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September 20th, 2007, 19:38 Posted By: VampDude
Via: IGN
US, September 20, 2007 - Let's make this perfectly clear: I'm one of those fans of the original Saturn version of Nights: Into Dreams, one who played it to death to the point where there was nothing more to see. I'm one of those gamers that begged and pleaded openly for SEGA and Sonic Team to revisit the property for a sequel. I'm one of those gamers who got annoyed at the company teasing with Nights cameos in other SEGA games; who got excited when SEGA gave away a really cool Game Boy Advance Nights gameplay/tech demo in Phantasy Star Online for the GameCube. And now I'm faced with the dilemma that is Nights: Journey of Dreams on the Wii.
Nights: Journey of Dreams was announced for the Wii a few months ago, and sped through development to make a Christmas release. It's been slowly taking shape between then and now, and it's been a rough journey…no pun intended. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo this July we had an opportunity to watch an early, choppy version of the game being played by a SEGA employee, but couldn't control it ourselves…we just had to imagine how the game might play simply by what was going on during the demo. And honestly, that doesn't really help a game that really needs to be played to understand - the Nights design isn't your traditional videogame.
So it's been two months since our last viewing of Nights: Journey of Dreams. It's on the show floor at Tokyo Game Show in SEGA's booth, in a high-profile space with more than a half-dozen kiosks dedicated to the game. And I have to say that, though the game has had its rough ups and downs and never really came across as a "high quality" Wii game in screens and early video…the demo that's here brings back that ol' Saturn feeling.
First, a little background: Nights is more a racing game with action than it is a platformer. The idea is to gracefully fly around the 3D environments on a 2D plane, looping around enemies, snagging orbs and flying through hoops for score. While this is going on, a timer's ticking away, so you have to make it to the "track's" finish line before the seconds expire. Each level is broken down by three laps, each one changing slightly from the one before it to let players explore portions of a level that the previous lap didn't let them see. At the end of each lap, the player's ranked by the score they earned on each lap, so players are encouraged to snag items and fly through hoops to keep a chain going that'll increase the multiplier. It's a fantastic, yet very deceptive game design that might not float everyone's boat. But it floats mine, and the Wii version captures a lot of that same Saturn magic, even if it's not doing it quite as impressively or as efficiently as it could have.
The Wii version's controlled via the Nunchuk's analog stick, and the Wii remote's only being used for its buttons - no waggle. I hear that the game will have many control schemes, including Classic Controller support as well as one that uses the Wii Remote's pointing function, but at TGS it was Nunchuk/Remote exclusively.
The demo starts out with you as a child, and you must climb up a chain to a cage that'll free the Nights jester. That's when the action really begins: lots of ups and downs and loops must be performed, but the main task is to catch up with a bird that's flying the course with a key in its beak. Attack the bird, grab the key, and head to the cage to start the second lap that heads down a slightly altered path in the 3D environment. The Wii version emphasizes the "racing" aspect of the design by showing a map of the course in the corner of the screen…much like every racing video game does.
At the end of the three laps, it's off to the boss battle. In one boss battle, you're up against a balloon clown that bounces around the environment - the idea is to attack it from below and bounce it up high to the top of a very pinball machine-inspired level layout to defeat it. In another boss battle, it's a chameleon lizard magician that hides in a cloud of purple mist - the idea is to make large loops to remove the mist in chunks and reveal where he's hiding.
There were some hidden treats that I saw other players doing that I couldn't recreate myself during my short hands-on. In one stage, for example, Nights can snag a pick-up that'll transform him into a dolphin (complete with the same jester clothing) to swim deep into the underwater areas. It was a neat addition that I'm looking forward to trying out myself.
I definitely came off of Nights: Journey of Dreams happier than I thought I would - I'm a little irked that the game's not as smooth as I would have liked. The Saturn game doesn't exactly have the smoothest framerate either, but in the first generation of 3D systems this was an area where we looked the other way, but now a herky jerky framerate can be a real gamekiller. It's not so bad, but it's hard to understand what's causing the framerate to dip every so often.
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