Chocobos, having long been the preferred method of yellow-feathered transport in the Final Fantasy universe, finally get their moment in the spotlight as they ditch their riders for a series of kid-friendly mini-games. In what could’ve been called Aesop’s Final Fantasy Fables, your heroic oversized chicken participates in an assortment of vaguely familiar stories, ranging from Jack and the Beanstalk to The Hare and the Tortoise to The Ugly Duckling. And since these stories are presented with bright, colorful graphics in pop-up book form, it’s safe to assume that the game’s target audience hadn’t even been born when Final Fantasy III came out.
The mini-games all make varied use of the DS’s touchscreen, and the difficulty ramps up nicely around the game’s midpoint. The only annoying aspect of the gameplay involves boss battles. At these points, the game throws all variation aside in favor of another Yu-Gi-Oh style, card-based battle system. Aesop knew better than to muck up his fables with trendy card games.
One of the long-running conventions of the Prince of Persia series is the ability to repeat past sequences in time, but Rival Swords comes with an extra dose of deja vu. That’s because it’s essentially a port of The Two Thrones, which graced the last-generation consoles nearly 18 months ago. But if you’re inexplicably compelled, for $50 you can get all the same acrobatic action and year-and-a-half-old graphics on the Wii that you can get on GameCube for $30. Of course, since the Wii plays GameCube discs, that doesn’t make a great deal of sense.
How did they manage to squeeze the entire island of Oahu into that tiny Universal Media Disc? The fact that this Xbox 360 game has made the transition to a handheld platform -- with its content virtually unscathed and with minimal load times -- is an incredible technological feat. The game allows you to enter a series of races, both online and off, on a scale reproduction of Oahu so realistic, you can almost spot them shooting episodes of Lost on the beach.
This feels less like a contemporary Native American-themed game than an ancient Indian artifact -- a relic from the Nintendo 64 era, when it was still okay to pump out generic platformers that predictably ushered you from the forest level to the desert level to the ice level and so forth. Eventually, the game allows your young Indian brave (named…uh, Brave) to transform into a few woodland creatures, in case you’d rather be bored as a bear than an Indian.
When Las Vegas Weekly contributor Matthew Scott Hunter realized his career as a lab technician was seriously interfering with his gaming, he pink-slipped himself into a successful career as a freelance writer. Bug the hell out of him at [email protected]