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Growing up, I was exposed to video games at a pretty early age. My first console was the Wii, and the first one I owned myself was my Nintendo DSi. Being a young kid right during that generation, I was obviously gifted many games of varying quality, primarily for Wii. I had plenty of the big hitters, yes, but for some reason I never found the lower-tier games I owned to be really all that bad. Maybe it's nostalgia being nostalgia, but I still think some of them aren't that bad despite what many critics stated at the time. I wanted to go over a few games I distinctly remember from my childhood; many of them I would not consider shovelware, but they have just enough effort put into them to make me strangely interested in them. Consider this mostly a set of reviews, with some personal notes sprinkled in here and there.
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Bakugan: Battle Brawlers – Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS
This was the game that inspired me to revisit this rabbit hole of games in the first place. This game was developed by Japanese contract developer Now Productions (who you may know better for their Famicom output, including several titles in Hudson’s Adventure Island series) and was released in 2009 for pretty much every console that was active at the time except for the PSP. Based on the Japanese-Canadian media franchise Bakugan (although more closely based on the first season of the anime series of the same name), this game has you do Bakugan battles on varying field types, pitting your Bakugan against your opponents and winning Gate Cards, using special ability cards on the field and in-battle to boost your Bakugan’s stats.
<picture here>
One really interesting part about this game that I didn’t learn until several years later was that most versions of this game have interesting quirks. The Wii, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo DS versions all use their consoles respective gimmicks – those being the motion controls of the Wii Remote and Sixaxis/DualShock 3 controller and the touch screen/mic of the DS respectively – while the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2 versions lack any such thing. This game uses those gimmicks pretty consistently; you throw Bakugan onto the field by shaking the Wii Remote or DualShock 3, or swiping up on the touch screen, for example. The biggest use of them is during battles, which consist of QTEs you perform to gain more power than your opponent. On Wii and PlayStation 3, expect to do a lot of shaking. If the gimmicks aren’t your thing, the Xbox 360 version omits this entirely and is in HD, so that’s probably the best version overall.
<picture here>
The game has a pretty accurate cel-shaded art style to the anime, something that isn’t always a given for these anime-licensed games. Surprisingly, your main character is actually properly voiced in cutscenes, although it’s the same voice regardless of what your character looks like. This game does have a story, but unfortunately I never completed it as a kid. Maybe one of these days I’ll return to it.
I personally am a big fan of how this game presents itself. The music goes surprisingly hard, and it’s all original songs, too! The theme that plays in the Aquos arena is my personal favorite of the soundtrack.
Also, I love how much this game screams “I’m a video game aimed at young boys that like high-tech things!” It’s absolutely full of sharp edges all over the UI, futuristic fonts, robotic whirs and mechanical clunks… heck, they don’t even let you create a custom female character! It’s almost comedic to some extent, I think, that it aims itself so squarely at this one specific demographic.
I can see why many people looked down upon this game; it’s pretty repetitive all things considered, and on Wii and PlayStation 3 it’s a huge gimmick fest, but I can’t help but be charmed by this game’s aesthetic and how simple it is to actually understand. One of these days I really wanna do the 4-player local versus mode because I never got to do that as a kid and MAN does that sound like it’d be a blast with the right friend group.
<picture here>
Neopets: Puzzle Adventure – Wii, Nintendo DS, PC
(I’ll be focusing specifically on the Wii version, as it’s the only one I have any experience with.)
I know many kids out there who grew up in the very late 90s and early 2000s probably played Neopets at some point or another, but I was not one of those. Despite that, I got this game as a Christmas present in 2009, and I wasn’t even aware of the much more well-known Neopets web game until a few years later. Believe it or not, this game has a bit of prestige behind it: it was developed by Infinite Interactive, the studio behind the well-regarded Puzzle Quest series, and this game is effectively a spinoff of that franchise.
<picture here>
The meat and bones of the game pretty much comes down to how you battle. The Puzzle Quest games play like other standard match-3 games like Bejeweled, but Neopets: Puzzle Adventure spins it differently and instead has you playing reversi matches. I’m admittedly pretty bad at reversi. In fact, I was never good at it. I didn’t let that stop me though!
Really the biggest thing that seperates this from just any other reversi game is the Petpets you can bring along with you into battle. They can grant you any number of special abilites that can throw the game in your favor, including flipping opponent tiles to your color or skipping your opponents turn. Your opponent also has Petpets, and they can do just the same to you. That, combined with the many stages provided – many of which introduce new hazards that force you to adjust your strategy – actually does a pretty good job twisting the reversi formula into something more than that.
<picture here>
Really, the biggest thing I tend to ding this game for is how it looks and performs. This game is incredibly ugly by today’s standards, donning that strange, late-2000s “stank” that many low-budget games of this generation (and the last) tended to have. Something that has always bugged me is that regardless of if you run the game in widescreen or not, it will effectively always run at 4:3 – they simply just throw a border on the sides if you’re in widescreen. They definitely got lazy. Another thing that bugs me: why is this game so “slow”? It’s not a framerate thing, though: it just takes an uncomfortably noticable period of time between clicking on things and the game responding to your clicks. It’s very strange, and I can’t fathom why it does it. Surely, the Wii can handle those calculations faster, right?
The game’s sound effects and music are fine, but the mixing on those sound effects is rough. I used to be frightened of losing in this game because the game over music/SFX was so loud and shrill compared to the rest of the sounds in the game.
Supposedly, based on the game’s website (which is shockingly still up, somehow), there were codes you could get from playing the game that granted you rewards in the online game, but I was never aware of any such thing in the Wii version. Either that, or I didn’t notice it. I played a strangely large amount of this game as a kid, and I cannot fathom why given that I’m as bad as I am at reversi. Overall, this is definitely a decent title… but probably not on Wii. I’ve heard the Nintendo DS version of the game is a fair bit better and seems to have gotten much higher review scores from critics, so I’d probably assume that’s the version you’d want to go with if you wanted to play it today.
This is all I've got so far of this, I'll probably include another 2 or 3 games in the finalized version of the post. I just wanted to submit what I have so far as a draft so I can apply for the writer's guild. ^^ Feel free to give me your thoughts!
<picture here>
Bakugan: Battle Brawlers – Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS
This was the game that inspired me to revisit this rabbit hole of games in the first place. This game was developed by Japanese contract developer Now Productions (who you may know better for their Famicom output, including several titles in Hudson’s Adventure Island series) and was released in 2009 for pretty much every console that was active at the time except for the PSP. Based on the Japanese-Canadian media franchise Bakugan (although more closely based on the first season of the anime series of the same name), this game has you do Bakugan battles on varying field types, pitting your Bakugan against your opponents and winning Gate Cards, using special ability cards on the field and in-battle to boost your Bakugan’s stats.
<picture here>
One really interesting part about this game that I didn’t learn until several years later was that most versions of this game have interesting quirks. The Wii, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo DS versions all use their consoles respective gimmicks – those being the motion controls of the Wii Remote and Sixaxis/DualShock 3 controller and the touch screen/mic of the DS respectively – while the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2 versions lack any such thing. This game uses those gimmicks pretty consistently; you throw Bakugan onto the field by shaking the Wii Remote or DualShock 3, or swiping up on the touch screen, for example. The biggest use of them is during battles, which consist of QTEs you perform to gain more power than your opponent. On Wii and PlayStation 3, expect to do a lot of shaking. If the gimmicks aren’t your thing, the Xbox 360 version omits this entirely and is in HD, so that’s probably the best version overall.
<picture here>
The game has a pretty accurate cel-shaded art style to the anime, something that isn’t always a given for these anime-licensed games. Surprisingly, your main character is actually properly voiced in cutscenes, although it’s the same voice regardless of what your character looks like. This game does have a story, but unfortunately I never completed it as a kid. Maybe one of these days I’ll return to it.
I personally am a big fan of how this game presents itself. The music goes surprisingly hard, and it’s all original songs, too! The theme that plays in the Aquos arena is my personal favorite of the soundtrack.
Also, I love how much this game screams “I’m a video game aimed at young boys that like high-tech things!” It’s absolutely full of sharp edges all over the UI, futuristic fonts, robotic whirs and mechanical clunks… heck, they don’t even let you create a custom female character! It’s almost comedic to some extent, I think, that it aims itself so squarely at this one specific demographic.
I can see why many people looked down upon this game; it’s pretty repetitive all things considered, and on Wii and PlayStation 3 it’s a huge gimmick fest, but I can’t help but be charmed by this game’s aesthetic and how simple it is to actually understand. One of these days I really wanna do the 4-player local versus mode because I never got to do that as a kid and MAN does that sound like it’d be a blast with the right friend group.
<picture here>
Neopets: Puzzle Adventure – Wii, Nintendo DS, PC
(I’ll be focusing specifically on the Wii version, as it’s the only one I have any experience with.)
I know many kids out there who grew up in the very late 90s and early 2000s probably played Neopets at some point or another, but I was not one of those. Despite that, I got this game as a Christmas present in 2009, and I wasn’t even aware of the much more well-known Neopets web game until a few years later. Believe it or not, this game has a bit of prestige behind it: it was developed by Infinite Interactive, the studio behind the well-regarded Puzzle Quest series, and this game is effectively a spinoff of that franchise.
<picture here>
The meat and bones of the game pretty much comes down to how you battle. The Puzzle Quest games play like other standard match-3 games like Bejeweled, but Neopets: Puzzle Adventure spins it differently and instead has you playing reversi matches. I’m admittedly pretty bad at reversi. In fact, I was never good at it. I didn’t let that stop me though!
Really the biggest thing that seperates this from just any other reversi game is the Petpets you can bring along with you into battle. They can grant you any number of special abilites that can throw the game in your favor, including flipping opponent tiles to your color or skipping your opponents turn. Your opponent also has Petpets, and they can do just the same to you. That, combined with the many stages provided – many of which introduce new hazards that force you to adjust your strategy – actually does a pretty good job twisting the reversi formula into something more than that.
<picture here>
Really, the biggest thing I tend to ding this game for is how it looks and performs. This game is incredibly ugly by today’s standards, donning that strange, late-2000s “stank” that many low-budget games of this generation (and the last) tended to have. Something that has always bugged me is that regardless of if you run the game in widescreen or not, it will effectively always run at 4:3 – they simply just throw a border on the sides if you’re in widescreen. They definitely got lazy. Another thing that bugs me: why is this game so “slow”? It’s not a framerate thing, though: it just takes an uncomfortably noticable period of time between clicking on things and the game responding to your clicks. It’s very strange, and I can’t fathom why it does it. Surely, the Wii can handle those calculations faster, right?
The game’s sound effects and music are fine, but the mixing on those sound effects is rough. I used to be frightened of losing in this game because the game over music/SFX was so loud and shrill compared to the rest of the sounds in the game.
Supposedly, based on the game’s website (which is shockingly still up, somehow), there were codes you could get from playing the game that granted you rewards in the online game, but I was never aware of any such thing in the Wii version. Either that, or I didn’t notice it. I played a strangely large amount of this game as a kid, and I cannot fathom why given that I’m as bad as I am at reversi. Overall, this is definitely a decent title… but probably not on Wii. I’ve heard the Nintendo DS version of the game is a fair bit better and seems to have gotten much higher review scores from critics, so I’d probably assume that’s the version you’d want to go with if you wanted to play it today.
This is all I've got so far of this, I'll probably include another 2 or 3 games in the finalized version of the post. I just wanted to submit what I have so far as a draft so I can apply for the writer's guild. ^^ Feel free to give me your thoughts!
