CNet has a decent article about Activision‘s Call of Duty: World at War for Wii.  It’s a pretty informative article, and gives an “Excellent” rating.  I am really hoping to get this game for Christmas from Santa…  From the article by Chris Walters:

The default controls feel balanced and well-mapped, but there are a few hang-ups. The fast and deadly melee attack is performed by shaking the Wii Remote or hitting down on the D pad. Unfortunately, shaking will shift your aim abruptly, often causing you to miss your target. The D pad is the better option, but melee attacks will still tend to go astray more often than they should. The D pad is also used for switching weapons, so resting your thumb in the A-button/D-pad area is generally advisable. Unfortunately, grenades are mapped to the + button, and shifting your thumb halfway down the remote can be awkward. It’s a minor inconvenience, though, and all things considered, World at War’s control scheme is well-suited for the rigors of war.

HEY SANTA!

Ah, I’m sure he can hear me…

Check out a game trailer for Call of Duty: World at War:

Facebreaker: KO Party for Wii is out!  From IGN’s article:

Laugh out loud as you pummel your opponent with a barrage of blows to the face, and watch in satisfaction as your progress is illustrated by real-time facial deformation. With haymakers, face shots and body blows, wait for the right moment to drop a Breaker to make your presence known. Taunt your adversaries and flaunt your talent, by boxing with one hand behind your back to add ultimate humiliation to your bout. In FaceBreaker K.O. Party, rearranging faces just feels better when done with friends.

Amazon has Facebreaker: KO Party for $39.99 right now.  Check out a trailer:

Lately I’ve been playing the heck out of Medal of Honor: Vanguard by EA Games. MOH-V is the tenth installment in EA’s series of World War II first person shooter games, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely. You play Corporal Frank Keegan of the 82nd Airborne in MOH-V, and the game is a mix of emotion and skill as you cut around corners, firing brief half-second bursts as you pop your head above the walls long enough as to not get hit by snipers.

First things first, the bad stuff (in this editor’s humble opinion, of course…)
MOH-V has at times some pretty muttled graphics – I found this specifically on some of the long distance views, and in a lot of high contrast light situations. I need to qualify that statement with the fact that this happens on just a few occasions. Overall, the graphics are fine – and where I have complaints about a few scenes, I also have major praises for many of them. One sparkling example of this is in the last mission, with a sniper rifle weapon upgrade; when you place the rifle’s scope to your eye, the view is absolutely stunning and beautiful – as beautiful as a war-torn landscape could be, I suppose, but still crisp, clear, and full of graphic detail of the surroundings.

The other negative thing I have to report, again in my humble opinion, is the length of the game. It’s too short! For the amount of time that I blew through the game, I was ready to get in the car and go purchase the previous installments!

(the Damage Indicator shows you from which direction you were hit, and displays red)

Missions:
For Medal of Honor: Vanguard, you navigate through several missions that take you from beaches to warehouses, to trenches and row house fighting, nearly hand-to-hand at times (and that’s if you DON’T get a punch or rifle stock jab in – there are lots of opportunities). The Italian and German soldiers are tough in all levels of difficulty, and the game is exciting.

The missions are:
Operation Husky, the attack on Sicily
Operation Neptune, the attack on Normandy
Operation Market Garden, fighting in Holland behind enemy lines
Operation Varsity, which was the largest and most successful campaign in history

Multiplayer
There is a multiplayer component to this game as well – play through several types of games, including

• Deathmatch
• Team Deathmatch
• Capture the Flag
• King of the Hill
• Scavenger Hunt

(the X means that is an Allied soldier! Don’t shoot!)

Weapons
Medal of Honor: Vanguard has a large selection of weapons to master. The German MP40 submachine gun and Thompson submachine guns; single shot K98, Enfield, and M1 Garand rifles; the STG 44 and BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle); stick and pineapple Frag Grenades; the Colt 45 pistol, and the very excellent and powerful M9 bazooka. You can also man an MG 42 machine gun nest, which is awesome in firepower, but very difficult to aim. Think quantity and not quality with these.

Movement
Moving around with the wiimote and nunchuck is actually quite intuitive, despite the reviews that other sites have given this trait. Your weapon is trained (pointed) with the wiimote, and the joystick on the nunchuck moves you around. Top button on the wiimote makes you stand up and jump, and the bottom button has two levels of lower maneuvring – squatting and crawling. One of the best features of MOH-V is the ability to crawl around a wall, sneak your head out, and fire. Pressing A on the wiimote makes your character stop moving and use the iron sights on weapons. This is how the accuracy component comes into play.

Medal of Honor: Vanguard is well worth picking up. It has very exciting and grabbing action – you’ll be breathing quietly in your own living room trying not to let the enemy know you’re waiting outside the door.

Check out Medal of Honor: Vanguard at Amazon.

Need a Wii-Mote?

Need a Nunchuck?

Mario Kart Wii is coming in the second quarter of 2008 (we hope sooner than later in the Spring) – and Sterling McGarvey over at Gamespy.com has provided a good preview post of what we can expect to see from this very anticipated release. Support for 12 players online, a Mario Kart Channel on the Wii, and ridiculously versatile controls are all very positive points as we see it. An excerpt from Sterling’s article over at GameSpy:

There’ll be three new power-ups as well. The POW item looks like the old POW box from the original Mario Bros., and as in that arcade classic it causes havoc on the stage. If you’re in, say, fifth place, the POW will cause every car that’s ahead of you to spin out and lose control. The Lightning Cloud is even more devastating; it’s like a mixture of the Golden Mushroom and “hot potato.” You’ll get huge boosts of speed for a limited time, but as the clock ticks, you run the risk of being hit by lightning, which shrinks your kart. Fortunately (for you, not your fellow racers), you can pass the Lightning Cloud around to other people when you bump into them and leave someone else to deal with the consequences. Finally, there’s the Giant Mushroom, which, just like in New Super Mario Bros., allows you to super-size yourself and leave a trail of turmoil in your wake.

Sign up at to be notified when Mario Kart Wii with the Wii Wheel is available at Amazon.

Today only, Amazon has Trauma Center: New Blood for $29.99. This is $20 off the retail price, and shipping is free.

Trauma Center: New Blood is one of my favorite Wii games. I tend to like the nerdier titles, and not shooter-type games. This game fits the bill. It’s entertaining and does not have a lot of movement on screen (which tends to give me a headache).

The game makes good use of the Wii controllers to manipulate the surgical tools (you will need a nunchuk to play). The storyline can be a bit odd and lengthy, but you can skip past them by pressing the minus (-) button during the heavy dialogue. After you get past the introductory story for each level, the surgeries themselves are fun to complete. With the game’s two-player mode, two people collaborate on the same surgery.

Trauma Center: New Blood is challenging, even in easy mode: right now I’m stuck on a level where I have to complete 3 surgeries in 10 minutes. I’ve found the walkthrough on IGN to be helpful when I get stuck on a level.

I paid full retail price for this game, and feel that I got my money’s worth. At $29.99, it’s an even better deal.

I have, as of late, found myself very much addicted to Wii Sports‘ Golf.  I have driven my score well above “pro” status, and it’s a ton of fun every time I start playing.  The basic gist of Wii Sports Golf is nothing terribly fancy – either a 3-tier, 3-hole challenge that places you on 3 holes of the course based on their difficulty level (beginner, intermediate, or advanced), or a 9-hole game.  Controls for Wii Sports Golf are pretty basic, and I have found that they actually work more efficiently and consistently if you swing the remote like you would a golf club.  I have had some difficulties with putting, which seems to be the most complicated bit of Wii Sports Golf – the velocity and angle in which you swing the putter seem to be a bit of a challenge from time to time.  However, this gets better with each game, and I’ve been hitting in lots of 30 to 50 foot puts lately!

There is an accessory if you so choose to purchase it – a little golf club head extension for your remote.  It’s cute.  The best value seems to be to purchase Intec’s Wii Ultimate Action Pack – it comes with a baseball bat extension, a tennis racket extension, a little sword extension, and the golf club – all for under 20 bucks.  Check it out.

Have you ever paid attention to all of the cash games that line the boundaries of any Shakedown Street of any carnival or festival? Jack of All Games has produced a Wii game that recreates many of the same games the barkers are always trying to get you to spend your cash on. They’ve done a decent job of replicating the experience, with graphics that are a cut above average (not spectacular, but solid!) and hours of mini-games that are fun for as many players as you have remotes. Speaking of remotes – Carnival Games has multiple ways of requiring you to orient your remote – you learn a lot of remote skills by excelling at these games!

Carnival Games is an excellent multi-player game as well as a solo-flier game. My wife and I have hours of fun with Carnival Games, and I will venture to bet that you will too. I’ve read some poor reviews of this game by some of the major reviewers, and I have to disagree. You have to take this game’s purpose into consideration – lots of fun with simple mini-games (not always so simple, mind you!) for one or many players. The games are quick, fun, and often energizing. People with a short attention span for gaming will love Carnival Games.

A comprehensive list of the available games (some of them need unlocked in the “career” mode):

• Alley Ball (Skee Ball for the Wii!)
• Spilled Milk
• Balloon Darts
• Shooting Gallery
• Hoops
• Shoot-for-the-Stars
• Hole-In-One
• Ring Toss
• Day at the Races
• Collection Plate (sort of like Ring Toss)
• The Great Swami
• Frog Leap
• Bowler Coaster
• Meter-O-Love
• Pigskin Pass
• Buckets Of Fun
• Going Nuts
• Clown Splash
• Ka-Pow
• Prize Claw
• Nerves Of Steel
• Lucky Cups
• Dunk Tank
• Push-A-Prize

There are a few alternate takes on certain games as you unlock levels in the game.

Carnival Games by Jack of All Games at Amazon

I’ve been a big fan of the SSX series of snowboarding games by EA Games since their release in 2000. The stunning terrains, the mind-expanding views as they fly by on your way down the side of the mountain, and the amount and variety of trick combinations all make this series a top selling game with great ratings. Primarily using the PS2 console, I have taken every shortcut, performed every trick, and taken place in every competition – I love this game series more than any of the other games in my selection. After we bought our Wii and hooked it up, I think the first few words out of my mouth were “We should get SSX Blur for our console!”

I was fortunate that my sister-in-law bought me SSX Blur for Wii as a gift this year, and I spent a good chunk of time cruising the slopes. I plugged through the first series of competitions and checked out the halfpipe on Peak One – it’s a fun game that is pretty physical and takes a good amount of movement of both hands to play.

Between its predecessor consoles and the Wii, the control system is vastly different. This is a two-handed, standing-upright game (not required, but definitely recommended) that will require the player to get accustomed to managing the controls. Some of the control aspects are more intuitive than the previous two-handed button combos like jumping and ollie-ing, but certain ones require yet another step of mastery. Turning and cutting, for example, is now a joystick on the left hand with tilting of the Nunchuk required for fine left and right tilt and cut. Add another step for grabs and holds and flipping up, down, left, and right for the right hand – there’s some getting familiar time needed for the novice player.

If you’re never played the SSX Series before, don’t be frustrated when you need to run the tutorials a few times. The tutorials for SSX Blur are actually quite helpful – they add combinations of skills together in just the right order to get the player on the mountain quickly. However, mastery of the moves in SSX Blur is definitely going to separate out the players from the posers.

Graphics and rendering for SSX Blur are a little better than previous consoles’ versions in standard resolution (viewed via video from RCA cable out of standard video port on Wii), but I noticed some almost replica sections of SSX 3 courses. For me this was positive because it made me able to mix some familiarity into the game and focus in on tricks – enough of the course is new and unfamiliar enough to not be a bother. Some of the view functions of SSX 2 and SSX 3 – like the Race Completion Percentage meter – are presented differently, and took a few rounds to get accustomed to reading. All of the views are still stunning, and the landscapes that fly by are still phenomenal, hands down.

Ubertricks are completely different in SSX Blur for Wii. The ol’ two-index-finger-button days are gone, friends. Ubertricks in SSX Blur are accomplished by holding down “A” on the remote, and then tracing a pattern with one or both of your hands. Some players will never be able to master this skill correctly – veteran players might have a bit of trouble with this at first, but it improves quickly. There is also a section in he tutorials that lets you practice these shapes and get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on your accuracy. The challenge of the Ubertricks in SSX Blur is refreshing, and once you master performing these tricks, your score goes crazy. There are several Ubertricks you unlock throughout game play, and each becomes increasingly more difficult.

In every game there are things you wish were a bit different – SSX Blur by EA Games for Wii is no exception. Overall, this is an exciting game that most players, SSX enthusiasts included, will enjoy and play frequently. Don’t take my word for it, get a copy and check it out for yourself.

SSX Blur by EA Games for Wii