gave the club nintendo exclusive grill-off with ultra hand! for wiiware a spin this past week. grill-off is a simple arcade-style game which, despite its meat-centric focus (not a veggie burger in sight, sadly), is not without its charms. see the review at nintendolife.com for a typical response. as for my take, the motion controls get a little wearisome, but not prohibitively so, although i’m not sure why the designers chose to force you to hold the controllers up instead of horizontally as would be more natural for mimicking the actual ultra hand (speaking of which, it’s great to see this spotlight on a piece of nintendo history; gotta love the big N for continuing to give retro love to even their pre-video game products). the 1-hit-and-you’re-out mechanic is somewhat trying, but it’s appropriate for this type of game. the presentation is colorful without being grating and works well, and the gameplay is solid enough and involves just enough mental power (plus plenty of twitch action) to keep you engaged past the initial playthrough. the focus in the later levels (i got to level 5 by the way) is on predicting which piece of meat is going to be ready next; there are three sizes: shish kabobs, steaks, and whole chickens. although it’s easy to pick between the shish kebobs and steaks and i imagine that if you invested the time you could more easily pick among all three types which to target next, my interest waned before i got to that level of mastery. if it had included medals the game would not have felt out of place on a compilation like wii play, although as it is all in all i estimate that the average person can expect to spend about half an hour with this, and with a worthy opponent maybe another half hour or so on the multiplayer mode. not sure if that’s worth 80 club nintendo coins for most people, though.
some handy grill-off with ultra hand! links:
- official site which features an awesome video
- review at gonintendo: this guy has a high score that one can only dream of
- entries at wikipedia and nintendo.wikia.com
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