Odama for President

The day after I got all those games I drove up to my parents house. They live in the Shenandoah Valley in this little Virginia town. They moved there to get away from civilization and they did a pretty good job. This is one of those towns where people are proud of their Walmart. Not a Walmart, not even the Walmart, their Walmart. As if they built it themselves. Bumper Sticker: "My Walmart is an honor-roll student at..."

Anyway I was surprised to find a game store there that was very well stocked. It was attached to some video rental chain I had never heard of, kind of a Hollywood Video/Game Crazy kind of thing. They didn't have anything older than last generation but they did have a great selection of Xbox/PS2/GameCube games. In my zeal I bought two games for the Cube: Odama and Viewtiful Joe. In a previous post I stated that I was mostly done buying Cube games, but I guess with me "done" is relative.

Odama (NOT Obama) is a game that always intrigued me, both because of its premise and because my wife wanted to play it (again, see previous post on Tetris Attack). I had heard that the game sucked due primarily to awkward control. This rumor is entirely true. I'm not going to say that the game sucks but saying the control is awkward is like saying the ocean is wet. Here is the idea: you play as a general in a medieval Japanese army. The battlefield is a pinball machine and you control a giant ball with pinball flippers at the bottom of the screen. You use the ball to complete objectives and run over the enemy. You also control your army by using the GameCube microphone and issuing voice commands. If you don't have the little bracket that holds the mic onto the controller then you are screwed. What we did was my wife played the pinball part with the controller and I used the mic to control our men. Even with two brains to keep track of things it was, um, a clusterfuck. You've got to get your men to pick up these things, and fight the enemy, and open gates, and the ball is rolling over you and... yeah. I'm willing to give it another try but I have a feeling this one's going to be more collectors item and less actual game, that you know, I play.

I haven't spent enough time with Viewtiful Joe to say anything important about it. So I won't.

Lastly I got Doom 2 and Shadow Complex from XBLA. They are fun. That is all.