Demo Review 1: Lead The Meerkats

A pack of meerkats lived peacefully in a lushy green environment, until a rivaling group of dark blue meerkats stole it. The light-colored meerkat pack had to flee, but one of the meerkat females was separated from the group and fell in a nearby river. She woke up on the other side of the river, much later. If she wants to survive in this other environment, she needs to create her own meerkat pack. After which she'll have to try and cross the river and fight off the dark meerkats, in order to regain her home and save the light meerkats.

After you name your Meerkat, you realize that the whole place is... freaking dark! It's hard to see where you're going. It doesn't stay dark for very long, though. This game follows a day-and-night pattern. Your first mission is to find a yellow flag, near which you can then start building a burrow. These underground tunnels will protect the meerkats from predators. Your tasks, as you might have guessed, are to build a large burrow, to befriend some meerkats, to hunt for food, and to defend yourself from the dangerous wild animals. And of course, they wouldn't be wild animals if they didn't make babies. How do you create the new generation? By killing small animals, increasing your pack's vitality. When it's reached the maximum, meerkat pups are added to the pack.

And this is all the demo offers. Of course it's going to stop very early in the game. Personally, this game didn't attract me much. The CGI looks very nice, this feels like a wild environment; the world, however, feels bland after a while, as it's just a desert. However, it's a very open world, so you can go around and explore. There's no music to enjoy during the few minutes you spend playing this game. There's only sounds of wilderness, and that's it. However, I'll admit, the controls are well thought, as you can do anything better by shaking the Wimote and Nunchuk. All the buttons find a use. It's fun to see that the game expands constantly as you progress and the pack of meerkats grow, and the threats become bigger at the same time. I saw and battled a freaking eagle in the last minutes. The demo ends after three in-game days.

Is it worth paying? Honestly, I don't know. This game seems like it has potential; the idea is good, and there's interesting ideas. Sadly, its flaws don't really give me the impression that it's worth it. If you don't mind said flaws, however, maybe you should give it a try. The demo's free, so go try it!

Super Smash Flash

Hello! Are you currently in vacation between two times of studies? Are you free for two weeks? Do you have any idea how to spend that time? ...Studying? Yea, okay, sure, but after that? No idea? Well, Internet has thousands of fan games for you!

And yes, I do mean Flash games. However, don't be fooled. I'll just discuss Fan Games of Nintendo series. And let's start with Super Smash Flash!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/333995

Created by McLeodGaming, Super Smash Flash is a fan game based on the (you guessed it) Super Smash Bros series. It has all the things you'd expect from Smash Bros.: Large roster of characters, some of which have special abilities. Lots of stages. Possibility to play in multiplayer. Unlockables. What's not to love?

Well, actually, there's quite a bit not to love. Being the first Super Smash Bros fan game created by McLeodGaming, it's not without its flaws. The programming is problematic here and there. Some levels of Adventure Mode are really darn annoying. Some of the unlockable characters aren't quite great (among others TWO Sonic fan characters, and Mr. Incredible, just to name those). So yeah, it's flawed, but if you persist in playing this game all the way through, you should really enjoy it.

The starting characters are Sonic, Pikachu, Tails, Mega Man, Blade (one of said fan characters), Knuckles, Samus, Kirby, Mario, Fox, Link, Capt. Falcon and Zelda. Not half bad to begin the game, huh?

A sequel has been in development for more than three years called Super Smash Flash 2. Its roster aims to be even more impressive than this one. How, you ask? By giving the starting content to players, but by giving downloadable content as well; in theory, you could play with over a hundred characters. Good luck trying to beat the game with all of them! However, the project takes a lot of time before it's complete, so be very patient. And for the moment, enjoy the first Smash Flash. It should still give you hours of fun.

Next Two Weeks... And Beyond

Hello everyone. As some of you might know, my university semester ended yesterday. This means I am currently in vacation. I'll be without any true occupation until January 6th, the day my internship will begin. That's in almost three weeks. What can I do to pass the time? Will I bore myself out of my mind?

Certainly not!

Yesterday, after my classes ended, I bought a Wii Points card, and when I arrived home I bought four 500-point games with them. One Virtual Console game, three WiiWare games. And then I stared at the large selection of WiiWare games. "I'll never have enough money to buy all this." I found this kind of sad until I checked the selection of games separated by genre.

51 demos? What's a demo on WiiWare, you ask? Quite simple: It's a demo of a game available on the WiiWare, except you don't have to pay at all for the demo, while you'd most certainly have to pay at least five bucks for the real game. All those are entirely free, huh? And even if each of these demos offers at best a half-hour of play time, by the end it's still a grand total of twenty-five hours...

Why not make mini-articles about each demo? Yeah, that's my thought. On every day that I will not be too busy (that is, on every day that is not Monday, Wednesday or Friday), I'll post a mini-review of a demo available on the Wii Shop Channel's WiiWare section.

How long, each article? Hm, maybe 500 words... There's not much to say about each, after all. A demo is, by definition, very short, and doesn't contain all of the features the true game has.

What do you say about this? Three days out of seven, I do the regular things, and the other four, I write a mini-review of a WiiWare demo. Sounds good?

Good!

This will also serve to transition into the blog's new schedule. You see, once my inernship will begin, I'll spend thirty-five hours a week working. This is the biggest job I've ever had. I think I already mentioned before how I might change the schedule around to accomodate my new, erm... "pastime". Well, starting January 6th, this blog will change a little. There will be an artcle on Monday, an article on Friday, and nothing on Wednesday. Monday will either be an Editorial or a Fun Stuff article (depends how I'm feeling), and Friday will still be a review. However, whenever Friday is the first part of a multi-parter review, the second part will not be up on Monday, but on the Friday of the next week.

I hope this is fine for everyone. Tomorrow, another Fun Stuff article. Thursday, a mini-review of a demo. Friday, a review. Saturday and Sunday, mini-reviews of demos again. Monday, possibly an Editorial. And so on. Enjoy!

Master Of Illusion (Part 2)

Hello, and welcome back to Great Nicolas' Magic! Er... I meant, welcome back to this review of Master of Illusion! Last time, I could only talk about the Solo Magic section, which was a bit on the “meh” side, but now we're hitting the core of this game: The magic tricks you can do yourself! In the past two days, I've practiced the other magic tricks in this game, and I can assure you; Whenever I describe a trick, you will be unable to guess how the game was programmed to do that! Or, well, I'll try to hide the trick the best I can... Now, picture that a Nintendo DS magically appears in front of me. Are you ready? Let's continue, then!

Warning: The next images might reveal some secrets if you
look veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery closely.

You know, while I'm at it, I should explain another thing about this game. You see, when you do a magic trick, once it's over, you can choose whether it was a rehearsal or a show you gave to an audience. If you picked the former, nothing happens. If you picked the latter, you gain 1 “Performance Point”, I guess that's what they're called. You also have a level that is assigned to you; it increases at every few Performance Points you get, to a maximum of 10. Level 10 just happens to be Legendary Magician. Pfft! As if I was worth a David Copperfield or a Houdini! Hell no, I'm barely worth one thousandth of such great stage magicians. I see this game thinks of itself highly! Okay, back to describing the tricks.

Master Of Illusion (Part 1)

I LOVE magic, magicians, illusionists, mentalists and all those people who make us marvel at their talents in stage magic. I have a true fascination for those street magicians, they can do such wonderful things, you'll probably never understand how exactly did they do that. That's the incredible thing about stage magic. They can do impressive things, and you can only watch, impressed, as you ask yourself what the trick might be. Like a lot of children, when I was young, I had one of those starter magic kits, with the plastic wand, the disappearing ball trick, and so many other stuff. However, it didn't click as much for me as it did to others. In Quebec, we had our own stage magic school. In my province alone, we've got at least a dozen famous magicians. Ever heard of Alain Choquette? Or Luc Langevin? Gary Kurtz? Vincent C? Messmer?

“Master of Illusion” (Not to be confused with Master of Disguise) is a Nintendo DS game that was released with the intent of making a magic show out of your portable console... and a deck of cards. Yes, this game was packaged in a box with a deck of playing cards. Of course, the whole point to this deck is to be a part of your magic tricks. It's a tricked deck, too; there's a way to know what the card is even when it's face-down. The game of course tells you about this.

Is this game worth buying, or is it just a way to make two dozen bucks magically disappear from your pockets, never to reappear? Let's find out.