In Which I Play and Enjoy a Bad Game

The past few days, I’ve played quite a bit of Pokemon Rumble for the Wii. It’s not exactly a good game–highly repetitive, lack of real progression, far from innovative gameplay, etc.–but in multiplayer it’s pretty fun. It’s fairly mindless, really. All the pokemon are more or less interchangeable; the only thing that really counts is which moves they know. And even that doesn’t matter so much–it’s more like which types of moves they know: there are several kinds of moves which are repeated with varying graphics but pretty much identical effect.

The main difference between Pokemon Rumble and any action RPG is that the characters don’t level up–they’re just toys, so they can’t get any stronger. They can learn new moves, but it hardly seems worth wasting the money getting them useful moves when they’ll just be thrown away for incrementally more powerful characters in a few minutes.

Anyway, I beat the first difficulty on that one in five hours or so, and I’ve been playing on the next since then. The second difficulty includes a different set of pokemon to ‘befriend.’ Not that it matters, of course, since they are really indistinguishable, for the most part, but at least it’s something other than ‘everybody is thirty levels higher this time.’

Well, aside from Pokemon Rumble, I’ve acquired Psychonauts and Amnesia: The Dark Descent–thank you, Humble Bundle. I played about an hour of Amnesia, and it’s highly atmospheric and scary; I look forward to playing some more.