BOLDSTATE– “Even if a year passes, Mario [will still sell],” Shigeru Miyamoto said to Japanese retailers during a demonstration of New Super Mario Bros. Wii last week according to retailer Games Maya.

Miyamoto, game designer and general manager of Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development, announced NSMBW would be sold in Japan for ¥5,800 beginning Dec. 3, nearly three weeks after it is released in North America.

—Original Article–

Will New Super Mario Bros. Wii Be A Long Seller?

Kotaku, Brian Ashcraft– Last week, Nintendo held an event for Japanese retailers. New Super Mario Bros. Wii was dated and priced for Japan, apparently. Nintendo’s resident game wizard Shigeru Miyamoto talked and demoed the game as well. But what did he say?

[Jump]

We don’t know. All we know is that the manager of Japanese shop Games Maya quotes Miyamoto as pointing out, “Even if a year passes, Mario is still sells.”

If past Mario titles are anything to go by, Miyamoto isn’t probably right — he is right.

伝わってきました〜♪ [**店長からのメッセージ**]

—AP—

As this is my first AP post, I’ll begin by explaining the goal I’m trying to accomplish by recycling “professional” posts. It’s simple. I’m just re-writing posts from professional video game blogs using a more professional journalistic writing style. It’s my motivation for doing this that requires more background.

It bothers me that several of the most prominent, professional video game blogs spew out undigested bits of information that, in turn, are re-spewed out by many amateur blogs, all of which receive more traffic and commentary than I do here.

I reluctantly visit Kotaku daily as they are well-connected in the video game industry, and visiting often guarantees I won’t have to sift through pages of garbage each and every time. Still, the constant updates regarding rhythm games, lawsuits, scantily clad women, and all you could ever want to know about AAA titles like Brutal Legend and Uncharted 2 leave me desensitized, not only to posts in those veins, but majority of posts in general. Something really needs to pop out and grab my attention if I’m going to “make the jump.” And jump I will because making money comes before informing your audience at Kotaku.

If I’ve been correctly informed, bloggers at sites like Kotaku get paid by the click; that is, how many people decide to view the whole post. In order to guarantee the click of any slightly interested reader, Kotaku’s bloggers often tease desired information on the main page, implying the answers are just a “jump” away. This is in direct contrast to the philosophy behind leads in professional journalism. My example here hits on everything that is wrong with Kotaku’s style of “journalism.”

Perhaps Ashcraft’s worst offense here is his horrible misuse of the “jump.” Miyamoto said something to Japanese game retailers last week while demoing NSMBW, and Ashcraft implies he has that information after the jump. What did Miyamoto say? “We don’t know,” Ashcraft writes. He does, however, have a poorly translated quote of a quote from a (literal) no name manager from some retailer we’ve never heard of. The quote? Mario will still sell a year from now. Earth-shattering stuff.

Aside from tricking readers to make the jump with an empty promise and offering no news other than a Japanese price and release date (which he failed to put into context for his primarily North American readership), Ashcraft presents terrible writing in general. The structure and language is all wrong and screams worse than amateur. I seriously wonder if Ashcraft was drunk, high, or just half asleep when he posted this “information.”

I may be stepping on some toes here, but I can’t stand what passes for journalism in my chosen industry. If I’m ever to become a professional, it’s precisely this type of drivel that I hope to do away with.

Hello. My name is Chas, and I’m a video game addict.

It’s been over a month since my last post, but I’ve been playing more games than usual lately: Scribblenauts, Okami, Final Fantasy VI, Modern Warfare, Muramasa: The Demon Blade, and I’m about to play through Lost Winds again. I also have a new addiction thanks to Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. It’s not the game, however, that has me obsessed, but the tea brewing mini-game.

An in-game hobby of the professor’s has become a real-world hobby of my own.

I’ve been drinking tea for the last three weeks or so, finally realizing what I had been missing all these years.

When Layton and his apprentice Luke arrive in the gloomy city of Folsense, the professor decides the stressed citizens could use a nice cup of tea, each specified to their liking. This forms the basis for the most interesting, and frustrating, of Diabolical Box’s mini-games.

You begin with three basic ingredients, which you can combine in a teapot to brew a potential winner. Not every combination works, and Layton and Luke will tell you just how awful your concoction tastes when you screw up. Of course, they’ll also rave about how great and unique the flavor is when you get it right.

Each citizen will present you with a different situation, which can only be remedied by a specific brew: one lady is concerned about her skin, a rugged man in an alley way is longing for the specialty of a long gone bar, and a diligent lookout needs something that will put some pep in his step. As you help each person with their favorite cup of tea, they may offer you a new ingredient. Each has a brief description describing its taste and effect on the final drink; your clues to what constitutes a desired brew.

I suppose it was the detailed descriptions of the great flavors and uplifting effects that piqued my interest, but I found myself grabbing a a sampler box of various teas while making my grocery bill. A bit of research revealed that a little milk and honey go a long way with herbal teas like my new favorite chamomile. I also tried a sampler of the more popular English teas, which taste great plain with just a little sugar. Earl Gray is my current drink of choice.

This sudden obsession with drinking and learning more about tea had me wondering how video games could be effective tools for motivating this type of behavior in all sorts of ways. The only other game I could recall that affected my real world interests in this way was Okami, which resulted in my purchase of a cheap bottle of sake. I was interested in seeing if I could truly tolerate sipping such a drink, but the incredibly dry white wine flavor didn’t appeal to me at all. Surely, there are more enjoyable, and responsible, behaviors games can inspire.

I can see games easily proving interest in hobbies like cooking, bird-watching, Taekwondo, etc. just by adding layers of detail and portraying the activities in a positive light, but most games revolve around intangible concepts like magic or unreal martial arts. Drawing magic from materia or flying through the air with massive swords as in Final Fantasy VII and Advent Children could inspire the study of mythology (Shiva, Odin, Hades) or lead to an interest in over the top martial arts movies, but they don’t lead to a practical, tangible hobby.

I’ll be on the lookout for more games like Diabolical Box or Okami. Though these effects may be minor, I think they over a great deal to the argument that video games are a legitimate medium.

My review of Bit.Trip Core is live on Game Positive. The game joins its predecessor and several other games that make me glad Nintendo hasn’t canceled its download services outright. Core consists of only three levels, and it doesn’t take long to complete overall. Of course, it doesn’t cost much either, and the number of times you’ll play through each level (without frustration) will more than guarantee the six dollar purchase.

When most students return to Nicholls State University this week, they’ll find every vehicle in the school’s various parking lots showing off the university’s new interpretation of their controversial mascot, Colonel Tillou. The controversy is new again, however, as instead of seeing a supporter of the confederacy, some students and alumni feel the new mascot resembles a Nazi.

Others, like myself, will see a different evil dictator while on campus.

Have a great school year, everyone!

I’m sitting in my living room, listening to the same chip tune play over and over on a loop as I type this post. Bit.Trip Core’s title screen is displayed on my television, and it’s indicating that I have yet to beat the game’s second level.

Discovery was easy enough, but I’m having trouble beating the boss of Exploration, an homage to Missile Command. I want to beat the level as soon as possible so I can play the third and final level of Core and get started on my review, but I know that when I reach it, I’ll be in the same rut I’m in now. In fact, I’ll be there longer.

I know, because I’m also stuck on Growth, the third level of Bit.Trip Beat, which is Mega Man hard. And like Mega Man’s sequel, Bit.Trip Core is even harder than its predecessor. Also like Mega Man 2, Core is a much deeper game.

I’m reviewing Bit.Trip Core for Game Positive. In fact, this will be the first review that comes as both a request from my editor and comes with the game thrown in gratis (all six bucks worth!) as publisher Aksys is looking for more reviewers to shed some light on their series.

In preparation for the review, I downloaded Bit.Trip Beat so I could be familiar with the start of the series and recognize what makes Bit.Trip tick. My conclusion?

Beat-focused pattern-recognition and reflex-testing with retro flair.

Each time I try my hand at Discovery (and hopefully get a little better), I toss out potential lines for my final review in my head:

Core takes what Beat started and adds four quadrants of depth, requiring more keen reflexes and more fast-paced memorization.

While Beat was a more passive rhythmic experience, Core puts the player in an active role, requiring him to literally blast out the beat with his blocky, orange laser beam.

I can’t help but notice how nearly every observation I make, like the ones above, deal with how Core stacks up as a sequel and how the Bit.Trip series stacks up as a rhythm game. That’s because I recently read some of flOw and Flower developer Jenova Chen’s thoughts on how reviewers should approach games.

Chen believes that game reviewers focus far too much on the specific technical elements of games like graphics and sound. It’s true that many reviewers follow rigid formats requiring them to touch on these elements, often in a specific order, for the games they review. I actually follow such a format at Game Positive.

Instead of focusing on how well games looks and sound, Chen thinks reviewers should focus on how a game makes us feel. The thought is admirable, but I think Chen is giving majority of modern games way too much credit. Most modern games don’t make me feel much of anything significant, but that’s because most don’t focus on trying to make players feel.

Having these thoughts bother me while I start planning my review of Bit.Trip Core might be uncalled for, but Chen’s ideas have me thinking about the smaller bits of content in my reviews. For example, I was planning on mentioning Core’s inclusion of a meter that indicates how far along you are in each stage as an improvement over Beat, and, if it matched the final tone of my review, I may have even gone on to offer my idea for bettering the game by allowing players to continue from the sections indicated in the meter.

Is that even acceptable to do in a review of a game? Is it a reviewers job to offer constructive criticism?

On the one hand, it makes the game’s developer aware of what wasn’t liked but could be fixed. On the other hand, do reviewers know enough about game development to offer such a suggestion? And does the reviewer’s audience even care about his suggestions or do they just want to know what’s wrong (or right) with the game in question?

Looking at it now, I think mentioning the progression meter would be nothing more than a trivial detail, not even worth its own sentence in my review as it surely wouldn’t guarantee or ward off a purchase. As for my suggestion that players should be able to continue from the individual sections within each stage, who’s to say developer Gaijin Games didn’t try just that and decided against it because it made the game too easy. It is only three levels long.

Instead, I’ll focus on the core experience of Core, describing everything one needs to know in order to truly grasp the gameplay. I think in that way, I will be describing how the game makes the player feel. It doesn’t have to be something profound like love or sorrow; just a feeling like exhilaration or frustration, everyday video game feelings.

The video game community is quick to dismiss the occasional claim games are becoming racially charged, but many fail to fully understand the issue, posting shallow arguments on popular gaming blogs.

In response to an article in the Houston Chronicle citing Left 4 Dead 2 as an example of racism in video games becoming “the norm”, Chet Faliszek, a writer for L4D2, said, “when two of the characters in your game are African-American, it’s a weird thing to be accused of [racism]. (src)”

Faliszek is correct in that, as far as anyone can tell, his game is in no way racist, but his argument is in the same vein as those of countless posters on Kotaku: shallow and flawed.

Willie Jefferson, author of the article in the Houston Chronicle, claims Left 4 Dead 2, Resident Evil 5, and Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood signify an increase in racist undertones, but his argument against L4D2 is more about social awareness and sensitivity regarding Hurricane Katrina.

Set in New Orleans, players will have to fight their way through hordes of zombies – with several of them who appear to be African-Americans. When I saw the first trailer for the game, all I could think about was Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. Setting the game in a city that was scene of dead, bloated bodies floating by so soon afterward was a bad call, IMHO. The city has had enough to deal with — Valve, you should have spared them, even if it’s just a video game.

Both Jefferson’s arguments that L4D2 is racist because it depicts black zombies and that the people of New Orleans simply cannot handle a game featuring violence in their city is flimsy. I’ve lived an hour away from the city my entire life and have been there numerous times before and after the storm. Currently, there isn’t a sense the city needs to be “spared.”

Left 4 Dead 2 is only inserted alongside Resident Evil 5 in Jefferson’s argument for dramatic effect so his objection to Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood’s confederate protagonist seems more significant. I haven’t played Juarez, so I can’t judge Jefferson’s opinion, though I doubt the game is so shocking it forced him to drop the controller. I have, however, played Resident Evil 5, a much more popular game with much more infamous claims of racial undertones plaguing it. Jefferson’s mentioning of RE5 is only used as a segue into his Juarez rant.

Resident Evil 5 puts gamers into the heart of Africa, blasting zombies. I bet you’ll never guess what color they are.

If game developers and the like are going to use history and certain locations, they should be prepared to suffer the backlash that comes from it. It could be perceived as being racist – and turn some potential customers off.

The wording of Jefferson’s facetious bet invites the popular argument “It’s not racist to feature black zombies in Africa.”

It’s in this sense that Faliszek’s defense of Left 4 Dead 2 is flawed. He tries to justify the game’s objective of killing zombies, some of which are black, in New Orleans by pointing out the fact two of the protagonists are black as well. Just by trying to justify his game, Faliszek is giving too much credibility to Jefferson’s claim.

Left 4 Dead 2 doesn’t need to be defended as Jefferson is the only person I’m aware of to have such an opinion about the game so well publicized, but even if the game did need defending, the justification that it’s okay as long as black people are killing black people doesn’t counter the original argument. Jefferson just needs to be told, probably by a resident of New Orleans, that there’s nothing insensitive about killing zombies in a video game taking place in the city.

Jefferson’s second statement goes overlooked (probably because the rest of his argument is shallow and flawed) despite being very true.

Anyone who backs such an argument is totally missing the point. Of course, Africa is predominantly populated by black people. Of course, it would be ridiculous to feature another race in an attempt to be politically correct. And of course, Resident Evil 5 is not a video game interpretation of a real event. Why then did the game, belonging to a series known for its hordes of local zombies, have to take place in Africa, a continent predominantly populated by black people?

Resident Evil 5 is not racist, but it is an irresponsible move on Capcom’s part that could have been handled much better.

At one point, there had to have been a meeting or series of emails between the creative staff behind RE5 in which the African setting was approved. It’s not hard to imagine the idea being brought up because of the huge departure it would be for the series, which typically took place in more urban environments and had recently visited Spanish farming villages and castles. Of course, there had to have been discussion on the depiction of the game’s enemies, local African villagers infected with parasites which turn them into violent beasts. The game didn’t have to take place in Africa.

Many people bring up Japan’s separation from America’s racial history to justify Capcom’s portrayal of RE5’s black zombies, but it doesn’t take much research to discover our country’s troubled past dealing with racism, specifically racism aimed at African-Americans. Capcom went a step further, however, and featured enemies wearing grass skirts and armed with throwing spears, all to achieve a themed set-piece which amounts to a small portion of the game.

Anyone who has played through RE5 should be able to tell you the game is not racist. Such a claim would imply the game’s designers purposely injected racially insensitive elements not only to shock and offend players but to express their hatred for all people of African descent. This is a bold claim that obviously isn’t true. Nothing, not even the game’s occasionally insensitive depiction of Africans, carries with it a underlying message of hatred.

Resident Evil 5 just tries to be a fun, action-packed game in a new environment. Again, the game isn’t racist, but irresponsible with some of its imagery.

There is another aspect of the RE5 argument that is often stated, but even more flawed than defending the game because it takes place in Africa: the idea that killing Spanish enemies should carry the same weight as killing African enemies.

Obviously, Jefferson blew the instances of what he believed to be racism out of proportion, but it is a fact that, at least in America, racism aimed at African-Americans carries far more weight than that aimed at people of Spanish descent. A white man tearing through the Spanish countryside, guns blazing doesn’t conjure up the same racial images of a white man doing the same in an African village.

Again, it’s not inherently racist to depict either situation, but one can be construed as such much more easily, and in a medium so misunderstood by those who don’t associate with it on a regular basis like most people with more than a passing interest in video games, it’s irresponsible to carelessly raise a lightning rod on top of the industry like that.

I’ve never played a racist game, one that was designed with a message of racial hate like I mentioned above. While I’ve seen numerous examples of insensitive images and portrayals through the years, I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of such a game either. To my knowledge, there’s nothing in the video game world that goes beyond what we see and usually accept in movies and especially hear in music. Video games are part of a young medium, misunderstood by many and susceptible to all sorts of accusations.

The worst thing we as fans of the medium can do is express our opposition to flimsy arguments with equally flimsy arguments.

I apologize for the late review, but several important revisions were necessary for the final draft of my take on The Conduit. Originally, I compared The Conduit to first-person shooters on other platforms in order to make the broader comparison of the Wii’s lesser position to the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. That was a bit ambitious and out of place for a simple review, so I decided to take my opinion and expand upon it here in my blog.

The Conduit begs players to ask,

“Is good for the Wii good enough?” The answer is a strong “no.”

If it’s not obvious by now, I was severely disappointed by The Conduit. Sadly, I agree with the critics: The Conduit supports the best online multiplayer on the Wii. In fact, I reluctantly listed working online as the game’s only positive in my review, something I wouldn’t dream of doing for a game on any other platform, not even a handheld.

So, what does it say about a system when supporting basic features is something to be praised? It says the system is not part of the modern generation but something else, something “hardcore” gamers don’t want.

I don’t know when it happened, but I went from defending the Wii, claiming it was an innovative machine beyond the current generation, to condemning it as an outdated platform which has abandoned its oldest fans. The Conduit only solidifies my current view after seeing professional reviewers, and even myself, praise a game for working. That’s all, though. It works, but it’s not good.

Looking at The Conduit’s multiplayer, you might get the impression it was inspired by the likes of GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, and Halo. Of course, The Conduit is lacking the warm nostalgia of the former two and the quality mechanics and presentation of the latter.

Players clip through one another in The Conduit. Gun fights are won by unloading multiple clips of ammunition into another player’s face at point-blank range while jumping and circle strafing. It’s 1997 all over again, but High Voltage Software is either unaware the FPS genre has changed for the better over the past decade or incapable of adopting accepted FPS mechanics either because the Wii is a sub-par system or they’re just not talented. It’s probably a bit of both.

I doubt High Voltage’s talent because of The Conduit’s poor presentation. As I mentioned in my review, the game’s recreation of the White House features doors with eye-level doorknobs and an Oval Office with a two-foot tall desk. The plot is treated with the same lack of polish. There are three characters in The Conduit, none with any real motivation and none ever really seen. The poor quality plagues the entire campaign by requiring the player to accomplish the same pointless objective over and over again. Destroy the steam valves, destroy the egg sacs, destroy the radio jammers, destroy this, destroy that, all in linear, ugly levels.

The Conduit’s original hype surrounded High Voltage’s unique graphics engine, designed to rival Xbox 360 graphics. You wouldn’t know that looking at the game, however. What’s worse is that, even if the game did look good, all you would see is good looking yet boring environments. The art design is terribly boring. There’s nothing remarkable about the way The Conduit looks, sounds, or even plays.

Yes, it’s a first-person shooter featuring motion controls, and thankfully, the controls actually work, but you’ll notice I didn’t list the customizable controls as one of The Conduit’s positives. That’s because there isn’t much to the button mapping. You don’t have full control as many reviews suggest. Certain actions are locked down to a select few buttons. The real control comes in adjusting the sensitivity, but I had great success in the campaign and especially online with the default sensitivity settings. The controls are much ado about nothing, really.

The Conduit’s “plethora” of online modes was also subject to much hype in the weeks leading up to the game’s release. Players might be disappointed to find, however, that The Conduit features two basic game modes: death match and capture the flag. Everything else is just a variation. You get to vote for which mode you want to play next along with the weapons and level, but with options like Marathon (a twenty-minute deathmatch) thrown in the mix, your votes rarely turn out the way you’d like.

It’s hard to put exactly what’s wrong with The Conduit into words without getting too specific. It’s a poorly developed game for a weak system, and it’s only receiving attention because it’s on that system. Were The Conduit a PS3 or 360 game, it would have been brushed aside almost immediately for how incredibly generic it is. The few reviews that would get written wouldn’t dare mention the online with any sort of positive tone.

But the game is on the Wii, and it does feature a working online multiplayer, but that only serves to highlight the weaknesses of both the game and the platform. “Good for the Wii” is not a compliment, but The Conduit isn’t even a good Wii game. It’s a sub-par game for a sub-par system.

I’ve heard the line that, if the Wii is all you own, The Conduit is a good buy. That’s just not true. If you can derive enjoyment from The Conduit, there are many infinitely superior first-person shooters on better platforms. It might as well be a fact that games like Halo 3, Bad Company, and Modern Warfare are better first-person shooters. If The Conduit is the best FPS you own, you’re missing out on undeniably better games.

Last year, Microsoft’s big E3 announcement was Final Fantasy XIII coming to the Xbox 360. Some Sony fans complained about Microsoft moving in on their system’s coveted franchise, but this year, Microsoft is moving in on Nintendo, and in a much bigger way by introducing their motion controller, or lack thereof, Project Natal.

“The controller is a barrier seperating video game players from everyone else,” Don Mattrick, senior Xbox VP, said in his introduction of Microsoft’s rumored motion controller. The term “controller” is actually a bit misleading as the motivation behind Natal is eliminating the physical controller and replacing it with the player’s entire body.

While the idea is obviously linked to that of the Wii’s motion controls, Natal looks to expand far beyond Nintendo’s current reach, if only because the technology appears to be far superior to that of the Wii remote and Nunchuk. I’m a bit skeptical, however, that Natal will usher in the revolution in gaming Mircrosoft’s presenters implied.

I was immediately skeptical of the device during the trailer that was showed in the beginning. Kicking soccer balls and swatting airplanes as a giant monster scream I-Toy mini-games, and while simple games shown like Richochet look to actually have fluid, 1:1 body control in a 3D environment, I’m skeptical that some of the more specific motions can truly be reconized as easily as shown. Opening your mouth to blow fire in the monster game or reaching down to shift gears in a racing game are tiny yet specific motions that I can’t imagine will work as flawlessly as previewed.

The demo of Paint Party, a game that has you hurling paint onto a canvas with your hands, seems to show how unwieldy some of the more specific motions actually are. And while the camera was able to recognize the host quickly even with his large sunglasses on, his demonstration of how avatars follow your motions looked off, with his avatar contorting his legs in odd directions.

Peter Molyneaux, the man behind ambitious games like Black & White and Fable, previewed the deepest demo of Natal’s potential. His team has developed a program that has players interacting with Milo, a boy that can recognize faces and voices, allowing players to interact with him in multiple ways. Some of the interactions were interesting such as Milo throwing the player a pair of goggles and recognizing when they accomplish the motion of “putting on” the goggles. The game is also capable of displaying your image seamlessly onto the screen, in this case, a reflection onto the water where you can run your fingers across the surface to create ripples.

At one point, Milo asked the player to draw a fish, but in real life, not in the game. The girl playing drew a fish on a sheet of paper and quickly scanned the image in front of the camera. The motion took only a second, but I doubt the scan was as deep as the preview let on. Milo only commented on the color and nothing more. This scanning feature was also displayed in the trailer, in which a boy scanned his skateboard and immediately started skating around on it.

I’m not doubting Natal is incapable of these features, only that Microsoft is doing exactly what Nintendo did when they revealed the Wii: exaggerating the actual motion controls in an attempt to showcase their potential rather than application. If the Wii is any indication, this will only lead to disappointment.

Project Natal might launch the 360 above even the Wii financially, but I’m doubtful Natal will ever be any more substantial than the Wii. While games on Nintendo featuring motion controls can still be full-fledged gaming experiences, I can’t see Natal games being anything more than a distraction or a fun thing to show off when friends are around.

Natal is being demoed to select audiences at E3, so I’m sure we’ll be receiving first impressions from some of the major gaming blogs in the coming week. These are just my impressions from Microsoft’s showing. I’m glad the company is making the move to bring games to the forefront by combining them with other media, but I can’t help doubting the potential of their latest innovation.

Thankfully, there are a ton of great games coming to the 360 in 2009 and 2010. I’ll be posting more about those later in the week.

My review of Punch-Out!! is live on GamePositive+, but there’s not much to say about the game other than “Punch-Out!! fans, go play it!!” The motion controls might be a gimmick that only hampers the gameplay, but Next Level Games delivered a solid experience that recreates the Mike Tyson experience and expands it into a great new direction. Play it!!

Demoman is a feature in which I make (incredibly harsh) assumptions about upcoming games based on their (horrible) demoes, while making observations about the purpose and importance of video game demoes.

Today’s victims: Miami Law and Knights in the Nightmare

Miami Law (NA release, June 9th)

The Nintendo Channel demo of Miami Law mentions this is only “Demo Vol. 1,” implying that there’s more to come from Hudson. Hopefully, that means they are aware of just how awful a demo this is and they’re working on a better one because, so far, this demo is only working against Miami Law.

The demo consists of two mini-games:  Security Check and Back-up Shooting.

In Security Check, you play the role of Sara, and FBI agent monitoring security cameras in a drug cartel’s hideout. Your job is spot guards on the different screens so your partner Law can be prepared for what’s coming. By tapping guards with the stylus, you’ll alert Law to their presence. Some are a bit tough to spot and there’s a timer running, but this isn’t Where’s Waldo. When you think you’ve spotted all the guards, you press “Enter” you would assume to see Law take out the guards or get shot by ones you may have missed, but you’d be wrong. The demo ends right then and there without any mention of how you did.

Back-up Shooting isn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds. As Law, you drive a car chasing after some escaped criminals on the freeway. Sara shoots at the car while you steer left or right, avoiding traffic. Sara is done taking out the criminals in no longer than a minute and, again, the demo ends.

The game aims to replicate TV crime dramas like Miami Vice, splitting the gameplay between action sequences with Law and puzzle sequences with Sara, but the demo doesn’t really show you any of that. You aren’t told whether or not you found every guard in Sara’s mini-games and you barely do anything in Law’s. I doubt the Nintendo Channel has much of an affect on game sales, but releasing such a poor quality demo of a fairly anticipated game like Miami Law can only hurt sales. Even if it’s just a dozen or so people playing the demo and deciding against buying the game because of it, that still makes uploading the demo onto the channel pointless as I seriously doubt anyone will be convinced to buy after playing this poor example.

Knights in the Nightmare (NA release, June 2)

A bizarre hybrid of genres ranging from strategy RPG to space-shooter, the demo of Sting’s Knights in the Nightmare features just a tutorial of the game. There are seven different lessons to be learned, each featuring multiple demonstrations which you must replicate afterwards.

The game’s concept is a bit confusing despite the Armored Maiden’s bleeping-blooping explanations of the mechanics because the game never actually lets you engage in a battle. Instead, you only complete individual parts of combat and then move onto the next lesson. What you do get to play is interesting, though.

The game puts you in control of a Wisp, which you use to manipulate your spectral knights on a grid in real time. You charge attacks to increase the range of your warriors and drag items to unleash powerful killing blows. When an enemy is defeated, it releases gems that increase your MP when collected. Only the Wisp can be damaged, so when enemies shoot “bullets” you need to avoid them while still activating your units. There’s more to it including a strange “fog” mechanics and “law” and “chaos” phases, but the game never really gives you the opportunity to experience any of these elements in a natural setting. It would have been nice to play thorugh a full battle once you complete the tutorial, but the game just concluded by assuring your success in the full version.

Unlike the Miami Law demo, Knights in the Nightmare’s demo tutorial at least shows players what the full game is somewhat about. Neither demo is very satisfying, and while it’s not exactly the goal of a demo to satisfy the player, a good demo should make the player feel like they’re experiencing a well-polished chunk of gameplay that represents the full version, leaving them with the desire to buy the game.

I suppose the Knights tutorial does that for fans of the bizarre games Atlus is famous for bringing over to the West, but I honestly don’t see the point in going through the trouble of preparing a demo for your game if that demo is going to be sloppy and poorly designed. This seems to be a big problem for third-party developers on the Nintendo Channel, but that’s probably because most of the games they demo there aren’t these innovative games that require an actual demonstration to truly understand. There’s a reason games like Brain Age and Flash Focus are constantly featured on the channel.