Game Spotlight: Three Wii games you don’t care about

I was going to write three separate Game Spotlights for these games, but then I realised that it’d be a waste of time considering that people really don’t care about these games to begin with… of course, these games aren’t that great anyway.

The three games I’ll be talking about are The Conduit, Deadly Creatures and Disaster: Day of Crisis. All three games seemed to have had high expectations by Wii enthusiasts but ultimately received very low sales.

The Conduit

The Conduit is probably the highest profile game out of the list of three, though in terms of quality, its only shining feature is the amount of customisation available for players to set their own controls. Once you get the controls tweaked just the way you like ’em, you end up with a Wiimote controlled FPS that feels too damn good to be true… the rest of the game however…

It’s half cooked and the ingredients used are not very fresh to begin with, and that’s the bottom line. The creature designs of the drudge seem like they came from rejected ideas from Retro Studios (the Metroid Prime Trilogy) and Bungie (the Halo series). Even worse is the fact that the drudge seem to have the exact same voice actors that were used for the various aliens in the Halo series. There were quite a lot of moments where you just thought “this is way too much of a rip-off of everything else”… it really wasn’t funny.

To add to it, the ending of the game sucks. I mean, it doesn’t have much of a plot to begin with so don’t worry if you’re worried about spoilers, but the ending was so forced… EXTREMELY forced. It’s done in such a way that they’re basically going to shove a sequel down your throat in the future whether you liked the taste or not. I’m not kidding here, when I got to the end of the game, I didn’t even realise I was at the end, I was convinced there had to be a couple more chapters at least… but there I was, staring at the end credits thinking “this game just screwed me over.. hard”…

Controls are great, story mode sucked… I haven’t tried the multiplayer yet, but I really want to try to find some kind of redeeming element to go along with those controls.

Deadly Creatures

I’ve probably enjoyed myself the most playing Deadly Creatures than the other two so far. THQ managed to create something very interesting with this game, though it does have some flaws, most of which you can overlook such as the pauses in the game for when it’s loading new areas.

What Deadly Creatures does right is that it combines action and adventure with exploration and some nice brawling. Sure, you may be playing as a Tarantula and a Scorpion, and the story may not be directly related to your adventure, but that’s what makes this game interesting and worth my time playing. It may not be for everyone, but THQ certainly believed in this game enough to invest enough money to hire Billy Bob Thornton and Dennis Hopper to play the two human characters.

It may not be the greatest game ever made, but it certainly is a good effort from the folks at THQ. I hope to see more of this kind of work from them in the future.

Disaster: Day of Crisis

As the name suggests, this game is exactly what you think it is: a very cheesy disaster movie turned into a game. The game itself is developed by Monolith Soft, a developer acquired by Nintendo quite awhile ago now… though, apparently not everyone over at Nintendo was too happy about this game which is why it will most likely never be released in North America.

As I play through this game, I feel like it had so much potential if the right developers were working on it. It combines action and adventure with mini games and at times and some impressive cutscenes (if you block out the fact that the amount of cheesiness dumped into this game is more than a triple cheese pizza with a cheese filled crust). At times it plays like a poor man’s Metal Gear without the stealth and Kojima flavoured awesomeness. I’ve only really just started the game and played the first few levels so I can’t give a complete impression, though from what I’ve seen so far, I’m glad I got it at half price lol.