Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, the Wii-make of the critically-lauded 360 zombie actioner is released today in the US, yet bizarrely - at the time of writing, anyway - there’s not a single review up on aggregator site Metacritic. That’s never a good sign, and indeed, the suggestion that it might not be the world’s greatest port is borne out by the two magazine reviews which currently exist, but haven’t been added to Metacritic just yet.
UK magazines Official Nintendo Magazine and NGamer both carry reviews of Chop Till You Drop, the former awarding it a fairly average 68%, with the latter plumping for a measly 55%. Both suggest it’s an infuriating experience thanks to the addition of zombie parrots and poodles, but that the lack of enemies also disappoints - neither were problems in the 360 game whose mall was absolutely full of the undead. But as NGamer summarises, “a zombie-infested mall doesn’t make much sense without zombies to infest it. Poodles and parrots are among the most irritating substitutes imaginable.” Ouch.
In truth, Dead Rising never seemed like a good fit for Wii, and so this is hardly a surprise, although the addition of tiny flying and ground-based foes which are difficult to hit was a problem that simply didn’t need to exist. Perhaps EA had the right idea turning Dead Space: Extraction into an on-rails shooter, if an experienced developer like Capcom can struggle to port a third-person HD action game onto Wii.
Expect more reviews to roll in later this week, and expect them to follow suit. If you’ve still not been put off, Chop Till You Drop is released in Europe this Friday.
Gaming Target is reporting on a rumour that Fatal Frame IV will get a US release later this year, but that it may not have that title when it finally comes out.
The spook-snapping horror has been pencilled in (very lightly) for a European release for quite some time now, but it’s certainly not going to make the February date the site suggests - indeed, it’s not down for the entire first quarter, and still hasn’t been 100% confirmed for launch in PAL territories.
Yet Gaming Target claims to have spoken to an unnamed industry analyst, who claims that it may not be released as Fatal Frame IV. “Why any publisher would throw away the cult of popularity the series has gainded over the years is questionable,” it adds, but then concludes that “the desire to start fresh and make Fatal Frame more of a cult series could be the impetus behind that decision.”
I think ‘popularity’ is the wrong word for the series, which has never performed particularly well in the west, and perhaps under a new banner it could sell a whole lot more. Anyone for Ghost Photography Training?
As if to partially disprove the point made in my last post, and to show that it is interested in selling core games, Nintendo has decided to partner with Square-Enix for the forthcoming Dragon Quest IX on DS, with Satoru Iwata making it very clear how keen the company is to help promote the game overseas.
In an excellent piece from one of my favourite writers, Chris Kohler on Wired.com’s Game | Life blog, Iwata remarks that “there are two things I’d like to make reality. The first is to build a thriving Japanese game market together with Dragon Quest that rivals the West’s. The second is to form a strong tag team to promote Dragon Quest overseas. At Nintendo, we were able to popularize the Brain Age series overseas, which was said to be unmarketable. I want to increase the number of people worldwide that understand the appeal of Dragon Quest, which represents all Japanese gaming culture…even if that only turns out to be a single person.”
As Kohler says, this is hugely significant for two reasons - one, that Iwata is concerned about the Japanese gaming market, to the degree where he’s hoping one game can spark it back into life after recent lacklustre sales of both core and mainstream titles; and two, that he’s concerned that Japanese games aren’t selling overseas.
If anyone can get this strategy to work, it’s Nintendo - and it’s heartening to see that someone is making an attempt to bridge the gap between Japanese and western gamers. It’s telling that there’s a growing market in Japan for western titles (with a few games - mainly first-person shooters like Resistance 2 and Bioshock - selling to relatively small but not insignificant numbers, particularly in launch week) but that there is little sign of the reverse happening in the west. Let’s hope that Dragon Quest IX can open the eyes of a few people to how the Japanese do things, and that this could spark an increase in more eastern-friendly titles making it big in the west.
Later, I’ll be posting the first half of my top ten DS games of 2008 list. One game which won’t be appearing is Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon. And that’s one game I’m almost certain that, had I played it, would almost certainly be on there.
I’m a big fan of the Fire Emblem series - to me, it’s had the same strategic allure of the Advance Wars games, but with characters you genuinely care about. The franchise’s USP - that once your characters are dead, they stay dead - is part of what make it so great. It’s devastating to witness the death of someone you were particularly fond of, and many players have been known to restart battles as soon as they lose a valued fighter. It makes you more careful than you’d otherwise normally be with the often expendable troops found in most strategy titles, and the RPG-style levelling-up adds an extra layer of attachment to the bond you’ll form with your band of rebels.
So, it’s with great disappointment that I find myself unable to include said game in the list - mainly because I’ve not seen it available in a single shop I’ve been in. I’ve scoured the DS sections of Game, Gamestation, Gamestop, Zavvi, Tesco, Asda and other stockists near me, to no avail. In desperation, I asked my wife - who works in the centre of Manchester - if she’d be kind enough to buy me the game as a Christmas present. She hasn’t been able to locate the game either.
While Nintendo might say that this is down to ‘retail orders’ (as it suggested when I asked about the whereabouts of Professor Layton and the Curious Village) I can’t help but feel that the publisher is sending some of its more niche titles to almost certain retail death. Fire Emblem is a game that would benefit from some kind of advertising spend, but because it’s not geared towards a mainstream, mass-market audience, Nintendo just doesn’t bother. And as hardcore gamers become more and more disgruntled with the casual-focused titles on Wii and DS and start to gravitate towards other consoles, games like Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon are likely to sell less and less, the eventual result likely being that Europe won’t see the next game in the franchise.
It’s a great pity - Nintendo has sure-fire hits which will undoubtedly sell regardless of advertising, and it spends a small fortune on putting those games even more in the public eye. Then it has games of undeniable quality, but does so little to promote them that even many core gamers are unaware they are available. It’d be nice to see the company take a risk on one or two of these smaller games - give them some prime-time advertising slots, show a celeb or two (perhaps, you know, someone who actually tends to play games in their spare time) enjoying said titles, and see if they do any better. I’m sure that way we wouldn’t have this ridiculous - actually, let’s be honest, disgraceful - situation where a fan of a particular series can’t actually wander into his local games retailer and buy a copy of the game a week after its release. ÂÂ
Curious DS owners wishing to get their hands on D mystery-puzzler Professor Layton are finding this fantastic game particularly hard to come by at the moment. With store shelves empty, and copies on Amazon.com changing hands for a staggering £99 - heck, even Play.com’s cheapest copy weighs in at £48.95 - it seems that once again Nintendo has undershipped one of its key titles over the winter period.
I spoke to Nintendo UK PR guru Rob Saunders about the situation, and he insisted that Nintendo hadn’t underestimated how well the game would sell, saying “no, we don’t manufacture the same number of games for every title we release - we produce and bring to market quantities based on retail orders we receive”. So there you go: it’s the retailers’ fault, apparently.
Saunders also assured me that shops would be receiving more stocks before Christmas. “Yes, stock is coming in every week to all retailers across the UK,” he asserted.
Sadly, he was a little less forthcoming when asked whether we could expect the second and third games in the series to be localised for Europe. “We’ve not announced any plans at this time” was the rather predictable response.
So, your best bet if you wish to get your hands on a copy of the game before Christmas is to speak to your retailer of choice and ask whether they’d be prepared to reserve you a copy once stock arrives. It seems some shops may well offer this service (from anecdotal information), so ask around and you might just be able to get your hands on a title that’s going to be as rare as uncooked turkey this yuletide.
While I still can’t say I’m full of confidence about Disaster: Day of Crisis - particularly given how ominously close its release is and still no-one has played the game - the newly-launched official Japanese site shows a game with promise - far from the outright disaster some were fearing the name all-too-accurately represented.
After a decent-quality (if a little cheesy) intro movie, the site offers information about the characters, the story and the various disasters occurring during this particularly eventful day. It’s the Player Action section that’s of most interest, though - this features brief gameplay vignettes that suggest the game mixes some third-person action-adventuring and survivor-rescuing along the lines of PS2 disaster titles SOS: The Final Escape and Raw Danger with minigame sections, driving sequences and Time Crisis-aping lightgun-shooting interludes. The driving sections (with the remote held sideways, a la Excite Truck) certainly look potentially quite exciting - vaguely reminiscent of the thrilling-but-frustrating earthquake escapes in Alone in the Dark or 24: The Game. Though hopefully without the frustration.
With a bit of clever marketing, Disaster could potentially sell as a ‘bridge’ title, appealing to the casual crowd with fairly simple controls for the most part, while the story and score attack features would attract core gamers. Perhaps its biggest danger is that it risks falling between those two stools, and maybe that’s why Nintendo is reluctant to allow the press some hands-on time with the game.
Minigames with a decent story tying them together? It’s not such a bad idea (let’s face it, Professor Layton isn’t a million miles away from that) and while Disaster might not turn out great, perhaps it could inspire other developers to give similar concepts a try.
Several short TV spots have been released on the Japanese Nintendo Channel for the out-in-two-weeks Disaster: Day of Crisis, and blow me down if the game doesn’t actually look really quite exciting.
But there’s a problem. Disaster: Day of Crisis is a game which no-one has played. Two weeks before its release, and there have been no previews, no early impressions, no hands-on opportunities. Even the GameCube pinball-strategy curio Odama had previews, even if review code wasn’t given to journalists until after its release (and judging by the scores it received, it’s clear why).
It’s not like Nintendo to bundle a substandard game out of the door - Odama was probably considered niche rather than bad (disclosure: I really liked it) and Project HAMMER was canned after not testing particularly well at E3 a couple of years back. Is Disaster merely a half-hearted sop to the core by way of an apology for the casual-friendly winter line-up? Is Nintendo simply unsure how to market it? Will it - like Odama - be ignored by the masses, and cherished by a very small minority? Did a Nintendo advert really say ’shit’?
All these questions and more will be answered in around two weeks’ time. I’ll be importing Disaster on day one (it looks to have English voices, so should be relatively westerner-friendly) so expect impressions around the 23rd.
 
 
 
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