SuperPhillip Reviews Donkey Kong Jungle Beat

SuperPhillip

SuperPhillip

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Hello there. My name is Phil (user name SuperPhillip), and I started a blog this past June to combine two of many of my hobbies-- writing and gaming. One of my most popular stories are my reviews, so I wanted to share them with more people. I want to dedicate this thread and update it each time I write a new review as well as include all of my past reviews. I'm not liking to my blog for hits as I don't use Google Adsense or anything like that. This blog is just for fun, and I didn't think it was right to try to make money off it. It'd just give me an excuse not to get a real job as I attend college! Below I have categorized all of my reviews by platform, and I hope it's okay to link to all of them. I just really like getting feedback and comments for my writing so I can know where I stand. I'll be doing a new review tomorrow or Monday, so I'll update this list with that for sure.[Updated 4/23/09]

[Nintendo DS]

Crosswords DS
Dragon Ball Origins
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates
Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales
Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure
Kirby Super Star Ultra
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
Mystery Case Files: MillionHeir
Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword
Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise
The World Ends With You

 [Sony PSP]

Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles
Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions
God of War: Chains of Olympus
Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee
Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2
LocoRoco 2
Me & My Katamari
Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters

 [Playstation 3]

007: Quantum of Solace
Grand Theft Auto IV
Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds
LittleBigPlanet
Ratchet & Clank Future Tools of Destruction
Resident Evil 5
Resistance 2
Sonic the Hedgehog
Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection
Sonic Unleashed

 [Wii]

Animal Crossing: City Folk
Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy
Boom Blox
Deadly Creatures
Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop
de Blob
Excite Truck
Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon
The House of the Dead: Overkill
Kororinpa: Marble Mania
Madden NFL 09 All-Play
MadWorld
Marble Saga: Kororinpa
Mario Kart Wii
Mario Super Sluggers
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
MySims
MySims Kingdom
NASCAR Kart Racing
New Play Control! Mario Power Tennis
Ninjabread Man
Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles
Samba de Amigo
Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip
Sonic and the Secret Rings
Super Mario Galaxy
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Super Swing Golf: Season Two
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 All-Play
Wario Land: Shake It!
We Love Golf
Wii Music

 [Xbox 360]

007: Quantum of Solace
Beautiful Katamari
Crackdown
Dead Rising
Gears of War 2*
Grand Theft Auto IV
Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and the Damned*
Resident Evil 5
SEGA Superstars Tennis
Sonic the Hedgehog
Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection
Sonic Unleashed
Viva Pinata

 [Past Generations]

Mario vs. Donkey Kong (GBA)
Mario Superstar Baseball (GCN)


Thanks for visiting my thread.
 
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Have you ever dreamed to live somewhere else? Perhaps Spain, France, Japan, the Caribbean, or out of your parents' basement? (No, YOU'RE late on the rent!!) We all have, but how about inside a town full of anthropomorphic animal citizens? If you jumped up with tears in your eyes and a passionate song in your heart, then Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Nintendo WIi is right for you! Of course, if you just want a fun game, then yeah, I guess Animal Crossing: City Folk is good for you, too, but is City Folk merely an expansion of past games or is it something more palatable?

As a character out on his or her own for the first time, you ride the bus towards your new home. On the bus you meet a fellow traveler named Rover. Your answers to the questions he asks determine how your in-game character looks. When you get set loose in the world, you can outfit your character however you like by acquiring new shirts, headgear, and accessories like glasses, flowers, and the like. You can even create your own shirt, hat, and umbrella designs to make all of the neighbors jealous. New to the game is a feature allowing you to design your shirt by part: front, back, and left and right sleeves, so let your inner fashionista run wild!

 
After the poor sales of their last game together, Okami, Clover Studios was disbanded by Capcom. However, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the company lives again, but this time under the Platinum Games label. MadWorld is the Platinum Games' first of many projects for the upstart developer, and their game has finally launched on the Nintendo Wii. A brutal, bloody beat-em-up, Is MadWorld a title worthy of the same people who brought us Viewtiful Joe, Okami, and God Hand?
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I guess I'm a Wii kick with reviews.

Let's face it. Although the Nintendo Gamecube had a fantastic library for the Nintendo faithful, it was pretty much a failure in capturing the majority of the video game market. Now that the Wii has been the breakout hit that it is, Nintendo has opted to let millions of new gamers and those gamers who skipped the Gamecube experience several of the system's best with brand new motion control. Nintendo's label for this series of games is New Play Control with Pikmin and Mario Power Tennis as the first two titles for North American audiences. The latter hasn't turned out so well.

 
An object rolling through multiple perilous mazes, attempting to reach the goal in each one, isn't a new concept at all. Of course, they've been around long before the days of Marble Madness with those wooden labyrinth toys you'd tilt to get all of the iron balls into the goal. Wii owners especially have already seen an abundance of these types of games with Super Monkey Ball, Mercury Meltdown, the marble game from Wii Fit, and a little known title called Kororinpa: Marble Mania, now one of the rarest titles in the Wii's library. The game was fun but flawed. Controlling your marble through the many Kororinpa or levels the game threw at you was very intuitive and easy enough to do. The only problem was that you essentially only got one level per dollar of the $40 price tag. Rising to criticism, Hudson has released the sequel, Marble Saga: Kororinpa, with 150 unique levels and an editor to boot, but is this package all that it should have been?
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Laurel and Hardy. Mario and Luigi. Peanut butter and jelly. Bugs Bunny and cross-dressing. All of these pairs go together well, but the platforming genre and the puzzle genre? We've seen how the puzzle genre works with role-playing thanks to Puzzle Quest, and that worked well. However, not just any genres can be combined just for the fun of it. It has to work. There has to be a cohesive and entertaining experience. Thankfully and for the most part, Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure is just that, and I do think a "bravo" is in order.


 
In 2006, a little celebrated title known as LocoRoco tumbled onto Sony's Playstation Portable with a tiny amount of fanfare. A Playstation 3 spin-off aside, it's been a little under three years since the original rolled its way into many PSP owners' hearts, and now a sequel, LocoRoco 2 skids into retail. For those who have played the original, is there enough to warrant this sequel, and for the prospective newcomers, will they want to roll over to LocoRoco 2?
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Back to the days of the Super Nintendo, the Final Fantasy series was more than just the mainline games. There were the Legend and Adventure games for the original Game Boy. Into the Playstation One era, and there was Final Fantasy Tactics, Chocobo Dungeon, Chocobo Racing, and Ehrgeiz. Fast-forward to present day, and we seem to be drowning in spin-offs. Now we have another entry in another spin-off, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time. It may seem like Ring of Fates with online play, but are there echoes of something new?

Long ago the world was filled to the brim with luminescent crystals. In current times? Not so much. In fact, one of the only crystals left intact lies within a quaint little forest resting behind an even littler village. This particular village is home to a coming-of-age ceremony that takes places on every child's sixteenth birthday, and it just so happens that your character's birthday is the beginning of Echoes of Time's story. What follows is the link between this ceremony, the crystal, and a sinister fellow wanting the world for himself.

 
In 2005, horror reinvented itself as Resident Evil 4 took a chainsaw to the franchise's mainstays-- the fixed camera, clunky controls, and prerendered backgrounds. The game garnered praise from both gamer and critic alike. More often than not you can find it nestled among many top ten video games of all time lists including yours truly. Now it's four years later, and the expectations of the long-awaited Resident Evil 5 are at their highest. And while it doesn't reinvent the wheel the way its nearly perfect predecessor did, Resident Evil 5 stands strong as one hell of a game.

Resident Evil 4 had secret agent Leon Kennedy on the job with the task of searching for the president's kidnapped daughter in the rugged European wilderness. While there are some plot elements that come up in Resident Evil 5, most of the links between the two games are as loose as a Licker's tongue. Whereas Leon toured the countryside of Europe, Chris Redfield of the original Resident Evil is sent to investigate Kijuju, a West African village whose citizens seem to be infected with the same virus that swept over the zealots Leon dealt with. In past games, the Umbrella Corporation and any other players in the series' past were only glossed over. This isn't the case at all in Resident Evil 5. Resident Evil 5 aims to wrap up all of the series' loose ends, and while the knot isn't as tidy as it could have been with a plot hole or gloriously campy dialogue here and there, the player is left satisfied as the story concludes.
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The Hot Shots Golf franchise has always been Sony's go-to franchise for an accessible game of golf with a cast of characters full of spunk and comedic allure. There have been five main installments of the series since its inception on the original Playstation. To date, their has been on a Hot Shots Golf game on each and every one of Sony's gaming platforms. The last console version was the Playstation 3's Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds, and while the visual and online quality was certainly bigger and better, the content was a little on the skimpy side. The sequel to the first PSP title, Open Tee, the aptly-named Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 is set to take the original's content and drive it 380 yards. Is this sequel one you'll demand a gimme for, or is Open Tee 2's mediocrity just par for the course?

What Open Tee 2 tee'ers will most likely spend the most time playing is the Challenge mode, where the goal is to complete tournaments and matches as they rise their way to higher rankings. Each ranking has three challenges to choose from. These can be 9 or 18 hole tournaments or match play competitions. The tournaments have you competing against yourself basically-- trying to achieve the best score possible all the while attempting to beat 19 other faceless AI golfers' scores. Match play has you taking on a computer opponent in a 9 hole match. The player who gets the least amount of strokes on a hole, wins that hole. Win the most holes in nine or have a lead of three holes, and you win. Complete enough of these challenges to unlock the opportunity to face a new character in match play rules. Beat that character, and you advance to the next ranking. Each ranking is harder than the last to build a nice and progressive difficulty. New stipulations like Rough +2 rear their head in during specific challenges to bring up some added demand of your skill.

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When it was original released back in 2004, Katamari Damacy for the Playstation 2 rolled critics over with its fresh gameplay and quirky charm. Two sequels later and now we have Namco-Bandai offering up another game in the Katamari platter with a taste of Beautiful Katamari-- and on the 360 no less. Does this newest installment in the Katamari Damacy series still innovate, or is this a title that should roll up some new ideas?

Everything begins when the King of All Cosmos, his wife, and their pint-sized Prince are enjoying a vacation. The King of All Cosmos serves a wicked tennis shot that causes a black hole to instantly develop and begin sucking all of the universe into it. Now an entirely new universe must be created, and Prince and his katamari are the only ones who can help. Hm... This story sounds a little too familiar.
 
Way back when the Wii hit North American shores, a cult classic launched with the system, too. Sure, it was greatly eclipsed in interest by a brand new Zelda game, but Excite Truck was one fantastic arcade racer deserving of respect. This time around, developer Monster Games (NASCAR: Dirt of Daytona, Test Drive: Eve of Destruction) has ditched the bulky four-wheelers with bots resembling something out of Transformers Beast Wars. The end result is Excitebots: Trick Racing for the Nintendo Wii, and it's one heck of a ride.
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Racing is just half of the equation in Excitebots. Hence, Trick Racing. Sure, getting first place is optimal, but you have to do it in style. You don't win races solely by crossing the finish line in first place. With Excitebots the goal is to earn as many stars as possible, and they're readily available by performing a plethora of tasks. In the single-player mode, you start out with the School Cup, a set of four races which can be chosen at will. Clear all the tracks in a given cup to unlock the next which features another set of new races to complete. Each track has a minimum amount of stars needed in order to advance, but to unlock the two bonus difficulties you'll need to shoot for far more stars in each track than the bare necessities.

 
This review is my first for Dreamstation. It'll be on their site within the week. I may have to take the one down on my blog, so enjoy it while it's there. :cry:

Before there were Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and the wave of other rhythm games in-between, there was a cult classic about a beat-dropping dog known as Parappa the Rapper. This Playstation One original was a hit with gamers and critics alike. A decade has passed, and creator Masaya Matsuura has worked on Unjammer Lammy, Vib-Ribbon, and the Tamagotchi Corner Shop line of DS games since then. His latest rhythm-based project is an innovative marching band game, Major Minor's Majestic March for the Nintendo Wii. Is Major Minor's Majestic March one you'll enjoy, or does this game march to the beat of a different drummer?

 
In a gaming world plagued with lackluster sequels, first-person shooters, Mario spin-offs, sports titles, and run-of-the-mill titles only varying slightly from one another it's nice to see a game like Graffiti Kingdom from Taito come to surface. What sets Graffiti Kingdom apart from other action-RPGs is that you can actually design your own character, monster, or whatever which is implemented quite well.

 
Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them a bow? Can you throw them over your shoulder like a continental soldier? Do your ears hang low? There's only one video game mascot which could answer "yes" to all of these questions, and that's none other than Klonoa, back from vacation and transported to the dream world of Lunatea. Does Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil play like a dream, or is this a game you'll get nightmares over?
 
It's been over a decade since Namco-Bandai's floppy-eared feline, Klonoa, had his first foray into gaming with 1997's Klonoa: Door to Phantomile. Since then, Klonoa had a wonderfully delightful sequel on the Playstation 2 known as Lunatea's Veil (2001). Fast-forward to 2009, and Klonoa's debut has been remade with a more sophisticated graphical makeover with the simply-titled Klonoa for the Nintendo Wii. The visual touches are just part of the new budget-priced package, but have the years been kind to Klonoa's original adventure?
http://superphillipcentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/klonoa-wii-review.html
 
A little known development team created a fresh new platforming bonanza which utilized a special bongo peripheral. This project was the cult-classic known as Donkey Kong Jungle Beat for the Nintendo Gamecube. This same team's next project was a game you may or may not have heard of. It's something called Super Mario Galaxy, and this development team is none other than Nintendo EAD 1, the premiere first-party team under Nintendo's arsenal of capable developers. It's 2009 and the New Play Control line of Gamecube games remade with Wii controllers in mind have already made their assault on Wii consoles with varying degrees of success. It's Donkey Kong Jungle Beat's time to get a second chance in the spotlight, but this time, the bongos are nowhere to be found. Is this bongo-less version of Jungle Beat one you'll go bananas for?

 
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