by [name redacted]

Episode forty of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Game of the Week:

New Super Mario Bros.
Nintendo
Nintendo DS
Monday

Out of all the pre-release devisiveness, in my experience New SMB takes the ribbon. Every time the game’s brought up, the Internet melts just a little. There’s no pleasing anybody! Maybe that has something to do with the game’s own conflicts: it wants to both revisit the style of Super Marios 1 and 3 for the NES and to “update” it with all the advances since Super Mario World. It wants to both play on nostalgia and to attract all the new and disillusioned eyes who have gravitated toward the DS. It wants to both be the successor to the Super Mario Bros. mantle and to come off as something altogether new.

So what we’ve got is a forward-pressing 2D platformer (as with the NES games) that calls upon the moves introduced in Super Mario 64 to help Mario more precisely explore a 3D world, flashy gimmicks introduced in Smash Bros. as a kind of a joke, and a whole lot of silly scripted events and mechanic-wanking intended to impress the pants off of anyone who thinks he knows how Super Mario Bros. works. And yet, it’s kind of fun. Maybe it’s a little too concerned with the past instead of with doing its own thing – and maybe it’s too concerned with making the past appealing to people who weren’t there at the time – yet maybe the gamers are a little too concerned about Mario.

In its overkill, its mix of old and new, the game clearly isn’t taking itself very seriously. The game gives off an air of exuberance; it knows it’s just screwing around, and it doesn’t care. Within those constraints, New SMB is pretty neat. The past has had its time; if you’re going to bring it up again, you’d better either take it somewhere new and inspirational or have shameless fun with what’s there. Ikaruga and Jonathan Blow’s Braid do the former; New SMB does the latter. Fair enough.

Rest of the Week:

The Da Vinci Code
The Collective/2K Games
Xbox/PS2/PC
Friday

I first heard about this game from a flash advertisement on someone else’s computer during E3. The slogan: “See the movie, then play the game!” If that, or indeed the mere presence of a videogame adaptation, is less than encouraging, the developer might assuage a few concerns. The Collective has a solid track record for “better than it shoulda been” projects, like the Xbox Buffy game and Marc Ecko’s Getting Up. These guys are starting to remind me of a Western Cavia, except less prolific. For another thing, despite what the ads imply, the game is based on the book instead of the movie, which seems a wise decision to me. What we end up with is a PC-style adventure game: search for clues, talk to people, pick up random objects to use in byzantine puzzles. The game records everything you do, to keep you from having to take notes. There’s also a combat engine because, hey, it’s a videogame!

Fuel
Firetoad/DreamCatcher
Xbox/PC
Tuesday

Speaking of, DreamCatcher is known for low-budget PC adventure games; though the company has published on consoles before, and has published non-adventure titles (hey, these guys even picked up the GunGrave sequel in Europe), Fuel – sort of the Road Rash of triathalons – sticks out as something of an anomaly. You start off in a nasty footrace, elbowing your rivals for a lead, until you encounter a truck or a jeep, at which point you hop in and zoom forward for the win. The courses are wide and offer plenty of shortcuts and nooks to explore, calling to mind Sonic R for the Saturn. Visually, the game looks kind of 1998-ish; since it’s a budget title, that’s excusable. Firetoad’s more concerned with the theme here.

X-Men: The Official Game
Z-Axis/Activision
Xbox/360/PS2/GameCube/PC/DS/GBA
Tuesday

As something of a novel gesture, Dave Mirra developer Z-Axis has chosen to tie into the upcoming X-Men movie by bridging the narrative gap between the the film and its predecessor, explaining such inconsistencies as Nightcrawler’s vanishing act between the movies. Through a number of specialized and sort of contrived levels, the player controls several protagonists from the comic-n-movie series, each of whom has a completely different style of movement and play. The game is pretty, and the characters all behave as you’d expect them to – which in itself is something of a minor feat. The structure seems to have that EA’s Lord of the Rings mixed-bag feel that comes from adherence to a license rather than to game design. Still, what ya gonna do. At least it’s got some vision, and some execution.

Zoo Tycoon 2: African Adventure
Blue Fang/Microsoft Game Studios
PC
Tuesday

The second expansion to 2004’s two-and-a-half-star Zoo Tycoon adds meerkats and Ethiopian wolves, as well as a bunch of new buildings and objects and whatnot, to the endangered species tacked on last year. Wikipedia says the foxlike Ethiopian wolves are themselves one of the more endangered canids around; outside of this expansion, you can only find them in the alpine regions of Ethiopia and Eritrea. The meerkat is a relatively common species of mongoose; African folk belief refers to the meerkat as the “sun angel”, and reveres it as a protector against the “moon devil”, or werewolf. (More like a protector against gorgons, am I right?) Later on in 2006 you can expect another two expansions, that add sealife and dinosaurs. Coulda sworn I wrote about the aquatic add-on last year; maybe I’m mixing my Tycoons.