Who could have imagined that a series of games centered around simplistic game design ideas would have been one of my only reasons for ever using the WiiWare service. A main character who is nothing more than a black rectangle, graphics that pay homage to the early days of the Atari, combined with a kickin’ soundtrack, and a difficulty that puts even the most hardcore of gamers to the test, made these games an absolute must-own for any Wii owner with a taste for good, quality titles. It also happened to feature music by renown Chiptune artists like Nullsleep and Anamanaguchi.
What’s better is that now every single Bit.Trip game is available on a single 3DS cart, that you can take with you and play anywhere. That’s quite a combination for success. I’ll go over each game and how it holds up on the 3DS, and then give my take on the overall package.
Bit.Trip Beat
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The Bit.Trip that started it all has you controlling a paddle on the left side of the screen (see Pong) repelling back squares as they fly towards you in patterns that get harder and harder the further you progress, which also play tunes that complete each song that plays during each level. The better you do, the better the quality of the music becomes (which goes for all the games). The game controls great, if not better with the stylus than it did with the Wii Remote. The 3D effect works and doesn’t distract from the gameplay, though I honestly found myself having it mostly turned off, only because the framerate is slightly better when it’s not used.
Bit.Trip Core
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Core, once again, relies on rhythm-based gameplay that places your core in the middle of the screen, having the player fire beams in one of four directions (up, down, left and right) to destroy patterns of blocks. These blocks start off easy enough but quickly get much harder—to the point where level memorization almost becomes crucial. If you find yourself getting too overwhelmed, you do have a few bombs that clear the screen. Out of all the Bit.Trip games, Core was definitely my least favorite. Again, the 3D effect wasn’t needed; it did nothing to make the experience any better.
Bit.Trip Void
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Void was the first of the series to allow full 8-direction movement. Players would take control of a black circle that grew in size as you collected black pellets and tried to avoid oncoming white pellets. The game is controlled with the circle pad which sometimes makes for awkward and slow movements, and would have controlled much better with the use of the stylus and touchscreen. A lack of any explanation of the game could confuse some players at first, since you’re not told whether there is any sort of score bonus while being big in size, before pressing a button and deflating. This was one of the hardest games to play on the 3DS due to the small screen. Unless you’re playing in a dimly lit area so you can see the screen well, the black pellets you’re supposed to collect will disappear into the background. So assuming you’re in good lighting conditions, the 3D effect is actually beneficial since you can easily tell the pellets from the background.
Bit.Trip Runner
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Easily the best of all the Bit.Trip games, and definitely one of the meatiest. I can see myself justifying getting this collection for Runner alone. Commander Video is on the run, to the right to be exact. This is by far the most rhythm based of all the games, as every jump, slide and kick is a note that accompanies the song of the current level. This is one hell of a challenge, and expect to retry a lot. Thankfully Runner will just simply take you back to the beginning of the level, rather than relying lives and continues and making you start over from the very beginning. Make it through each level with all the pick-ups and you’ll be rewarded with bonus level that harks back to Atari’s Pitfall. A boss encounter awaits in the last stage of each world that once again will throw everything you’ve learned and conquered in the previous levels. The 3D effect looked great but I found myself once again turning it off because that smoother framerate made it that much better to play.
Bit.Trip Fate
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The shooter (or shmup) of the Bit.Trip series, Fate is yet another oddity that manages to be extremely challenging yet absolutely rewarding. Commander Video is on a set path that the player navigates back and forth. All the while you’re trying to dodge incoming projectiles from enemies and taking these enemies down with some firepower of your own. The main difference between this and other shmups is that you’re constantly attached to a winding rail, meaning you have to be smart when dodging projectiles since you can’t move anywhere you want. The control scheme also works great as the circle pad moves Video along the rail, and the stylus aims where he shoots. Other indie game characters join as temporary powerups, such as Super Meat Boy and Mr. Robotube.
Bit.Trip Flux
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The series comes full circle as Flux goes mostly back to its roots. This time the paddle rests on the right side and players must repel and absorb certain pellets, while avoiding others. The difficulty is ramped up fairly early, and Flux will truly put your skills to the test. Since it shares many similarities with Beat, the gameplay feels very familiar and therefore a bit disappointing for those that were expecting a completely new experience, but the challenge (and the music) makes it totally worth playing through.
The Entire Package
The interface that holds all six games together is just as minimalistic as the games themselves. Not really offering much help on how each game is played, some players are bound to scratch their heads a bit, but let’s be honest, people that are considering this package are most likely acquainted with Commander Video and just want his adventures on the go. The 3D effect in each game isn’t overly necessary, and you can just as well play each game without the need to turn them on. Bit.Trip Saga is an awesome collection of Commander Video’s adventures, though extremely light on extra content (even the Wii version of Bit.Trip Complete had the soundtrack CD included), the package is well worth for both fans, and players wanting to get familiar with the lo-fi hero.
From gamezone.com
The art of the twin stick shooter is a delicate one. Do it right and you’ll wind up with a classic amongst the likes of Smash TV and Robotron 2084. Do it wrong and you’ll end up with the kind of shovelware that folks wouldn’t even refer to on a drunken stupor. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of companies attempt to take the twin stick shooter, with one for movement and the other for shooting, in bold new directions. A few, such as the closed-down Bizarre Creations and its Geometry Wars series, have succeeded, but we were yearning for the next great classic to come down the line sooner rather than later. Thankfully, our players have been answered with the stylishly violent Renegade Ops.
The game puts you in control of four members of a special operations team, who are flown in to an island nation to shut down a madman general and his army who believes that chaos is the order of the day. Of course, the only way to stop him is to meet him with an equal amount of chaos. You’ll choose from four different members of the team, including big, bulky dudes and smart, sassy girls, who then take command of a vehicle that’s dispatched by a rough-and-tumble team leader. Your mission is simple – follow the primary and secondary objectives at hand, and destroy the living crap out of everything.
Your basic weapon is a machine gun with unlimited firepower, which is fired from the back of your vehicle. Luckily, it’s set up remotely, so all you need to worry about is using the left analog stick to drive around, and the right analog stick to direct your fire. As you proceed over the course of the mission, you’ll gain enhancements to your machine gun and also be able to use a special ability assigned to each driver. One has a shield that protects from massive damage, while another can call in an air strike should things really get nasty. (And they will.) On top of that, other weapons are accessible, including a flame thrower, a rail gun, and a rocket launcher.
The game spreads over the course of nine huge mission maps, which will take you a few hours to get through, but the journey is far greater than the destination, thanks to Avalanche Studios’ complete devotion to destruction. This is the same team that did such wondrous work with the open-world action game Just Cause 2 last year, and you can see that degree of destruction here, even in downloadable form. Everything blows up smoothly, whether you’re driving through a building and watching it crumble, or tearing apart a tank with a few well-concentrated shots from your rocket launcher. Watching it go “WA-BOOM” is part of the fun, and it’s great to see that these guys didn’t scale down on the way everything goes up – even if it does go borderline on the 2 GB download size.
The environments don’t really differ that much over the course of the game, but Avalanche did a superb job with them, particularly with the lighting. It’s cool to see the sun peek around corners and shine down on your vehicle, even with just a hint of shadowing. The vehicles look great too, and the frame rate remains steady – in single player anyway – as you blow everything apart. The audio is also marvelous, with plenty of spirited voicework (that evil general is a hoot – he almost sounds like Dr. Evil at certain points) and thunderous battle music, the likes of which you might hear in any Arnold Schwarzenegger film.
However, it’s the gameplay that’s the real draw. Renegade Ops is incredibly addictive, and the sheer joy of obliterating an army with tons of firepower never gets old. Even after you beat the game on the first run-through, there’s so much more to come back for, including the secondary objectives to earn Achievements/Trophies, and the happy-go-lucky chaos you bring in. You can also call on friends to join in the fun, either with local split-screen support or online, up to four people. Things do tend to slow down severely when you bring in more folks, but that’s the price you pay for going all A-Team on the bad guy’s army.
With wonton explosions, plenty of exciting gameplay and a presentation that really holds its own on the downloadable front, Renegade Ops is worth every cent of the $14.99 price tag. The single player missions are exciting (wait till you start outrunning a nuclear explosion – whoa, baby), and the multiplayer has its moments too, even if it’s a little too much with the lag and all. This is one twin stick shooter well worth your time – and your thumbs.
From gamezone.com
Let’s journey back in time for a moment to the days of Nintendo 64. Blissful days? Yes, but that system wasn’t free of crappy software. Most of it consisted of games based on the Comedy Central show South Park, including a somewhat average first-person shooter, a terrible kart racing game, and a lame trivia/party game. They were such awful examples of programming that even the creators of South Park themselves were vehemently against their existence. You would think that Comedy Central would’ve learned its lesson and shied away from lame show-to-game adaptations.
But you’re wrong. Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon is another primary example of a game that’s all license and no substance. As a result, it wears out its welcome with everyone – even fans of the show will be appalled at how mind-numbingly repetitive this game gets. And with no redeeming factor in sight – no replay value, no awesome weapons that last longer than five seconds, no unlockable goodies – it’s not worth even touching at all.
The game has you choose from the four main characters of the show – Callie, Leonard, Mike or Grimes, each of whom play about the same – and set out to prevent Apocalypsegeddon, I suppose, by facing waves of enemies that pretty much stay the same over the course of the entire level. One moment you’re facing zombies that complain even more than when they eat brains, and the other is packed with bird men that are so obnoxious, you wonder how they don’t end up killing each other. Your job is to shoot everything on sight, since the game is a twin stick shooter by basic nature.
And boy, do we mean basic. There’s really nothing new that Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon brings to the gaming scene. While the characters are amusing at first, they wear out their welcome too quickly, especially after they quip the same thing the second or third time you change a weapon. The developers didn’t even go for variety here. The enemies also repeat the same thing way too often, to the point that you try to maneuver the controls to turn the gun on yourself. (Sadly, no such luck.)
There is some decent gameplay buried beneath all this rubbish, as it’s fairly easy to aim at targets and take them down before they attack you. However, it’s all an avoidance thing, since you don’t have massive melee techniques, and the weapons are lackluster at best. Some fire too slow for their own good. Your best bet is to just snag the baseball cannon and hope for the best. (Kind of a shame when the default weapon can get you through the entire game, without letting you tinker too much with variety.)
The in-game graphics aren’t horrid, but you can tell that some corners were cut in order to get publishing done. The crude animation probably won’t win over any fans (even if it slightly mimics the same style of the show), and the backgrounds aren’t very inspired to say the least. As for the sound, well, the voice samples approach nausea levels, while the music is bland and forgettable.
The game can be beaten in about an hour or so, and if you feel like torturing friends, you can invite them along to kill useless enemies with you. Fans of the show who are on some sort of drug buzz may find amusement out of this, but reality will eventually settle in, and the fact you’re out $10 after buying this game will indeed make you feel Ugly.
Seriously, what went wrong here? The game’s developer, Backbone Entertainment, has worked on far better games than this one. And the fact that Comedy Central learned NOTHING from the South Park days is just unacceptable. Avoid Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon like the plague, unless you have a yearning to kill bird men that are on the same intelligence level as you.
From gamezone.com
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