Well, it looks like WordPress has (perhaps not surprisingly) sucked a bone in their upgrades and lost most of my category information and even a couple of my posts. I’m going to go over the whole blog and stitch everything together again over the holidays, remove unnecessary pages, and add a couple of new ones.  Stay tuned as I jolt some energy into this sucker for the new year.

I’m going to break from this blog’s consumption focus for today in order to honour one of the greatest heroes of rock music, Richard Wright, founding member and keyboardist of prog-psych pioneers Pink Floyd.

Wright was the gentle spirit of Pink Floyd, and a kind of melodic balance between the volatile Roger Waters and David Gilmour. His atmospheric keyboard work, exemplified by “Echoes” from Meddle (1971), “The Great Gig in the Sky” and “Us and Them” from The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” from Wish You Were Here (1975), and “Marooned” from The Division Bell, all tracks he wrote or co-wrote, often played the part of the battlefield on which Waters and Gilmour waged war—a sort of background feature, but integral to the whole experience. Wright also lent his voice to a number of tracks—his singing is a big part of what makes Obscured by Clouds (1972) one of my favourite Pink Floyd albums—including lead vocal duties on the underrated but superb “Summer ‘68″ from Atom Heart Mother (1970) and “Wearing the Inside Out” from The Division Bell. (Both of these quirky tracks also featuring interesting parts for horns—check them out!) Wright’s style is also a big part of what makes the Waters-free Pink Floyd albums actually sound like Pink Floyd; without him, it is likely that A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell would simply have been spiritual follow-ups to David Gilmour’s About Face (1984).

Wright died yesterday, 15 September 2008, after a short battle with cancer. Thanks Rick, for all of the wonderful music and for all of the good that your music did in my life.

“I am not frightened of dying.
Any time will do, I dont mind.
Why should I be frightened of dying?
There’s no reason for it; you’ve got to go sometime.”
— “The Great Gig in the Sky”

(2K Sports; 2008)

Graphics

The Wii is definitely capable of better graphics than this. The ice and arenas look quite nice, and the animation and flow of the game is not all that bad, but the player models look terrible. None of the players’ faces look right—even generic faces are muddy and unclear—and their bodies look low quality and messy. The jerseys are pretty messy, too.

One odd thing I noticed is that the crowd graphics/animations are kind of… off. When they’re in the distance, they don’t look too bad, because it looks like people in the audience are doing different things. But up close, the audience members are really grainy and pixelly. Interestingly, they all seem to be facing the camera at all times! During a break in the action, the camera was showing the ice from behind the net, and the people between the net and the camera were sitting facing the camera—away from the ice! Not just turning around looking at the camera… I mean legs, chairs and all! Sloppy coding?

Some of the stat menus are very cramped and the numbers are quite small, even on my big TV. I can’t imagine playing this on a 25″ CRT television—it would just be impossible to read the charts.

Note that I am playing on a 32″ Sharp Aquos with component cables.

Graphics: 4/10

Sound

Normally, the endlessly repeating soundtrack and commentary in a game like this can be very annoying. For what it’s worth, the soundtrack is appropriate to the game. The fact that I haven’t played too much yet may contribute to the fact that I don’t find the music gratingly annoying, but at least it’s not annoying right out of the gate.

The commentary is generally pretty sharp and appropriate to the game. I haven’t had too much of a problem with it yet. There is a play-by-play guy, a colour commentator, and an on-ice commentator who occasionally offers insight into a game’s progress by reporting on interviews (which we don’t hear) with the coaches.

You also have a lot of flexibility in adjusting the volume levels of the arena announcer, goal horn, crowd, commentary, etc.

Sound: 8/10

Controls

The new Wii controls are obviously going to be pretty important to the success of this game. I’ll say right away that they’re hit or miss, so I’ll break it down that way.

The Good:

Precision passing and chain passing using the Wii pointer are not as complicated or hard to execute as they look on paper. The pointer doesn’t really distract from the action, and it’s pretty smart about which player you intend to point at.

The shooting control waggle for wrist shots and slap shots is also well done. Sometimes, if you don’t waggle correctly, it won’t register as a shot attempt, but this is just an issue of getting used to how to use the controls.

The Bad:

Menu navigation is not very intuitive. Sometimes you use the analog stick to cycle through options, and sometimes you use the control pad, and it’s not immediately obvious which to use where. It takes some getting used to, and it becomes easier after a while, but it could have been done better.

Body checks are performed by shaking the nunchuk. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work quite as well as the remote-shaking shooting controls. It’s not exactly bad, but it definitely feels imprecise.

The Ugly:

Fighting is also performed with motion controls. The player tilts the nunchuk to maintain balance and punches with the Wii remote. Unfortunately, this just doesn’t work at all. What makes it even worse is that big goofy “instructions” appear in the screen in the form of cartoonish graphical representations of the nunchuk and remote moving around. It’s pretty brutal. Fighting can be turned off, but that’s no fun.

Controls: 6.5/10

Features

The game’s most interesting feature is its roster management system. This also happens to be the feature to which the player has the most access right from the get-go, so that’s what I’m going to talk about here. There is a fully-featured character and team creation system as well as a character editor that allows players to adjust the stats of their favourite NHL stars. Think Sidney Crosby is overrated? You can scale him back.

Sounds good so far, right? Unfortunately, while this system should have gone all the way and allowed players complete control over the creation and management of their rosters, the system is crippled by a couple of limitations.

The first is the limit on the number of players each team can have. Joe Sakic starts the game as a free agent, but I couldn’t assign him to the Colorado Avalanche because they have too many players already! If I want to solve this, I have to dump one of their other players to the minors or free agency.

The second limitation is the salary cap. While the presence of the salary cap in the game is a definite bonus, the player has no control over the salaries of players! Chris Chelios starts the game as a free agent. When I assigned him to the Detroit Red Wings, his salary was arbitrarily assigned based on his stats, to the tune of $1.15m. In real life, Chelios signed a one-year deal with the Wings for $750k! Not only can this screw a player over in terms of cap space, but it can also mean that tweaking the rosters so they reflect their real-life counterparts can put teams over the salary cap, which means you either have to make more adjustments or play with the cap disabled. When adjusting rosters in a fully-featured editor like this, the player should have full control—and that includes control over salaries.

Features: 7/10

Minor Issues

Other than what I’ve already mentioned above, there are a couple of lingering little issues. The first is that the in-game presentation of stats and interesting factoids is a little bit weak. The game doesn’t trace interesting storylines, and doesn’t even make it immediately apparent who got the assists on a goal. The player has to look in a menu for that information.

I’ve also run into a strange little problem with the auto-save function. After playing a game and exiting back to the season’s home menu, the game will attempt to auto-save (if you have that option enabled). But I keep getting a message saying the game is unable to save to my Wii system memory. The odd thing is that I have 350+ blocks free on my internal memory, and if I try to save manually I face no problems whatsoever. I don’t know what the problem is, but it’s not a major one.

For the record, the save data for my game, which includes my player profile, custom rosters, and my ongoing season save data, is 47 blocks. It’s not too bad, but if you run your Wii on empty, make sure you free up some space before playing.

Conclusions

All in all, this certainly isn’t the best hockey game I’ve ever played. It has a lot going for it, but it seems that every positive feature of the game is shot in the foot by some annoying problem. If you just want to play a quick arcade-style game of hockey, the skating, passing, and shooting controls should be fun, but they’re held back by wonky faceoff, fighting, stick-handling, and checking controls. If you want an in-depth hockey / management simulator, you definitely have a lot of freedom over what you can do with players and rosters, but you may find yourself having to find creative ways around the game’s arbitrary limitations, and you’re going to have a hard time getting everything exactly how you want it.

In the end, this seems like the kind of game that makes a player hopeful for a promising sequel. Unfortunately, pretty much every sports game works that way, and sequels seldom fix all of the problems from previous games (while usually introducing new ones of their own).

The bottom line is that this is the only NHL and NHLPA licensed game for the Wii, so if you want to play an NHL game and you only have a Wii, then this is what you get.

Final Score: 6/10

Level-5; 2008

Late last night, I completed the final chapter of Professor Layton and the Curious Village, triggering the end credits. I’ve also solved every puzzle in the main game except for the inn decoration side-quest. I have solved a couple of the extra puzzles in the bonus section, but not all of them (my total number of completed puzzles is 122). The game took 9:49 over six or seven days to complete… and much of this time was spent staring blankly at sliding blocks.

With this game out of the way, Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy IV are the portable priorities among my open games.

Nintendo; 2008

The Club Nintendo Super Famicom Classic Controller is a specially designed Classic Controller for the Wii, made to look and feel exactly like the original Japanese Super Famicom controller. It was released earlier this year as an exclusive gift for platinum members of Club Nintendo in Japan, and it’s a perfect treat for those who enjoy playing Super Nintendo games from the Wii’s Virtual Console.

I have always thought that the regular Classic Controller is just fine for most games, but it doesn’t feel exactly like the original SNES controller. The button placement is slightly different, for example, which became most noticeable to me while playing through Super Metroid. Additionally, the cord to connect to the Wii Remote comes out of the bottom of the normal Classic Controller, which is different from most controllers (where the cord comes out of the top). This particular controller is exactly the same as a SNES controller except for obvious aesthetic differences that stem from the fact that it’s an import (the multicoloured buttons, for example, were present on the original SFC controllers in Japan but were changed to dull purple and blue for the SNES).

Level-5; 2008

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is an odd little detective game that revolves around solving puzzles, riddles, and brain-teasers in order to advance the story. The plot seems to be standard mystery fare, with zany characters trying to find a mystery item in a mysterious setting. The key to the game’s success (and addictiveness) is the odd method of interacting with the game world. Professor Layton and his sidekick travel around town via a pretty standard point-and-click interface that makes decent use of the Nintendo DS’s stylus and touch screen controls. In order to get help from the townspeople, Layton must solve puzzles for them. These include riddles, word games, the old “getting stuff across a river” standard, odd-one-out visual puzzles, sliding shapes, and so on, and increase in difficulty as the game progresses.

Against my better judgment, I started playing the game just to see what it was like, and I wasn’t able to put it down for over an hour. As such, it’s going into the open games list, but given the game’s snappy pace I suspect it won’t be there for very long.

Capcom; 1993

Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers is yet another entry in the classic series-within-a-series of 2D fighting games. This was gifted to me after the Detroit Red Wings won a game against the Dallas Stars near the end of the 2007-2008 National Hockey League season. Super Street Fighter II is adds four new characters who have since become mainstays in the series. They are the slutty secret service clone Cammy, the stereotypical Native American T. Hawk, the stereotypical Jamaican dancing kickboxer Dee Jay, and Bruce Lee imitator Fei Long.

Yesterday afternoon, I played through an entire game as Chun-Li on the one star (easiest) difficulty level. I lost five rounds in a row against Ryu despite this. The ending attempted to cajole me into playing on a harder difficulty setting, but I consider the game to be complete for the purposes of this blog.

Warner Bros.; 2008

The Dark Knight is the sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan’s “reboot” to the DC Comics hero’s film franchise. I enjoyed the previous film well enough and had been excited about seeing the sequel ever since I heard that Heath Ledger would be playing the Joker. I saw it just over a week ago in IMAX and I was not disappointed.

The film is far darker than Batman Begins (which attempted to bring some much needed grit to the series, itself) and also far better. Begins lost points, for me, because of its focus on the mostly nameless Gotham mobsters, a crappy villain, a crappy villain ex machina, and Katie Holmes. The Dark Knight benefits from Holmes’s replacement, a boost in the importance of Gary Oldman’s Gordon character, a sublime villain, and, well… extra points for the sublime villain part. As good as it is, The Dark Knight loses some points of its own, especially with regards to the new clean Gotham. I thought the first movie did an excellent job of creating a dark, dirty city, so it was a bit of a disappointment to see that setting transformed into a clean and bright Chicago for the sequel.

Heath Ledger is awesome. His Joker is awesome. He pretty much makes the movie. Almost any scene he is in is excellent purely because of his involvement. This is a credit not only to Heath but to Nolan, who wrote and directed him. The Joker’s schemes and pranks are awesome, too, from the opening bank heist to his assaults on Batman’s psyche to the final climactic showdown. Aaron Eckhart makes a great Harvey Dent, even if he is a bit too squeaky clean. I felt that his transformation into Two-Face was a bit rushed and not entirely convincing, but it did provide a nice frame of reference for Batman’s ambiguous moral situation. Michael Kane and Morgan Freeman are back in their supporting roles and they’re both as excellent as one would expect. Christian Bale is fine as Batman, but I would have liked to see a bit more of the public face of Bruce Wayne (because he’s hilarious).

The movie is long, long, long, and some of the scenes seemed like they could have been trimmed down a little bit. I’m thinking particularly of some of the motorcycle / Batpod sequences (of which, it seemed, there were many). The whole Hong Kong scene seemed like little more than an excuse to showcase some of Batman’s gadgets (the toys that made Jack Nicholson’s Joker so jealous), but I still thought it was pretty cool. Still, the film doesn’t feel as long as it is, and the pacing is good enough that it doesn’t drag at any point.

This review is pretty much spoiler-free, but I can’t guarantee the same will be true of the comments, so continue at your own discretion. That said, more in-depth and spoiler-filled discussion of the film is welcome in the comments.

Square Enix; 2008

I first played Final Fantasy IV back in 1991 when it was released on the SNES in Canada as Final Fantasy II. It was awesome. It has always held a special place in my heart. This latest version—a 3D DS remake—features a complete graphical overhaul, as well as a revisited script and a retooled gameplay system. Dual screen support and optional stylus-based controls have been implemented. The game even features new video scenes and voice acting during important sections of the story. Much of the tweaked gameplay brings the game into line with more recent entries in the series (making it easier to manage items and equipment, for example), but there is also a new ability system that allows for some customization of the characters.

This game enjoys enough priority that it’s jumped straight into my open games list, bypassing the queue altogether. I’m still working on other open games as well, but nostalgia wouldn’t let me keep this puppy sealed for one minute.

Capcom; 2008

Okami is a 2008 Wii port / remake of the critically acclaimed 2006 PS2 artsy action adventure title. It features gameplay in the same vein as the more recent entries in the Legend of Zelda series, and sports a pretty, original art style that is reminiscent of traditional Japanese art. The player controls a sun goddess in the shape of a white wolf (Amaterasu) whose goal is the restoration of life to a demon-cursed world. The Wii version has been updated with slight graphical tweaks and the requisite motion controls. I haven’t started playing it yet (it’s still sealed), but it’s going into the queue until I clear a few more open games. This is one that I’ve been dying to play since it came out on the PS2, but I haven’t got around to it yet.