Review: Mushroom Men: Spore Wars

[ccesarano]

As the rest of the “hardcore” gamer crowd, I found myself bypassing Wii titles the past year in favor of high-budget titles for the Xbox 360. One of the games I passed over was Mushroom Men: Spore Wars, a rather creative looking platformer featuring sentient fungi.

The premise of the game is there simply to develop an interesting world. A slew of green meteorites hit the Earth and had seemingly no effect to anything on the planet, but has in fact developed odd behaviors in animals and turned mushrooms into living creatures. A few breeds of mushroom became aggressive and started to horde away chunks of meteorite, while also wiping out a tribe of Bolete mushrooms. One of the last of his kind, you play as the hero Pax, a unique little guy that can absorb the meteorite pieces to develop telekinetic style powers.

Full article

[EarthViper]

The game was given pretty low review scores from several publications, something that comes off to me as ridiculous.

Well, you just have to remember the golden rule of multiplatform journalism. "If it's on a Nintendo console and not Mario or Zelda, subtract 20-30% off the final score."

[ccesarano]

Rereading that, I should probably rephrase the whole thing. Really dumb pointless sentence.

Still, I can certainly get your meaning. It is not the most compelling title, but the game has an average 73% on gamerankings.com. The game is much better than that as the only real problems are the length, the camera (which I forgot to mention) and, if it bothers you that much, the lack of difficulty.

I've actually been quite glad with the past two Wii games I got from GameFly, and I just started Monster Lab today. It's technically a good thing all the 360 games are taken because otherwise I may never have played these titles, which are sadly very overlooked. It's not like Deadly Creatures where half the game was no fun. It just isn't ground-breaking in any manner.

[EarthViper]

Definitely give some impressions on Monster Lab if you don't do a review. I'm intrigued by the game and may look into it at least for GameFly if I reactivate my account.

[ccesarano]

Just random since it's on topic, my mom overheard guys at VGXPO bitching about how Nintendo "abandoned millions of hardcore fans" and are "only selling to grandma's" when waiting to watch Vision of Escaflowne. It's just a broken record now, because everyone's basically beating each other off with the same masturbatory phrases without actually thinking of what's available.

I hope I overhear someone bitching about the same crap just so I can turn around and say "So, tell me what a hardcore game is?" and begin tearing their argument apart piece by piece. I mean, I haven't even played it yet but I want someone to tell me Muramasa: The Demon Blade is a casual game for grandmothers. I BEG them to tell me that.