Games Galore: Sega's Spring Showcase - Page 2

To be very clear – both experiences were enjoyable, we can imagine playing on both systems for hours with friends, but we definitely preferred the Move.  Perhaps the most important part of that last sentence was the "with friends" bit – as much fun as the Move and Kinect may be, they don't allow for the same degree of control as using a traditional gamepad.  People going through the career mode—which has been expanded for this latest outing—are probably going to want to do it with an old-school gamepad instead of on a Kinect or Move so that they can have much more control over the ball.

Slightly winded from humiliating Andy Roddick in Virtua Tennis 4, we moved on to Yakuza 4 where we saw some of the minigames in action and got a glimpse of the world in which the title operates.  As has been highly publicized, unlike Yakuza 3, Yakuza 4's North American release will contain the minigames which were in the Japanese version.  Now, as for the specifics of the minigames we saw, we can say that the title certainly earns its M rating and that those people who detest the appearance of adult themes within videogames will not particularly enjoy Yakuza 4's offerings.

As for the game's world, it seems to be of very good size and offers a whole lot of details – shops sell real world brands; loads of sidequests exist; and if you head down the wrong street, gangs of thugs will try to give you what-for.  Playing through everything in the entire title, including all the sidequests, we're told will take somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 hours. 

From the mature to the ridiculous, the next title we saw was Super Monkey Ball 3D.  Never having gotten our grubby little hands on a Nintendo 3DS until yesterday, it took a little time for us to get acclimated to the 3D-ness of it all.  Once we did, we quite liked what we saw.  Monkey Ball's graphics, running at 60 frames per second, were really impressive – fluid, bright, and beautiful.  Trying to hold the system perfectly still so as to not move the screen from the 3D sweet spot proved a little difficult, but we eventually get the hang of it and grabbed our fair share of bananas.

Well, we did in single-player, but playing local multiplayer was a different experience.  We saw two different multiplayer modes, the first of which had us bash one another repeatedly, something which we spent more time doing than grabbing bananas (it's the bananas which determine victory, not the bashing).   The second multiplayer game was a kart-style racer and even though we ran our first lap rather slowly, we picked up the pace for the second and third laps and finished respectably (low overall but in spot two of the four humans playing). 

Article Author: Josh Lasser

Josh Lasser, formerly known as "TV and Film Guy," and complete with a Masters Degree in Critical Studies in said areas, gives his opinions on TV, Film, and Entertainment in general. All of which he does in a shameless attempt to try to get paid to do the exact same thing. …

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