Game Review: Trauma Center: Second Opinion For Nintendo Wii

Trauma Center: Second Opinion for the Nintendo Wii, luckily for me was only rented.
I read the other reviews on here first, which promised me some fun game play, and this is why I picked it up.
I will agree the game was fun for, oh a mere 20 minutes. After that everything else was just a repeat of the last surgery, or mission. However you would put it.

You start off as an extremely immature, lazy sleepy eyed, doctor; Doctor Styles.
No one really likes him/you; everyone tells him he’s not a real doctor. Even as you play with him, you yourself will begin to feel like he’s a moron. What kind of doctor would perform surgery without blood test results first? Really it’s not your fault though. You have no control over the story line, and the immature behavior of your doctor. You only control him in the surgery room, after that he’s whatever the game developer wants him to be. Idiot, smart, idiot…

Every surgery is like the last with some minor changes. First you go through about 5 minutes worth of extremely boring semi pointless dialogue, before each surgery. No voices either. I’m talking reading, reading, and more reading. The character faces never change. They sit at the right side of the screen and the only thing that changes is the dialogue box.

The music never changes either. There are two, yes, only two different melodies; a good upbeat rhythm, or, a sad melancholy tune. When you hear the sad music, you know something sad is going to happen in the dialogue, or- story. If it’s good music, it’s good news. Extremely predictable. Get it? Got it? Good.

Performing surgery can be quite difficult at first. You have your operation tools on the bottom left side of the screen. This is the hardest part to figure out on the controller. For some reason all of the tools are lined up in a circle, instead of just a straight line on the bottom of the screen. You have to use the nun-chucks analog to choose which tool you will be using. However this is tricky, the analog is hard to control and choosing the right tool you want is hard. Like, very hard!

The remote you hold in your other hand becomes the doctor’s hand. At first it’s a tad bit tricky to do all of the things perfect. You will find yourself sewing up stitches, and sometimes messing up really bad. You have to move your hand in a zig zag motion to sew up a patient.

You really only get 3 patients to work on in the beginning as your tutorial, after that your nurse (assistant) leaves the hospital- more boring blah blah this and that dialogue. After she leaves you get a new nurse who doesn’t help you anymore. She will sit there at the bottom of the screen though, and scream ‘DOCTOR’ every time you mess something up. Other than that she’s useless to you. You will be hearing a lot of that in the entire game. DOCTOR, DOCTOR, DOCTOR… It’s very annoying, and probably the only real voice you will hear in the game.

Some of the surgeries you will be performing are, removal of tumors, removal of glass in the body. You will be putting bones back together, which is probably the hardest thing for you to do. It consists of making hands jerks, and weird twists and turns of the wrist, to get bones back to their correct positions. Every surgery will feel like the last, (besides bones surgeries) only longer and more tedious, as you have a time limit ranging from 3 minutes to 5 minutes. If you do not complete the surgery/operation within the allowed time, the patient will flat line and die. Yes, I lost one because of a fractured arm. Whoopsie daisy! My bad!

Pretty soon your immature doctor becomes an adult, and realizes his past mistakes, but wait there is a twist. Now that he takes his job seriously, he’s also magical! Hooray! Yawn. Figures…
That’s right, your character Dr. Styles has a rare healing touch. Mm hmm, this is the stupidest thing in the story they could of thrown in. You now can draw a star on the patient and it could save them from death. Pretty much it means none of your patients will die, if you draw a star on them time slows down, and you can save him. Lame.
You also have a magical potion, a shot. You give your patient a shot of this green medicine, and their heart rate goes up. The green magic goop never runs out either. So poke away.

You will be working with a few different tools. A scalpel, magic green medicine, disinfectant, ultrasonic/magnifying glass, tweezers, and during some missions other tools will become available. But only for that mission, you don’t get to keep them.

Now lets move on and cover the graphics. I myself have a weak stomach, and can’t bear to look at blood or inside of organs, and guts.
Thankfully this game did a nice job of making it not too graphical, or gut wrenching disgusting. To me they are not wonderful graphics, but well enough for such a game. I honestly wouldn’t want to see better graphics though.
However the way the blood pours in the game is too fake for me. It comes out in clouds, and kind of fuzzes over the effected area. It’s weird looking. A little gushing would have been okay to add, without crossing the line into disgust.

Every mission ends the same 99% of the time. You sew them up, disinfect them, and then give them a bandage. All done.
Each mission is repetitive, so you won’t find yourself playing this game longer than an hour or 2 when you first buy it. After that, it’s just another disc to throw into the closet. There is more dialogue in this game then there is actual game play. The dialogue is boring, and gets worse as the game continues.

I wouldn’t recommend buying this game, but I would recommend giving it a try by renting it. It’s not worth the $50 price tag most stores are asking for it. You could probably beat the game in a day or two, if you didn’t die of boredom first. For a game to last only 2 days, it’s not even worth a buy.

Game Review: Shrek The Third For Nintendo DS

I don’t know what possessed me to cough up $29.99 for the movie made video game Shrek The Third. Usually they stink! But the cover was cute, and I’m always a sucker for eye candy. Plus there was only one copy on the shelf, leading me to believe that this game was hot! But what kept me from purchasing it for the wii for only $20 more is beyond me.

STORYLINE:

I was at first greeted by Donkey, and he went into a very long and boring explanation on what’s going on and why you’re here………

Shrek is sent out to seek an heir for the throne seeing how the king has fallen ill. Shrek of course finds Artie, whom is also Fionna’s cousin.
On their quest back Donkey is accidentally turned into a parfait, and the kingdom is once again taken over by Prince Charming.

It is up to you to find fairy dust to heal Donkey, and also up to you to regain order to the kingdom.

Pretty pathetic storyline, wouldn’t you say? At least I thought so. I was really hoping the game play was not as bad as the storyline.

THE GAME:

You are controlling 3 characters from the very beginning, Shrek, Puss and Boots, and Artie.

The controlling is very strange though. You each character has it own special abilities unique from the other characters.

SHREK:

Can wail himself into enemies, and break through thick object with ease.

ARTIE:

Can use his little dagger to either throw or stab with. He also comes with a shield to protect himself from hits.

PUSS:

Can jump to extremely high places with ease, and crawl.

You easily move each character through the 2D side scrolling levels using the D pad and using the stylus to perform special moves. In the game you simply tap on the picture of the character you want to control.

GET THE PICTURE?

Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s happening next. The 3 have to work together to make it to the end of the board.

Yes in this strange new game play you will be controlling each character individually to progress on. It’s more of a puzzle than a game.

The game is very similar to Super Paper Mario for the Wii, when it comes to dealing with puzzle solving and using each character to move on. You’ll be using Shrek to break walls, Puss n’ Boots to jump walls, and Artie to throw his toothpick stick up at high levers and at enemies.

This is where I encountered my first problem with the game. You must get each character to the end of the board in order to get to the next level. The game developers came up with an easy linking technique, this way you could have all 3 characters walk at the same time.
They thought it was easy didn’t they? The linking is deeply flawed though.

Every time I link up with the other 2 characters they fall from the link when I take a few steps forward. I guess they want you to move in slow motion. Which is nearly impossible to do when a giant living tree is ready to stop on you. If you do not link up, the other 2 characters will just sit there frozen and not move or follow you.

Having to constantly link back up every 10 seconds is just a pain in the rear, so I easily grew frustrated just in the beginning of the game, and ended up just walking each character to the next.

Each world is filled with another puzzle, some difficult, some way too easy. In order to get through most lands you will need Shrek to knock over giant enemies or break walls, Artie to use his throwing dagger to activate levers, and Puss to jump up to high places. That’s seriously pretty much it. Their moves and uses are limited and do not increase over time.

DONKEY!:

When you are having a difficult time in battle you can summon Donkey who will help you using his magic. He can either freeze enemies making it easy to kill them, or levitate you. His power is limited though, and you cannot summon him every 5 seconds. The game though is so simple that you really won’t need him.
You only run into about 4-5 enemies in each level. You can easily take them out by wailing into them using Shrek. The rest is all puzzle solving, and making sure you don’t fall into a hole.
Holes will kill you more than enemies.

THE GRAPHICS:

The graphics in Shrek the Third were actually pretty impressive, and looked very true to the actual movie, the lands were very colorful and inviting, and the backdrop scenery was pretty impressive as well. However many levels looked very similar to the last only with a different puzzle to solve. Therefore I cannot praise the graphics.

SOUNDS:

The characters are limited to grunts and oomph noises in the game. In the background you will hear cheesy medieval type music, but it’s such a low hum that when you’re into the game and thinking hard about what to do next, the noise is barely even heard. This is a good thing.

MULTI PLAYER:

Yes. If you can convince your friends to buy the game that is, then nerd out and plan a 3 way Shrek gaming party. If you and 2 of your friends are within 50 feet of the wifi signal or a wifi area you can all link up and battle together.

I like this feature instead of having to link up with the characters on my own and having them unlink easily. *This type of game play can cause blood battles between kids, so monitor game play. Haha.

In multi player you don’t have to worry about unlinking. You all control a character, making things much easier. (Unless you have a little idiot in your group-hehe-) There are also a few silly mini games thrown in. But like all included mini games in DS games, they’re all the same, but look different.

REPLAY:

None really at all!

The game is easily beaten in less than a day if you go at it all day. There are only about 20 levels, and each of them only takes a minute or so to complete (unless you’re really, really bad at gaming). Once the game is beat there is honestly no reason to go back at it and give it another round. It’s one of them games that land in the closet to collect dust after you have finished it.

ISSUES:

The game had issues from the start. The storyline was just garbage, and I have yet to see the movie. I truly hope the movie is not as cheesy as this game was.

1. Linking technique does not work for longer than 10 seconds or 10 footsteps.
2. They used a new character from the third movie as a game played character. Many Shrek fans from the past would have surely rather of used gingerbread man, or Pinocchio as a third character. Seeing how I did not see the movie, all I got was a brief description in the game on who Artie was, and now I’m playing as him. Bah!
3. The non-stop switching of characters every 5 seconds is downright annoying.
4. Horrible re-play value

THE GOODS:

1. The graphics were decent
2. Very little violence, so young children can play it without their parents freaking out. 6+
3. Multi player

OVERALL:

At the $30 price tag is it seriously a game worth passing up. If you cannot find it for less that $15 don’t even bother. Honestly they could have set the whole thing up much better instead of throwing in the ridiculous broken linking technique.

RECOMMENDATION:

Only if it goes on a major sale, other than that, no, it’s not worth a purchase.