Hi G&C Wii. I have an upcoming AAA recommendation for yo

[Xisiqomelir]

Title: NO MORE HEROES
Genre: Action
Platform: Wii exclusive
Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture (Killer7)
Publisher -
US: Ubisoft
Japan: Marvelous/Spike
Europe: Rising Star Games
Release Date -
US: January 22nd, 2008
JPN: Failed us already
EUR: ?

Official Website

Trailer

Screens:




+more at the GAF thread I'm plagiarizing. Check it out for awesome concept art.

Plot:

The story revolves around Travis Touchdown, a stereotypical otaku who lives in poverty in the fictional town of Santa Destroy, California. After winning a beam katana in an internet auction he agrees to assassinate a hitman, Helter Skelter, which earns him rank 11 by the UAA, the governing body of assassins. For the rest of the game the player lives Travis' life, earning money and climbing the ranks of the UAA, eventually discovering secrets of his past.

Gameplay:

Unlike Killer7, the player will control the character Travis Touchdown only. The game will have a free roaming world, allowing Travis to move around on foot or on his motorcycle—the "Schpel Tiger". Game play is open-ended, with the concession that the player must kill the top 10 assassins in order for the storyline to progress. There will exist numerous part time job side quests to earn money and gain additional weapons. The player will also level up through experience points, but the exact details have not been revealed.

Control will be handled through the Wii Remote and Nunchuk attachment, with the Remote control the katana beam and the Nunchuk moving Travis. Most attacks will be performed using the "A" button, with certain other moves—including finishing strikes and sword lock breaks—being executed by following on-screen instructions. Further, since the sword runs on batteries, the player will have to shake the remote from time to time to "re-charge" it. While the sword will not follow the exact position of the remote, it will be able to distinguish between three different height levels and the angle of attacks. Successful execution of these moves will provide additional chances for attacks. Travis has also been shown demonstrating professional wrestling maneuvers to subdue opponents, including a Dragon Suplex, done by manipulating both the Wii Remote and Nunchuck.

Reviews:
Edge 9/10
Press Start - One Hundred Smiles
NGamer - 9.4
GAF impressions thread <---Recommended
Gametrailers 8.2
Famitsu 9/8/8/9 (34/40)
GamePro 4.5/5 GOTM
IGN 7.8
XPLAY 5/5
Gamespot 9




Why you should buy this game:
-You've already finished Galaxy
-It's a serious use of the Wiimote instead of a terrible cash-in
-Suda51 is sad. Make him happy by buying his great game!

[Bounty]

I will. Just read the NGamer review and this looks promising.

[Hotfoot]

Looks good, I was actually pretty interested in this game, though the "Press A to attack" makes me cry a little inside. I want so desperately for a game to track the wiimote and turn actual movements into attacks, like merging Die by the Sword and the Wii.

It sounds a hell of a lot better than the implementation of the wiimote in, say, Twilight Princess though. I do hope the recharging thing isn't too often though.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Gonna go out to the LGS and get a copy, hopefully.

[DarkSilver]

been looking forward to this game for months

Like Hotfoot, the "press a to attack" makes me cry a lil inside, but otherwise, I'll make the concession.

this one looks like it is made out of pure win and awesome, I just hope it catches on well enough that dev's take the Wii more seriously in giving us awesome games for it (one gets tired of party games and mostly horrible minigames, and ports of PS2 games eventually you know..).

[Xisiqomelir]

Impressions to follow

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Thread title could be a little less obtuse.

[Stark]

Not if you're a massive poser, I guess. With fat greasy hands.

[Xisiqomelir]

I've just beaten the first assassin. This game is absolutely amazing. The combat, which is about 85% of the gameplay is really well done. The autoblock is pretty good, with two levels of guard (high/low), and there's a God Hand-esque dodge mechanic as well. The really fun part, of course, is attacking. You attack high/low by positioning the Wiimote and pressing A, or you punch/grapple with B. Both the beamsaber slashes and your physical stunning blows can be charged for extra power by holding the button down. The actual waggle comes in to play when you weaken an enemy to finishing blow point, when a graphic directs you to swing in a direction. Doing it successfully (not hard) gives you a better than normal kill, and starts slots spinning on the bottom of the screen. If the slots line up, you obtain a variety of bonus powerups, which I won't spoil.

The artwork is typical over-the-top Suda style. Decapitating an enemy (you will do this a lot) results in copious fountains of blood, far in excess of the Killer 7 levels of gore. Travis himself is a cool design, and the enemies are all nicely done as well. The other assassins can only be described as trippy.

Technically, the game isn't really a system pusher. The jaggies are numerous and seemingly omnipresent, and the polygon count of the game surely isn't very high. The controls are very tight though, which is particularly important here because things can get hectic with multiple enemies at once. The polish on the menus and toilet save system is really well done, and there's a very retrogamer feel to the end-of-stage scoring.

So far, this seems to be a 9, or at least a high 8.

Thread title could be a little less obtuse.

The SDN subject bar keeps tricking me. I entered the final "u", but of course it doesn't show up on the forum.

Not if you're a massive poser, I guess. With fat greasy hands.

If your hands are smaller than mine you must be pretty tiny :p

[DarkSilver]

Picked it up last night, went hunting for it, and damn near had to choke a Gamestop employee who kept insisting the game "wasn't released yet".

Xisiqomelir's review is pretty much right. The game controls is wonderfully tight, concise and easy to do. Killing the mobs produces wonderful founts of gore and coins(!), and getting the humor of the game is awesome. Travis' apartment is like an anime freak gone insane with decorating.

Travis Touchdown is kinda...weird. The art work and attitude is just so spot on, except for his "I don't care about titles and power, I just want to be Number One!" line after the first boss fight (the 10th rank assassin, Death Metal) just reeks of cheese. The style though, the over the top Suda style animation, along with the way the Hud and menu's look, are a perfect combination. No, it's not a system pusher, but damn it, it doesn't NEED to be!



I managed to do two lil minimissions after the first big kill, and getting myself to a number 10, and had some fun with them.

I'm not sure if NMH will be a triple A title, but it's damn close, and alot of fun. The only thing is a lack of Multiplayer, but I can live without it. I'll be surprised if it doesn't get high 8's, mid to high 9's in reviews.

[Xisiqomelir]

Bunch of reviews:

Gametrailers 8.2
Famitsu 9/8/8/9 (34/40)
GamePro 4.5/5 GOTM
IGN 7.8
XPLAY 5/5
Gamespot 9


and the text of the Edge review is up too, I'll change the link in OP.

EDGE REVIEW: No More Heroes

By Edge
No More Heroes is the game that Suda 51 and GHM have always threatened, but never quite delivered.

When you load up No More Heroes, Grasshopper’s logo appears on the screen bearing the legend ‘Punk’s Not Dead!’ It’s a comic moment – slightly desperate in its insistence, slightly banal in its sentiment – and wholly suited to No More Heroes, a game that reconciles rebellion and beam swords with a matter-of-fact take on the realities of life. It’s a singular vision, the script joking about emotions and toilets in the same breath, its tasks veering between insanity and mundanity: its greatest achievement is the melding of these diverse qualities into something coherent.

It begins with Travis Touchdown coming across a beam sword and killing a local assassin at the request of a pretty girl he desperately wants to impress, which sets him on the road to encounters with another 11 killers. The game is built around these 11 assignments, between each of which Travis can traverse a hub town on his motorbike, seek gainful employment or take on freelance assassination missions.

The world, and its characters, are skewed parodies that balance gaming functions with homely advice and bizarre voice-acting. The cardboard town is basic to say the least, and will be misconstrued as an attempt at GTA, but it’s a much less ambitious and compact space that concentrates on the minutiae of Travis’s life: thus, the only things of interest to him and the player are the bars, clothes shops, the odd friend, perhaps the gym, and the Job Centre.

There is one key surprise within this part of No More Heroes: though it’s full of events and distractions, it also dares to try to bore you. The jobs depend on your learning the technique for each before doing as much as you can, and make a virtue of their real-world mundanity with ridiculous 8bit fonts proudly trumpeting that you are a ‘Coconut Collector’ or ‘Lawn Mower’, while the boss stands around with his arms folded and watches “the third-class man” sweat. At three minutes long, there’s the suspicion that Grasshopper has timed exactly how long is too long for repetitive tasks, and made them stop right on the borderline.

But it doesn’t become boring because the game as a whole constantly alters the rhythms of the challenges you face. The fighting missions initially seem repetitious, but manage to introduce the basics and then push the possibilities. The structure is simple: Travis moves through a location and defeats scores of enemies before coming up against his target, the beam sword used by pressing the A button, and punches and kicks triggered with the B button. Attacks also depend on dodging, your position relative to the enemy and the angle at which you’re holding the Wii Remote – as well as, for finishing opponents, Remote gestures.

Acquiring a new beam sword will change all of Travis’s moves in both style and effectiveness, and each assassination mission brings with it a new wrestling throw to use on your many foes. It balances flowing attack and subtlety with a real challenge as the game progresses, and what initially appears to be a limited system reveals such variation beneath the surface that it can be mastered to a degree that once-unbeatable enemies won’t be able to touch you.

Beyond this, the later levels mix up the nature of the fighting to an almost schizophrenic degree: quite outside of the variations in locations and bosses, you’ll have to fight side-on, top-down and upside-down, as well as conquer Great White Giant Glastonbury – a discovery best left to the player.

And the bosses are a wonderful collection of freaks and eccentrics, with a level of invention in the battles that has more than a hint of Metal Gear Solid about it. That game’s tendency to tease the fourth wall is here nothing less than an explicit gouging: characters freely slip in and out of their roles to comment on the action, and as No More Heroes reaches its climax the twists become progressively more ludicrous and the ‘game’ becomes part of the broader story. It’s breathless stuff at times, and so inventive in adopting little cinematic tricks (the first time you re-centre the camera is a delight) and contradicting itself gleefully that it’s hard not to be swept along.

Needless to say, the game also has the trademark Grasshopper look, from the colored freeze-frames that mark loading (accompanied by a guitar riff) to the cel-shaded figures with whom you interact. It’s by far one of the best looking and most distinctive Wii games to date. There are some technical problems: there’s noticeable pop-up in the town, which leads to some invisible walls, the framerate occasionally drops, and certain models (notably cars) are basic.

The honorable exception is the audio, which has a sound effect for almost everything in the game of some comic note. The themes are infectious and you’ll frequently hear a snatch of a remixed 8bit tune as you progress through the assassination missions.

Amid these disparate elements the game does have a unifying theme, and perhaps a surprising one for a Wii title: gaming culture and gamers. It goes beyond the retro stylings (the scoreboard is a particular highlight) and incidental tributes to other titles to a wry fatalism about what lies outside the excesses of imagination: after the pyrotechnic thrills of each assassination, Travis returns to his motel room to two answer phone messages, one about the late return of a pornographic video with a highly inventive title, and one about the amount of money he has to pay for the next fight, necessitating a new job.

No More Heroes is a caricature of men’s fantasies. It takes the inner life of a young mind, then expands and explodes it. It’s overblown, out of proportion and ridiculous at times, numbingly familiar at others, and has a breadth of reference and a delicate touch with even its most obvious sources that is unusual in gaming. It’s a game in which you notice how loaded the dialogue is the second time around, a game full of niggly faults that ultimately feel irrelevant to the experience, a game that knows it’s a game and wants you to know that it knows you know. Yes, the narrative is driven mainly by cutscenes, it can be a little basic in places, and it isn’t a ‘paradigm shift’ in any sense, but it is proof that games can love their roots and use the quality of being a ‘game’ to give form to their stories – and excel at it.

Verdict: 9/10

[Alferd Packer]

Rather than start my own thread, I'll just use this one. I picked up this game on Saturday and holy fuck, is it fun.

I fired it up, not really knowing what's gonna happen, and then I get to the tutorial. OK, this is a good idea, since I have no idea how to play the game. When I decapitated my first enemy, I squealed with a retard's glee at the blood and coins rocketing out of the neck stump. OK, so the lightsaber combat is really cool and holyfuckoverthetop with the blood and coins shooting everywhere.

Then, the tutorial introduced me to the grapple/throw combat.

See, I thought when they'd said "wrestling" it'd be amateur stuff. Oh, hell no. Clumsily following the on-screen instructions, I grab my hapless foe and drop him with a fucking brainbuster. By now I look like the fat mama from Eddie Murphy's Nutty Professor, clapping my hands together and chanting, "Hercules! Hercules!" So I continue on and I drop the next guy with a DDT. Now I'm somewhat impressed with the moves so far, noting that the development team must be at least passing fans of wrestling.

But boy oh boy, was I in for a surprise. I grabbed a stunned enemy from behind and hit a fucking dragon suplex. As I would later find out, this game was definitely designed by and for wrestling geeks. Moves I've learned as I've progressed include a standing powerslam, a release German suplex, the Tombstone piledriver, and the fisherman's suplex (both bridging and release, though main character only bridges in cut scenes). Moreover, locations in the game are named after wrestling moves or styles, such as Suplex Burger, Luchaco(gas station), or Bear Hug Studios. Big plus for a wrestling geek like me.

Anyway, this game is so absurdly over the top, it's wonderful. There are tons of little jokes and gags that are only for the geeky. The amount of blood is ridiculous, and it brings this goofy grin to my face every time. The fight controls are are pretty easy to get used to, and the graphics are pretty neat, stylistically. The game definitely chugs as the Wii's puny hardware struggles to keep pace, but fuck it.

But honestly, I don't know who I should recommend this game to. Let's put it this way: you probably have to be a little off to really enjoy it. You could definitely spend fifty bucks on worse things, though.

[Xisiqomelir]

New sales record (for Suda51) get!

Marvelous' president

For non-Moonspeakers, that's 100K us + 160K Yurop (thanks Yurop!). This means a 1/2M lifetime is definitely possible!