5th December 2010, 12:36 PM
I've got the 360 version. This is a game where they tested the waters of "how meaningless can we make DLC?" because there's a bunch of nickle and diming "costumes" you can get for one of the characters, and nothing else. Utterly worthless.
It's a pretty good game. The cutscenes are skippable, at least in this version, but it would be nice to have an option to disable them entirely once you've seen enough.
The most annoying part so far is that opening scene. The DK Rap in DK64 is at least "so bad it's good", and is fun that way, but this is just "so bad it's bad". MS REALLY wanted to make the next Pokemon with this franchise and poored everything into making it take off, so instead of an intro that was, well, normal, they basically used a saturday morning cartoon style intro, which has nothing at all to do with the game itself (the pinatas have no human style personalities, and in fact you're raising them for the slaughter) and everything to do with getting the kids they thought would ALL be obsessed with the game to want to watch the terrible cartoon (there's a few episodes on a second disk my "special edition" came with, it's completely bland and unimaginative, a textbook sort of thing with textbook jokes and textbook characters).
Aside from that abortion though, the game itself is pretty fun. It tries to basically combine Pokemon with Harvest Moon. Mind you, it doesn't have the staying power of either, because once I did everything I quickly grew bored of it. It doesn't really have much "sandbox" potential outside of being able to design the land how you like. Not a bad game, and it's clearly a Rare game, but it could have used more development (something I'm saying a lot about Rare's recent games).
It's a pretty good game. The cutscenes are skippable, at least in this version, but it would be nice to have an option to disable them entirely once you've seen enough.
The most annoying part so far is that opening scene. The DK Rap in DK64 is at least "so bad it's good", and is fun that way, but this is just "so bad it's bad". MS REALLY wanted to make the next Pokemon with this franchise and poored everything into making it take off, so instead of an intro that was, well, normal, they basically used a saturday morning cartoon style intro, which has nothing at all to do with the game itself (the pinatas have no human style personalities, and in fact you're raising them for the slaughter) and everything to do with getting the kids they thought would ALL be obsessed with the game to want to watch the terrible cartoon (there's a few episodes on a second disk my "special edition" came with, it's completely bland and unimaginative, a textbook sort of thing with textbook jokes and textbook characters).
Aside from that abortion though, the game itself is pretty fun. It tries to basically combine Pokemon with Harvest Moon. Mind you, it doesn't have the staying power of either, because once I did everything I quickly grew bored of it. It doesn't really have much "sandbox" potential outside of being able to design the land how you like. Not a bad game, and it's clearly a Rare game, but it could have used more development (something I'm saying a lot about Rare's recent games).
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)