Mario Strikers Charged

 

    Soccer never really interested me, I'll be up front. When I was a kid, my parents attempted to sign me up for soccer as I think is tradition for all parents, and I almost immediately became the one sitting down and picking at the grass. That disinterest bleeds into games as even now, even more more video game tuned variants like Rocket League don't particularly catch my eye, and you'll see me dead before you see me within the near vicinity of a FIFA game. Even with that, though, I think Mario Strikers Charged is worth talking about, because clearly Nintendo and Next Level Games thought that soccer was uninteresting on its own as well, and the way they set about giving it some spice is absolutely wild.
    Apparently in the Mario universe, soccer is the single most intense and deadly sport you could hope to play. The games are set in what I can only describe as battle arenas, with the ball being replaced with some kind of metallic energy sphere and the field being surrounded by an electric fence. Forget about traditional soccer rules; people are free to throw the battle with their hands, tackle and punch other people to get control of the ball, and the team captains have the ability to shoot up into the air in a burst of energy and kick multiple balls into the goal at once. Of course, there's power-ups too, which more often than not lead to you or your teammates being knocked back high into the air, with visible scars and damage marks as the match goes on.
    It is far and away the most abrasive depiction of these characters ever to exist, and I know that sounds like I'm overexaggerating, but you need only look at the cutscene animations to see what I mean. Almost every character has either been made incredibly sassy or extremely angry, and it's pushed to such an extreme where you can see things like Waluigi's entire team doing a crotch chop, or Wario pulling a Persona 3. It is downright bizarre and some would say clashes with Mario's established tone, but the sheer amount of effort that's gone into the animations is easily the best thing about the game. Characters that in other games only have one personality trait or unique animation to their name take on a new life with how well-realized they are here, and it's impressive how much of that is conveyed without a lot of dialogue. The fact there's so many of these one-off animations will make you want to keep playing, just to see what the characters will do next.
    Of course, for as much as this makes playing the game way more entertaining, it is still a soccer game, and I feel like you have to enjoy the sport at least a bit to get the most out of it. There isn't really a whole lot to do besides just play a bunch of matches, either in the free play versus mode or the single-player modes. The main campaign is a pretty typical “play a bunch of times to unlock stuff” sort of ordeal, which is pretty standard, but is hampered by the rather steep difficulty curve. As soon as you hit the second cup, the game stops being nice, and the AI will proceed to pummel you into the ground with how perfectly it plays, often leading to you ranking out and having to try the whole cup over again. There's also a challenge mode, which puts you in specific match-ups with certain stipulations to win, and has the same difficulty spike issue, though thankfully lets you retry as many times as you want.
    It's definitely not the most beginner-friendly of games, but it's clearly meant to be the kind of thing you play again and again with friends, or online if you can find a way to get that running in the modern day. In that sense, it goes above and beyond even what other Mario sports games offer, providing something uniquely over-the-top that manages to remain one-of-a-kind, even with the many Mario spin-offs before and after it. It is a loud game, both figuratively and literally, and if you want a soccer game with an extra bit of kick to it, then it's worth a look if you can find it for a good price. Now I just have to think about if that last bit was a good joke or not.

Excite Truck

 

    People that buy a console at launch, I've noticed, have a tendency to also buy “tide-me-over” games. What I mean by that is, there might be a game that they're anticipating down the line, but since it isn't out yet, they buy a similar enough game to the one they're waiting for to kill some time. I imagine while Wii owners were waiting for the system's Mario Kart game to come out, they picked up Excite Truck in the meantime. As the name implies, the game is part of the Excite series, which traces back all the way to Excitebike on the NES. Despite being an official Nintendo racing series, it never gained quite the same fan base as Mario Kart or even F-Zero, mostly because of its presentation being a fair bit dry compared to the instant recognizability of Mario Kart or the sci-fi cool of F-Zero. With this game, however, there is definitely an active attempt to give it more of its own identity.
    Start the game up and you're greeted with a mandatory tutorial, although one I'm actually pretty thankful for, as the game does function pretty differently compared to your typical racing game. Excite Truck, at its core, is all about the stunts. Pretty much every special action or motion does a different type of trick, and there's tons to do within the tracks to make your driving look more stylish. Everything from going through rings, narrowly grazing past trees, turbo-boosting off of ramps and even crashing your truck in a cool way will earn you points. It's such an integral part of the game that it's not only encouraged, but required; getting in first place may still be a part of each race, but it won't count as a win if you didn't do some cool stuff to reach that point. The unorthodox scoring system is more in line with a skating game or even a spectacle fighter, making it so the goal becomes stringing combos of stunts together as smoothly as possible.
    Of course, what holds it all together is the trucks feeling pretty good to control. It uses what would become the standard for Wii racing games, holding the Wii Remote on its side and using it akin to a steering wheel. The trucks have the right amount of traction to them, with none of the steering feeling oversensitive or anything like that, and the wheels of the trucks will even account for how much you tilt the Wii Remote forward or back, to give you a boost if you land parallel to the ground. The only part of the controls I found problematic were the air spins, where you have to hold the 1 button down and swing it back and forth to spin, but I could never quite get it to work consistently. That's the only major issue, though, as the feel of the game is pretty much on point for what it's going for.
    That being said, even with its unique gameplay, it doesn't really add much on the visual or sound end to match. It is very much still just a truck game in that regard, none of said trucks having much in the way of visual flair and the tracks mostly being straightforward off-road ventures. The track selection may list real-world countries as their basis, but the theming doesn't go beyond “this is the snow level” or “this is the desert level”. There are icons you can hit that terraform the levels in real-time to make them easier to trick off of, but the effect loses its wow factor after the first couple times. The meh presentation extends to the sound too; while the sound of the trucks has that important crunch to it, the music is pretty lackluster, consisting of completely forgettable instrumental hard rock tracks. It does at least let you load custom MP3s from your SD card, which is a nice feature.
    All in all, though, what holds it back in the long run is that, being a launch title, there's not a lot to do and it gets somewhat repetitive. The game has four cups of increasing difficulty, with one unlockable extra-hard track at the end, so most of your time will be spent completing those to make all the tracks available for multiplayer. There is a challenge mode, but it's nothing to write home about; go through gates, go through rings, smash other cars, and that's about it with only six challenge maps to speak of. You could go for S-ranks or the game's built-in achievements if you really want, but by that point your patience with the generic guitar riffs will start wearing thinner than the amount of content the game has.
    There is something there, though, I feel. Even with its bland style and sparse amount of stuff to do, the utterly unique stunt system is enough to make it engaging for as long as it lasts. It's the kind of game where, if renting games were still a thing, it would perfectly fit that specific need and have just enough entertainment to fill a weekend. I hear ExciteBots, this game's sequel, does address a lot of what I complained about with this game, and I will get to it eventually. For this, though, it's a good enough racing game with a very well-realized, unique idea at its core, and if you're willing to learn its mechanics, I'd say it's definitely worth giving a try, at the very least.

Wii Sports

 

 

 

    Who do you suppose was the first person to accidentally throw their Wii Remote into the TV? Tell me you couldn't picture it; someone there at the very launch of the system, spending the whole day setting it up, creating their Miis, getting right into a tennis match until wham! The very first instance someone forgot to put on their wrist strap, sending a cascading ripple effect for similar events across the world until it becomes the most iconic joke made about the Wii. Putting it that way gives it an oddly poignant perspective, a collective breaking of every gaming tradition and barrier up to that point. Perhaps it makes the hassle of buying a new TV sting a bit less, knowing you were right at the precipice of a revolution.
    Anyway, do I even need to waste your time talking about why Wii Sports was good? I feel like if you're reading the first post of a brand new blog specifically themed around the Wii, chances are,you've already played it at some point. It's one of the best selling video games of all time and brought in a massive new audience of people that, up to that point, probably didn't even play video games beforehand, all thanks to both the game's simplicity and the motion controls of the Wii Remote itself. Whether or not that popularity was a blessing or a detriment is debatable, you'll find a large number of older people that think the Wii was just this game and nothing else, but there's no denying it still had a pretty significant impact at the time. That does raise the question on whether or not the game still holds up nearly twenty years later, and as such, I went back to give it a try.
    Wii Sports is a very basic collection of five mini-games in total, those being tennis, baseball, bowling, golf and boxing. Most of them can be played with just the Wii Remote, save for boxing, which requires the Nunchuk.  It also comes with three training mini-games for each of the five games, along with a “Wii Fitness” mode, which just puts a random selection of training mini-games together and grades you at the end. As the games are so simple, I can quickly go through each of them in order.
    Tennis is exactly how you would expect, and is far and away the most simple out of all the already simple games. Swinging the Wii Remote swings the tennis racket, and that's all you need to do; you don't even have to move your Mii around, as they'll get into position to hit the ball back automatically. It actually tracks the angle at which you hit the ball surprisingly precisely, allowing for some trick shots and close saves, with instances of it detecting the wrong angle or missing its cue entirely being quite rare. It is somewhat bizarre that you can only do doubles matches, especially in single-player, where you have to go up against two computer players with two copies of yourself, but it's not something I particularly mind. Overall, it works about as well as it needs to, and is pretty fun.
    Baseball is condensed from its real-life counterpart, with the inning count being reduced from nine to three, and other simplifications like the number of plates you can run to being determined by how long the automated catchers take to reach the ball. The controls for batting are about as simple as tennis, but I find them to be a lot more unreliable here. I'll do my best to swing the bat in the exact same way, and it seems even odds whether the baseball will go sailing out of the park, or pitifully sent backwards into the foul ball zone. Pitching is easier to get a hold of, with it picking up the speed at which you throw the ball, and also allowing for things like curveballs, screwballs and splitters by holding down the A and/or B buttons. While the simplifications are welcome, baseball is simply okay here.
    Bowling is far and away the best mini-game of the entire collection, and a pretty good contender for the best bowling game ever made. You set up the position and angle of your shot, hold down B and start swinging, and then release B at the end of your swing to send the ball rolling. The controls feel absolutely perfect, and the speed at which you can blast through all ten frames makes it easy to pick up at any time. I also love all the smaller touches that simply add to the experience, like how if you throw the ball backwards, all the Miis will jump and yell in surprise. If there's any game that will keep you coming back to revisit Wii Sports, it's this one.
    Golf is one mini-game I'm pretty bad at, so in that sense, it's accurate to how bad I am at golf in real life. You select which club to use, line up your shot with the D-pad, approach the ball with the A button, and then swing away. The courses are remasters on the ones from Golf on the NES, which is a neat detail along with the variable wind speed of each course, making it so you can't predict exactly where your ball will land no matter how good you get at the game. Much like tennis, it works as well as it needs to, although the somewhat limited number of courses does hinder its replayability a bit.
    Boxing is the odd one out between all the mini-games, as not only does it require the Nunchuk, but it's also the most “game-ified” of all the sports. You have to balance dodging the other opponent's attacks and finding the correct moment to throw your own punches, trying to get their health bar to zero. Whether or not they're knocked out or will get back up is dependent on how quickly their health dropped to zero, and how many times they've gotten back up already. It was definitely designed with the intent to show the Nunchuk's motion control capabilities, but it ended up faltering a fair bit. The Nunchuk isn't nearly as accurate as the Wii Remote with detecting motion, and even with that, it expects you to do incredibly specific motions that are finicky to pull off. It's simply mediocre, especially in comparison to the other games.
    Speaking of having to do specific motions that the controls aren't accurate enough to handle, the training games, which is where the experience starts to crack a bit for me. A lot of the training mini-games expect way more from the motion controls than can reasonably be expected, such as trying to hit targets or angles with narrow room for error, and thus a lot of them are over very quickly. That's not to say they're all bad, as a couple of them can prove to be a good time; the Power Throws training game for bowling, where you have to knock down an increasingly large number of pins, is far and away the best of the bunch. For the most part, though, it proves to be a relatively throwaway part of the package, in a game that's already pretty light on content.
    Although, does the lack of content really matter? It was bundled in with the console, after all, and for a console pack-in, it does exactly what it needs to do. It showcases the motion controls of the Wii Remote in an incredibly easy to understand and concise way, all while having the kind of distinct charm that only Nintendo could pull off. A couple of the mini-games are a smidge clunky in hindsight, but for how effortlessly the rest of it plays, it's really not something that detrimental. It says a lot that out of all the launch window Wii games that I have, Wii Sports is the one I keep wanting to go back to play, because even though it doesn't have much to do, what is there has remained pretty timeless.