The Japan Expo is a big festival about the japanese culture, taking place in Paris, France. There were a lot of playable demo of major upcomming wii titles, so I've wrote some hand-on after a day of gaming pleasure
Oboro Muramasa : (10mn of demo)
- Tutorial at the beginning explains the basic moves
- I've played with the Wiimote+nunchuk it's just perfect. (I mimicked momohime putting her sword in her case ^^)
- Choose two scenarii for each character, Mohohime or Kisuke
- You have to switch sword otherwise you'll break them. When you change swords, a special attack is triggered against all enemies
- Broken swords can't be used to block, and you deal less damage
- You can send back shurikens by timing your attack
- Explore & fight, speak to people in villages giving you advice & so on, and collect items. Items can be used at any moment in the game. It's indeed a RPG, not just a hack and slash !
- The boss fights are epic and last several minutes ^^
Tatsunoko VS Capcom : (1 match)
- you have a second caracter than can help you sometime, then you can switch to the second char
- the specials are easy to do, and after a few ones a devastating attack is unleashed
- Awesome finishing moves. I vaporised my opponent with a double giant hadouken
- Beautiful game, on par with SF4, really makes me feel capcom lied about the Wii not being able to handle this last...
- Played with the classic controller. y, x a are used for the normal kick/punch, with different strength, while b is used to call your secondary char or switch him (didn't found out how somehow ^^), and the dpad
Wii Sports Resort :
- I just played the bow.
- The game asks you to put the Wiimote one a surface for the calibration, which take only 5 seconds.
- The bow game is quite hard, since you have to take into account the weight of the arrow and the lateral wind. The matches are splitted into 4 rounds, and the target is further and further.
- The table tennis game looks awesome
- Two childs fought in the kendo style game , but it was a wagglefest. Too bad, I expected a bit more of complexity to this mini game. Somehow I didn't tried it
New Super Mario Bros Wii : Played in 4 player
- This title will be a multiplayer beast.
- 4 player platform mayhem. You playe with the wiimote as a nes controller, 1 to run, 2 to jump. When you loose a life, you appear short after in a bobble (as long as u have life left) and you can somehow control the position of your bubble by shaking the wiimote.
- Yoshi is in the game ! (not as character)
- Ten levels were playable in the demo
- One important point in multi : When any characters transforms (mushroom, fireflower..) there's a 2 second pause for everyone on screen. This could be very frustrating when you are in the middle of a jump :/ also, you can't run 'through' another player, and you can help each other, eg, i could use the head of Toad to make higher jump ! When riding yoshi, you can swallow another player and throw him to opponents ^^ funny :D
Resident Evil : The Darkside Chronicles (played 15mn solo)
- Two chapters were available : Resident evil 2 (the beginning, running in the city to get to the police center)
- I wasn't very excited by the videos. Now, this is a must buy for me cause it's an awesome upgrade of RE:UC
- Played with the wii zapper, asked to get it off , but couldn't :/. It was my first use of the Wii zapper, and I think it's awkward to play with
- 4 different weapons are assigned to the d-pad.
- The zombies are harder to headshot
- There's a lot of camera movement ^^
- Grenades seem to bounce on the enemies :/
- You can see now the nice reload animations
- There's a very nice addition : An equipment screen, accessible in game, to check the health bar of your two chars. You can affect the guns to the dpad, and give herbs !!! I found it a very nice move from capcom here, and a big improvment in the game
- At the upper right of the screen, you see your current gun and the ammount of ammo. The ammo bar is no longer in your reticule. There's no health bar, you can't see your status, unless in the equipment screen.
- So, at the end, we have a railgun shooter RE with elements of the original RE :D. A nice surprise for me, since I was not really happy with the announcment of this second RE railgun shooter spinoff. I liked RE:UC, but this one is far better.
Sin and Punishment 2 : (I played with the girl ^^)
- Two chars playable : Saki (girl) and Achi (guy, not sure about his name)
- More a shoot'em up than a railgun shooter
- I had once played S&P on N64, and the gameplay was a bit awkward. In this one the controls are very easy to pick up. You use your wiimote to point and shoot, the nunchuck's analogic pad to move your car on screen. There are a lot of ennemies on screen and shoots all over the place while you drift in a devastated city. There are ground fights and air fights. C is used to dodge the shoots. B is your primary weapon, which is quite weak, while A is a concentrated blast. With the girl, you can lock several ennemies on screen and release the blasts. Press B repeatedly to use your gun as a saber to repell attacks or to attack at close range.
- I finished the demo, but you can be easily wiped out by the bosses.
- Powerful attacks are displayed by some specific enemie. Forget them and you'll pay the mistake ^^ Sometimes, I struggled what to shoot cause there was a lot of foes on the screen ^^
TMNT Smash Up : (played two match)
- I played a lot SSBM, SSBB, and expected a lot on this game, somehow, ubisoft has come around, and the demo I was displayed was a big disappointment to me.
- Played two match, with 4 players, on one map. First with splinter, I didn't knew what i was doing, the controls didn't feel like smash bros, sometimes you trigger a combo but you can't stop it so your opponents come from behind and plug you :/. I haven't checked out what was the difference pressing B or A. I got nailed down. Second match, took a black armoured ninja guy who looked like shredder but without the name, and this time i nailed my opponents ^^.
- The environment is destructible.
- Overall, it was a watered down copy of ssbb/ssbm imho
Red Steel 2 : played 10 mn
- The use of cell shading is a sharp move from Ubisoft, the game is beautiful.
- The Ubi staff guy kept on telling everyone this would be the first action game using WM+... Boring, so I brought truth to the ignorant surrounding people by talking about the excellent multiplayer in the conduit ^^
- I asked if the stabbing was implemented, thanks to the WM+, but the ubiguy told me you couldn't :sad panda:
- Basically, I struggled a bit with the controls, but I think this game has a lot of potential. When you used more your guns than your saber in RS1, it's the opposite with RS2. There's a lot of saber fights, against multiple opponents. you can lock onto your foe, give him a few strikes, switch to another, strafe around him... The gameplay is not 'pick up and play', there might be some learning curve.
- Some foes had a stronger armor, so you have to really strike hard. That was great imho, this means the game is able to understand the light strike and the hard ones.
- you can block strikes from the side and above, so you have to see what kind of strike your opponent is doing. Somehow, it's quite clear what your enemy is doing, cause it takes him a lot of time to wield his sword (which glows red) and strike.
- There are finishing moves, but I didn't manage to do it :/
These were all the game I had the chance to play ! there were also shows for Arc rise Fantasia, Fragile (which looks beautiful), FF: The Crystal Bearers, Tekken 6 and Bayonetta which both look really promising for our PS3 friends, and tons of DS games I didn't bother to watch. Anyway, this is my first hands-on, so thanks for reading this wall of text ! o7
