You’d think sometime in the 11-year history of Pokemon, the Humane Society would’ve gotten involved. Here are these cute and diverse little creatures, roaming wild and free, and people attack them, capture them, confine them in a small spherical cell that fits into the palm of your hand, and force them to do battle in what are essentially cockfights. If that doesn’t scream animal cruelty, I don’t know what does. Every entry in the Pokemon series, regardless of arbitrary subtitle (FireRed, LeafGreen, Ruby, Sapphire), has featured the exact same gameplay. It’s abusive, but even worse, it’s gotten old.
With Pearl and Diamond, the Pokemon slave trade has gone international. Now, courtesy of Nintendo’s wi-fi service, you can easily pit your Pokemon against players all over the world. But it’s essentially the same old, barebones, turn-based RPG combat that it was back in the days of Pokemon Red and Blue. The only other addition is a feature that lets you dress up your Pokemon. And I think it’s already been established that playing dress up with your pets is not only cruel, but humiliating for pet and owner alike. So I say put a stop to Pokemon abuse! Release them back into the wild…at least, until we get better incentives to keep playing.
Few games are as punishing as sidescrolling shooters. They’re games designed to keep you pumping quarter after quarter into arcade machines, so owning a home console version will save you a ton of laundry money, right? Not quite. The console version will simply reveal that had you not run out of quarters in the arcade, there’s only about 45 minutes of gameplay here. And Raiden III’s $30 price tag is still quite a few quarters for less than an hour of play and fuzzy, ancient graphics.
There are several dogfighting flight sims on the market now, so what does Heatseeker do to distinguish itself from the Ace Combats of the gaming world? Well, it features the Impact Cam. When you fire a missile, you can follow it all the way to the plane, and then watch the explosion in slow-motion. In the meantime, who’s flying your plane? Oh, don’t worry -- you were shot down while watching the missile. But wasn’t the explosion cool?
In Norse mythology, Valhalla is the equivalent of heaven, where warriors go after dying gloriously in battle. That doesn’t have much to do with this game. I mean, sure you’ll die, but it’ll never be glorious. It’ll be because this is one of those infuriating dungeon crawlers that pits you against overpowered bosses from the get-go, which means you’ll spend hours battling weaker, generic enemies just to level up. Then you’ll backtrack all the way to the boss and probably die anyway. Is there a Norse equivalent of hell?
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]