You can tell a game is going to kick your ass when the MAIN MENU MUSIC is more intense than the final boss music in most other games.
I, being a longtime Treasure fan (having spent a large portion of my youth playing Gunstar Heroes and Dynamite Headdy on my Sega Genesis, which to this day are two of my favorite games) was overjoyed when the Japan-only Nintendo 64 game Sin & Punishment was finally made available to a North American audience via the Wii’s Virtual Console. It was really campy (naturally) and amazingly hard, but I loved it all the same.
Then Nintendo released Sin & Punishment: Star Successor for the Wii, which I consider one of the most dangerous games ever released. This game not only throws an incredible difficulty level at you, but it’s also designed in such a way as to make you feel worse about yourself every time you screw up.
Don’t get me wrong, the game is wicked fun, but it’s about as unforgiving as they come. No doubt everyone who calls themselves a gamer is familiar with the term “bullet hell.” Bring that into a 3D environment and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what to expect from S&P: SS. You choose between characters Isa and Kachi, who fly around with a jetpack or hoverboard respectively, and use the Wii’s pointer to shoot at a multitude of enemies while you dodge an unending, seemly erratic barrage of enemy attacks. You also have the ability to reflect certain projectiles back at your attackers by tapping the fire button when something is in melee range.
Not only is keeping yourself focused on where you’re shooting and where you’re dodging tough in and of itself, the game also keeps track of your score for each stage and uploads it to a global leaderboard. Defeating enemies makes your score multiplier go up by about .1%. Enemies can also drop medals that boost your multiplier further, to a max of 16%. The problem is when you get hit, your multiplier drops by several percent at a time. Factor in that when you get hit you’re more than likely taking multiple hits at once and your multiplier can drop very drastically very quickly. It’s pretty frustrating, especially when you pull off a flawless run of a level and lose your multiplier on one of the giant, screen-filling bosses and get pretty much no score bonus for beating him.
- Now that’s what I call a sticky situation.
If you feel like taking a serious knock to your gaming self-esteem, just check to see where you rank on the leaderboards after each level. You may think “Wow, I got seven million points! That’s pretty good!” but as soon as you see that the top player on that level has over 30 million points, you feel substantially less badass.
The game is just so freaking intense. Every move you make HAS to be deliberate or you’re on a slippery slope to losing it all. The game demands an extraordinary amount of mental dexterity just to keep track of everything going on at the screen at any given moment. I can’t recall a game that ever had me gripping my controller as hard as S&P: SS. They could have put “white-knuckle action!” in big bold letters on the back of the box and it wouldn’t even be a lie! I can’t play more than a couple of levels at a time because my hand gets so sore from keeping an involuntary death grip on my Wiimote.
S&P: SS is a game that every Wii owner should play, especially those who bemoan the fact that “there are no hardcore games on Wii!” It’s a whole lot of fun, but just go in knowing that this game is as hardcore as they come and it WILL kick your ass and then laugh at you about it.
