Darksiders/New Super Mario Bros Wii Hands-on Preview

First up, Darksiders... which I keep wanting to call Darkstalkers. (Seriously, I'm a Capcom whore.) Being a comics reader in the 90's, it was hard to not love Joe Madureira's artwork... as chronically late as it was. My friends and I used to joke that he was too busy playing the video game du jour to finish up Battle Chasers #10. Little did we know that eight years later, he'd be designing a video game himself...

Maybe it was the low res monitors that they were demoing the game on, but it was hard to make the connection between the conceptual artwork by Joe Mad and the on screen graphics. As far as gameplay, it shares a lot of similarities with games like God of War. For one, in Darksiders, you play as War, one of the Horsemen of the apocalypse, and in God of War you play as, well, the god of... War. The combat in Darksiders feels similar but a little stiffer than its Greek counterpart. If you're expecting fluid combat like God of War or Devil May Cry, you should look elsewhere. Because that huge sword that War wields takes a bit of effort to swing around.

Playing on both a Xbox 360 and PS3, there weren't any noticeable differences. Except for the fact that when I was prompted to hit the B button on the Xbox controller to execute the execution moves, I had to look down to figure out where the B button was. I did run into a few camera issues when doing the execution moves, but the game seemed to be an early build, so hopefully those problems will be fixed in the retail version. Oh, and hopefully the humongous life bar and "mini" map will be toned down for the final version also. Seriously, the life bar in the demo ran across nearly the length of the screen and took up about an eighth of the entire screen. I don't really need to know that badly how much of a beating I'm taking at any given moment.

The other publisher present was Nintendo, which surprised me at first but then I realized that there's a Nintendo store in NY, so it probably wasn't that big of a deal to show up across town. They were showing off their entire product line, from the DS and DSi to the Wii and it's many peripherals. But what caught my eye was the New Super Mario Bros Wii. It's been a while since there was a proper side scrolling Mario game on a console so I was eager to test it out.

For the most part, if you've played any of the previous Super Mario Bros games, you'll feel right at home. The Wiimote is held like the classic NES controller, with one button being jump and the other being run. The biggest change to the Mario formula is that you can now play with up to three other players simultaneously. No more waiting and passing around the controller! But I had got the same feeling playing it as when it was first announced... it feels a lot like LittleBIGPlanet. That's not really a bad thing, but I feel a little dirty comparing New Super Mario Bros Wii to LittleBIGPlanet when the latter wouldn't even exist without the original Super Mario Bros.

But does anyone really play Super Mario Bros for the innovation? Sure you get different power ups, but at its core, every side scrolling Mario game is the same. But speaking of innovation, the "Wii" in the title doesn't just denote what console the game will be on, it means there are motion controls (love 'em or hate 'em) in the game. Not so much with the waggle, but a more subtle downward flick will activate the new propeller suit and a tilt will activate some platforms. It has yet to be determined if the game will make you flail around like an idiot for minor gain.

So that's it... hopefully I'll get to do more of these in the future. Possibly the near future since I will be attending GameX (it's eXtreme!) this weekend and there promises to be a few hands-on demo kiosks at the show. If you're in the Philly area, be sure to stop by our table in Artist Market!