Microtransaction Microreviews: Defend Your Castle and LostWinds

Posted by Gary Hodges at 2:33 AM May 15, 2008

Despite Corky Thacher’s compelling concept art, New Line Cinema ultimately went with Peter Jackson to direct the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Sooner or later – maybe in 5 years, maybe in 10, but inevitably all the same – most the games we buy will be downloaded. We can whine about not having boxes to hold or manuals to smell (I can’t be the only one) or an actual physical backup for when the console dies on us, but it won’t make any difference – it didn’t with iTunes. Might as well resign ourselves now, and start treating downloadable games like we do any other – which includes reviewing them.

But I’m going to remind these little, non-physical games of their place by giving them little, non-physical reviews: a few paragraphs apiece, Joystick Division exclusive (i.e., no hard copies), and with a whimsical rating system. Take that! downloadable games, for denying me the sweet, sweet bouquet of a freshly minted game manual!

This time I’ll be covering Defend Your Castle and LostWinds, the first two titles I downloaded off Nintendo’s new XBLA/PSN equivalent "WiiWare"... and which brings me to a little preamble.

Nintendo, between you and me: You didn’t really think any of this shit through, did you? Do you know how many Virtual Console titles I had to move to my SD card to make room for these two games? Five. FIVE, you clowns. And can I play any of those games from the SD card? No, you don’t allow that, for reasons I don’t even care to hear you explain.

The Wii's memory constraints could very well hobble WiiWare – and even the Virtual Console – in the long run. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 offer the possibility of buying memory cards or hard drives to allow more content; the Wii offers no such solution. Sure, you can back games up on a memory card, but that’s all it is – a backup, useless until you transfer the game back to the system memory, a cumbersome and irritating process that makes me wonder how late it was in the Wii's design process before Nintendo started thinking about downloadable content. I wonder what sort of fix Nintendo has in mind for this, other than the inevitable "Wii v2.0" (some sort of second-generation Wii that adds HD video output and more internal memory... if it's not announced by Summer 2009, I'll YouTube myself singing an a cappella version of Divinyls' "I Touch Myself" and post it right here).

Rant over; on with the show!

Defend Your Castle
Developer: XGen Studios / ESRB Rating: E / Price: 500 Wii Points ($5)

Defend Your Castle might be familiar to you if you’re a fan of Flash-based browser games; if you’ve never played it, the basic premise is to, well, defend your castle from hordes of stick figure invaders trying to smash their way in. Invaders approach from the left, and ideally you want to neutralize them before they get to your castle on the right – typically, by using your pointer to pick them up and drop them from an unsafe height.

The WiiWare version of DYC is pretty much identical to the original in terms of gameplay, the only significant changes being to the visuals. While the original was fairly sterile-looking (even by Flash standards) and comically gory (dropped besiegers splat in a splash of blood), the WiiWare port overhauls the look completely with a preschool arts & crafts aesthetic that depicts a world made out of construction paper, enemies as crayon-drawn stick figures with buttons for heads, and your most deadly special attacks taking the form of pink erasers and rolls of caps.

And it’s pretty amusing, for a while anyway. There is something weirdly compelling about plucking up a squirming attacker who’s brandishing a popsicle stick like a battering ram and flinging him into the air. And the game supports multiplayer, so friends can simultaneously work as a team to thwart the invasion while competing for the most kills.

There are two critical flaws, though. First, the controls: in the Flash version, you had to aim your pointer at a moving enemy, click and drag him to the top of the screen and then let go – a somewhat clunky process that became the game’s challenge once the hordes really started pouring forth. You can only click and drag so quickly, the pointer inevitably ends up outside the Flash-window (forcing you to waste time reorienting it), and your targets are much smaller.

The Wiimote, though, it like a hydrogen bomb in the DYC arms race – it’s easy as pie to point your cursor and target an enemy, and rather than clicking and dragging, you can send enemies flying by merely flicking your wrist. In a way, the Wiimote controls are too good; with only minimal attention you can hold off the swarms single-handedly, and easily earn the points to fully repair your castle each round… making the game a war of attrition on your concentration and patience, one you’re more likely to capitulate out of boredom than anything else.

The second critical flaw? You can still play the original for free.

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/castle

Final Rating:

1 out of 5 Blue Pig Ganons




LostWinds
Developer: Frontier Developments / ESRB Rating: E / Price: 1,000 Wii Points ($10)

At least so far, LostWinds is probably the closest thing to WiiWare’s raison d’être. Of all the launch titles for the service, it’s the most novel, the most polished, and the best-fitting, so if you’re going to download any of them, it should at least be considered.

LostWinds put the player in control of two characters, sort of: the first it Toku, a little boy looking to save his land from an evil blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda; the second a benevolent wind spirit, Enril, who assists Toku in his adventure. Generally speaking, Toku is controlled with the Wii’s nunchuk attachment (analog to move, Z button to interact with objects), while the Wiimote applies Enril’s powers: strategically timed and meted gusts of wind that puff Toku into out-of-reach spots and move objects to where they need to be.

A sidescrolling platform adventure, the best shorthand I could give you for LostWinds’ gameplay is “Metroidlike” in that the world is more or less open, but gaining powers allows access to areas you couldn’t reach before. But the game’s stylized look, traditional-sounding music and Enril’s motion-based controls (where you draw paths for wind currents) make it feel like a strange, distant third cousin to Okami – not a bad thing at all. It’s also very, very pretty – I’d say the best-looking Wii game I’ve played aside from Super Mario Galaxy.

That being said, I hesitate to call it a must-download. LostWinds is a very, very short game, even given the price. While you can tell the developers spent their time perfecting their concept rather than diluting it in a bigger, less-polished game, that’s little consolation when you’ve blown (ahem) through it in a couple hours and have no reason to ever play it again. And the gameplay – while clever – is never challenging, making the game’s easygoing, relaxed vibe walk a fine line between mellow and boring. It really feels like a first-level demo for a larger, more interesting game.

Having played through it, LostWinds strikes me as a title that would make an ideal pack-in for the Wii: introductory software that shows new owners what the console can do, and what the Wiimote can add to gameplay. Because it’s a great little game that, in a way, realizes everything gamers were hoping the Wii would be when it was first announced… it’s just too damn fleeting and under-realized to start doing cartwheels over it.

Make this the first 5% of a $50 retail release, Frontier Developments.

Final Rating:

3 out of 5 Blue Pig Ganons