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User Rating: 7 | The Conduit WII
Hype is a funny little animal. It is always premature. Hype is born months, sometimes years before it can be rightfully replaced by the game for which it exists. It is always amusing to see a game struggle to replace its forbearer, father hype. Father hype is nearly impossible to dethrone. He is omnipresent and omnipotent. He exists in the minds of all gamers as they await the coming of the next masterpiece. He blinds the masses with beautiful promises he never made and he charms the confident ones with images of what is to be. All have faith in father hype, he is so convincing. Is it not clear that there could never be a game that could truly match the greatness of father hype? So much weight is emphasized on the left leg that when the game is born it cannot stand on its right leg at all. It continues to lean on hype and the gamers slowly abandon it, already searching for the next one. This is how a game becomes crippled.

Ah, but we all know this story. It is an old one, it is told many times every year. This year, Wii owners were told the same story. Is it their fault that they believed it, or is it time to learn from history and accept that even crippled games can be fun to play?

The Conduit was developed by a pretty low profile team, High Voltage Software. These guys are not exactly known for making epic masterpieces. In fact, one quick look at their portfolio is enough to understand that expectations should be placed safely near the ground. High Voltage obviously wanted to make the best game that they could, and I think that they succeeded. The Conduit was supposed to be the killer app first person shooter for Wii, and sad as it may seem, it came about as close as any other third party effort has so far.

Make no mistake; The Conduit is not an ultra atmospheric epic masterpiece with super realistic artificial intelligence. It does not have any massive battles of epic scale. It does not have enormous environments, or a cohesive game world to explore and taste. It is a bare bones first person shooter, not unlike the sort of thing that you would have seen in the late nineties, on the N64, Playstation or PC. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing. With The Conduit, you get a fun corridor shooter, with lots of awesome weapons and pretty lighting effects. It's still fun to just shoot at aliens with cool guns. It still hits the spot to see a grenade blow up in a crowd of fleshy insect 'like creatures. At its best, it almost manages to feel like the original Halo, which it obviously tries to emulate.

If there's one thing that The Conduit does better than any other first person shooter on Wii, it's in the controls department. The controls are fully customizable and will accommodate just about any player that has two hands and a pair of eyes. You can choose the buttons layout, you can set the sensitivity of the IR remote and motion sensors, and you can change the size of the dead zone. The dead zone is basically an invisible rectangle in the middle of the screen that dictates how and when the camera moves as you move the pointer on the screen. As you point your remote towards the edges of the dead zone rectangle the camera will move in that direction. You can decide how large or how small this box will be and you can decide how fast the camera moves when you point at the edges of this same box.

And this is what makes the game, in my opinion. The controls are so smooth and so intuitive (once you find the perfect setting that works for you) that playing The Conduit becomes as natural as playing a video game can get. Well, I use strong words here, but the point is, the controls are tight and they really make the experience much more enjoyable.

I'm the kind of guy that's always cheering for the underdog, and in many ways The Conduit is the underdog of the first person shooter genre. Conduit was late for the party, he missed the nineties, he has a lot of catching up to do, but if High Voltage Software work hard and do their homework, they might just become one of the top Wii developers. The Conduit was loads of fun, but if you've already played a million standard shooters and Halo clones, don't bother, this game is not for you. If you're new to the genre, there has never been a better time to get onboard.