Tag Archives: warioware

PlayStation, Reviews

Incredible Crisis [PlayStation] – Review

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Incredible Crisis - PlayStation - North American Box Art

I had a pretty memorable Independence Day this year. Among other reasons, I finally sat down and played through Incredible Crisis. It’s a quirky game that has been on my backlog for a while now, and on my radar for even longer; I probably first learned of it surfing the net in the mid 2000s. For me, it’s remained a stalwart example of the scores of zany Japanese games that somehow saw release in the west during the late 1990s and the mid 2000s. Maybe off-the-wall games like it had been, and perhaps remain, prevalent in Japan, but at least in the west, it seemed like they came and went during these years. Continue reading Incredible Crisis [PlayStation] – Review →

Game Boy Advance, Random Games

Random Game #3 – Drill Dozer [Game Boy Advance]

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Drill DozerWhen you have a video game collection like mine, it can be hard to play all of the games. This is especially true when additions are made on an almost weekly basis. Still, I appreciate nearly every game I’ve accumulated for this reason or that. In the hopes of improving my writing through continuous effort and promoting ongoing learning of these games, I’m going to compose brief, descriptive articles.

I don’t fully recall how I came to own Drill Dozer but I imagine I acquired it from Best Buy a year or so after its release. I remember reading about it in Nintendo Power at the time. It seemed interesting, especially because it was something different from Game Freak, and it was well received, but it wasn’t for me. This, more than likely, was because I didn’t have a job at the time. As best as I can remember, it played like a cross between Mr. Driller and a Treasure side-scroller akin to Gunstar Heroes. It looked fantastic, had a unique premise, and I don’t remember it being terrible, although I didn’t finish it. Thinking about it now, I ought to return to it.

Drill Dozer was developed by Game Freak (you know, the Pokémon studio) and published in North America by Nintendo on February 6, 2006. This was a Game Boy Advance game, and as the Nintendo DS had been released about a year-and-a-half earlier, I imagine this would’ve been one of Nintendo’s final GBA games. It, along with WarioWare: Twisted, were the only GBA games that utilized a rumble feature.

PlayStation Portable, Reviews

Hot Pixel – Review

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It's available on the cheap!

Figuring I might have a little bit of free time on a trip to visit my girlfriend’s family, I decided to bring along my PSP and a few games. Of the games I brought, Hot Pixel received the most attention. It was developed in France by zSLide and published by Atari on October 2, 2007.

Massage the tattoo on this lady's back, but quickly!

Hot Pixel is really nothing more than a WarioWare clone with an urban theme. It sticks with the idea of microgames and coasts on that idea for about an hour, the time it took me to beat the game and finish with 67% completion. The core mode is broken up into ten episodes consisting of about ten microgames as well as a boss battle. Whereas the microgames lasted a few seconds at most, the boss battles were slightly longer, like a remixed round of Breakout. This isn’t the only remixed Atari classic in the game but there aren’t that many; I wish there was there was more of an emphasis on utilizing Atari’s catalog of old games.

One feature that I thought was inventive was the addition of playlists. Hot Pixel comes preloaded with many playlists, usually with clever parameters; they can be customized too. I can’t follow up the previous paragraph with one composed of two sentences and I still want to talk about unlockables, so I will! They were lame. There doesn’t seem to be a lot and the ones I unlocked weren’t compelling enough to keep me playing to see what else there was. I was rewarded with pixels for completing games, but they weren’t used for anything. I would’ve liked to see an abundance of unlockables and a shop where pixels were spent, but that wasn’t the case.

This game of Breakout takes place on a skyscraper.

Like Mr. Driller: Drill Spirits, Hot Pixel was satisfying for a short period of time. I didn’t dig every microgame I played, many were too similar, and I wish the game played up Atari’s past more but the game was enjoyable nonetheless. There isn’t enough of a reason for it to be a primary focus, but it’s great for a trip.

2/5

In Between Posts

In Between Posts, December 11, 2011

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Finals week(s)! I took three finals last week leaving me with my final final that I’ll take tomorrow. I did fantastic in Operations and Supply Chain Management, Accounting Information Systems, and Money and Banking. I really put effort into studying though so that makes sense. Tomorrow I’ll finish Principles of Finance and be done with school for a few weeks.

I just got back from visiting my girlfriend’s family in Wichita, Kansas so I didn’t play a lot of games. I did bring my PSP though and tried out Hot Pixel and Tokobot. Hot Pixel is a WarioWare style game so it consists of lots of games that last a few seconds. It didn’t take long to get my fill of it and I’ll probably write a short review.

Tokobot was a prime exclusive for the PSP early on and I remember it getting a lot of press, but I didn’t like it. It’s aimed at a young audience and that threw me off of it, but the gameplay seems alright. The protagonist has a group of small robots that follow him around and he can arrange them in formations and use them to solve puzzles and navigate. I’ve always been interested to try Tokobot, but I don’t foresee playing it to completion.

And I played a wee bit of Skyward Sword too.