It’s but a couple of months until the DS’s first 18-rated title, and Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is already looking the dog’s whatsits. And it’s not just rabidly Nintendo-centric sites leading the praise, but respected multiformat sources like Edge and Eurogamer.

The former’s latest issue carries a preview of the handheld adventure, suggesting that its minigames are well-integrated, and in fact “serve to engage you further with the action”. “This could be the best handheld version of GTA yet” concludes the industry bible.

Eurogamer is equally taken with the slimmed-down version of Liberty City - even claiming that the DS offers some more engaging tasks than its hi-def counterpart.

“[A] living, swearing, squishing openworld city, that quickly measures up to the catalogue of hit sequels to the early top-down Grand Theft Auto games the first Chinatown Wars screenshots initially recall. If anything it goes further, using the stylus, the microphone and those two screens to drag you closer to the nuts and bolts of Huang’s quest for vengeance, and the series’ trademark skewed perspective, than the camera elevation implies. It’s no wonder Rockstar Leeds is at twice the capacity required to turn out PSP titles Liberty City and Vice City Stories, and there seems little chance this will risk the lower review scores their conversion work occasionally prompted.”

With reportedly more lines of code than San Andreas, it’s certainly a complex game, and such is its attention to detail in most areas, there’s no room for voice acting during the story sequences. By all accounts, it’s GTA in miniature rather than a GTA-Lite, with everything that description implies.

It’s here on March 20th. I can’t wait.

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Sonic creator Yuji Naka has been a busy bunny of late - his new development team Prope, not satisfied with sweetly innocent throw-and-catch sim Let’s Catch, has crafted a game where you don’t have to pick up a controller at all. Because Let’s Tap is controlled by tapping on a cardboard box, with an upside-down remote positioned horizontally at the end of it.

Weird? Yep, very. But it works. The game comes with a box intended for this very purpose, though you can use pretty much any container of a similar size - the example shown when you’re learning the controls is a tissue box, so you’ve got an idea of the kind of proportions I’m talking about.

The first of five modes is named ‘running tap’ which sees you guiding a simplistic figure across a neon track against three other runners - tapping with your left and right hands helps you to run faster, and pressing down sharply executes a jump, allowing you to clear hurdles. Once I’d recalibrated the remote to a slightly more sensitive setting (I was really having to batter the box to action a leap) it worked just fine. There are plenty of levels, and it’s bound to be a hoot in multiplayer, assuming you’ve got a few small cardboard boxes lying around (a DS Lite box is just about perfect).

There’s a rhythm-action game which requires you to tap along with the beat - while the tunes are really quite catchy, it seemed quite hard to fail. It wasn’t entirely clear when I should have been tapping with my left hand and when with my right, but that’s the language barrier for you. With most of the menu options in English, it’s fairly import-friendly, but this was the one game where I wasn’t sure about what I was supposed to be doing.

The third mode tasks you with removing hexagonal tiles, which are stacked up with an item on top - the idea being that you remove them all without letting said object slip. You tap to select a block, tap again to stop a meter showing which direction you’ll be removing it in, and then gently tap to shake the tile free. It’s very tricky, but will undoubtedly be rewarding once you master it - I got down to two layers before losing out.

A strange Balloon Fight-esque game is the fourth option - instead of pressing buttons to keep your avatar afloat, you’re powering a strange creature by tapping, and destroying obstacles with missiles fired with a firmer whack on the box. I’ve not spent much time with this yet, but it looks like it could be addictive.

Finally, there are several visualisers - ranging from fireworks displays, with explosions triggered whenever you tap, to sumi-e paintings where your fingers daub splats of paint or longer brushstrokes for more vigorous taps. The fishtank one, where you’re presented with a series of koi carp, turtles and other fish as you create ripples in the water, is utterly gorgeous. One of these offers more of a game-like experience, rather akin to those bath toys where you press to squirt bubbles to manouevre balls into small containers - here you tap to guide spherical gems into jars of increasing height.

It’s all fairly slight, but it does offer a pretty unique experience (even if it could reasonably be replicated with the DK Bongos). Innovation for innovation’s sake? Perhaps, but then it’s nice to see someone trying something different on Wii, and it’s quite beautifully presented. It’s very Japanese, but let’s hope Let’s Tap makes it to Europe - though it would certainly benefit from a budget price. I’ll have a full review for you very soon.

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Let’s Catch comes from Yuji Naka’s Prope - it’s a WiiWare accompaniment to retail title Let’s Tap, though it bears absolutely no resemblance to the box-tapping weird-em-up. It’s available for a slightly-expensive 1000 points on the Japanese WiiWare service and takes up just 91 blocks of your Wii fridge.

It’s a game that’s about throwing a baseball to someone and catching it. And throwing it and catching it again. And again. And again. And…you get the picture, I’m sure.

It might not sound like the most compelling of concepts, but there’s something altogether charming about Let’s Catch - a gentle innocence that sucks you in. It’s oddly addictive, as you turn the remote perpendicular to the telly and gently lob the ball to your AI chum. You get points for each successful throw and catch - both you and your partner, so don’t give them any tough catches. Throwing requires you to hold A and B and flick the remote forward - naturally you can twist it to throw the ball to either side, while the speed of the flick affects the pace at which you throw the ball. Catching simply requires you to press A and B at the right time - but the timing for perfect catches is incredibly exacting, and you must press both buttons simultaneously. The more perfect catches you take, the more your points tally will rise - chain ‘perfect combos’ together and your tally will rise more rapidly (and you’ll usually be given an extra ball). You’re initially set a target of 400 points and given a certain number of balls to achieve that total. That then moves up to 1000, 1800, 2800 and 4000. Your AI partner levels up as you get better, eventually up to a maximum of three stars, whereupon you can swap to a new partner, who’ll either throw harder or faster, but who will often help you get more points once you get good. If you drop the ball, you have to go and fetch it (waggle the remote to run quicker) and will lose a ‘life’. Initially you’ll get five, but later partners only allow three mistakes. Though perfect catches cancel out a mistake each, so you can pull yourself out of trouble with some well-timed catching.

That’s about it for the main mode, save for a UFO that pops up every now and again, forcing you to time your throws a little more carefully. There are multiplayer variations on the same theme, and a couple of other games, one involving you knocking out numbers on a board (which is where your throw strength and direction plays a more significant part) and another where a bomb changes hands, its timer going down by 1, 2, or 3 for catches which are merely good, normal or bad as opposed to perfect. Whoever is holding the bomb when the timer ticks down to zero loses one of their three lives.

Let’s Catch looks like it could be a good laugh in multiplayer, but I enjoyed the hour or so I spent with it this afternoon on my own. The gently lilting background music is particularly praiseworthy - giving a sweetly relaxing feel to this innocent virtual pastime. At 1000 points it’s definitely overpriced, but would be worth a look should it make it to Europe at a lower price point.

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It’s been a long time coming, but finally you can chat away to your Wii friends using the Wii Speak Channel - assuming your pals have the peripheral in question and have downloaded said channel from the Wii Shop, that is.

And it all works very well. My wife’s round at her parents’ house today, and we were both able to talk in a fairly relaxed manner, with Wii Speak picking up our speech very well. While we got the odd bit of echoey lag (I could hear myself speak when I raised my voice, which came through a couple of seconds after I’d spoken) the sound quality was decent, and background noise was barely noticeable. At least until my son decided to start shouting from the other side of the room…

Once you’ve downloaded the channel and accessed it from the Wii Menu, you can start adding your friends into a central space by ticking off their names - a Wii Speak mic will appear next to their usernames assuming they have said channel installed. Once you’ve added them, they’ll appear in a circle within your own space, which has plenty of room and can be scrolled around by holding the B button and moving the pointer. If you want to chat with one or more people, it’s a simple case of selecting their icon and inviting them to a chat. Assuming they accept you can then start having a chinwag. A nice touch is that you can add Miis to represent you, and swap between them instantly. Sound waves move out from the icon when you’re speaking while your Mii will turn to ‘face’ who you’re chatting to, with their mouth moving up and down as you talk. Lovely stuff.

You also have the ability to send short voice messages to friends, even if they don’t have the channel installed. I was given a warning that it might take a little while to arrive in my friend’s inbox, so I’ll check with him later to see if and when it arrived.

It’s a shame this wasn’t bundled with the Wii, as it would have offered a great social option from the outset. As it is, Nintendo will do well to make its audience more aware of this, as it’s a function which will no doubt appeal outside the core gamer demographic.

I’ll report further on Wii Speak’s effectiveness next week, once I’ve tried it out with a few more Wii Friends in a round-table chat and also in Animal Crossing.

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Right, final Crossing-related piece of this week, and this time it’s the city that’s being scrutinised. Once you’ve hopped off the bus, you’ll find an area which is fairly small, but contains a number of buildings to enter.

On the far left is a door, behind which lies a shady organisation. I say organisation, it’s merely sly fox Crazy Redd, returning from previous Crossings, who requires you to have an ‘invitation’ before you can access his exclusive/expensive/fake wares.

Further up you’ll find a cash machine which allows you to pay off your mortgage or deposit and withdraw money into and out of your own personal bank account. You might think this pointless considering you’re never punished for having cash in your pocket, but then again you can get special items from depositing a certain amount. Then there’s the theatre auditorium where Dr. Shrunk puts on a ‘comedy’ show - you watch for around half a minute and come out 800 bells lighter and with a new emote, selected by pointing at the appropriate icon in the HUD (which only ever pops up when you’ve got the remote aimed at the TV screen). If you’ve got Wii Speak this may feel like a waste of time, but those communicating by text will find it useful. Then there’s the Happy Room Academy - inside you can meet weasel Lyle, formerly an insurance salesman but now fronting said house-grading organisation. For those unfamiliar with the HRA, basically the arrangement of the rooms in your house governs a deep points system, with ratings based on all sorts of factors, like multiple examples of the same furniture set, rare objects - even the placement of specific coloured items is important, with your luck and monetary wealth affected. There’s a special ‘room of the moment’ in the back which picks the house from your own village adjudged to be the best, according to the current category (which is ‘cutest house’ in my game).

Further along you have expensive boutique GracieGrace, with clothes, hats, glasses and an entire room’s worth of furniture available to those with money to burn. Then you have the auction house, which allows you to bid on specific items entered by other users (the first starts tomorrow - expect an update on that soon). There’s Kicks, the shoe-shine skunk who can change the colour of your shoes to match either your favourite colour or current style, while Shampoodle offers haircuts and Mii-mask makeovers should you want a more drastic change of appearance. Fortune-teller Katrina is furthest right, offering a similar service to previous AC titles.

Mysteriously, there’s a bit of pavement to the right which appears to lead somewhere but is cordoned off by two cones. Will they unlock later in the game? Will we see DLC open up a new area of the city? Hopefully I’ll be able to answer these questions as I get further in the game. Stay tuned for more impressions over the coming weeks.

(One final observation: a great line from Harry the hippo earlier when I gave him a fossil he requested - “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you put other people’s minds to it.” Lovely stuff.)

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As promised, here are some more details of my time in Animal Crossing: City Folk (or Let’s Go To The City for PAL gamers) so far.

It’s fair to say that I’m probably in the best possible mindset to appreciate the game, given that a) I work from home, and b) I didn’t play the DS game all that much. The former means I can simply switch on the Wii once my wife and son have ventured into the wilds of Stockport and potter about my town for 20 minutes, seeing what new stuff Tom Nook has in his shop, chatting to the villagers, doing a bit of fishing and bug-catching, and just having a nice relaxing time before I have to shower and shave and start writing about things for a living. That last bit’s in the real world, by the way.

Even with that in mind, there’s a hell of a lot that’s familiar about Animal Crossing. It looks a little sharper, but graphically this is very close indeed to the GameCube and DS versions. The rolling world’s an improvement on the GC’s flick-scrolling, of course, and the extra screen space afforded over the handheld game mean it’s a simplistically pleasing, colourful aesthetic that retains all the charm of the first two games (three if you count the Japanese-only N64 original).

Gradually, the slight differences begin to emerge - ranging from tiny graphical changes (bells - the game’s currency - shaken from trees now appear as coins rather than bags of loot) to more significant alterations, like the city area. You’ll travel there on a bus driven by Kapp’n, who you’ll remember rowed you to the GBA island in the GameCube game - it’s a real shame there’s no DS equivalent here - and he’ll engage you in brief conversations about celeb-spotting (he’s a fan of gossip mags, apparently) and affairs of the heart. It’s worth making the trip purely for the chat - as sparklingly scripted as ever, the dialogue is just a joy, with each character (perhaps more than ever before) seeming to have their own unique personality. There are apparently over 4000 pages of dialogue in the game, and when you factor in that we’re talking about Japanese characters rather than Western script, you can bet the localised version has a lot more. It means that conversations are less likely to repeat themselves, and cleverly Nintendo has placed slight restrictions on the dialogue offered when you chat to villagers or city folk - you might exhaust the possibilities for a one-to-one within three interactions, but that just means that there’ll be new stuff to talk about the following day, with animals only asking you for favours when they want something. So you won’t be able to just do work for them when you want, but when they want, which seems a little more streamlined and realistic. 

I’ve not had much chance to check out the social aspect of the game, with no-one I know owning the game just yet, thus leaving me unable to visit other villages for the time being. But from what Nintendo says, it’s likely that animals will react to your presence in other villages in a more convincing manner than before, and can even move from a friend’s town to your own overnight if you leave WiiConnect24 running.

Meanwhile, it appears from venturing inside the museum that there are many more fossils, paintings, bugs and fish to collect. Having caught quite a few rainbow trout and sea bass, it seems that all the old favourites will be there, but there are plenty more to donate or sell for a hefty profit (not quite so hefty in the case of the sea bass, admittedly).

Ultimately, it’s a very difficult game to judge without playing it for some significant amount of time, which is why I won’t be reviewing this for a long while, instead updating you on my progress with a regular diary each Friday. It’s clearly a game which unfolds its secrets over time, rewarding players constantly in some small way - whether it be a new villager, some new items in fashion boutique Gracie Grace (there’s an entire room setup in there whose items all cost around 100,000 bells or more, while its seasonal clothes are far more expensive than Nook’s tees) or yet more of that wonderfully warm, witty dialogue. It’s perhaps going to be a little too much of the same for those who’ve sunk hours into the previous games, but then those people are more likely to spot the slight tweaks and delight in the little graphical touches - like the yellow bird which perches on the bulletin board when a new message appears. So it’s hard to thoroughly recommend without a few caveats, but then it’d be a cold-hearted individual who didn’t find some joy in this gentle, sweet-natured game.

(And yes, the Mii masks do look a bit odd.)

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Okay, just a quick impressions piece before I start what’s going to hopefully become a regular feature this Friday - a diary documenting my progress in Animal Crossing: City Folk/Let’s Go To The City.

The first thing I noticed is that everything seems bigger, somehow. That’s probably because I’ve upgraded my telly since I first played the GameCube game several years back, but this has definitely had a graphical lick of paint since then - it looks sharper, characters look smoother and nicer, and the font used in speech bubbles when animals chat to you is definitely superior - nice and big and chunky. Good stuff.

Less good is the fact that to all extents and purposes this is near-identical to the Animal Crossing you’re all familiar with - whether you’ve played the DS or GC versions. In fact, it seems like a bit of a hybrid of the two at times, obviously more closely resembling the GC game but with the DS’s rolling world rather than flick-screen scrolling. Moreover you still work off the first part of your mortgage at Tom Nook’s, and he gives you the same jobs you may well have done twice before. Sigh. I’m running out of witty slogans for his shop after three attempts.

I’ve only just ordered the Wii Speak accessory from the US, so I can’t comment on the voice chat yet - not that I know anyone else with the game anyway - so hopefully that will improve the social side of things, which was a little limited in the DS version. The interface here works better than in the Cube game, but is obviously a little slower and less intuitive than the stylus-based menuing in Wild World. There’s a nice screenshot-taking feature, but the pics are generally horribly compressed - presumably to save space. I’ve squidged the one above down to fit the blog, so it doesn’t look too bad, but don’t expect them to look great on your PC - they’re more suited to viewing on a Wii when you send them to friends.

Perhaps the most irritating thing so far is the loading when you venture inside and back out - it’s only a matter of a few seconds, but compared to the instant loads in the previous games, this seems pretty unforgiveable. It’s not as if it can be processing that much more info, surely?

Time will only tell whether this proves to be the best AC yet, but despite the loading issue, it looks like it could be the most polished yet simultaneously disappointing iteration yet. I won’t be reviewing this for a while, as it deserves a significant time investment - and a look at the DLC - before it can be fairly judged. But stay tuned for those diary entries!

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We’re finally starting to see evidence that third-parties are taking the Wii versions of their multiformat releases much more seriously, with a host of winter titles offering motion-enhanced experiences which don’t compare too unfavourably on the less-powerful console to its HD rivals. But it’s still rare to see a game which is much better on Wii than on 360 and PS3, but that’s certainly the case with Shaun White Snowboarding, whose debut on 360 - the other version I’ve played - is pretty poor, while the Wii version (though not perfect) is a vastly superior game.

The Wii version has the suffix Road Trip, and the game is presented as such, with a pair of boarders invited by the titular Olympian to join him on his latest snowboarding adventure. It’s charmingly presented, with some enjoyably daft story sequences and a pleasing art style coupled with a terrific soundtrack. But it’s the control scheme where the game really shines.

While you can use the remote alone, the game’s much more immersive when controlled with the Wii Balance Board. As you might expect, you position the board lengthways, and guide your boarder using your back foot to turn and leaning forward with your front foot to accelerate. Bend your knees and straighten them to jump, and adjust your foot position in mid-air to spin. Pressing A or B on the remote at the same time executes tricks.

The latter part is the only real difficulty with the board controls which are otherwise really solid - it just seems you need to press down and shift your weight a little too much to execute any moves and the game doesn’t really allow you quite enough time to pull them off. But it seems that comes with time - I’m already getting higher scores than I was on my first few turns, so it appears it’s just  a case of getting over that particular difficulty hump.

I need to play more before I can review the game fairly, suffice to say that if you’ve finished SSX Blur and are looking for some more winter sports action, you really can’t go too far wrong with this.

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There’s just one problem I have with Wii Music.

It’s not the presentation, because that’s great - it’s a little more vibrant and interesting than Sports or Fit, with a much-needed dash of colour everywhere making for a brighter, livelier look, while it’s oddly satisfying to see your own take on a tune spin into CD form, and then tuck itself into an inlay you’ve made for it with your Miis.

It’s not the tutorials, because they’re thorough and helpful (yes, even in Japanese), giving you all the necessary info in text form with a few helpful pics to clarify things - particularly handy for me in this case.

It’s not the MIDI sound, which, while sounding a bit naff for some instruments, works perfectly fine for the most part. Particularly when you’re in orchestra-conducting mode, and hearing a whole wealth of sounds at once.

My issue with Wii Music is the controls. It’s not that moving them up and down to drum or bash a glockenspiel isn’t fun. It’s not that it’s not enjoyably daft to faux-bow an invisible violin. It’s just that if you want to create something listenable, you need the kind of rhythmic precision that the remote and nunchuk just don’t always allow. Playing the saxaphone, recorder and trumpet is fine, because you just need button presses and the occasional volume-adjusting tilt for successful tones there - but when you’re beating out a fine percussive backing to the Zelda theme, it’s inordinately frustrating when a slightly weedy shake produces no sound, or a faintly aggressive up beat adds an extra thwack to the soundtrack.

Would MotionPlus make a difference? Hard to say, but certainly the drum kit would benefit from that - as, while the balance board kick pedal works a treat, pressing a number of different buttons to whack specific pads or cymbals doesn’t feel as satisfying or intuitive as it would if you were controlling the stick position with your hand movements.

With the US version on its way, I’ll be giving Wii Music a more thorough playthrough to discover more of its intricacies, and to see if I can get past this slight control issue. One thing’s for sure - this is likely to surprise a few people with how much fun it is to play, even on your own.

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I’ve not quite played enough of it to warrant sticking a rating on the end of this piece, but suffice to say I was wrong about Art Style CUBELLO. Very wrong.

It’s a game that’s actually much simpler than it looks, and is typical of puzzlers in that it’s much harder to explain than it is to play. It’s only after a couple of goes that you can really get your head around it.

The idea is that you have a series of cubes forming a large pattern around a central cube called the Cubello. The idea is to fire cubes at the spinning pattern and match four or more, which makes them disappear. They don’t have to be in a line, or two-by-two - as long as the four are connected then off they’ll pop - destroying them all except the Cubello ends the stage. You’re shown the colour of the cube you’re about to fire along with the next few in your magazine. This got me confused as the displays are linked, so I kept reading the next colour in the mag as the one I was firing rather than the one in the chamber.

Once over that hump, I started to get addicted - there’s a certain satisfaction to hearing the robot voice telling you colours have been ‘eliminated’, while the ambient music is amazingly fitting. It has a few other wrinkles - you get a ‘bonus time’ where the colour in the chamber stays the same, giving you limited time to eliminate individual colours, though it’s irritating late in the day when you’re rid of one set of cubes while a single one of that colour remains in the chamber, forcing you to wait for three more. The colours get more numerous and the shapes more complex as the game progresses. And there’s the small matter of having to complete a chain within a certain number of turns to give you more ammo.

A few internetters have commented that it’s similar to N64 puzzler Tetrisphere. Having not played that, CUBELLO seems a wholly original experience to me, and even if its mechanics resemble the aforementioned game, its unique presentation is pretty damn cool. Well worth 600 points of anyone’s money.

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