Guitar Hero

When I first saw Guitar Hero I had no idea what the game was. Then about a three months later I picked up the color coded string based plastic guitar and rocked the house. Of course I was only on medium difficulty at the time, but who cares.
Guitar hero did for me what dance dance revolution would do for someone who has no rhythm. It made me feel as if I could actually play guitar in real life. Some of the more notable points of Guitar Hero are the facts that it weaves you into harder difficulty with the songs getting harder and harder as you play through the difficulty. By the time you beat all the songs on one difficulty, you are inevitably ready to take on the easiest song of the next difficutly.
Guitar Hero mimicks the motions of moving up and down the frets pretty well. I found that I did a lot better in hitting notes that I otherwise might have been late hitting if I simply slid my hand up and down the frets rather than trying to take my finger off the fret and putting it on another fret. Again, mimicking real guitar playing.
The song selection in my mind was great. There were a lot of songs I recognized, and I'm not even a rock fan. I also like the fact that the song selection was spread out with a little bit of rock, pop rock, and somewhat jazz like tunes. Overall, if you want to feel like you can rock out and get on stage with the best of the best (while still knowing you only completed easy mode), Guitar Hero is a great game.

Kingdom Hearts 2

Kingdom Hearts 2 is a significant step up from its predecessor. Not only is the game-play virtually one dimensional as in the last game, i.e. the magic attacks were all forward firing magic attacks, the attacks were the same three combo moves and the innovation of gameplay just was not there; but the story line is also up to par.

Coming froma player who did not play Chain of Memories on Gameboy advance, I had no problem understanding the story line. It's not the hardest story line to understand, but that's not to say that you can skip over all of the drawn out and multiples cut-scenes throughout the game.

Kingdom Hearts 2 brought something that I did not expect from the Kingdom Hearts franchise. It brought the sense of a true RPG in an easy to understand module that was extremely fast paced. Take for example the triangle button. This one button, during different parts of the game, allowed you to perform various enhanced attacks that are otherwise unavailable to the traditional 3 part combo move displayed using the X-button.

Therefore this makes the gameplay much faster and interactive and less boring. It also adds the extra movie element to the game where the player feels like they are in control but just enough out of control to watch amazing action.

The teamup attacks are probably one of the best innovations of the game. Not only can you fight side by side with multiple Disney characters including Mulan, Captain Jack and Simba, but you can actually team up to control them using, you guessed it, the triangle button. This is the part of the game that makes it a lot more fast and interactive than games past.

The story line of the game follows pretty much the end of Kingdom Hearts, but with a twist. Instead of just having the heartless, there are beings known as the Nobodies. Sometimes it seems that the Nobodies are battling the heartless and the heartless are battling you and you are battling both, which can make for some extremely confusing scenarios.

Overall, the fast gameplay, the collective fighting with other disney and Final Fantasy, characters, the new summons and drive meter, and the unbelievable story line to intertwine all of this makes for an exciting game.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance

Outside looking in this game looks to be amazing. Not because of its unique game play (since it is almost identical to the X-Men Legends series), not because of it's graphics, and not because of its pretty well molded story-line. This game looks amazing because there are so many different marvel characters. I admire what Marvel tried doing, I really do. What haunts me is the fact that I didn't know half of the villains. Unless you are a fan of most of the Marvel comics you'd have a hard time identifying some of these villains too. Radioactive Man? Yeah I thought it was cheesy too. Where's Hobgoblin? Venom? Sandman? Mr. Sinister? Kingpin? The Sentinels? And many many more villains? Ok, I can understand that Marvel can't put in all of the characters, but at least when you say I can play with over 20 characters, make them characters worth playing with. I had no interest in Spider-Woman and Ms. Marvel. Give me Beast, Magneto, or even make Venom a good guy. Contrary to the statements so far, I liked this game a lot. The game was fun and has pretty decent replay value pending that you are interested in seeing the alternate endings for things that you decide to do and not to do. But overall I feel that more could have been put into this game to make it superb. Maybe number two will be better.

Wii motion too much?

Wii motion plus for Alliance

Commenting on the gamespot.com review of Marvel Ultimate Alliance I have to slightly agree and disagree with them. Ultimate Alliance for all purposes is the same game on the Wii and the PS2. That being the case they are two totally different experiences. I agree that the camera movement in the nunchuk controller is an added plus. However, the motion sensor does not take away from the core play to make it a solid game. People have the tendency to swipe and swoop the controller all over the place while their character on screen is still performing an attack. Patience is the key here. It is odd that the reviewers on such an esteemed video game website did not take this into account when evaluating the experience of the “Wiimote.” Moving the controller constantly throughout the game helps the game not become so repetitive. If the player knows to move the controller left while holding B to do a move then they never will have to scroll through the list of special powers to actually perform the move. That alone is innovation enough from the PS2 to the Wii.