Good Game Get! Face Pilot
I miss Pilotwings.
I haven’t played a new Pilotwings since a day before my birthday in 1996 on September 26th.
Fourteen years have passed and I’m pretty sure that HAL Laboratory of Kirby and Super Smash Bros. fame should handle all development of a new title if one were to exist.
Supposedly Factor 5 was working on a GameCube sequel but Nintendo wasn’t comfortable with it so they didn’t release it,
Next Level Games has also shown interest in making a new Pilotwings after their Punch-Out reboot, but again, nothing really has come of it.
Why should HAL Laboratory make it?
Face Pilot rules, and it feels like a hang glider section of a brand new Pilotwings game, which is such a good thing. It has a ton of stuff to do, including various locales to fly in, lots of different hang gliders, and of course many things to collect and unlock.
The game utilizes the player facing DSi camera to snap a photo of you to map to your character, and to track your face which turns your DSi into a fancy camera powered accelerometer controller. You tilt the DSi to fly your hang glider throughout a stage to fly through star rings, collect balloons, find hidden medals, etc. The result is surprisingly good and awesomely accurate.
Face Pilot actually has two play styles though - the one I described above, and a different one in which you set the DSi on a table and try to play while moving your head around. While I’ve read other accounts of this working really well, it didn’t work well for me. With two options though, I can’t imagine that someone couldn’t get either one to work for them so I think it’s a safe bet to not let camera/face-tracking issue fears sway you from the rad five dollar price tag.
Face Pilot gets me stoked to play motion oriented 3DS games once the system drops, and while I feel it can sometimes be a gimmick, nothing beats a flying game and moving an object with both hands instead of twiddling a thumb stick.
Nintendo you should get HAL Laboratory working on Pilotwings 3DS immediately.
- Kyle
Footage from X
As you know, or may not know actually, I really dig recent DSiWare game X-Scape which is essentially a sequel to the old GameBoy game X.
While the original game is looking a little long in the tooth, it still is awesome to see simple pseudo 3D renderings moving around in a GameBoy game.
It’s also a straight nostalgia trip to see all of the cool tunnel similarities between X and X-Scape.
- Kyle
Good Game Get! X-Scape
X-Scape is the definitive DSiWare title and let’s face facts, DSiWare really hasn’t been all that great and most of the time browsing for games in the store isn’t enjoyable, and with a lack of demos and the frustrating points system it gets downright ugly. Add all of that in with the simple fact that none of your games are tied to any sort of account but rather a system that doesn’t allow you to transfer games to a new system - well it becomes incredibly stupid and is always a deterrent when it comes to downloading DSiWare or WiiWare games for me.
Nintendo obviously still makes great games, but almost all of their online gaming decisions up until this point have been awful, archaic, and worst of all have been fueled by a ridiculous paranoia that hasn’t came true for Microsoft, Sony, or Apple. They’ve all managed to create robust and enjoyable store/digital distribution combinations that really don’t have issues with sexual predators trying to bait children.
Back to X-Scape though, because it rules, and I will tell you right now, despite all of the bashing I did of DSiWare and Nintendo’s model, the $10 you’ll spend downloading 1,000 points just to get X-Scape will be oh so worth the 800 points you’ll spend on the title.
The gameplay itself is fairly typical and in fact isn’t all that special besides being extremely well polished, quick, occasionally challenging, and always fun. In fact the gameplay in some respects can be quite retro especially when discussing movement of your ship versus some contemporary ways of flying and shooting in games. The ship movement is very basic, and in fact most of the time the only control you have over your aiming reticule is via moving left and right and back and forth. You really will rarely ever have the chance to fully manipulate your AIM in the 2D through 3D space that most games have. Not that it matters, and that doesn’t cripple you as the game was designed around this and thus certain handicaps are put into place such as enemy patterns and of course a nice auto-aim system.
Basically it’s as if you were playing a first person shooter with only one digital stick instead of two and if the digital stick was translated to a stylus on a touch-screen. That is really the best way to describe it.
It works though, and despite its large (at least with me) learning curve, it becomes quite intuitive and you begin to understand the control scheme and why it’s been implemented.
Partially I believe the control system exists to give the game even more of minimalist retro feel which it already accomplished with it’s incredible museum worthy, modern and incredibly abstract Tron-esque visuals. I only say Tron-esque because of the primitive 3D and limited but endearing color palettes that the games used. To be completely honest though, at times I’ve felt the Tron comparison is more than skin deep as I swear one of the earlier enemies sounded eerily like a light-cycle when zooming around.
The real magic of the game lies visually in one of the coolest graphics aesthetics I’ve seen. The game does not know what realism is and never once tries to achieve anything through it’s art that closely resembles real things. I mean - don’t let me fib you, the game has trees - it does. However, these aren’t really trees, they’re merely inspired by our trees, as you’ve never seen trees like this.
The game’s visuals continually go against the grain the entire time and occasionally can be so stark because the designers not only said “fuck traditional graphics design”, they also said “fuck color theory.”
Which is pretty punk rock of them.
The narrative the game follows is just as abstract and engaging as the art it is place upon, while a little cut and dry at times the ability to hack and investigate the history and uses of certain planets is so un-needed but so absolutely cool that it becomes just as addicting to explore and discover the tiny planets and it’s especially important to note that I usually find sci-fi shit to be contrived. X-Scape’s script happens to rock really hard and I have found myself geeking out to all of of the cool fictional planetary facts.
X-Scape is not going to sell well - but I’m telling you - solidly, hands down, X-Scape is the absolute best DSi exclusive game I have played. I didn’t get a DSi (actually was a gift from my girl) for any reason in particular, but had X-Scape been out prior to my receiving, the want would’ve been heavily influenced by this title.
X-Scape is simply awesome, and is a contender for game of the year with me. It’s that good.
I’m not fucking around, you need to play this game.
- Kyle
Good Game Get! Photo Dojo
It’s free until June 10th and 200 points afterwards. It is the absolute most I have laughed with a game all year.
Photo Dojo is a simple fighting game and it’s not even that good of a fighting game.
The magic comes when you create yourself and your friends into fighters.
You take photos and record audio of yourself taunting, shooting fireballs, punching, and so on.
Done in elegant and awkward Nintendo fashion, it is one of the most absurd games I’ve ever played, but in it’s simplicity you will find such hilarity and such coolness at seeing yourself as an animated fighter complete with your own voice acting.
Photo Dojo is a prime example of the magic that we could be seeing with DSiWare, and its execution is perfectly humorous and fun.
Mighty Flip Champs
Mighty Flip Champs is just a new excellent part of what the DSi and DSiWare is all about. Small, original, and exclusive little games that rock. In Mighty Flip Champs, you manipulate the world by changing the level, and you do this by flipping the level to the next version. The next version is on the bottom screen and the current is on the top. You check the relation between your current version and the next version to determine when to flip, where to flip, and how much time you want to leave between flips.
While that sounds confusing, and I’m sure the video may confuse you more, the game’s premise is fairly easy once you understand how the top screen and bottom screen relate to each other.
It’s a contemporary twist on classical non-jumping platforming experiences and at eight dollars, if you have a DSi, you really should not pass it up. The music and graphics are superb, by the way, of course you probably knew that while watching the video.
- Kyle