Reviews by Deadgood

Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars (Wii) review

Did you know that fungi are more closely related to animals than plants? The characters in Mushroom Men take that one step further, thanks to a strange meteor shower that grants them sentience, as well as deforming some of the woodland creatures into hideous angry mutants. You play as Pax, the sole survivor of his village after a horrific tribal war. He wanders into a village of some fellow Bolete-species mushrooms and ends up absorbing their sacred meteorite. He is banished until he can find a meteor that he won’t absorb, with which to replace it. Of course, along the way he uncovers a larger plot that threatens the whole of Mushroom-kind. Pax is a pretty nimble fellow right from the get-go. He can jump, block and roll, and glide by clutching his mushroom cap. Initially his only weapon is a stylus, which considering he’s a mere three inches tall, is wielded like club. I’m not usually a fan of waggle-control for combat, as even the most enthusiastic masturbator can begin to feel some wrist strain after a few hours, but Mushroom Men executes this control method better than most. You feel like you have some real control over the timing of combat, and the tempo of combos. Animations can also be cancelled, so you’re always able to roll out of the way or block if things go bad. One of the most enjoyable parts of Mushroom Men is building new weapons from the various pieces of junk that you manage to scavenge. These weapons are excellently designed, as is the screen that tells you what components are found within the current level. There are four types of weapons, each effective in different situations. Slashing weapons are great when swarmed by enemies, bashing is good when a big creature is coming straight at you, thrusting helps kill those hard-to-catch flying enemies, and the radical weapons can pretty much destroy anything in your path, but they need ammo and so are only for limited uses. Handily, you can shake the Nunchuk to quickly switch back to the previous weapon. One of my favourite weapons includes a diamond ring held by tweezers and tied together with thread, so you can stab people with your bling. But the favourite must be a makeshift lightsaber, created with a laser pointer, shining through a marble that is held in place with an unbent paperclip. Adding to the Jedi feel is that fact that Pax has the power of Sporekinesis, which allows him to lift or move certain plants and objects that have been infected with the glowing green alien spores. As well as being rather useful for flattening enemies with heavy objects during combat, this is also utilised in some interesting puzzles. The pointer is also used for the devastating Spore Punisher move. When an enemy begins to bleed, Pax can use his Jedi Spore powers to destroy them in an explosive attack that not only guarantees their death, but can damage nearby enemies too. The only real criticism of the combat and platforming is that the camera needs to be adjusted with the d-pad quite often, but at least you are given full control over it, unlike many other Wii games of this type. Health indication is integrated into the game-world excellently, as sections of Pax’s mushroom cap are knocked off when he takes damage, exposing his fragile little brain beneath. Luckily, death isn’t really a problem for the little fungus, as when he is killed, his spores simply settle down a small distance away, and he re-grows. Although this means there is no real consequence for dying, this does encourage exploration of the well-designed levels, and the player is rewarded with an item for defeating a boss unscathed. Speaking of bosses, the ones in Mushroom Men are wonderfully varied and interesting. Whether you’re battling an opossum (that obviously ends up playing dead), or finding ways to drop various heavy objects on some angry bunny rabbits, or throwing regurgitated apple cores back at an insane hare with antlers or removing some infected fungus from an angry turtle, they always find a way to test your skills without becoming frustrating. For defeating a rampaging Mole King, Pax is rewarded with one of those sticky, stretchy hands that you might win from a gumball machine. He can fling this at various surfaces and use it to pull himself up, like some kind of amateur Spiderman. This ability is used to give some of the levels a real sense of verticality and scale, making them a real joy to traverse. However, there are periods where the sticky hand isn’t used for a while, meaning some prompting would have been helpful to remind players to keep on the lookout for objects to grapple onto. Mushroom Men is a game with an appealing visual design, satisfying combat and platforming, an excellent soundtrack, and a superb variety of challenges, but unfortunately it’s just all over too soon. There are nine levels, which won’t take you more than six hours to complete. Although there are collectibles which increase Pax’s health and strength, and others that unlock some rather good concept art, even playing through the game twice may leave you feeling unfulfilled. Once the game is completed, several unrelated mini-games are unlocked. These are based on Pipemania, Chinese Chequers, Catapult and Memory, plus a simple Pachinko game that will probably fascinate Peggle fans for a little too long. They are all Mushroom Men-themed but probably won’t hold your attention for more then ten minutes. Although this is never ever told to the player, Mushroom Men also has a Mario Galaxy-style two player option, which allows a second person to pick up another Wii remote and assist by performing any of the pointer actions that the first player can. They can also tap the A button to replenish Pax’s help. It’s strange that a feature borrowed from such a popular game hasn’t been used as a marketing bullet-point on the back of the box. It’s excellent to see an action platformer on the Wii that is an original concept, and doesn’t fall prey to many of the routine mistakes of the innumerable other shoddy efforts that have been pushed out onto store shelves. However, I fear that Mushroom Men will fail to find its target audience and be overlooked, as the fact that it failed to make it into the Wii’s top 40 games in its first two weeks on sale appears to prove. Mushroom Men leaves you wanting more, which is both its biggest triumph and its only failure.

Fallout 3 (Xbox 360) review

When Fallout 3’s Executive Producer Todd Howard summed up Bethesda’s take on the post-apocalyptic franchise as “Oblivion with guns” that statement may have been closer to the truth than he would have liked to admit. But whilst the foundations for Fallout 3 were clearly laid by the excellent latest Elder Scrolls installment, this title has built upon and improved those fundamentals immeasurably. Set in the year 2277, two hundreds years after a devastating nuclear war, Fallout 3 opens as your character is born into the world. The player character grows up in Vault 101, a self-sustaining underground shelter designed to protect its inhabitants from the horrors of the outside world. The initial tutorial tasks you with playing through various snapshot moments of childhood and adolescence, and this does a fantastic job of quickly giving the player a sense of belonging. The claustrophobic metal corridors of the Vault soon bring with them a desire for freedom which doesn’t take long to manifest itself into an opportunity for escape. Your father mysteriously disappears from the confines of your steel dwelling and you become a wanted man (or woman). Unsurprisingly you soon find yourself stepping into daylight for the first time in your life, in a moment which parallels Oblivion’s introductory sewer escape, but is much more poignant. The bleak, foreboding, irradiated, ravaged landscape that is laid out before you immediately makes you wish to turn tail and flee back to the safety of the Vault. But this is where the game-proper begins and the exploration that is at the heart of Fallout 3 can commence. The game is set around the ‘Capitol Wasteland’ of the former Washington D.C. and surrounding areas, and although a familiarity with the local landmarks and previous Fallout games will no doubt add an extra level of satisfaction, it’s certainly no necessity for enjoyment. Reminiscent of Bioshock’s retro-futuristic 50s era links, the America of Fallout 3 is one that appears to have been foreseen from the 1940’s. It’s a world of robot butlers, fusion-powered cars, fear and awe of the power of atomic weaponry, and staunch patriotism and anti-communism that has been reduced to a husk of its former self. The destroyed freeways, shopping malls, subways, tower blocks and monuments, when viewed over a soundtrack of superb 40’s classics like Billie Holiday, are hauntingly beautiful. Appropriately for the setting, much of the gameplay in Fallout 3 consists of scavenging for weapons, ammo, apparel, health packs and any other junk that can be sold for bottle caps, which have become the new currency of those people that make up the remnants of civilisation. As the weight of items that you can carry is limited, deciding what is worth salvaging can potentially be a huge diversion, but certainly something worth doing to ensure you are best equipped for survival. The Wasteland is a hazardous place, and you’ll come across a huge variety of mutated bugs, mole rats, dogs and ghouls, as well as the dreaded Supermutants. Luckily, you can use the invaluable V.A.T.S. (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) which essentially allows you to freeze combat and select a specific enemy body-part to target with your chosen weapon. These have different percentage changes of success based on your distance from the enemy, the selected weapon, any obstacles and your current combat statistics. When the selections have been made, a slow-motion and usually gory scene will follow. Unfortunately, you only have a limited number of Action Points that can be used each time (usually enough for three or four shots), before you must wait for these to regenerate. Although V.A.T.S. is optional, and you can simply point and shoot as in a regular First-Person Shooter, the guns look and feel so unimpressive outside of the V.A.T.S. system, that you may as well be blowing spitballs at enemies. Battles tend to dissolve into a routine of using V.A.T.S. and then running, hiding or evading whilst your Action Points replenish, then popping out to use V.A.T.S. again. Despite this, the over-the-top violence, the uniqueness of V.A.T.S. and the variety of weapons and foes to use them on, somehow manage to keep combat enjoyable despite its potential repetitiveness. That said, the enemy A.I. is somewhat lacking, as almost every adversary will blindly run towards the player whilst attacking, and will vary rarely attempt any advanced tactics like retreating or seeking cover. The animation also leaves something to be desired, as robotic movements aren’t ideal for any assailant, besides those that are actually robotic of course… Thankfully, Bethesda have provided the player with the possibility of occasionally avoiding combat through the development of alternative skills such as lock picking, hacking and persuasion. Fallout 3 has much more traditional system of progression than Oblivion, with Experience Points being awarded for kills, quest completions and exploration. With each successive Experience Level gained, points can be assigned to various attributes ranging from Repair to Science to Strength. Speaking of strengths, that of Fallout 3 has to be the script and wonderfully inventive quests. Dialogue, voice-acting and facial expressions and variety have been much improved over Oblivion, and the sheer freedom of choice to do Good or Evil deeds is almost overwhelming. In fact, Fallout 3 allows the player to express themselves morally in far more profound ways than other titles like Mass Effect and Fable 2, neither of which included the option at one point to sell an innocent child into slavery. Although there’s nothing stopping the player from sticking resolutely to the main quest of finding their father, and completing the game in around 20 hours, they’d be doing themselves a disservice as some of the most interesting scenarios arise from the many optional side-quests. There are around 20 major side-quests, some of which will take over an hour to finish, and all of which are excellently designed and varied. Also there are many, many more minor side-quests that you may not even come across. This is a huge world that Bethesda have created, and as with Oblivion it’s likely you won’t have seen everything even after 100 hours of gaming. I was fortunate enough to not come across any bugs in my playthrough of the game, although many other players have reported glitches that range from the hilarious to the gamebreaking. Luckily, you can save the game at any time, so any errors whether made by the player or the programming can be swiftly reverted providing to remember to save often. Fallout 3 is an admirable achievement for Bethesda. It’s a game that provides action, adventure, exploration, interaction and excitement in a beautifully realised Armageddon that provides so many unexpected moments, but somehow manages to remain consistent and believable. Regardless of the sometimes-weak combat, this is role-playing at its finest. It’s almost enough to make you wish that those damn Communists would hurry up and drop the bomb!

WALL.E (Xbox 360) review

Set on Earth eight hundred years in the future, where a single mega-corporation has assumed the position of government and the world has become so polluted that humankind has fled into space, Wall·E is could be considered something of a negative commentary on mass consumerism and environmental apathy. Is it ironic then, that Wall·E has an inevitable movie tie-in videogame that has been released on every conceivable format, in every conceivable language? (Except for Welsh) Ever since E.T: The Game was held partially responsible for crashing the entire videogame industry back the early ’80s, movie-to-videogame adaptations have generally been regarded with scorn. And with good reason, as time constraints and the difficulty of translating cinematic endeavours into engaging gameplay usually result in a poor-quality product. So how do you take a movie with minimal dialogue, about the last robot alone on Earth, and turn it into a fun videogame? Don’t ask THQ, as they clearly haven’t got a clue. They’ve only gone and created a typically terrible action-adventure title that completely fails to appeal to its intended audience. Wall·E’s ‘special skill’ is crushing trash into cubes. This is something you can expect to do several hundred times over the course of the game. But, despite this sounding extremely boring, it never once threatens to feel any less than tedious. There are four types of cubes, two of which you will use more than once in the game, the charge-cube and the heavy cube. Getting excited yet? Bafflingly, cubes can only be made from trash-dispensing machines (why do these even exist?!) which almost –always need to be fixed by finding an additional component. This missing part is consistently found RIGHT NEXT to the machine that needs it. This piece of game design is so utterly pointless that it defies further explanation. It’s akin to the game presenting you with a door that has a key already inserted into the lock and a giant neon sign above reading “TURN ME”. Gameplay as the the lovable galvanised-turd Wall·E alternates between cube-throwing and basic platforming. The animated box-on-wheels handles like… a box-on-wheels, mostly adequate. The bigger issue here is with the camera, which actually turns out to be the most interesting enemy in the game. It’s unclear whether the epic battles you’ll be having with this game’s camera were intended, or whether the personification and malicious personality the camera appears to have is the result of some sort of emergent A.I. Playing as Wall·E’s more sophisticated love-interest EVE is an experience that actually edges towards actually being enjoyable. EVE can fly, and as such her levels are much more open and free environments than Wall·E’s linear crawls. Unfortunately, EVE’s controls are more annoying than a sight-impaired elderly bus driver with a faulty hearing aid – fixed camera, single analog control; hold a button to move forward. Her levels are also completely without any semblance of challenge and the tasks are more repetitive than what the average McDonalds worker faces. Fly through tunnels/rings, find a certain number of items scattered across the map. Despite this, her levels are the least irritating part of the game, so it’s a shame there are only two such levels in the game. Strangely, for a game that is clearly aimed at an audience that has only just learned how not to defecate in their underwear, Wall·E includes some rather harsh difficulty spikes. Although most of the game is so easy that it would drive the most hyperactive child into a coma, later levels introduce a dangerous red floor that if touched will INSTANTLY DESTROY YOU! If you see your child alternating between fits of catatonia and weeping frustration, don’t call the exorcist or child psychologist, simply burn any copies of Wall·E in you home (preferably before your child’s eyes) and they will be cured. Graphics can be best described as PS2 textures that have been sharpened to HD resolutions (i.e. ugly as sin). The visuals completely fail to capture the charm that is inherent in Pixar movies and instead evoke feelings of bleakness that aren’t usually encountered outside of Holocaust films. The usual suspects of frame-rate dropping and screen tearing are all present and correct. Glitches and bugs are minor, but you’re likely to come across some during a play-through of the game. The most amusingly bad ones include – Wall·E slowly sinking into solid floors and objects like a dead chicken into a swamp, and Wall·E suddenly doing a Torville & Dean impression as the physics engine seems to recognise random patches of tarmac as ice and the little robot goes sliding over them. The sound design of Wall·E is undoubtedly the most headache inducing ‘soundtrack’ ever created. Imagine the most nerve-twitchingly bad melody that you might hear in an American cartoon, multiply that by a thousand, and then imagine this on an eternal 5-second loop. Move over Waterboarding and Sensory Deprivation, the U.S. Government has a new favourite torture technique! Wall·E does also feature a number of collectible items, and some multiplayer modes, but by the time you get around to these you’ll likely have thrown either this game, or yourself, out of the nearest window. Somehow someone somewhere managed to design and create a game that is almost completely devoid of fun and enjoyment. If you do purchase and play through this game, you’ll be left thinking of all the better ways you could have spent your time. Such as watching paint dry, bouncing a tennis ball against a wall, surfing random articles on Wikipedia and banging your head against a brick wall.

Flower, Sun and Rain (DS) review

Game designer Goichi ‘Suda51’ is well known for creating games with striking visuals, new twists on old genres, bizarre characters and surreal plotlines. The most prominent examples of his work are Killer7 and No More Heroes, but before either of these games came Flower, Sun and Rain. You see, FSR is actually a DS remake of a game that was released way back in 2001 on the PlayStation 2, sadly the visuals are much more reminiscent of early PS1-era games with horribly blocky polygonal characters and eye-wateringly bad textures. Make no mistakes; this is a truly ugly game to behold. The audio doesn’t do much better either. Voices are represented by a Simlish-style gibberish babble that doesn’t take long to become annoying. Sound effects such as footsteps and doors are flat and irritating. The music is either nauseating elevator muzak or horrible MIDI versions of classics such as Bach, Debussy and Gershwin. These 8-bit bleeps and bloops remove any charm from the original classics. So, if this game is such a presentational mess, why would anyone bothered persevering through it? Luckily, the plot and characters are good enough to redeem Flower, Sun and Rain from being a complete write-off. The player is cast as Sumio Mondo, a professional ‘searcher’ who has been called to the titular Flower, Sun and Rain hotel on the remote Lospass Island by hotel manager Edo Macalister. Edo tasks Mondo with finding and stopping a time bomb that has been placed on a plane that is due to leave the island’s only airport within the next 24 hours. Mondo takes his job seriously and resolves to head directly to the airport, but is sidetracked by other hotel guests and island residents who all need his help with a variety of problems. These distractions result in the plane taking off and exploding before Mondo can even get near the airport. However, the next day Mondo wakes up in his hotel bed and is shocked to find that the previous day has not even happened yet. And so begins a Groundhog day-style time loop scenario that sees Mondo constantly being diverted from his task by the needs of others. Mondo’s biggest asset is his ‘partner’, a silver briefcase which he has named Catherine. (This leads to some humorous innuendo when Mondo disgusts people by telling them he’ll be putting important items inside his partner…) Catherine can ‘jack in’ to people and objects and by inputting a certain number; the player can unlock the mysteries of the island. The gameplay takes the form of controlling Mondo on his quest, by talking to the ensemble cast of eccentric characters, finding out their problems and helping them by figuring out what number Catherine must use to solve each mystery. Helping you along is a rather handy guidebook to the island that Edo provides at the start of the game, and much of the time once you’ve worked out which page of this book is relevant to the current task, you’re halfway there. Jacking into a target presents you with a pointless bit of trial-and-error gameplay as there is no way to figure out which of the nine particular jack heads will provide a successful connection. The difficulty of the various number-puzzles varies wildly. Some require no thought at all as you’re provided with a ton of clues from the character and there will be only a single number on the relevant guidebook page. Others present you with almost no hints and some obscure logic clouding the correct answer. Only rarely do the conundrums hit that sweet-spot of being satisfyingly challenging without being frustrating. The game is extremely linear, and although there are bonus lost items that can be searched for there is really no point of deviating from the path that the plot sets before you. Some aspects of FSR seem to have almost been designed to frustrate the player. It takes almost two weeks to finally escape the confinements of the hotel, but once you do, you’ll begin wishing you were back there. Apparently, Lospass Island is some kind of eco resort, and vehicles have been banned from the roads. Mondo must rely on his feet as his only mode of transport, and many tasks force you to trudge back and forth across the Island along inexplicably featureless and lengthy paths. After having battled through the tedious gameplay and hideous design, the wonderful characters and dialogue feel like a reward. Conversations are simultaneously baffling, unintelligible, hilarious, unexpected and fascinating. The fabulous cast includes a maid who finds comfort in crawling under guests beds as they sleep, an alcoholic angel, a former professional wrestler-turned-pirate who won’t take off his Luchador mask, a naïve Japanese student who is forever chasing after her male pink talking man-eating crocodile named Christina, a soccer-obsessed French systems engineer who delights in testing Mondo with cryptic phone calls and sinister threats and a Federal agent who uses the unique investigate technique of guesswork. Best of all though has to be the excellent self-referential nature of FSR. Mondo constantly bemoans the repetitive nature of his tasks, voicing the feelings of the player exactly. This attitude is personified by Shoutaro, a neglected kid who amuses himself by constantly irritating Mondo by repeatedly breaking the fourth wall and criticising the poor game design. Standout lines include, “This plot is terrible. Who would believe a terrorist attack on a practically deserted backwater island?”. “Our 3D models look completely different from our 2D art. It’s rubbish.” When Mondo threatens to hit the kid if he doesn’t shut up, Shoutaro retorts that the game will be removed from shelves if it contains instances of child abuse. This makes it all the more amusing when Mondo punches the child square in the face. With some shocking plot twists just past the halfway mark, the story actually becomes amazingly compelling, and the unpredictability of the plot keeps your stylus firmly glued to the screen. Flower, Sun and Rain is like a cake with a filling of captivating characters and story, surrounded by a terrible game. If you can make it past the horrible audiovisuals and laborious gameplay then there is some fun to be had here, but you really have to work for it.

Tornado (DS) review

There are few games that put you in control of a natural disaster, and technically Ignition’s latest DS game Tornado doesn’t either. You’re actually controlling a Space Cat who is a member of the intergalactic garbage disposal squad called the Cosmic Cleaners. An evil entity known only as The Prince has decided to use a black hole to suck up all of Earth’s landmarks, people, animals, plants and buildings and use them to decorate his own world, Planet 69. The Cosmic Cleaners have decided to use their own personal Tornado machines to transport everything back to Earth. As you can probably tell, plot is not one of Tornado’s strong points. The character design could have been copied from any number of generic American children’s cartoons, and the dialogue is similarly throwaway. So, the presentation certainly won’t grab you, but does the gameplay redeem things? Tornado’s gameplay style has clearly been inspired by Namco’s excellent Katamari Damacy, and the same principle of collecting objects in order to grow in size, which in turn allows you to collect larger objects, applies here. There are ten levels in total, set in various countries such as the United Kingdom, Japan, United States, Egypt, France and of course Iraq and Antarctica. These are populated with ‘appropriate’ people and buildings which are depicted in a blocky 3D graphical style that is also reminiscent of Katamari. Some slight humour manages to shine through, although much of it borders on racial stereotyping. Britain has red phone booths, football players, Buckingham palace guards and a familiar boy on a broomstick. Japan has sumo wrestlers, otaku, Shinto shrines, cherry blossoms and gaudy skyscrapers. Iraq is full of unexploded bombs, American soldiers, camels, palm trees, women in Burqas, men in turbans, and a genie. And obviously Antarctica contains yetis, Eskimos, snowmen, reindeer, huskies and Santa Claus. There are five levels of size for your Tornado to work through, all of which appear sufficiently swirly. These begin with uprooting smaller objects like trees, cars and people, and culminating in being able to demolish skyscrapers and national landmarks. Depending on the layout of the level, it takes around 30 seconds to get to the third power-level, a minute to achieve the fourth and three minutes to get to full power. This basic mechanic would have worked just fine, as growing your Tornado and sucking up the range of objects is actually fairly enjoyable, but unfortunately Tornado’s developers made some bafflingly poor design decisions in multiple areas of the game. Firstly, the controls. To keep your Tornado’s power level from dropping you must make circular motions on the touch-screen almost constantly, as transporting all but the smallest objects will use up some of the Tornado’s energy. It doesn’t take too long for this to result in possibly the worst case of DS hand-cramp since Metroid Prime: Hunters. Once your Tornado reaches power-level 2 it can use a rather handy dash attack, this becomes essential when trying to knock down larger buildings, to cut a path through a dense cluster of objects or simply get from one side of the map to another. Most DS developers have realised that microphone controls should be optional, or at least infrequent, unfortunately here there is no other way to activate the dash move without blowing into the DS mic. Besides making you appear like a raving Looney when playing in public, this control method is also imprecise at best. The shoulder buttons are only used for changing from one irritating techno/rock music track to the next, so there doesn’t appear to be any reason why they couldn’t have been used to control the dash instead. The Tornado can be directed with either the d-pad or stylus, and either of these work just fine. Secondly, the game gives you a strict time limit of between three and six minutes. Once you run out of time (which will happen frequently) the game not only kicks you back to main menu, but actually resets the cartridge, forcing you to sit through all the unskippable logos again and load up your previous save before you can try again. Considering you’ll need to try some levels easily 20 or 30 times this decision is so bizarre that it makes you wonder whether this title was subject to any playtesting at all. Thirdly, the Story mode of the game provides you with two main types of mission objectives. On the first and third levels you are targeted with finding a certain number of items, one of which is usually contained in a building that can only be toppled with a high-level tornado. The harsh time-limit and relatively close-up camera angle make it impossible to scour the whole level in one go, so you’ll be forced to play several times until you’ve memorised the locations of all items. As annoying as this may sound, it feels like an evening in a hot-tub with your naked supermodel of choice compared to the other type of objective, which tasks you to find a buddy who is hidden inside a random level-five building somewhere in the level. Combine this randomness with the fact that the top-screen map is only useful for showing you areas that you’ve already cleared of objects, and that you’ll only have time to check a few buildings each time and that any logical method of trial-and error is rendered useless and you’ll soon be praying for a real tornado. I must have tried the sixth level close to fifty times before my buddy turned up in a building that I had destroyed countless times before. The short sweet relief of success was cut short by the next level having the exact same issue. The fifth level contains the arse-flavoured icing on this indigestible cake, when another tornado appears mid-way through your search. You continue searching only to eventually realise after a few tries that your objective has actually changed to defeating the other tornado without the game bothering to notify you. The multiplayer mode is hardly worth mentioning as it suffers from the same ridiculous time limits and hopefully the chances of you finding another DS owner with a copy of Tornado will be slimmer than the minimal production cost of the game. However, Tornado does have an Arcade mode that does away with the idiotic objectives and simply challenges you with clearing away at least 60% of the objects in a level. This feels like a purer expression of the core gameplay, and as such is much more entertaining. Sadly, the time limits still feel too restrictive, and you have to beat a level in Story mode before you unlock it in Arcade mode, by which time you’ll probably slammed your head through your DS screen in frustration. Tornado is a title that started with a solid base of fun gameplay mechanics and interesting level design and then buried it under a mound of inexplicably terrible design faults that seem like they were created to generate annoyance. It’s a shame to see a game with such potential be ruined by so many unnecessary irritations, but I’m afraid that Tornado sucks.