Category: Games

There was a debate on one of the gaming blogs about the accuracy and response time of the Wii controller. Now from personal experience I know it’s pretty damn accurate and pretty damn fast, but others suggested the opposite – and that a limitation on response time would prevent very fast action games to be created.

The someone posted this video and the debate was over 🙂

To those that haven’t yet used a Wii – think of the remote as sort of a light gun. It’s a wand you point at the TV to use (the cursor in the video is where the player is pointing the remote). It has other functionality as well (accelerometers, positional detectors), but they aren’t in use in this game. The game show is one stage from Wii Play, and is basically a shooting alley type game (Duck Hunt clone).

Some time ago, I made a post about Wizardry games and mentioned a new one that had entered my radar named Yggdrasil Labyrinth. That game, now named Etrian Odyssey came out this past week (for the DS), and it’s fantastic.

Gameplay is very Wizardry – create a party from scratch (there are nine classes) and explore a dangerous dungeon. Improvements on the usual formula include character skills that you can customize (and of course you have far less points to spend than there are good skills to learn), wandering powerful monsters you can see on the map, and – of course – the fact that you draw the map yourself on the touchscreen.

Take a look at the screenshots above. The top DS screen shows the game action and the bottom shows the map. Using a simple editor, the player draws the map themselves, marking in floors and walls and the various obstacles encountered in the dungeon. A gimmick perhaps, but a delightful one for the gamer like myself that can remember doing the same thing on graph paper as I played.

What makes Etrian extra special is the game has a very high level of polish. Graphics and sound are beautiful (spell effects are remarkable actually), and the interface design is perfect on the DS. The developers comment on the game’s website that they were striving to create ‘the last great dungeon crawl’, and, although I hope it’s not the last one, it certainly seems so far that they have nailed the ‘great’ part of their goal.