Top killer

by ERIK LEIJON

With the release of No More Heroes (Wii/Ubisoft, Grasshopper), Goichi Suda has solidified his ranking as one of the most exciting creative minds in the industry. A master at blending visual styles and providing quirky, fulfilling gameplay, Suda’s games are unlike anything out there.

It would be easy to call him gaming’s Tarantino—Suda has a similar love of B-movies, mixing Western and Eastern culture and isn’t squeamish with blood—but his ability to make an honest-to-goodness interesting Wii game is perhaps a greater accomplishment than anything Mr. Brown has done in film. That being said, even if the Wii third-party line-up was half-decent, No More Heroes would still be a fantastic game.

Featuring a dark, cel-shaded art design similar to his previous title, the cult-favourite Killer 7, No More Heroes stars a brash young assassin and ex-professional wrestler named Travis Touchdown, who wields a lightsaber-esque blade called the beam katana. The game plays like a simplified version of Assassin’s Creed, since Touchdown starts the game as the world’s 11th best assassin and must eliminate the top 10, one severed head at a time.

Moving Touchdown is done with the nunchuk’s analog stick, and he swipes his weapon with the A button. It takes a few slashes to kill a common foe, and the last hit always requires moving the remote in a specific direction. Once completed, Touchdown will typically decapitate the poor jabroni, resulting in a blood fountain effect. Touchdown has an arsenal of wrestling moves to learn, thanks to notes left behind by his old Calgary-based trainer.

There are side quests in addition to the main assassinations, which are accessed by riding around a mini-Grand Theft Auto-type city on an oversized motorcycle. Touchdown also has to pay to learn the locations of his rivals, so there are simple mini-game jobs that take advantage of the remote’s motion sensor.

Most Wii third-party games tend to be collections of cobbled together mini-games, so it’s refreshing that Suda didn’t make them the focal point. The remote’s speaker is also used creatively here; it warns you when the katana runs out of juice and is used as an in-game cellphone.

Where Suda is peerless is in his macabre and bizarre sense of humour. All the characters have their own David Mamet-style codespeak, and his obsession with the American West (through a Japanese perspective) makes for some hilarious Tex-Mex/samurai/hyper-sexual mish-mash dialogue. The guy’s a genius—and the only one with the balls to make a Wii game on par with Nintendo.

China boys

If you really want to wait for the long-awaited crossover showdown between rival gaming icons Sonic and Mario, Super Smash Bros. Brawl will be hitting the Wii next month. Or you could simply pick up Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (DS/Sega, Sega Japan), available right now on the Nintendo DS. Thirty-five construction workers died in the digital recreation of the Beijing sports facilities.

Similar to the old Sega track and field button tappers such as Winter Heat, albeit not nearly as good, the best characters from the Sonic and Mario brands compete in the more obscure summer Olympic events using various combinations of the stylus pad and the buttons.

For some reason, events like skeet shooting and fake “dream events” come at the expense of the omitted high jump, diving and most gymnastics. The game also does a lousy job of recognizing commands, so a sport like the javelin toss becomes more about understanding the particular off-timing of the game than actual intuitive playing. Not awful—just frustrating and not very rewarding.