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BOMBERMAN LAND
Jordan: Poor Bomberman. While lines never seemed to shorten up for most Wii games, Bomberland was lucky to have only one person playing when I noticed it tucked into the very corner of Nintendo's booth. I felt sorry for Bomberman, though after trying the game I'm not really surprised the guy was so neglected.
This game really has nothing to do with traditional Bomberman gameplay. It's a collection of three mini-games that shows off the Wii's functionality but isn't very interesting. The first game has you trying to shoot down rocks as they slowly fly towards you. The second consists of Bomberman rollerblading through a tunnel that you can turn around in order to avoid obstacles, and the third finds our hero trying to keep his balance while a group of punks throw objects at him. I'm sure Hudson will be adding more games to this collection, so if they can come up with more interesting ones, Bomberland may be worth taking a look at. Alas, right now I'd toss it into the same category as Wii Sports.
ELEBITS
Curtis: I'm going to start off by saying something nice. Elebits has a great concept behind it; the Pikmin like characters are cute, and moving around the world, opening drawers, moving fridges, and doing normal things that you would do looking for things in your room proves to be charming.
The game has a lot of work to be done, mainly on the camera/control system and the graphics. First off, the camera seems to be constantly fixed as the player's center of vision. Whereas Red Steel would have a sort of delay on the camera when following the weapon, Elebits seems to move exactly at the same time as the camera, and it can become very, very disorienting (I'm talking seizures and lawsuits and Virtual Boy disorienting).
Next, the graphics. Again, I try not to be "that guy" (you know, that Nintendo fan that is secretly a graphics whore and wants Halo 3 on the Wii), but this game looks like it's an N64 pre-launch title, and nothing "next-gen" should look that bad. Blocky characters, bad textures, and no polish top off this horrendous-looking, but fun-to-play title.
Oh, and the game totally crashed on me.
Desiré: Fun times, cute graphics, very Nintendoesque.
Danny: Elebits was a very fun little demo. The objective is to find Elebits (think electric Pikmin) that are hidden in a common home and zap them with your electronic/telepathic ray (which also grabs and moves items) for their energy. The fun in this is that there are thousands of objects in the room controlled by a convincing physics system and the Wiimote is used wisely. Unlike games like Half Life 2, the Wiimote allows depth input (3d input, not only 2d input) so not only can you look around intuitively but you can also move objects towards and away from you.
There were Elebits in the kitchen sink (which pop out when you grab the tap and swing the controller around to make the water run), in the oven (which you turn on for them to jump out), in the fruit basket (which you fling into the air), in the cupboards (which you open), hiding behind the kitchen lamp and other imaginative places. Even without the Elebit zapping, this game is fun just to play with physics and have real 3D control. The developers were even considerate enough to include a backyard strictly for messing around with physics. The area included a couple of basketballs and a hoop which traveled and bounced realistically (even though I never got one in the hoop), and a crowd favorite was grabbing huge neighboring houses a flinging them into the air. The demo did seem a little shallow (would I really want to play this for more than an hour?) but at the Konami booth there was a long FMV which hinted at a story.
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