The poll was quite a bit split this week with equal portions who have preordered and who is waiting for the 3DS Lite, and equal portions of those who need a specific game first and those waiting for the PSP2 (which is actually the NGP). As soon as a price point and a release date is set for the NGP, I’ll be asking the same question for this handheld too. I wasn’t interested in that one at all, but Sony’s recent press conference with the big reveal has slowly made me excited. However, such excitement will easily crash if the price is higher than the 3DS.
This week’s poll has been really sad for me to come up with. Since I finished Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, I was eager to get to work on Epic Mickey, despite all the poor reviews and complaints about the camera. I thought the camera in Kingdom Hearts was horrible, so surely if I could get through that and love the game, I could have the same experience here. Besides, how bad could it really be? Surely everyone else is being extremely picky for no reason. NIER got bad reviews over one little mini-game, and I loved everything about that game. I know I can prove everyone is wrong here too.
And then I played the game and was severely smacked in the face with how much everyone was right.
I desperately wanted to like this game because it has so much going for it. The art direction is really unusual and amazing, the use of music–particularly how the chords change after Mickey cleans up the area–is clever, and the little sidescrolling events where Mickey travels through his original cartoons are incredibly fun. The camera, though, is a game killer. You have very limited control of panning the camera, and when you can pan, you’re constantly doing it thanks to the constant movement of the auto-follow camera. If you could turn off the auto-follow, it would have made a light year’s difference. But as it is, I felt like I was constantly battling with the camera except in two areas: boss fights and the sidescrolling sections in between worlds. My wrist would actually be sore sometimes from pressing the d-pad so much in sad attempts to align the camera with what I needed to do.
In the end, wanting to like the game just couldn’t win out over the pain of playing. The only thing that was sadder than me realizing that I wasn’t going to like it was how I had to force myself to play it each night.
I really hope it comes out on the PS3 or Xbox. I think having a second analog stick for the camera would help immensely, and maybe the auto-follow issues would be fixed by then. I can dream, can’t I?
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