Sin and Punishment: Star Successor

About a year ago I played the recently-brought-to-America port of Sin and Punishment, a very short rails shooter on the Nintendo 64 that felt a little like StarFox 64 on acid. Now I have completed the series by playing its second installment, the Wii sequel Sin and Punishment: Star Successor, and while the Wii is obviously a perfect fit for any rails shooter, it felt like only a marginal step up from the first game. Controlling a reticle with a Wii-mote feels a bit more natural, sure, but the addition of defensive play that's not usually found in rails shooters means controls mostly felt the same as its predecessor, and as such Star Successor was really that- more of the same. For most games that would be a strike against it. But for Sin and Punishment, a series that prides itself on being basically insane (one boss is made up of robotic whales; another is defeated by kicking giant bison in his direction), it kinda works. Rails shooters are fun in short amounts but can get stale pretty fast, so to compensate they need to get gimmicky- Dead Space: Extraction found this in hallucinations and its survival-horror focus on ammo conservation; Sin and Punishment: Star Successor mostly just throws as much shit on screen as the Wii can handle and wants you to shoot almost everything. The one major improvement here was getting rid of the dated Continues system from the first game which required you to restart the game several times before you got good enough to beat it, and combined with its longer length Star Successor is probably the better game. It's worth a play if you're in the mood for an on-rails shooter, but there's a reason why that genre has for the most part died out completely and Star Successor is no sign that it should come back.