TWiG 2009-01-19: Old Shooters Made New

I missed a week! Ack! OK, here’s last week in a nutshell: Moon. If anyone can do a first-person shooter on the DS, it’s Renegade Kid, who put together the actually-pretty-excellent Dementium: The Ward last year. It’s been pretty well-reviewed so far, and DS gamers don’t have a ton of options for when they want to shoot things. You can shoot things in Moon. Have at it!

As for this week, there are plenty of sneaky picks that look awfully interesting. Skate 2 follows the very well-received inaugural edition of EA’s big new Tony Hawk-killer, which so far has lived up to such a title by actually making video game skating feel like something worth doing again. SimAnimals is a new Wii “Sim” experience that ditches the humans, which might actually be the smartest thing that EA’s done on the franchise for the Wii…human simulation is a little too much for the little console that could, so why not coerce the veterinarian in all of us out for a while? I have no idea what The Maw is, really, but the stills I’ve seen from the Xbox Live Arcade title look pretty interesting, and the PS2 continues its JRPG renaissance with Ar Tonelico: Melody of Metafalica, a title that’s probably pretty profound in context, but looks kind of meaningless right now.

Even so, it’s a different Japanese import that’s got my eye this week, one that may not sell many copies, and may not turn many heads at all. It’s a little something being put out by budget publisher UFO Interactive, with a truly nondescript title: the Wii-exclusive Ultimate Shooting Collection.

Ultimate Shooting Collection is actually, as you may have guessed, a collection of three games, two of which have never been released in the United States. The one that has been released in the states is Chaos Field, which sounds like the space-shooter equivalent of Shadow of the Colossus, basically a collection of space shooter boss fights one after the other. Radio Allergy was almost released in the states — it was supposed to be one of the last GameCube games, if not the last, but it was cancelled before it could see the light of day. Finally, there’s Karous, a game whose art style has fascinated me since I first caught wind of it back when it was a brand new Dreamcast game being released in the very un-Dreamcasty year of 2008. Yes, I’m going to go ahead an pretend that un-Dreamcasty can be used as an adjective. It’s actually the reason I bought a Dreamcast in the first place. Of course, once I did, I could no longer track down a copy of the game.

Now’s my chance…and yours as well.

Is anyone else out there as excited for the Ultimate Shooting Collection as I am? Going Skate-ing this week? Perhaps the PSP Star Ocean remake is more your speed? Check the full release list after the jump, followed by a trailer for, yes, Ultimate Shooting Collection.

Xbox 360:

Stoked (20 January)

Skate 2 (21 January)

The Maw (21 January)

PSP:

Star Ocean: Second Evolution (19 January)

Wii:

High Voltage Hot Rod Show (19 January)

Deal or No Deal (20 January)

Deer Drive (20 January)

Ultimate Shooting Collection (20 January)

SimAnimals (20 January)

DS:

Jumble Madness (19 January)

Big Bang Mini (20 January)

Wonder World Amusement Park (20 January)

PS3:

Skate 2 (21 January)

PS2:

Ar tonelico 2: Melody of Metafalica (20 January)

PC:

Carriers at War (20 January)

Hot n Cold (21 January)