Posted Wed Sep 10, 2003 10:48 AM
For a while there, I was actually feeling the opposite of liveinabin. I was very dismissive of all the current games (how many first person shooters and variants thereof do we need, anyway?) until we were in TRU and my partner picked up a controller and started walking around a level of Super Mario Sunshine.
Eventually we bought a Gamecube and for a while it was like 1981 again in terms of my enthusiasm for games. He doesn't play much, he just enjoys watching because the modeling and camera angles and whatnot in SMS are so right-on.
But everything comes crashing down, and for me that happened when I started playing some of the other half-dozen games I got for the GC. One of them was a demo disk with the first level of that egg-rolling game that hasn't come out yet, "Sonic DX Director's Cut", "Viewtiful Joe", "Soul Calibur II" and "Splinter Cell". I didn't even try the Splinter Cell because nothing seems like it could be less enjoyable to me than creeping around in the dark trying to assassinate people (and actually it's a little disturbing to me that so many people actually go for that stuff) but I did try the other four.
That egg rolling thing was probably the least annoying because at least its concept was semi-fresh. Roll eggs around over fruits till they get big enough, and hatch them to (sometimes) get little animal friends who follow you around for some purpose I didn't get. You can also use the eggs to crush enemies and as a weird sort of transportation device (these rings that catapult you and the egg to a different platform) and you have goals to achieve (freeing a rooster from an enchanted egg; retrieving some kind of talisman from a high-up platform.) But the graphics weren't nearly as well-done as Mario Sunshine (camera angles more angular, textures and shading less smooth, animation less fluid, etc.) and there were some gaps in it (like you leave an area and come back and everything's reset to the way it was the first time). Not a bad way to waste half an hour, but I don't think I'd even rent this one.
Sonic DX looked so much like Mario Sunshine that it got me thinking the Mario guys were consciously emulating the Sonic series with Sunshine. Thing is, maybe because it's a port from the Dreamcast but it has the same problems as the egg thing: comparatively crummy textures, not entirely smooth characters and animation, etc, and on top of that, a terribly frustrating camera that only wants to point in the direction the game wants you to run, frequently getting obscured by objects in the process. Also, since the environments look so much like Mario, it's easy to compare the overall look, and where Mario would actually partially obscure objects in the distance with heat haze, in Sonic they're just sort of there. I had a lot of hope for this one because I loved the Sonic 2D series, but.... yuck.
Viewtiful Joe appeared to be a side scrolling platformer only with 3D rendered graphics in an old school comic book style, but it turned out to be largely an incomprehensible fighter that happened to have platforms in it. I mashed buttons a lot and managed to kill a couple enemies, but it just wasn't fun. Next.
Soul Calibur II was HILARIOUS. It was a straight ahead fighter in the Street Fighter II mold (in the same sense that any vertical shooter is more or less in the Xevious mold) and I picked a character named Cassandra. I held the joystick right and just kept hitting buttons at random, and that was enough to kill (uh, sorry, "KO") 3 people while George howled with laughter at the ridiculously overwrought brutality. "You vicious bitch," he said as my sword went through this big guy's body and came out the other side about 20 times in a row while he still remained standing. The instant replays were very entertaining. Ultimately, though, our enjoyment of the game came only from the fact that (a) it's so far from the sort of thing either of us would want to play and (b) I got as far into it as I did without knowing a single thing about the controls, just hitting buttons randomly.
Finally, I put in Harry Potter: Chamber of Secrets, which is what I'm still playing. I'm continuing to play only because it's Harry Potter and I want to see how much of the story they work into the game (and I do have to admit I want to get to the quidditch part.) Everything is far more detailed than any of the other games, even Mario Sunshine, but the level of interactivity is vastly curtailed (you can basically only do anything with the incidental objects if you're standing next to one of them and the view of the button layout changes to indicate you can do something) and the detail comes at the cost of 10-15 second load times whenever you walk through a door or go from one area to another. The game itself is very much a standard "explore 3D environment to find things" and you even have the Sonic-esque conceit of "get hit by an enemy, lose your jellybean collection and try to pick some up before they disappear". Shockingly, it's possible in certain areas to get too many objects onscreen at once and cause the Cube to slow down for a second... shades of the original NES. And the camera is beyond useless; sometimes (as in this room where you're supposed to sneak between aisles to get around the shopkeeper and hit a button on the wall) it seems actually malicious. Overall, while it's pretty to look at and it is Harry Potter it's not a very well done game.
So, my initial exuberance over finding that modern games can be as good as Mario Sunshine is tempered by the fact that..... well, most aren't. I still have the limited edition Zelda Ocarina of Time, Super Monkey Ball, and Crazy Taxi to try out, we're looking for a good baseball simulator to try out (might have to wait till spring when the new ones come out or stick to rentals, judging by our trips to stores that sell GC games... it's all about the helmets and hoops now) and I do have the GB player which I'm looking forward to trying out, but I still have 90% of Mario Sunshine to complete and I'm thinking I'm going to take my time at it.... because who knows when the next time is that I'm going to find anything nearly as well-designed, nice to look at and fun to play.
Hmm, maybe I should take this text and start doing GC reviews for the FPS-o-phobic on my blog....
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Be it arcade, 2600, 5200 or any other console. I think with thousands of games at our disposal these days, eventually I can find SOMETHING that clicks on whatever particular mood I'm in on any given month. 
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