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PAX Game Re-Cap: The Underdog By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman Long ago, when RwN was a bunch of half articles written on ALF notebook paper, I used to blog on myspace. Though I would mostly write about stupid things like masturbating at work, I remember writing one article talking about the lack of decent Wii games on the market. I mentioned that by the end of the Wii’s lifetime its strongest game genre will probably be point and click adventure games or lightgun games. Well, I was pretty close to right seeing as to how many shooters are out on the Wii and how nearly every action game on the Wii has some sort of lightgun based gameplay element incorporated into it (even the end credits of Punch-Out!!).
On-rails shooters/lightgun games have become so prevalent on the Wii that I silently shuddered to myself when I saw EA was displaying 2 of them during PAX. EA’s Dead Space Extraction did not win me over during the show. In fact, I’m quite glad that I got to play it at PAX, since now I’m pretty much convinced that I won’t be buying that game. However, the other on-rails shooter I got to play was really fun. There wasn’t one specific element to Nerf N-Strike Elite that made it so fun to play. In fact, its appeal was kind of Gestalt in that its total fun was based on several little things that Hasbro and EA had done.
Nerf N-Strike Elite is at its core a pretty run of the mill on-rails shooter (it’s actually a sequel to another N-Strike game released almost a year ago that fell under the video gaming radar). However, most of the game’s fun came from the Wiimote shell that came along with the game as well as the overall theme of the game. Nerf N-Strike Elite is basically an on-rails shooter made for children under the age of 14. The colors are very bright and vivid, the theme very spy game like, and it takes forever for you to die. While the game is easy it has some notable things that make it very entertaining; as you would expect from a game with Nerf in the title all your shooting is done with Nerf weaponry. This was a huge plus in my book, since right off the bat I was able to use guns I knew and loved such as the Nerf Wildfire (or whatever the 2000’s version is called), the Maverick, and the Warthog (the one with the bandolier like bullet chains). The second quirky thing about the gameplay is the fact that your opponents (these weird robotic terrorists) are also shooting Nerf darts at you, each time you take a hit from enemy fire you’re treated to a cute effect of having a Nerf dart stuck to your screen mildly obscuring your field of vision. I didn’t think much of it at first, but Vivian, Aspen, and I found ourselves laughing out loud when we started taking heavy fire and Vivian’s side of the screen was near totally covered with purple tipped darts.
My favorite thing about the game was their choice of Wii Zapper peripheral. As with the other Nerf game on the Wii, your Wiimote holder is designed to look like a Nerf gun from the N-Strike line. I was told by the girl at the booth that the holder was also a fully functional Nerf gun; however, I’ll have to take this with a grain of salt as I was asked not to test it out at the show. Another cool thing about the Nerf gun Wiimote holder was the weird addition of a translucent red “scope” at the top of it. At certain points of the game you’re to look at the screen through the “scope” revealing secret codes, access panels and baddies. It’s the same effect used with the old red/turquoise 3-D glasses, but done in a much less annoying way.
All in all the game was really fun to play and I can actually see me buying it when the price drops a bit (since I’m not too keen on getting a Wii game for $60 even though it does come with Nerf guns). It’s one of those games that you can play on a drunken weeknight or on a day where you’re at home sick.
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