Another Game Review Roundup

Not a bad February for out-of-the-blue games. Here’re three.

House of the Dead Overkill: Another in a long line of Sega light-gun games, only this one’s the first by an American developer. That means out with the generic Mulder-‘n-Scully plots of old, in with a tribute to ’70s exploitation flicks. Every other word is “motherfucker,” ’70s porn tunes reign, and a cornball narrator talks up each stage of the shootin’ with overblown organ beneath his one-liners about carnage. As a video game, it’s an interesting novelty; as a tribute to the genre, it’s a little too overwrought, even for an exploitation kill fest (on the kid-friendly Wii, no less).

The rest is basic shooting-gallery stuff—kill throngs of zombies like you’re in the arcade. Some multiplayer minigames are thrown in for good measure. The game’s kinda wonky—it’ll repeatedly freeze or chug just as you line up a shot. And for whatever reason, the series’ tradition of shooting off individual zombie limbs by aiming correctly has been muted—only worth noting because everything else about this game revels in gore and F-bombs. But HotD:Overkill’s longer than most of the Wii’s shooting-gallery library, and I’ve had a good time roping people in with the cheeseball plot to go kill-crazy in two-player modes.

Flower, Noby Noby Boy: If Sony’s gonna get anywhere with their PlayStation 3, forget the old Final Fantasies and Gods of War. Look instead to two fascinating downloadable games, both released within the past week on Sony’s PSN.

Flower throws you into a series of six ultra-colorful landscapes, and you’re tasked with flying from one end to the other of each, blooming the flowers you see dotting the ground. Some levels have more puzzles than others, but there’s not much challenge, and certainly no death.

Thing is, there’s no way to describe this game without leaning toward the poetic, partly because of the stunning tech, but more so because of the art direction and sound design. Individual blades of grass, numbering in the thousands, flit and tilt with the wind that you’re blowing. Petals cling to you, twirling like birds in formation, as you speed along grassy hills. The color palette is wide, yet organic—when oranges and purples flood the ground beneath a sunset, there’s nothing florescent or fake. And with each thing you do, you’ll hear a ringing instrument or tone, all accenting a modest synth-orchestral score. It sounds cheesy, but then you pick up the controller, and maybe 10 minutes in, your jaw will open like a reflex.

Watching a preview video of Flower isn’t the same. Get an HDTV and hold the motion-sensitive controller to float through this stuff. I’ve beaten the game, and I’ve returned to the game a few times already just to revel in it. It’s controllable Fantasia. And it’s $10.

Noby Noby Boy is lumped in here because it came out around the same time, and it too revels in aimlessness—but, uh, not the same way. One look, and you can tell immediately that the guy who created Katamari Damacy is behind this weird-ass shit:

You’re the long worm, warping from place to place and eating whatever you see. There are no objectives, and the instruction manual’s intentionally vague. Way I see it, there are three things to do—eat, shit, and stretch. So why bother?

For one, it’s five bucks. For another, there’s a Katamari-like joy in figuring this game out organically, like when I figured out that after eating certain things in a row, my worm poops them out as a combined freak-creature. Or there was the time I ate something so huge, my worm shat my butt clean off of my body, and I had to run back to my butt… and eat my butt. And, of course, the time I had a dozen cats ride my worm body as I flew it toward the sun to kill them all, the critters meowing all the way to their new Sun Lord. Some day, I will play this game while simultaneously listening to Dark Side of the Moon.

Oh, and you can automatically upload videos of your play to YouTube, like I did in the video above. This is an awful idea, only because I might break the Internet by uploading hundreds of these things.

This is the wave of today’s gaming renaissance—fewer “endings,” more open worlds, and beautiful tech experiences that draw us in more than the boyish desire to save a princess.