Thursday, April 30, 2009

Nintendo Wii Screenshots: Ultimate Band

Ultimate Band is an interesting music game from Disney. It may be associated with Disney, but it is not like it has classic Disney songs or songs from the pop stars Disney tends to support or at least not in the first two areas. That would be nice and some may expect those type of songs, but the songs are at least cleaner ones than the ones that tend to be in the Rock Band and Guitar Hero type games. In the game you do not use music instrument peripherals, but only the nunchuck and Wii remote.

The band roles you can play as in Ultimate Band are Guitar, Drum, Front Man, and Bass. I like the Drum the best, although it is not as cool as playing the drums in Rock Band. The controls at least feel mostly like you are actually playing the drums, although it has some odd movements like swinging the Wii remote in a circle. The Frontman thing is at least unique and the movements make sense as sort of dancing moves and such. The Guitar and Bass moves work almost exactly like the others and do not feel realistic at all, which is why I do not like them in this game. In all the roles when your "spirit" meter is built up you go into a special mode that you do a variety of moves such as maraca, time out position, making a baseball safe gesture, etc. These really make little sense as part of any role except Front Man, but they are a kind of fun aspect anyways.

Overall I found this to be a fun and different music game. It does not really give much of the realistic music feeling of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, but it is a nice alternative considering the clean music and you do not have to find a place for the bulky peripherals. However, I would recommend as a rental first because I think some would rather have a different music selection or would be disappointed with out the peripheral type play.



Tuesday, April 28, 2009

iPhone Game Screenshots: Word Search Unlimited Free

Word Search Unlimited Free is a decent word game for free. You can only find a few words per puzzle, but it seems the only better thing about the paid version is that you can find more per puzzle. Thus it really is not a bad free game to keep for playing over and over unlike many free versions that are easily played through in the first sitting because they want you to buy the paid version right away. Not saying that the paid one is never worth it, but it is appreciated when it is not entirely a waste to download the free version (i.e. you download and finish playing through it faster than the download time and then are ready to delete).

Click the thumbnails below to see a larger version of the screenshots.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Nintendo DS Screenshots: Back at the Barnyard Slop Bucket Games

Back at the Barnyard Slop Bucket Games is basically ten mini games woven into a very minimal story mode. The mini games are not too bad, but the game just has very little depth and I played entirely through it in only about an hour. The games are not really interesting enough to even have much replay value. Click on the thumbnails below to see a larger version of the screenshots.