Remember NiGHTS?

Quickie: Don’t Buy

Remember Nights, on the Sega Saturn? I used to spend hours at Sears playing the game and having no idea what I was doing, but it was fun to have the almost unlimited freedom to roam a beautifully mystical world with a character that looked like a jester in a purple leotard. Well it’s back on the Wii…

BORING!

I just wanted to fly, I loved flying in the game, but you have to play as a pre-teen running around collecting her Ideya…sounds like idiot to me…

But even when you have the chance to fly you have to Dualize with NiGHTS…it sounds like a sex term and instantly looses its innocent charm.

When you do have to play as the human they walk around like ducks and are horrible to look at. Your only weapons are the Blue Chips and it’s all timed so you can’t focus on the games beauty at all…and there isn’t very much, because the landscapes look like they took a Picasso painting and put it through a shredder.

I found myself pressing (+) at every cut scene, unfortunately you can’t skip. I don’t need all of the whiny drama or storyline to make the game better, it actually made it worse because the characters were as thin as paper.

Personally I can do without the story altogether and fly, by jamming the nunchuck stick to the right…yes…they even ruined the enjoyment of flight by making it as restrictive as a nunnery.

What is the point of having flight in a game if there is no freedom in it? It’s like giving a child a bike with flat tires; too much effort to ride, so they just leave it to rot in the sun and rain. It’s the same with NiGHTS, no freedom equals no enjoyable play.

It was repetitive and felt like a never ending torture flying through loops and chasing down keys for a pointless mission from the horrible storyline. The freedom was lost from the Sega Saturn I’d experienced and turned into a suppression via Nintendo.

One boss, Bomamba, was such a pain in the butt I just gave up on the game. You had to roll all the kitty heads…that’s right heads…into little holes in a certain amount of time…and there were many stages of ulcer causing pain.



I must have tried for two hours to complete this boss, but those kitty balls just wouldn’t fall in, especially if there was a hill to roll over.

The developers were trying too hard to add sense to the NiGHTS universe. Honestly I would have been satisfied with a little prologue and a simple storyline of saving children’s dreams or something but instead the player was given flat character children, boring levels, complicated bosses and limited flying, which killed the game ultimately.

Don’t try, don’t buy, it will just make you cry.

The Finish Line

Finishing a video game should be a honor for both player and game because it is an accomplishment shared by both programmer and player when a game is worth the gameplay.

I will admit I do not finish the majority of games because I come to the moment where the game looses its sense of immersion and the game and becomes grinding.


In “Fable” there was a little bit of this, but the fact I could kill everyone in the
entire town and own it kept me very entertained, along with the witty sense of humor and sick plot. But in games like “Chrono Trigger” and most of the “Final Fantasy” games I come to a point where I have to level up to progress further.

My opinion is a game should flow in a way where the character should be able to progress with little to no grinding, like “Prince of Persia: Warrior Within” a game I loved for it’s storytelling, amazing visuals and the slow-mo sequences when heads would fly.

I also hate games which have a good premise and decide to interject another game. For example “Thief: Deadly Shadows” had a nice concept of rob everybody and fence their stuff, with a little bit of a mission until you were blasted to the past.

I lost interest immediately, not only because it was creepy, but why did they have to add a time paradox to a thief game? It was downright moronic.

So, I don’t like playing games that grind you to level up and games that try to sneak in different games. These types are at the top of my crappy, other than ones that generally just suck, like “The Sims”.

Sims Castaway: Please stay away!

Quickie: Don't Buy




I’ve been playing one version of the Sims or another since it was conceived by the sadistic minds at EA Games. Unfortunately my dying laptop could barley handle basic Word functions, so I had to stay away and sighed at the loss.

Finally the Sims started to release on X-Box, PlayStation and Gamecube, and the Wii and I gladly regained my god powers making my sims burn in their own kitchens and die in small dark rooms.

But time after time I have been disappointed with the console versions of the game. For example, when the Sims 2 appeared for the X-Box I found out that you could not have children within the game. You were stuck as a sterile sim only out to complete goals and climb the Simcorp ladder.

The Sims: Castaway seemed like a fun buy and if I didn’t like it I could return it in 7 days. Thank goodness for the liberal return policy.

You create a character at the beginning of the game, very similar to the original standbys: clothing, skin tone and occupation. Also, you can create other crewmembers to help you with chores and tasks.

At first you are alone on an island and it’s okay at fist, but if you decided to be completely alone, it turns into the forever Castaway movie.

EA attempted to make Sims more like a RPG. But walking to different zones to collect certain materials rather then just moving about the world omnisciently and assigning tasks becomes very tedious.

One of the largest design flaws I found was when you build a shelter and make a mistake, you cannot simply delete it. You have to go into “GRAB” mode, trash it a and if you do dismantle it, you still loose all your precious supplies. It’s annoying and time consuming.

If you did decide to create additional characters the next step in the game is to find them. When you do, hope you didn’t make a lazy sim, because they are entirely useless, especially when the concept of a multi-sim game is to eventually make a thriving tribe. GOOD LUCK!

Everything is more difficult with this RPG style. Talking to sims is impossible because you have to constantly move around and catch up with the other sim. You also have no control over the other sims unless they are in your tribe. And how do you build a tribe? By talking. UGH!

Everything about this game is difficult to achieve because of the basic game flaws EA overlooked. These could have been altered and the game could have been very enjoyable, but in short the game sucks.

I’m still waiting EA, when are the Sims going to have a decent game to play on a console? Playstation, X-Box and the Wii are all online now, so why not develop a Sims 2 and also have expansions available to download online? This would allow players to have the feel of Sims 2 they want and they can expand their world with a click.

I spent too much time playing this game looking for a promising development, but the graphics were average, the third-person play made everything harder, deleting became a bureaucratic process, relationships were hard to develop and the goals were very tedious.