The Closeout Warrior

Just for fun, I thought I’d pull out one of the old reviews from my $10 and under days. This has nothing to do with a critical planning error on my part, and not getting a proper post done. Nothing in the slightest. Oh, and the pictures don’t work for now. Sorry about that.

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For a time, Crash Bandicoot was Sony’s flagship character and spokesperson… er… spokesmarsupial(?). He went so far as to film commercials in Nintendo’s parking lot cracking wise about their console. Given this staunch opposition to all things Nintendo, you’d probably surmise (much like I did) that nothing resembling a Crash Bandicoot game would ever materialize on any of Nintendo’s consoles. Well, we were both wrong.Now, to be quite honest, I’ve never actually played a Crash Bandicoot game before, so I had absolutely no idea what was going on when I flipped this game into my Game Cube. Thankfully, there was a very lengthy video sequence that set up the game. I didn’t time it, mostly because I didn’t want to sit through it again, but it was long enough for me to wonder if I had bought a game or Crash Bandicoot The Motion Picture. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about the story behind this game. Bad guys are concocting a plan to off the hero by releasing ancient evils upon the world. To thwart this evil, you must go through various stages and gather the crystals hidden within. Typical stuff.It’s fairly obvious from looking at and listening to this game that literally several dozen dollars went into its production. The characters are acceptably rendered, and the stages all manage to look fine. They even managed to wrangle some quasi-celebrity talent to provide some of the voices. Before traipsing through a select few stages, some of the Ancient Evils appear to talk smack to you to help keep you motivated. I had to put down the controller and walk away from the Gamecube (and this game) once I heard the voice of R. Lee Ermy coming out of the Water Elemental Mask, Wa-Wa. While at first it appears that there is some variety to the stages, many of them feel suspiciously similar; run around on a predetermined course in a 3D area, grab all the fruits/crystals, optionally bust open the boxes and head toward the exit. Occasionally you’ll control Crash’s sister Coco or pilot the odd vehicle, but those stages are the exception rather than the rule. From what I can gather, this is all typical Crash fare.

This probably won’t come as a large surprise to longtime followers of the Crash series, but Crash is about as durable as a house of cards in a tornado. Touching a seal (or a bat or anything else that moves in this game) spells instant death for our protagonist. This is offset by the ludicrous amount of lives you acquire throughout the game. By the time I got to the seventh stage I already had well over 20 lives in reserve and was in absolutely in no danger of running out in a tough spot; I couldn’t find any. The game isn’t particularly challenging. It’s possible to achieve success by persistence alone, which made for a tedious experience. Eventually I just gave up and decided to move on to Crash Blast, the game that you can download into your Game Boy to supposedly unlock secrets. The game really isn’t anything more than a shooting gallery. The only secret I managed to unlock was an advertisement for an upcoming Game Boy Crash title. Meh. So we have a game that looks OK, sounds OK, and plays OK. What does that leave us with? A game that’s just OK. There’s very little in this game that made me want to keep coming back for more.

Platform: Game Cube
Purchased from: Best Buy
Amount of money I wasted on it: $4.99 One word summary: Vanilla

I had always liked the Dance Dance Revolution series well enough, but since I didn’t own any of the systems that it came out on, I was restricted to playing it in the arcades, and at $1.00 or so a pop, I didn’t play very often. Well, and the crowds, I hate flailing around in time to techno music in front of a crowd.

I was pretty jazzed to find out that Konami had finally acquiesced and brought out a version of this franchise for the Game Cube starring characters from the Mario universe, so I could finally take part in the ‘DDR Workout Program’ that I’ve heard so much about.

For the sheltered few that may not know, Dance Dance Revolution games are rhythm/dancing games. Some goofy song plays and arrows (up, down, left, right, or some combination of them) scroll up from the bottom of the screen. They cross a silhouette at the top of the screen, and it’s your job to press the corresponding arrows on the giant dance pad at your feet, in time with the music of course.

It also just wouldn’t be a Mario game unless there was some goofy story involved. It’s kind of a nice change of pace to hold the stages together, rather than the other versions of DDR that just kind of throw some songs at you with nothing to really hold them together. They also like to break up the action with a couple of Mario Party style mini-games.

I only had a couple of complaints about this game. The songs were overall pretty well done, especially the remixes of the Mario series songs, but there just weren’t enough of them. There are less than two dozen songs in the game and half of those are techno remixes of public domain songs. And, yes, a techno-remix of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is just as good as it sounds.

I also found it odd that while two people can play the game, it requires two pads to do so appropriately. Not too big of a deal until you find out that they only sell extra pads through Nintendo’s online store, which just seemed weird to me.

The game also was pretty short. I managed to play through the entire game and unlock all of the songs in two playthroughs, which took about two hours. A little disappointing for a $50 game.

But other than those relatively minor things, it’s a solid game, and certainly worth playing at least once.

I recently finished up a very peculiar, but thoroughly enjoyable game that goes by the name Chibi-Robo! (The ‘!’ is actually in the title, I’m really not that excited that I finished a game). Chibi-Robo! might be one of the singularly least-violent games that I’ve ever played. Even calling it a “game” is a bit of a stretch.

Your character, appropriately named Chibi-Robo, is a diminutive robot with the goal to make his family happy. How do you make your family happy? By cleaning up stains, picking up trash, and doing ridiculous tasks for the inhabitants of the house. Just the first two tasks alone will take up a significant portion of your time as all the members of the family are complete slobs. There’s mud, sticks, cookie crumbs, candy wrappers, soda cans, and assorted miscellany absolutely everywhere. You’ll gladly clean up every piece of trash and scrub every floor to gain ‘happy points’ and raise your ‘Chibi-Ranking’ to get the carrot dangled in front of your nose since the beginning of the game: to become the number one ranked Chibi-Robo in the world, Super Chibi-Robo.

The house that is your domain is split up into six distinct rooms. Curiously, a bathroom is not one of them. That may not sound like a whole lot, but remember that you are playing the part of a robot that’s only about three or four inches tall. Something as seemingly simple as navigating a staircase becomes nigh-impossible.

The tiny house is chock-full of things to do. It’s quite easy to rack up a dozen or so hours doing silly little side-quests, without touching the main story (yes, there is one). You don’t even have to touch the main story if you don’t want to. Overall, I’d expect the average player to get about 20 hours out of the whole thing.

20 non-violent, making people happy, cleaning the house hours. If this game isn’t family-friendly, I don’t know what is.