E3 ’09: Missing in Action – These Wii games missed the conference
E3 has the goods. Heres three previously unannounced exclusives for the Nintendo Wii; Span Smasher, Line Attack Heroes and Monado: Beginning of the World.
Span Smasher is a mix between tennis and pinball – this little ball shaped guy called Smasher (name not final, they say) bounces around breaking and smashing things – and it’s your job to smack him around. The game seems to use controls similar to Wii Sports Tennis.
The game uses Motion Plus for more precise actions. We assume it’s compulsory to play, but it’s not explicitly stated. The visual style resembles something like a 2D Mario Galaxy – nice, clean lines and lighting, with a few of the designs mimicking Nintendo’s recent efforts, but thats the extent of similarities. It features a two player mode, cooperative we guess.
Line Attack Heroes is something different entirely. Your character is on a mission to recover pieces of a dragon statue. Something like a 3D brawler, or ’melee action game’ as they describe it, the player commands a line of warriors. They look like a barrel of monkeys, all linking arms and flailing around. There are several attacks, and strategy is the key, apparently.
The art style bring Zack and Wiki to mind with its sort-of-cel-shaded look, with each character being smooth and clean, and the environments having a bit more detail. The game features up to four player competitive and cooperative modes.
Monado: Beginning of the World hasn’t given away many details, only a pretty trailer for us to look at it. It seems to be an action RPG of sorts. The game looks to feature vast and quite beautiful areas for the player to explore. Monsters roam around and real time combat seems to occur seamlessly from the game world.
The game features a blonde young man with a great big sword. One scene in the trailer seems to show in-game footage of the hero taking on a whole crowd of monsters really quickly – but the battle system from the rest of the trailer doesn’t show up, so we’ll take that as a cut-scene for now. Still, the game looks impressive so far, almost resembling a Monster Hunter game in scope. No other details have been revealed yet.
Span Smasher and Line Attack Heroes’ releases are still ’To Be Determined’. And Monado – well, we don’t have dirt on that game, so we’ll take that as TBD as well. Expect them some time in 2010.
