Tech.Wapline

In Fires of Liberation, the decorated Ace Combat series roars into the current generation. The scope has expanded to include fantastic online play, and the game has found the perfect balance between a speedy, steady frame rate and quality graphics.

The overall experience is innately rewarding, and it ramps up the challenge throughout the course of the campaign and finishes on a thrilling high note that may very well inspire you to replay the final mission (and others, too) over and over again. Ace Combat 6 doesn’t always sustain this momentum, and you may actually find the early missions a bit tedious. But if you stick with it, it pays off in grand fashion.

There’s a fairly complex web of personal stories that take place between your single-player missions. The breathtaking cutscenes follow a heartbroken mother, a stoic enemy pilot, and other characters on their journeys of discovery and redemption. The story feels somewhat disconnected from the gameplay, given that the scenes don’t directly relate to what you’re doing in the fiery skies. The bad lip synching (the English dialogue is obviously dubbed over animations meant for Japanese speech) certainly doesn’t help the immersion, nor does some of the bland delivery from the voice actors. Yet for all its disconnected personal drama, it gives you a sense of the stakes at hand better than a more sweeping, political narrative would.

This is a key point because you aren’t fighting on familiar turf. Like in previous installments, Ace Combat 6 takes place in a fictional world, although aside from geography and nomenclature, it might as well be our own. The Emmerian good guys seemingly represent the Western world, complete with green-lawned suburban homes, whereas the enemy hails from USSR-inspired Estovakia (a comparison that is cemented in every time you hear an Emmerian refer to the residents at “Stovies”). Don’t assume that the obvious real-world connection means that this story is the typical Cold War yarn of shining good versus stark raving evil, though. This is a tale that really does have two sides.

In contrast to the moving intermissions, battles are fast and furious, and even if you’re a novice, it won’t take you long to light up the heavens with your dogfighting prowess. Flying in Ace Combat 6 is a delight. This isn’t a realistic flight sim–you won’t even be forced to take off and land on your own if you don’t want to. Instead, you can simply enjoy the fun, fluid flight model. Your speed is controlled by the triggers, you yaw with the bumpers, and your flight path is controlled by the left analog stick. If you’re intimidated by flying games, there is a novice control option, but we encourage you to stick with the default control scheme. It’s easy to use and gives you more precise control over your fighter. If you’re a veteran and really want to feel like a top gun, you can grab the $150 package that includes flight sticks. The sticks work just fine and give you that great in-the-cockpit feel. But if you don’t have the cash or are simply cautious about using a yoke and a joystick, don’t worry: Your controller will get the job done serviceably.

There is a good number of real aircraft to choose from, such as the F-22 Raptor and the Tornado, though there aren’t nearly as many as in previous installments. Their basic controls are all the same, but the subtleties among them can have profound effects in the battle zone. Before you enter a mission, you’re briefed on the multiple operations within it, and you can usually choose from a number of starting positions. When choosing aircraft, you need to take into account whether you need to focus on air-to-ground weaponry over air-to-air, whether you need speed over firepower, and whether your preferred plane supports the most helpful special weapon. You can feel these differences at work in every aspect of flight and combat. For example, executing a high-G turn in slower aircraft may cause you to stall more easily, and piloting a quick fighter may make it tougher to destroy multiple ground targets in succession. You’ll want to retry missions with different aircraft once you’ve unlocked them, just to see how those differences play out in the field.

Living in the world of Dave Mirra BMX Challenge would be a blast. Bicycles are the only source of transportation.

Every place you go–from schoolyards to shipyards–seems specially designed to make the most of your hobby. The laws of physics are enforced only on a case-by-case basis. And women frequently ride BMX bikes while dressed as schoolgirls. Yep, living in this world sounds like a hoot. Unfortunately, playing in it–in Dave Mirra BMX Challenge for the Nintendo Wii–is anything but.

BMX Challenge is based on the PSP game of the same name from 2006 and manages to incorporate many of the same qualities from the handheld game, including that game’s haphazard physics implementation, uninspiring course design, and atrocious visuals. In fact, apart from having to wind your way around more pedestrians who appear throughout the various courses in the game, it doesn’t look as if much has been done at all with BMX Challenge’s visuals. Ugly, vaguely blurred textures can be found everywhere, and pop-in seems to run rampant on certain levels. That’s in addition to character models that are just as hideous as they were on the PSP, as well as ho-hum trick and rider animations, and rag-doll crashes that are wholly unconvincing at best. Throw in dull, repetitive audio (both musically and otherwise), and you end up with a game that has one of the poorest presentations of the year.

You control BMX Challenge with the Wii Remote only. To pedal, you press the 2 button, and you steer your bike by holding the remote horizontally and tilting the controller left or right. It takes a few moments to get used to but, to the game’s credit, steering is pretty responsive once you’ve been acclimated to it. To jump off a ledge, you simply flip the remote up quickly. Tricks are handled with a combination of the directional pad and the 1 and 2 buttons. It’s a shame that there aren’t more tricks that involve the Wii Remote’s motion-sensing features but, at the very least, you’ll have a lot of tricks at your disposal with the system as it is.

The heart of the game’s single-player experience is the career mode, where you compete in both race and trick events. You start out by creating a rider based on archetypes so clichéd they’d make John Hughes proud (”nerd,” “hip-hop,” “punk,” “urban,” etc.), and then continue on to the events proper. During these career events, you earn stars based on where you place in the race, as well as for any trick and style points you rack up. Your star total will unlock new events as you progress. The star totals needed to open up many of the later courses in the game on “pro” level require you to not only finish first, but also to finish in style by racking up tricks and taking advantage of the often insane physics on display in the game.

Just as in the PSP game, grinding rails is one of the best bets for racking up trick points. It helps that the game’s grinding mechanic warps you to practically any edge with just a press of the 1 button. It also helps that the balance meter is very forgiving, even when you’re grinding around 90-degree corners, which looks and feels amazingly stupid. A couple of other wonky physics bonuses just to hit the point home: Periodically you can move in reverse at full speed, and at other times, you will slow to a crawl while pedaling for no good reason. In all, you’ll have an easier time earning a real degree in physics than trying to parse its implementation in BMX Challenge.

The Phoenix Wright series has been an unlikely success story in North America. The games have been able to overcome slow pacing, as well as lack of innovation, thanks to likeable characters, engaging storylines, and great music.

The same holds true for the third game in the series Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trials and Tribulations. It does absolutely nothing new with the established formula, but fans of the series will be just fine with that because it has all the gameplay and characters they’ve come to expect from a Phoenix Wright game.

Like the previous Phoenix Wright games, Trials and Tribulations places you in the role of a young attorney named Phoenix Wright. But this time, you’ll play as a few different people, not just Mr. Wright. A few of the game’s five cases take place several years before the present day, so you’ll get to see an awkward college-aged Phoenix find out about his deceased mentor Mia Fey’s past and catch up with a few old friends. Returning characters are both a strength and a weakness for the game. Certain people like Maya or the adorable Pearl are always so dynamic and likeable that they add to the experience, even if their situations change little from game to game. But with other characters, it feels like the developer just got lazy. There’s a character from the last game that’s on trial again for murder and Larry Butz is still a moron that appears in just about every case. That’s not to say there aren’t any new characters; it’s just that with the exception of Prosecutor Godot and young Ms. Hawthorne, many of them aren’t very well developed or are downright annoying.

Like the first two Phoenix Wright games, the writing in Trials and Tribulations is top-notch. The dialogue is well written and natural with humorous pop culture references sprinkled in by writers who have a knack for keeping things from getting too serious. Not many games can get away with nods to Alanis Morissette, Bob Marley, The Rock, and even Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in the middle of a murder investigation.

Even though Phoenix Wright is a defense lawyer, you’ll spend much of your time out in the field talking to witnesses, examining crime scenes for clues, and then presenting those clues to witnesses to learn more about the case. But not everyone wants to cooperate. Some people have deep, dark secrets that they don’t want to share. These secrets are protected by psyche-locks, which can only be broken when you’ve accumulated enough evidence. They were an interesting way of mixing up the gameplay in the last game, but they don’t feel as fresh the second time around.

Courtroom proceedings are unchanged as well. Witnesses will testify, and the defense must find contradictions in their testimonies. This can be done by pressing for more information during cross-examination. When a contradiction is found, you can yell “objection!” into the DS, or if you don’t feel like making a spectacle of yourself in public, you can just tap the screen and then present evidence or character profiles that back up your objection. You’ll want to be sure that you have some evidence when you object or the judge will penalize you for your mistake. If you make too many mistakes, you’ll be doing a large part of the case over, but you can avoid this by saving often and reloading your save file when you mess up. The ability to save then restart at any time is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it renders the penalty system completely pointless, but on the other hand, it makes the game less frustrating because once again there are times where you just don’t know what evidence to present. Thus, the only way to figure it out is through trial and error.

With the core developers of the Tony Hawk franchise off and skating on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the other console versions have been turned over to different developers.

Those developers are Page 44 Studios, who have turned out a version of Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground for the PlayStation 2 and the Wii. As with many multiplatform games, the different versions operate on multiple tiers. The PS3 and 360 obviously had the most work put into them, and the games were clearly designed for those systems. Then there’s the PlayStation 2 and Wii versions, which aren’t nearly as fresh as the 360/PS3 take on the game…which wasn’t especially fresh to begin with. That means you’re left with a third-rate Tony Hawk game that uses some of the elements from the main versions. And if you happen to be playing on the Wii, you also get to deal with a pretty bad set of controls.

The Wii controls weren’t really designed to handle a game like this, especially one with so many different little techniques. They’ve all been squeezed onto the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, but they neither feel intuitive nor take advantage of the Wii’s unique strengths. About the only concession made for the Wii version is that the screen makes note of every time you move the Remote or Nunchuk, so you can at least see what it’s detecting and adjust if that isn’t what you’re trying to do. But it never feels quite right when you’re aggro kicking for more speed by continually lifting the Remote, or when shoving both halves of the controller forward to perform an attack. On the other hand, the PlayStation 2 version has the typical Tony Hawk control set. In both cases, the game runs way too fast and the controls aren’t tight enough to properly control your skater at this high rate of speed. The end result is a skittish-looking game that feels kind of bad.

The controls are applied to a stripped-down take on a typical Tony Hawk adventure. The catch this time around is that there are three different types of main goals: the competitions and photo-taking of the career lifestyle, the rough-and-tumble world of hardcore skating, and the level-editing and climbing of the rigger. However, it’s all awfully straightforward, and none of the goals are especially interesting or memorable. You’ll also encounter street challenges, which set you up to grind specific lines, manual past set markers, and so on. All of this same stuff is present in the 360/PS3 release. The catch is that there just isn’t as much of it on the Wii and PlayStation 2, and the levels feel a little empty as a result. Also, it’s weird that there are “levels” to begin with. Presumably due to technical limitations, the “one large world” concept of the other versions isn’t present on the Wii and PS2. You have to stop, hit a menu, and load up another section of the world to take on different goals. But you don’t need to compare this to the other versions of the game to see its shortcomings. It’s lackluster on its own merits.

The visuals get the point across and look all right compared to other recent PS2 and Wii games. Taken side by side, the Wii version looks a bit cleaner around the edges. Unfortunately, most of the animation appears to be recycled from previous games and doesn’t look so hot. The levels feel sort of barren and lacking in features, and the cutscenes that introduce the goals are all video that was taken from the real-time cutscenes found in the other versions of the game. The sound effects, like the animations, are largely recycled. Some of them don’t match up so well, so you’ll occasionally hear the sound of your board grinding on a metal rail, but you’re pretty clearly grinding on concrete. The game also features the typical sort of multigenre soundtrack that you’d expect from the series.

Now that the main games in the series have moved on to a larger and somewhat more realistic style of level design, it’s hard to go back and break it down into chunks again for these lesser versions. Some chunks don’t have anything interesting to skate on, and it’s a pain to move around the city and go back to accomplish different goals, especially when those goals aren’t very good to begin with. The Tony Hawk series has seen better days on all platforms, but the PS2 and Wii releases are especially shabby this year.

The online-shooter category may be dominated these days by the Xbox 360 and, to a lesser extent, the PlayStation 3.

But that hasn’t stopped Electronic Arts’ studio in Vancouver from bringing frantic, large-scale action to the Wii and PSP with the forthcoming Medal of Honor Heroes 2, which is due to hit both platforms in the second week of November. The game supports 32 players in-game across six maps, which are set across a number of World War II-esque strongholds and crater-pocked battlefields. We went a few rounds online with both versions to see how things are shaping up.

On the Wii, the game has a pretty robust control model that seems as if it will afford you precise shooting when you get past its learning curve. You move with the analog stick and aim with the remote, as per most Wii shooters. You can also go to a view that zooms in through your weapon’s sights, and when you’re in this view you can twist the Nunchuk left and right to subtly lean in those directions, which will naturally come in handy for firing around corners. In the single-player campaign, you’ll have a powerful melee attack that requires you to thrust both controllers forward simultaneously. That attack is still available in the online mode, but as you’d imagine, it can be hard to pull off while you’re engaged in a firefight. So the designers have also added a weaker one-button melee attack that won’t kill in one hit but is much easier to execute.

You’ll get an exceptionally large crosshair in the multiplayer game, which sometimes makes it tough to gauge where exactly you’re shooting at when facing an opponent. At first, it felt as if we were emptying entire clips at our opponents and hitting only air, but after a few minutes we were able to figure out where we ought to be aiming to score effective hits. However, even a headshot won’t necessarily guarantee you a kill. Often when you get a headshot, you’ll see your enemy’s helmet go flying, accompanied by a satisfying metal clang sound. Once your opponent is bare-headed, your shots will certainly kill, but that helmet can sometimes make the difference between life and death when the action is moving quickly.

New to the Wii game’s single-player campaign is a number of gesture-based control mechanics intended to enhance the realism of the combat experience. For instance, when you want to use the bazooka, you’ll have to actually hoist the Wii Remote over your shoulder before you fire, as you would the real weapon. (The Wii will look for the remote to be upside down to verify you’re doing it right.) There’s also a pump-action shotgun that you actually need to pump to reload after each shot–by making a pumping motion with the remote, naturally.

These gestures have made their way into the multiplayer, but in a modified form. In a multiplayer match, you’re permitted to fire the bazooka from the hip for a quick response time, but you’ll lose some accuracy. On the other hand, you’ll have full aiming precision if you hold it up over your shoulder. You can similarly disable the shotgun-pump requirement via a menu option if that seems too laborious for you during a fast-paced multiplayer match (as it did to us). There’s also a motion-based grenade-toss mechanic that has you arm the grenade, then hit the fire button to designate a rough target, and finally make a throwing motion with the remote itself. The strength of your motion here will ultimately determine the grenade’s trajectory.

There will be three modes–deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag–that will occur on the game’s maps, and all of them play out exactly as you’d expect. Luckily, getting into a match will be much easier than with most online Nintendo-based games. No friend codes to be seen here–instead, you’ll use EA’s “EA Nation” Web portal to set up an account and then log in through the game’s front end itself. The EA Nation login will let you browse for running games online, and you’ll be able to jump into or out of games that are running at any time, rather than being required to join a game’s lobby before it starts. The PSP version’s matchmaking works the same way, though it’s inherently less noteworthy there because Sony’s online multiplayer strictures are less severe than Nintendo’s.

It looks as if EA Canada has made a real effort to get solid multiplayer into Heroes 2, especially given that the game is on two platforms that don’t typically excel at online multiplayer. We’ll bring you the final verdict for both the multiplayer and the game’s story-driven single-player campaign when it ships in mid-November.