Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

It may be only the third wheel of DS Pokemon games Pearl and Diamond, but Pokemon Platinum is still a major title… and it looks like the most enhanced Pokemon re-release yet. Plus Nintendo Power fills some holes in the 2009 lineup, including the return of A Boy and His Blob, a franchise MIA for nearly twenty years! Grab your jellybeans and read-a-long!

Issue #240, April 2009
featuring Pokemon Platinum (DS), Excitebots: Trick Racing (Wii), A Boy and His Blob (Wii), Grand Slam Tennis (Wii), Rhythm Heaven (DS)

Let’s begin this one at the beginning: the always-hilarious reader mail column. Spielberg fan Stacy M. thinks the level editor in Boom Blox “rocked.” It did not. Reader Jack laments the crush of poor Disney Channel-to-video game properties like Hannah Montana, and then closes his letter with “It was a sad day when I bought one.” An unsigned plea for the DSi mentions how one of his four destroyed DSes “fell victim to a Juice Baby Bottle Pop.” Reader Acerox thinks Will Smith’s I Am Legend would be the coolest movie game ever, and “a perfect fit for Wii.”

And finally, a reader with an agenda reports:

The movie I would want turned into a game is Twilight… NOT! I know this is a bit off topic, but I can’t stand that book/movie. Nothing against the fans of Twilight, but I can’t imagine a gamer liking the awful thing.

That bit of love comes to us from reader TwilightHater. Now on to this issue’s games!

The mag’s ten reasons to get Pokemon Platinum include some mindless fappery (“#10: It’s everything you’ve always loved about Pokemon!”), but the real meaty chunks are meaty indeed. Platinum is definitely the biggest Pokemon game to date, which helps to ameliorate the long-held feeling that each generation’s third game is nothing more than a tweaked cash-in. (Witness Crystal to Silver/Gold, and Emerald to Ruby/Sapphire.)

Several Gyms have been changed entirely. The core Sinnoh Pokedex has been upped to over 200. The new subplot (featuring Team Galactic and monstrous pokemon Giratina) highlights an M.C. Esher-inspired level called Distortion World. A new WiFi area lets you stroll through an amusement park with touchsceen toys to share and multiplayer mini-games to play. And if you have an online trade cooking, the game will message your Wii to let you know if it has completed!

Then there’s these mysterious silhouettes:

Which Poke-fans have already sussed out to be additional varieties of Rotom based on household appliances. The first Rotom, found in Pokemon Pearl/Diamond, resembles a television set.

As a Wii launch title, Excite Truck was an uneven affair. Lots of people liked it; lots of people ignored it. Perhaps the biggest factor against it was some general blandness. It did not feel or look like a core Nintendo release, and the connection to the two Excitebike games was tenuous at best.

Well, there will be nothing boring in the sequel, Excitebots: Trick Racing, as the ho-hum trucks have been shown the door in favor of giant animal robot cars. Excitebots is instantly franchise material in a way that Excite Truck could never be. Giant animal robot cars!

Developer Monster Games thinks ‘Bots is easier to control, thanks to improved handling. And while the game will support Mario Kart’s Wii Wheel (which seems like a no-duh since the original was basically Wii Wheel without the Wii Wheel), ‘Bots will not have alternate schemes for the Nunchuk or GameCube controllers. But it will have online multiplayer!

If you remember the two original A Boy and His Blob games, you’re probably pretty old (in video game years). The NES game appeared in 1989 and a Game Boy sequel arrived a year later. Since then, the name has been dormant and several hardware generations have come and gone without ever knowing the joy of feeding jellybeans to the Shmoo. (And if you get the Shmoo ref, you’re even older. Thanks for coming. Shall I go for a Herculoids gag?)

The Wii title is essentially a new take on the original. The Blob is an alien lost on Earth, in search of help to liberate his home planet. He finds the Boy (who appears significantly aged down from the tall pixel nerd of the original) and they discover that different flavors of jellybeans will transform the Blob into various useful forms. A licorice bean creates a Blob ladder. Tangerine makes a trampoline. Lime turns Blob into a key. By cleverly managing your jellybean supply, you must guide the pair through a traditional platforming environment.

What made the original such a memorable title was the unexpected puzzlely nature. It looked like a Mario platformer, but you needed to think your way through it since the Boy could not leap like Mario. What makes the new edition an instant standout is the handdrawn 2D animation and lush painted backgrounds. Like Wario Land: Shake It (your mother will be a natural), the new Boy & Blob proves that modern 2D can be beautiful.

Oh, and developer WayForward (LIT, Shantae, Contra 4) is heavily hinting that the ketchup-flavored bean – which you could use to warp the Blob instantly to the Boy’s location, should they become separated – will not return in the Wii version.

Shop Channel Staff Picks: Wolf of the Battlefield: Mercs (Genesis), LIT (WiiWare)

Top scoring Wii review: Madworld, 9.0 (all scores out of 10)
Top scoring DS review: Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, 9.0
Lowest rated Wii review: MotoGP, 4.0
Lowest rated DS review: Lux Pain 4.0

Lots of important reviews this month. Henry Hatsworth, Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, Peggle Dual Shot, Gardening Mama and Avalon Code all scored 8.0 or higher. On the disappointing side, Tokyo Beat Down got a 6, Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers is a 6.5, Ready 2 Rumble Revolution ranked 5.0, and both Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time versions scored in the 6′s.

And we have one more giggle at the expense of Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop:

For the second month in a row, Capcom opted not to send us a copy for review – not a good sign, especially since the game will be out by the time you read this. We’re calling this one dead on arrival.

This issue’s Fatal Frame Fakeout – The preview article on Dead Space No Colon Extraction is titled “The Fatal Frontier” and it features a bunch of dark, indeterminate screenshots. For a split second I thought we finally had some news on the Western release of Fatal Frame 4.

A tech detail you may have missed – The DSi will play music off an SD card, as long as the song is in AAC format. You can screw with the song by changing the speed and pitch and adding audio filters. NP also mentions a Mario visualizer that sorts of makes your music look like a game.

Start the begging campaign now – You may remember Japanese WiiWare title Pole’s Big Adventure when it made the weblog rounds a few months ago due to some penis-related sight gags. Although NP manages to sidestep any penile issues, they do show off a amazing NES parody that we should all get behind right away. When Pole hops into a green pipe, he comes out covered in crap. Naturally, there’s no US release in sight for this one.

Yes, you want Klonoa – The Wii remake of this cult 1998 PS1 platformer has full English voice acting as part of the coat of paint… but you can set it to the original MIDI-level gibberish! Plus, the game supports GameCube and Classic Controllers. We need more Wii games to do that.

Are you missing WarioWare? – Then you will want Rhythm Heaven, coming to DS next month. Although all fifty games revolve around a similar input mechanic – tapping to the beat with the stylus – Rhythm Heaven rallies around the bizarre Japan-o-random visuals that turned WarioWare into a franchise.

Next month in Nintendo Power… the teaser page has a bunch of cold-related puns. Is this the triumphant return of Ice Climber?