The International House of Mojo

Wrath Unleashed
by DJG

With Producer Jim Tso making sure we didn't break anything expensive, Jake and I sat down to Unleash our Wrath... on each other. Now when I first saw the LucasArts page for Wrath Unleashed, I wasn't terribly excited. "Soul Calibur meets Risk" was my comment in Mojo's previous writeup. In fact, this would not be a game I would buy for the single player campaign. I would simply not enjoy playing against the computer. It's like playing a computer in chess; it tests your skill, but there's one very important aspect you are missing out on: the trash talk.

In Wrath you move your creatures along a level and try and take control of temples on the map. When one creature walks onto another creature's spot, they fight to the death. There are four different sets of creatures: Earth, Fire, Air, Water. (Heart! Go, Planet!) On the map, randomly generated terrain is placed. A water creature has the advantage on ice levels and the fire creatures has the advantage on lava levels. Advantage means you hit harder, and the level's traps like lava pits don't adversely effect you. You have the strategy aspect of the game of positioning your troops, and the action portion when two creatures fight.

A problem with this action part, however, is that the terrain is basically flat land, with 3 rocks, or if on an ice level, 3 snowballs strewn about the level. Granted, in fighting games the terrain is almost always flat. However, these rocks just seem so out of place that they get on your nerves after a while. If they were more seemlessly integrated into the environment, they could indeed be a really cool feature, something that would distinguish Wrath Unleashed's action from all of the other fighting games out there.

If you ever played Mario Party with a group of friends, you should know that although the game itself is not amazing, it just lends itself to really fun multiplayer battles. Unfortunately, I was not sufficiently 'prepared for battle' and Jake mauled my Unicorn army with his Giantess (two characters revealed!). Nevertheless, it was fun. Much trash talk was exchanged. In fact some random person happened to be videotaping us so if you see a clip online of two people sucking at the game and shouting at each other, odds are it's us. :)

So, if you like Mario Party, and have friends, why not? Wrath Unleashed has a winter 2003 release scheduled for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox systems.

Rebel Strike
by Andrew "telarium" Langley

What am I doing writing this preview? I mean, I don’t even have a GameCube anymore. I sold it (along with my soul) so that I could buy an Xbox. I suppose since I have played the previous two Rogue Squadron games, I am at least somewhat qualified to discuss the third game in the series, Rebel Strike. So here it goes.

The demo started off with a DVD-quality cutscene taken directly from the movie. Luke, Han, and Chewbacca are planning to break into the Death Star’s detention block in order to rescue Princess Leia. This cutscene takes us directly into the gameplay portion, which I might have a little bit of a problem with. Didn’t we learn from Jedi Knight that going from live action cutscenes to 3D rendered gameplay can feel a little disjointed? Jake claimed to like how Rebel Strike handled this by saying that it didn't suck compared to most live action cutscene games, but as we all know, he is not to be trusted.

But I digress. This leads to the 3rd person combat portion of the game, which is a fairly new element to the Rogue Squadron series. We were told that players can take control of Luke, Han, Chewbacca, and Princess Leia through various levels. Combined with the vehicle combat missions and two-player levels taken from the previous game, Rebel Strike’s gameplay promises to be much more varied this time around.

So what kind of vehicle combat are we going to see? Well, I’m sure everyone knows about the speeder bike levels on the moon of Endor by now. When Luke takes control of one of these speeder bikes, you are treated to nice visuals of speeding along a fairly linear path in the forest. Just like Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels, the producer of this game informed us that we could go left, right, up, down, speed up, AND slow down. There is also a section of the game where Chewbacca hijacks an AT-ST and stomps around in the forest. Before you even ask, the answer is no, you cannot shoot and kill the Ewoks, but you can command them to do some classic AT-ST log smashin'.

Despite the massive amount of trees and ferns being rendered in real time, the framerate seemed to have no trouble keeping up. We were told that Rebel Strike features a new engine by Factor 5, allowing for impressive explosions, particle effects, massive numbers of ships, and a level of terrain detail that has improved about 15 times since the last game. Without a doubt, these graphics looks great in motion.

Sitting down to write this preview, I feel like I have the devil and an angel on my shoulders. On one shoulder, I can’t help but find it morally reprehensible that LucasArts is publishing yet another game that capitalizes on the classic Star Wars Trilogy. Not only that, but it seems to fly in the face of the LucasArts philosophy that gamers are only interested in new stories and characters, not replaying the events from the films. I mean, do we really need another game with a Hoth level?

Yet on the other shoulder, I remember that Rogue Leader was actually pretty fun, and this game just seems to expand on that in terms of gameplay and graphics. Oh well, I don’t have to worry about it. Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike will be available exclusively for the Nintendo GameCube this fall.