In addition to my time with the preview build of Treasure World, I also got the chance to talk to Aspyr's Justin "CosMind" Leingang, creative director and the lead designer on Treasure World.

I had a number of questions about a lot of neat little touches I'd seen in the game as I spent a week trying it out, carrying it with me on every drive I went on, every walk, and even out in the woods behind my house—just in case. (It didn't turn out to be a very productive walk. Turns out trees have little use for Wi-Fi.)

Justin had a lot to say about his baby, which we present to you now for your reading pleasure.

Ping.

I'm driving my 12-year-old Ford Escort on the freeway at 7 a.m., on my way to my day job. There's not as much traffic as there would be around 7:45, of course, but it's still not exactly wide-open road. I'm probably going about 75 mph. Oh, and I'm playing a game on my old DS Lite.

Ping.

I see in my rear-view mirror a billboard that says "Buckle Up, Hang Up, Heads Up"—part of a campaign to get drivers to pay undivided attention to the road. I chuckle a little.

Ping-ping-ping.

I'm impressed; that was a pretty big score right there. I look around me a minute and peek down at the seat to check my progress. I am playing a game, but I'm not really endangering the other drivers around me. The game in question is a preview build of Aspyr's Treasure World, and as my auto insurance company will no doubt appreciate, I'm playing it totally hands-off.

You may or may not have heard about Miami Law, a cop adventure title recently released by Hudson and featuring the wordsmith stylings of Vic Ireland's (yes, that Vic Ireland, formerly of Working Designs fame) Gaijinworks. Hudson sent along a copy of the game about the same time we were in the middle of our post-E3 content rush, and as such I am just now getting into it.

Miami Law is definitely bare-bones as far as adventure trappings go. There's no scene-searching that I've seen, nor do you have an inventory; you simply move from place to place (under your own control) and pick who to talk to, what to look at, or what to do from a menu. Its two key hooks are points where you can choose to follow the story of hard-boiled undercover cop Law Martin or FBI agent Sara Starling—this is championed as a reason to replay the story—and the appearance of some fair-to-pretty-decent pop-up minigames (as far as I've seen in my first hour or so, anyway), such as a shootout you'll get into very early on. If you've played the Nintendo Channel demos, you may have seen some of these.


The first coverage I'd read of the game was from Nintendo Power; their review had given the game a pretty atrociously low score, citing cheap deaths and a "credibility gap." I don't necessarily know that's fair, but I've only played a bit so far. I did, within my first few minutes, experience what I think was supposed to be one of these. I felt more like it was my own failing, not being sharp enough to pick up on the clues beforehand, rather than the game itself being cheap. Regardless, it only took moments from the "retry" button to get back into the action; this game certainly isn't instilling in me any sort of frequent-saving habit.

Despite any wishy-washiness I may have about the game itself, the writing is definitely entertaining. Hudson did a good thing bringing Gaijinworks on board. I'm looking forward to completing Miami Law. It may not be the pinnacle of its genre, but it does seem to be doing at least a few things right, and it's certainly entertaining.

I loaded up Punch-Out!! on the Wii Virtual Console the other day (the NES version, of course), after having taken a break from the infuriating punishment I was receiving in the new Wii Punch-Out!!. Little Mac was so... little! And all the dudes I was punching out were really little too. I remembered them being bigger. It was kind of lame.


Punch-Out!! for Wii has this tendency of doing that. The characters are huge and colorful and cel-shaded, the sound effects are loud and brassy and in stereo, the game runs in widescreen progressive scan, the intro music for the fighters is usually orchestrated or originally performed live, and all the fights have several stylish illustrations to introduce the fighters. It's Punch-Out!!, and it makes the old one look pretty much like crap.

One of the more peculiar mysteries in my life as a Wii gamer is how my two-dozen-strong disc collection has never included EA's Boom Blox. Well, truth be told, I really didn't know what the heck to think of the game when I first heard about it. Steven Spielberg? Making a... game? went the thought process, as I recall. By time I heard it was actually good, I was too busy enjoying other titles to go back and correct my mistake.

Even without my sale, though, EA seems have been happy enough with the original to give it a sequel. Boom Blox Bash Party—the name clearly calculated to resonate with someone's idea of a Wii buyer—arrived recently and I got my hands on a copy and gave it a spin.

Unlike many of the more vocal opinion-makers engaged in games coverage, I don't have anything intrinsically against minigame collections. One of my favorite DS games and its sequel were just that, actually (Feel the Magic: XY♥XX and The Rub Rabbits). But those two titles, I felt, had a little something special; they had a fun story which managed to be coherent with even the weirdest of the minigames, which themselves were almost uniformly enjoyable to play; fair, yet challenging.

Hudson recently released Help Wanted, which is definitely a minigame collection—it's right on the cover, there; you can plainly see there are 50 of the little buggers on the disc. And they're packaged together with a story that's decently entertaining and does maintain coherence with the decidedly wacky theme (as advertised). So is it enough to make it an effort worth getting into?

Halfway through our conversation, Yoshiro Kimura, clad in a denim jacket, striped shirt, and ballcap, pulls a miniature fire truck from his coat pocket and places it on the table in front of us. Jimmy Soga, XSEED Product Manager (and translator today) is busy relaying to us some information about the music in Little King's Story, but I catch myself drifting away, watching Mr. Kimura roll the little firetruck back and forth on the table. He reaches to the end of the table for a tiny foam rubber critter—Onii, a indigenous character you must fight in the game, as well as a pre-order gift for reserving a copy of LKS—then places him in front of the firetruck, knocks him down, then stands him back up. He hums the first somber bars of Beethoven's fifth symphony. "Da da da daaaaaaa..."


Fresh off an excellent critical reception in Europe, Little King's Story is being prepared for its US release, tentatively in late July. I ask Kimura, the designer of the game, as our interview begins, did you expect this kind of success?

His response? "Hai." Then silence.

I may have played the Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing demo at E3 more than anyone else at the show. I played it three times. Sitting right across from the packed Bayonetta demo, Sonic just didn't get a lot of action. None of the demo units ever had much of a line, and by Day Two the first words out of any Sega Rep's mouth were "it's a lot like Mario Kart." Yet, I had a blast. Is this a problem with me, or is E3 just too glitzy for a game like this?



Granted, Sonic & Sega All-Star Racing is a clone of Mario Kart—That's undeniable. You drive around fantasy race courses as cartoon Sega characters and quickly find fun power-ups to shoot at each other along the way. The game mimics Mario Kart right down to its box-like item drops, crazy jumps, secret alternative routes, little beach crabs, and charging power-slides. Fortunately, I'm a big fan of Mario Kart; it's nice to see Sega (or any developer) try to rip off a Nintendo franchise and not fail miserably in execution. All-Star Racing's controls work, and the game is fun.

If I were to say that The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks is just "Phantom Hourglass on a train," I really wouldn't be exaggerating. Not since Majora's Mask has there been a 3D Zelda that feels so identical to its predecessor. Whether or not this is a good thing, I suppose, depends entirely upon your opinion of Phantom Hourglass. If you were a fan of its look and control, Spirit Tracks could be a right good time.


Our Link this time is an apprentice train engineer, and lives in a world roughly 100 years in the future of Phantom Hourglass. As one might expect, rather than sailing from place to place, Link chugs along in his very own locomotive. While this change means the return of an actual land-based overworld, don't be fooled—you have less control over your travels than ever before. As the first part of the E3 demo illustrates, overworld travel is a matter of choosing between already-established tracks that crisscross the land.

I remember modding my N64 so I could play the original Sin & Punishment. The N64's sad excuse for region locking actually consisted of a pair of plastic tabs that lined up with US cartridges, but not with Japanese ones. The solution: melt them right off with a soldering iron, after opening up the system with a custom-ordered gamebit. Quite an extravaganza for a single game, but man, it was worth it.


Sin & Punishment 2 is a long time coming. The original, an on-rails third person shooter, practically begged for pointer-controls. With the sequel, developer Treasure hasn't strayed far from the series' roots. You still run blasting and slashing through a post-apocalyptic future where mutated livestock ravage the remnants of humanity. Kachi, the female protagonist, is being pursued by a mysterious organization, and Isa, the male protagonist, is trying to help her figure out why. You can choose which of them to play as when the E3 demo begins, and they each have a couple of unique abilities.