Kyle Orland’s Workblog

X2: Wolverine’s Revenge is Filled With Inconsistency and Excessive Button-mashing

Flashback to 1993: I was a 9-year-old boy who had just received a brand new Super Nintendo for my birthday. One of the first games I got for the system was Final Fight, a game requiring lots of button-mashing and little strategy. Basically, you walk in one direction and punch anything that moves. Initially, I was captivated by the random violence and pretty graphics, but even as a 9-year-old, I quickly tired of hitting the attack button over and over again to dispatch enemies who all looked the same.

If a time machine could send that little boy 11 years into the future to play Activision’s X2: Wolverine’s Revenge for the Xbox, Playstation 2 and GameCube, he would still be bored.

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The staying power of Nintendo’s Game Boy is nothing short of amazing. In the almost 15 years since its release, many able competitors have tried to wedge their way into the portable gaming market with colorful systems more powerful and more colorful, only to fall hopelessly flat in the face of Nintendo’s slow-to-change juggernaut.

Yet despite the unequal success of the system in all its numerous iterations, one problem has remained: The Game Boy’s screen has remained incredibly hard to see. People have tried to fix this problem with everything from ridiculous looking light attachments to personally installed internal lighting systems. Happily, the days of fumbling with unwieldy lights and messing with modification kits are over.

After 15 long years, Nintendo’s new Game Boy Advance SP (GBASP) has a built-in, front-lit screen.

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Since Nintendo made futuristic racers popular with 1991’s F-Zero for Super Nintendo, game after game has featured hovering cars racing on wildly twisting tracks. The best of these games (most notably WipeOut and Extreme G) have seen sequel after sequel that offer more tracks, more cars and more of the same predictable hover racing.

In light of all these repetitive sequels, the question inevitably arises: "How many futuristic racing games does one person need?" In the case of Majesco’s Hypersonic Xtreme for the PlayStation 2, the answer is "one fewer."

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For better or worse, the runaway success of the Grand Theft Auto series has revolutionized the gaming industry. Sony’s The Getaway for PS2 is a good example of some of the better, with a little bit of the worse hampering some of the execution.

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Fighting games as a genre have been rather stagnant recently. A new fighting game might add flashy graphics, big weapons, or new characters to the mix, but the basic premise usually offers little to no innovation over classics like Virtua Fighter (or Street Fighter 2, for that matter). It’s high time that someone came along and made a fighting game that gives the whole idea of fighting games a swift kick in the behind.

Luckily, Sony’s War of the Monsters for the Playstation 2 has done just that.

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Maybe you were skiing in the Rockies. Maybe you were sunning yourself in Cancun. Maybe you were too busy with Metroid Prime and 007: Nightfire to play anything else. Whatever the reason, there were probably a good number of games that flew under your radar during the busy holiday season of 2002. Here’s a quick breakdown on some of the games you may have missed.

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When I was first introduced to Insomniac’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series back in high school, I passed it off as just another fad sports game. I lumped it together with other "extreme" sports crazes like NBA Jam and NFL Blitz that have little to no depth but are worth consideration just because they’re so different. So I picked the first THPS up, expecting an entertaining little distraction that would hold me over until a more worthy waste of time came along.

Now the fourth game in the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series is here for PS2, Xbox and GameCube, and I’m still kickflipping. I’m still doing indy grabs. I’m still doing 360 benihanas and reverting into a nose manual to an invert fakie. And I’m still loving it. What I once thought would be an amusing diversion has become a three-year-long addiction to a beautifully done series of games.

How does a game series manage to keep my interest for so long? It’s a simple three-step process.

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FairPlay Campaign Protests High Video Game Costs With a Boycott

Do you think video game prices are too high? If your answer is yes, a group in England agrees with you - and is planning to do something about it. These British gamers make up the FairPlay Campaign and are organizing a general boycott of video game retailers for the first week in December. According to the campaign’s website (http://www.fairplay-campaign.co.uk), "Don’t Buy a Video Game Week" will send video game developers the message that "video games are a rip- off," and that "there isn’t a single reason that games couldn’t be sold at £20 [approximately $31]." Currently, prices for new video games typically range from $40 to $60.

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New Video Game Accessories Can Do Everything Short of Making Dinner

Of all the ways in which video games have changed over the years, possibly none is more dramatic than the progress of controller design. Where a dial used to suffice for the simple action of Pong, now there are controllers with multiple analog joysticks, molded plastic grips and dozens of buttons.

Not only are today’s controllers more complicated, but they’re also more gimmicky. In the past, controller makers have added features such as auto-fire, programmable buttons, and force feedback to their products with varying results. Following this pattern, Nintendo and Nyko have both released gimmicky controllers and accessories for the latest generation of systems, again with varying results. Here’s my opinion on some of their latest.

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When Namco released the original Tekken in arcades in 1994 it was a welcome change from the derivative 2-dimensional fighters of its day. While Street Fighter 2 and its countless copycats were stagnating with sequels that offered little more than better graphics and flashier combos and super moves, Tekken’s deep fighting system and well-balanced gameplay made it one of best fighting games of the time.

Eight years later, with the release of Tekken 4 for the Playstation 2, the series is beginning to show the same signs of the stagnation that it once stood in contrast to.

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