On Tap: Week of February 8th, 2010
Oh yeah. It’s on. This week sees the release of the highly anticipated Bioshock 2 as players return to Rapture and get their shoot on. I should also point out that there’s a little game from EA coming out this week that you might not have heard about. It’s called Dante’s Inferno. It had a really small budget, especially for advertising, and you probably didn’t really hear much about it. Hopefully the upstart word of mouth campaign they have going will help it get a few sales. Oh, and apparently there’s a new Super Monkey Ball game out (Step and Roll) for the Wii. This will make some people happy. Not me. The first game was extremely overrated as the motion controls were spotty and frustrating. Kids might like the monkey business, but the motion control stuff will only go so far until they throw their Wii Remote at the screen and I have buy a new TV. No thanks.
I really ragged on Brutal Legend a lot due to the overhype it received. Now, in that case, my rage was directed more towards the Internet bloggers out there who treated Tim Schafer like some sort of gaming god and couldn’t stop telling us how awesome Brutal Legend was going to be. We know how that turned out, what with the out-of-left-field RTS-heavy gameplay and poor sales. And I know we’ve sort of tagged Epic Mickey as the next great overhyped game, but really, we’re already seeing it now with Dante’s Inferno. (Yes, my first paragraph was dripping with sarcasm. I figured you’d pick up on it, but you never know who’s reading this stuff.) The hype factor here is off the charts, though for different reason’s than Brutal Legend was. Quite simply, we’re seeing a game with perhaps the biggest advertising campaign in gaming history behind it. Not just in cost, but scope. EA has hit everything here. Viral marketing. Internet bloggers. Gaming sites. Fake protests. Ill-conceived contests. A FREAKING SUPER BOWL COMMERCIAL. Anybody with even the slightest insight into the gaming scene knows about this game. We get it. Dante’s Inferno. It’s big. Stop telling us. I’m really hoping for an Epic Fail here, but sadly the marketing muscle involved will make that an impossibility. Though it remains to be seen if this was all worth it.
I’m in the process of playing No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle on the Wii as I’m reviewing it for this fine site. I didn’t play the first one, and now I see what I was missing. Not going to give a lot away here, but it has a certain core audience, namely juvenile. Sadly, I appreciate that kind of stuff and it’s hitting all my “entertained” buttons. It’s a shame it won’t sell well (like the first) and this game deserves a much better fate. Since Suda 51 is looking to take the series to other consoles where mature games tend to do better, they might find a more receptive audience. Review should be up hopefully later this week, depends when I can finish it (currently ranked fourth, so three more battles to go).
Oldest Son has been playing Lego Battles lately. I think he was expecting another beat ‘em up platformer like the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Batman games. Making the jump to something more involved like an RTS is something he’s not dealing with too well, though to his credit, he did get through the first three missions on his own. He’s six, so the complexities of an RTS might be a bit much, but daddy is starting to work with him on playing that genre, even though I’m not personally big into it. Still, I like how RTS games let you decide how to tackle a problem in lots of different ways. That kind of thinking can only be good for brain development, especially with out of the box type thinking.
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