

The long answer is that it's a combination of fiscal sense and lack of expertise. The better developers (e.g. Hudson) want a game completed on a reasonable budget. They're not trying to create the next megahit title, just a series of games that will turn a decent profit.

On the other hand, you have developers who are more artistically inclined than technologically inclined. They see hard limitations rather than challenges. Those limitations cramp their style and result in more half-hearted efforts.

The ideal situation is to have a good blend of technology and artistry. With the right people working together, incredible things are possible inside 40 MB. (And I should know. I was the 2004 winner of the Java 4K game programming contest. You wouldn't believe what can be done with only 4096 bytes. )

So don't sell the service short. I would not be at all surprised if the best is yet to come!

@Chicken Brutus - Interesting. When I purchase Wii Points, I have to pay tax. (IL) I asked Google and came up with this forum dicussion:

Sales tax on Wii Points

Seems that where you are in the states makes a difference...

@tootie_kicks - USAian is not a cromulent word. We live in the United States of America, silly. That's like saying you're an CoAian because Australia is really a continent. And besides, you're addressing all of North America, not just the US of A.

Besides, there are two games there to last you the two weeks you need to wait. You lucky dog. We usually have to wait for one every week!

Green pod? The gun is in the black crates.

Edit: It's level 5 I'm thinking of, sorry. Which is weird, 'cause I swear I had the gun by level 4. Go figure.

Edit2: According to GameFAQ, the upgraded SMG is in a storage container on level 3. So... I'm not crazy and it is somewhere in those crazy tunnels. Can't tell you where, though. Just look for stacks of crates and SHOOT THEM.

@Objection_Blaster - Nintendo does collect tax through online sales. No idea what they do with it, but they do collect tax.

@Doogle - And yet, Onslaught joins the mass of games given bad reviews by IGN that sell like hotcakes anyway. IGN has almost no sway over WiiWare games. Heck, if WiiWare World can't sway the public, why would IGN?

@Doogle - I don't think Hudson is too worried about it. The real measure of success is the number of downloads. And as we've already seen, reviews don't have much of an effect on WiiWare games. (**cough**pongtoss**cough**)

Personally, I read one thing into the IGN review: Confusion. It strikes me that they went into the review expecting to find one thing, then didn't know what to think when they found something completely different. Reading the text, the reviewer seems to actually like the game. Yet all of his statements are guarded as if he can't quite bring himself to say so.

Since Onslaught is NOT a traditional FPS, it's no surprise that reviewers will have a crisis of identity. They know it's inferior to most FPSes, but then why is it so much fun to play?!?

The answer I came up with (that one poster over on GameFAQs echoed) is that Onslaught has more in common with rail shooters than FPSes. And since it has all the sensibilities of a rail shooter, it provides much of the same mindless fun of a rail shooter. The only real difference is that dodging enemy fire means actually moving out of the way rather than shooting incoming fire.

@Bahamut ZERO - Now that you mention it, I believe the 200 bullet weapon is located in one of the storage boxes on level 3. Blast them all until you find yourself a gun. You're going to need it.

BTW, here's a tip: If you need to take out a whole lotta hives as fast as possible, use the electric whip,. They'll go down like dominoes.

I've managed to beat the game on easy and now I'm playing more online. If you see some weird guy with the name "Daddy", that's me.

Way to put Wisconsin at a disadvantage, guys. Considering that most digital download companies are physically located in other states (or even other countries!) there's no way in hell they're going to be able to collect these taxes. All they're doing is adding even more incentive for technology companies to avoid setting up in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin hasn't had decent leadership since Thompson left for Washington. Bring back Tommy Thompson!

@Bahamut ZERO - You should have a weapon that has 200 bullets and 250hp per bullet. It's called an SG-507S. It's mapped to left on my D-Pad. You may need to map it yourself by grabbing it from the right bar and moving it into the D-Pad configuration under the "Change Weapon" pause menu.

It's fully automatic, fires 4 rounds/sec, holds 200 round clips, and kicks some serious glowing bug ass! (If you've seen the back of the elephant bugs you'll probably break up laughing over that one. )

@Objection_Blaster - Don't bother using the rockets on the boss. They're too darn slow. Better to use an automatic rifle. They go down much quicker that way.

@Bahamut ZERO sez - Anyone know how to beat the first boss.

Hit the weak spot for massive damage! (silence) No, really!

Use the D-Pad to change to the 200 bullet, fully automatic, assault rifle. Then wait until you can see the whites... err... greens... um... of his ooze. Let loose with a flurry of bullets on the underside of the head and main body. You'll know you made a hit when you see green ooze leak.

While firing, continuously strafe to the side while keeping the boss in your sights. This is a basic circle-strafe and will allow you to avoid his attacks while pumping him full of lead. Take out the enemies if they get in your way (maybe hitting the hives here and there), but otherwise ignore them and focus on the boss. Keep it up and he'll be bug bait in no time.

@Objection_Blaster - It wasn't a "problem", it was just the way the game worked. Make a perfect head shot or no dead bad guy for you! Hitting their head slightly off-center obviously means a soldier-zombie is going to get a grenade in your face. Not exactly the most effective way to feel like a bad-ass. In fact, it feels more like work.

Come to think of it, the whole "get up in your face" thing was incredibly annoying. I think I preferred getting shot at by space marines with rocket launchers.

@Mickeymac - And let's not forget about the maze crawling! I hate trying to find my way through the maze... Just wanted to shoot something...

Now THIS is how all FPS games should be done! Who cares about the story? Who cares about collecting things? Who cares about being scared out of your wits? Just let me SHOOT something!!!!111!!!1!!11eleventy!!!111!

(Though many games even get that part messed up. Half-Life 2, I'm looking at you. It's a SHOTgun. You know? Because it spreads SHOT? Why oh why don't they go down unless I hit the magical correct spot? Meh.)

@Falk Sturmfels - Tower Toppler (aka Nebulous) is great stuff, but it was ported to every system known to mankind. There's even a free Open Source clone that's just as good (if not better) than the original:

http://toppler.sourceforge.net/

Enjoy!

@Ren - That's a fair argument. I guess my argument really boils down to the fact that the emulation won't be even close as an experience and that many of the best games for the system will never make it to the Wii. Of those that are already available on the Wii, most can be obtained by getting a C64DTV for ~$20. A significant savings over purchasing them all on the VC.

@Damien sez... C64 fans will be in heaven with the trio of games available today

Considering that us C64 fans actually have a C64 (or at least one of these), I find that statement to be in doubt.

Truth be told, these games are far from the best that's on the C64. In fact, it's going to be hard to get the "best" out of the publishers Nintendo has lined up. A lot of the really good games were EA, LucasFilms, MUSE, and a ton of companies that no one has even heard of.

If you honest want to play the best of the C64, save yourself some money and visit your local Commodore Club. You can pick up a Commodore for $20-$30 and the original game disks for as little as $1 a disk. The experience will be much better than the Wii's emulator* as the two systems aren't really of a similar design.

* Believe it or not crisp graphics are actually a problem with these old computer systems. Programmers regularly took advantage of the way that television screens worked to produce a wider array of colors and to smooth the images. Bleed between pixels was desirable! Playing the game on an ultra-sharp emulator will therefore look far more primitive and less interesting than the experience the real system will give you.

@Tony - Akinai Games is a sub-division of Yukes formed for the sole purpose of publishing downloadable games. This article may help you make more sense of the relationships.

@PapaSmalls - HVS developed the game and Yukes/Akinai published.

@KnucklesSonic8 - How in the world did you get "poor graphics" out of what I said?

Hot Rod show reviewed to be a mediocre game. Just like Gyrostarr and now Evasive Space. Nothing to do with graphics.

Edit: I think you misread that last line. I was saying that HIGH VOLTAGE creates good graphics for the Wii. By licensing Quantum 3 to other studios, other studios will produce good looking games too.

@KnucklesSonic8 - On the flip side, Hot Rod received pretty much the response I was expecting. One could argue that they're improving, except that High Voltage has been at this for nearly two decades now. When are they going to "get" it?

If you go back in time and look at their scores, you can see that HVS has never done particularly well at capturing the market. They have done well in creating half-decent games for licenses, so they deserve credit for that, but they're not showing any signs of being anything more than that.

I will say that I AM impressed with what I've seen of The Conduit. My hope is that HVS gets The Conduit right in spite of themselves. Given the amount of tuning I've seen to the game, that may very well be the case. But while they may succeed with The Conduit, I don't see the culture of detail that's required to sustain that success.

Thus my expectation is that HVS will become an engine producer like Id and Epic. If they do a good job packaging their software for other developers to use, they can have a very profitable business while other game studios get the serious kick in the pants they've been needing to start producing GOOD LOOKING Wii games.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but I'm not. Gyrostarr communicated High Voltage's abilities pretty clearly. Specifically that they are technologically very competent, but realistically have no idea how to take a game from mediocrity to greatness.

And it's not just a matter of not playing long enough or that the idea didn't pan out. The games they're creating are workable ideas that simply don't gel into something that's "fun".

This is an industry-wide problem I've noticed in a lot of casual games online. The developers have the graphics down, the sound down, even the gameplay mechanics down. Where they fail is that they don't understand how to tune the game to make it gripping.

"Gripping" (as much of a technical term as it can be) is in the details of the gameplay. The way the game reacts, how natural the controls function, whether X response is what the player expects rather than a natural function of the code. Such attributes are VERY hard to design and take quite a bit of time. In many ways, it's like an extended QA process.

Unfortunately, game creators like High Voltage rarely take the time to do such fine tuning. Once the game is code complete, it's on to functional testing, then it's out the door. A very nice approach from a business perspective, but not particularly enlightened when the software is all about the interaction rather than the function.

> Snowboarding... weapons to slow down your opponents

There's something you don't see every day...

@Virus sez, "World of Goo's success is greatly puzzling me. It's [...] not casual!"

How do you figure? World of Goo is the epitome of casual gaming! It's pick up and play, great for quick gaming sessions, doesn't require incredible gaming skills, yet allows players to find deeper challenges in clearing levels with more goo balls, etc. If that's not casual, what is?

I wonder what the deal is with the treasure finding.

I believe it's a way of finding cannon to mount on your castle. The cannon are then used to defend against the crab attack.

Kudos to Konami for making another 500 point game! After such a long dearth of inexpensive titles, it's nice to see companies step up to the plate.

[T]he dud of the list is the dastardly SPOGS Racing, although the overall 18/100 rating is also shared by Pong Toss! What are your thoughts on these findings?

My thought is that Pong Toss beats all! Not that it's any good or anything, but it literally beats all in sales. For some strange and inexplicable reason.

Is it any wonder that the Wii gets a bad rap when a significant percentage of the Wii population downloads something like Pong Toss? For shame.

I have to give BPlus cred for trying different things with the remote. However, whatever it is they are doing with the Wii Remote tilting does not look comfortable. In fact, it's giving me horrible flashbacks to playing Mario with the Power Glove.

The last game was marred partly by its controls. I hope BPlus doesn't make the same mistake twice!

I'm a huge fan of minigolf and this looks pretty good! I'm hoping the game delivers on a realistic minigolf experience. Even better would be if new courses were available as DLC.

@Wiiloveit - Computers can't replicate motion control or multiple controller support. WiiCade provides games that do both. Not to mention the ability to watch Podcasts on your big-screen TV.

@rich - My understanding is that the only requirement to get published on WiiWare is to be accepted into the program. If you can convince Nintendo that you're cool enough to join the club, they'll publish anything that meets their basic standards. (i.e. Needs to support the Home button, don't use Bongos, include a nice menu screen, etc.) Effectively, Nintendo makes no value judgments about the games.

When you think about it, the deal isn't that much different from the days of the NES. A small studio could publish a really bad game without too much trouble. (Though there was a much higher up-front investment!)

@calculon - After Gyrostarr (what a waste of good money), I have a similar level of apprehension about this game. I imagine it will end up, like Gyrostarr, appealing to the average game player, but not those looking for more creative gameplay.

@longtimegamer - Yeah, I wasn't suggesting that the original Windows version be directly ported. I meant that I wanted a new game in the series. Sorry if I was confusing.

@longtimegamer - According to Wikipedia, XBox Live was supposed to get a version of the game in 2007. (Though no one knows what happened to it. ) So the age is obviously not an issue, Just update the look (which was last revised in 2001 with The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions) add new puzzles, and BLAM! An instant WiiWare hit.