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GoNintendo 'End of Day' Thoughts: Cort's Water Warfare (Wii) Impressions

by cortjezter
25 March 2009
GN 1.0 / 2.0

Ok folks. That’s going to end our broadcast day for Tuesday. We’ll be up bright and early to get seats and live-blog the big Iwata keynote, and we’ve unthawed the Twitter box for the sidebar so you can get periodic updates from the show. Thanks everyone, enjoy the video below and we’ll see you again in a few hours! —RMC & Cort

While in Japan for TGS, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Hudson’s development studio in Sapporo, where I got to see many of their up and coming games and meet with various members of each game’s dev team.

Thanks to yesterday’s announcement, I can finally talk about one more of their secret projects, which was shown at about 60-70% completion last October. Here in the states it’ll be known as Water Warfare, and as the much cuter Bang Bang Kids in Japan (tentatively, as of the demo). A curious name for a game labelled as a “FPS—First Person Soaker” considering there will be more in the way of squirt-squirt than bang-bang.


“Press any button” is the tentative subtitle.

In some ways, it has a lot in common with another recent Hudson title, Onslaught, in that it aims to be a kind of pick up and play first person game, and appeal to a wider audience as is a typical tenet behind many of their titles. It’s also a WiiWare release, so it’ll be both affordable and have a smaller footprint than a full retail game; at least on your shelf. What makes this unique is that with an E10+ rating, it eschews the typical ammunition and violence for some younger fun with a variety of squirt guns. Instead of bleeding or regenerating health over time, your “health” is measured by how soaked you are, and as your clothing dries, your health improves. Your ranking even affects how fast your evaporation factor. Clever, I think.


Fornia… California!

They’re squeezing quite a bit into this WiiWare title; it comes with a pretty good variety of play modes including 2-person local multiplayer, 8-person WiFi online play (plus bot characters), Battle Royale, Team Versus, 38 Missions, a tutorial, and even a spectator mode for watching online matches. Nintendo didn’t approve Mii integration, but you can still customise your digital self. The environments we saw were mostly playground-oriented, which lent a lot of variety for structures/cover and made matches more fun for us. Overall, a pretty good amount of content and replayability, especially for the target audience, a good percentage of everyone with that E10 rating. Splashy summertime fun? That’s why you’re still a kid. —cortjezter