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the ball to make them join
your ranks, and as your army liberates more of the screen, you'll be
able to assault the gate and move on to the next level.

Depending on the orders you give, your
soldiers can become tired or even lose confidence in your leadership
skills and become complacent. Player 2 can use the DK Bongo controllers,
hitting them to get the soldiers' attention and get them moving faster
than before. If Player 2 does that, however, the soldiers' confidence in
Player 1 declines.
Special
powers/weapons/moves/features: By powering up your Odama, you can
capture prisoners of war by running them over with the ball. You can
then release them as your own troops to turn the tides of war. A second
player can also help you out by controlling your troops instead of
allowing them to make their own battlefield decisions.
So,
not only is Odama a military pinball game but a military pinball game
that uses the Donkey Kong bongo drums (for use with Donkey Kong Jungle
Beat and one of the weirdest peripherals I saw at E3).
It’s such a strange concept that it just might work. Sometimes, you look at a game and just know it’ll crash and
burn. But the way Nintendo
and Vivarium are mixing genres Odama has the potential to attract a
variety of gamers, even with its admittedly quirky premise.
And
Odama is probably the first real-time strategy game that really makes
sense for a console. There
have been console real-time strategy games before, but for whatever
reason (mainly lack of keyboard and mouse) they have failed to become
popular as a genre. Who
would have thought that mixing it with pinball might be the
answer?
Odama
doesn’t have a firm release date, but it is scheduled for sometime in
2005.
-
Omni
(August
7, 2004)
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