Dawn of the Geeks

One of questions many gamers have is “why do you even have lives?” It made sense back in the arcade days because lives cost real money. There was a financial incentive to make the game difficult so you’d die often and have to pop in more quarters. Many modern console games just annoy you if you run out of lives. For example making you go through the whole process of loading up your saved game again.

ACME Arsenal doesn’t have “lives.” You can still die but there are numerous checkpoints throughout the levels so that if you die you don’t lose much time and there’s no real punishment. That I like. Although it can be annoying in some parts where it’s possible to hit a checkpoint and then fall making you choose between killing yourself or working your way back up to the checkpoint. In some cases it’s faster to just kill yourself and get started back at the checkpoint.

The biggest annoyance is found at the tutorial level when you learn how to do double and triple jumps. The double jump is easy. The triple jump requires you figure out what the heck the manual is talking about. You press A twice and then twist the nunchuck a quarter turn left or right. What they don’t make clear is how the nunchuck must be held when doing the twist. You may assume from the illustration and the intended action that you rotate the controller while holding it vertically. That is not the case. You have to hold the controller level and twist your wrist to the side.

One complaint reviewers had was inconsistant behavior when trying to get the character to perform various actions. I’m guessing that was caused by not holding the controller properly. In many games an animation is used to tell you how exactly to move the controller. ACME Arsenal doesn’t do much to help you out.

Until you figure out how to hold the nunchuck and rotate it to perform the triple jump consistantly you’re not going to get very far in the game.

Once you’ve figured out how to work the controls the game is actually pretty fun. One of “cheats” that you may discover on your own quickly is that weapons that are provided by the game to perform a certain task reappear within seconds after picking it up. So you can pick up a gun and stay in the same spot and your ammo count will continue to go up rather quickly. This doesn’t apply to weapons dropped by enemies. In some levels you can find a weapon, wait for a minute or two in the same spot and have hundreds of rounds of ammo and go on a rampage. If you die you lose the weapon and all the ammo and you may not be able to go back and get it again after you make it past some checkpoints.

I picked the game up for about $15 and I’d say it’s worth the money. It’s frustrating to begin with but once you get the hang of it it becomes more entertaining.