And for the "slow Friday at work and the boss isn't there" moment, I present you Blast Works for the Wii, a thread I wanted to start yesterday evening but later scrapped due to dire need of sleep.
The first impression with the game isn't exactly great: graphics are clean but very basic and the shooter mechanics are almost boring; the interface has some problems (most noticeably the need to use the Wiimote to navigate around the menu even when you're using the classic controller) and it's one of those games that you can play with the sound muted, because the soundtrack is a generic disco/techno mix with absolutely no highlights and the only sound effects are enemy explosions...or better, the only sound effect is from enemy explosions. The game runs with progressive scan but there's no 16:9 option and no need for TATE mode as the game is an horizontal shooter, but more on this later.
Blast Works is the conversion of the Tumiki Fighters, a freeware PC shooter where downed enemies can be attached to your ship and work as powerups, firing when you do, and as a shield, absorbing enemy projectiles.
Although it sounds good, it's rare that captured enemies will end facing the direction you want, as they began to spin when shot down before disappearing on the bottom of the screen if you don't catch them; luckily enough your fighter ship features a non-upgradeable, fast firing forward gun that not only act as you main offensive weapon, but also as visual aid to understand where your ship is after you captured enemies, thus forming an humongous agglomerate of polygons around it.
Unfortunately knowing where your ship is in the aforementioned agglomerate is kinda hard, especially when the camera zooms out during boss fights as color patterns used for captured enemies and your ship is exactly the same, and the screen can get literally filled by yourself, your projectiles, enemies and their projectiles, which remain the most visible thing as they are right red over blueish backgrounds.
Level design is...uhm...no, wait, there's no level design. The game scrolls from left to right and everything is destructible, with everything being "enemies". There are no structures, no choke points, no foreground objects: just you an endless wave of enemies from start to end, with no attention to attack patterns: they just come at you, you destroy them, capture them and use them as a shield from the others, while repeating the whole process. With the single player game featuring multiple campaigns with three levels each, things get boring quickly.
Bosses, on the other hand, are more interesting, with multiple guns firing relatively inspired bullet patterns, shields and multiple weak spots to destroy.
However, the in-between is boring and it basically bleeds extra lives...on the first play I got up to 11 lives during the second campaign and unless you're trying to get killed, it's hard not to get an extra life every stage.
The biggest part of the game is its editor. You can edit everything - your ship, enemies, stages, bosses, bullet patterns...everything. The interface is kinda simple (although it suffers from the lack of 16:9 support and is a bit crammed) and there's a website (www.blastworksdepot.com) where you can upload your creations or download other user-generated contents, that can really change how the game is played; theorically it's possible to recreate a vertical shooter by changing how the units are built, as well designing stages with foreground, indestructible objects to give the player more challenges, but here's the real problem: Blast Works eats space like it was candy. 127 blocks are required to start the editor and downloading things from the site is likely to eat up huge chunks of the Wii internal memory, especially when user-generated content is often of better quality than the things found in the game itself.
So, when buying Blast Works, you shouldn't expect a good shooter out of the box (sigh), but a huge sandbox to create your own shooter.
And if Nintendo would release a Wii HDD it would be better.
The first impression with the game isn't exactly great: graphics are clean but very basic and the shooter mechanics are almost boring; the interface has some problems (most noticeably the need to use the Wiimote to navigate around the menu even when you're using the classic controller) and it's one of those games that you can play with the sound muted, because the soundtrack is a generic disco/techno mix with absolutely no highlights and the only sound effects are enemy explosions...or better, the only sound effect is from enemy explosions. The game runs with progressive scan but there's no 16:9 option and no need for TATE mode as the game is an horizontal shooter, but more on this later.
Blast Works is the conversion of the Tumiki Fighters, a freeware PC shooter where downed enemies can be attached to your ship and work as powerups, firing when you do, and as a shield, absorbing enemy projectiles.
Although it sounds good, it's rare that captured enemies will end facing the direction you want, as they began to spin when shot down before disappearing on the bottom of the screen if you don't catch them; luckily enough your fighter ship features a non-upgradeable, fast firing forward gun that not only act as you main offensive weapon, but also as visual aid to understand where your ship is after you captured enemies, thus forming an humongous agglomerate of polygons around it.
Unfortunately knowing where your ship is in the aforementioned agglomerate is kinda hard, especially when the camera zooms out during boss fights as color patterns used for captured enemies and your ship is exactly the same, and the screen can get literally filled by yourself, your projectiles, enemies and their projectiles, which remain the most visible thing as they are right red over blueish backgrounds.
Level design is...uhm...no, wait, there's no level design. The game scrolls from left to right and everything is destructible, with everything being "enemies". There are no structures, no choke points, no foreground objects: just you an endless wave of enemies from start to end, with no attention to attack patterns: they just come at you, you destroy them, capture them and use them as a shield from the others, while repeating the whole process. With the single player game featuring multiple campaigns with three levels each, things get boring quickly.
Bosses, on the other hand, are more interesting, with multiple guns firing relatively inspired bullet patterns, shields and multiple weak spots to destroy.
However, the in-between is boring and it basically bleeds extra lives...on the first play I got up to 11 lives during the second campaign and unless you're trying to get killed, it's hard not to get an extra life every stage.
The biggest part of the game is its editor. You can edit everything - your ship, enemies, stages, bosses, bullet patterns...everything. The interface is kinda simple (although it suffers from the lack of 16:9 support and is a bit crammed) and there's a website (www.blastworksdepot.com) where you can upload your creations or download other user-generated contents, that can really change how the game is played; theorically it's possible to recreate a vertical shooter by changing how the units are built, as well designing stages with foreground, indestructible objects to give the player more challenges, but here's the real problem: Blast Works eats space like it was candy. 127 blocks are required to start the editor and downloading things from the site is likely to eat up huge chunks of the Wii internal memory, especially when user-generated content is often of better quality than the things found in the game itself.
So, when buying Blast Works, you shouldn't expect a good shooter out of the box (sigh), but a huge sandbox to create your own shooter.
And if Nintendo would release a Wii HDD it would be better.
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