Games Played 07/18/2009

Legaia 2: Duel Saga - PlayStation 2
Raiden Fighters Aces - X-Box 360
SingStar - PlayStation 3
Street Fighter IV - PC

RANDOM GAME OF THE DAY:


Odama (2006)
Developer: Vivarium
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Purchase Date: 04/11/2006


Conceptually, it's a pinball game with a really insane twist.

Odama - no, not Obama... Odama! - is the most offbeat title to ever grace the North American GameCube market. It is a pinball game where you play as a Japanese army general who is using the untapped power of the Odama, a huge black ball of death to destroy your enemies (as well as your own men) and other obstructions found within the battlefield. The object of the game is to get the huge "Ninten-Bell" that is being carried by a bunch of half naked men across to an exit located at the top of screen. Since this is a game made by the same team responsible for their own oddball creation on the Sega Dreamcast called Seaman, Odama also involves a heavy amount of voice commands to be spoken into the large microphone included with the game. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you should know that I am very adventurous when it comes to the games that I play so when I heard about this game, I was highly anticipating its arrival. As strange and imaginative as this game may be - you will love how they were able to associate Nintendo's name to the origin of Bushido in the game's storyline - in the end, it's just a messy, unfocused, and quite infuriating piece of garbage. The voice commands are used to provide the direction of where your army should be moving towards but when you add the unpredictable nature of the pinball game mechanics, there is a real lack of accuracy and speed in which you can adjust to the constantly changing situation at hand. So for the most part, you'd end up killing many of your own soldiers while the Odama is ricocheting all over the screen. What could have been a crazy fun game ended up being nothing else but a crazy experiment that fails.

The microphone works great.
The same can't be said about the game.

LIBRARY STATUS: 2 out of 5