My “Gameplan” For The Next Six Weeks

Today I fly out to Germany for the next six weeks. Aside from the horrible fact (for you) that I won’t be on the podcast for the next six episodes, I’m also severely limited in my future gaming experiences. See, I’ve only got room for one console in my bags, and I’m taking my Wii because it’s the smallest. I’m going to try and finish all the games I have, and finally get my money out of them.

Here’s the list:
Okami
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition
Super Mario Galaxy
Super Paper Mario
Wii Sports
Wii Sports Resort

At the very least, I plan on beating Super Mario Galaxy and making Metroid Prime 3 my bitch. Other than that, who knows. Looking at the list now, it sure looks pretty bare-boned for six weeks of gameplay. Luckily, I’ll be busy traveling Bavaria and won’t notice.

It gets even more depressing when I look at the list of game releases I’m missing: Bayonetta, Darksiders, Dark Void, Mass Effect 2, MAG, BioShock 2, Dante’s Inferno, and Aliens Vs. Predator. Woe is me!

Shit, Now I Have To Buy A Wii Game?

Halfway through this preview by Kotaku deputy editor (and Mark’s Twitter buddy) Stephen Totilo and I’m hooked. He had some sit-down time with the finished product of Wii Sports Resort and says that it’s awesome. In fact, he says there’s nothing to critique about the game, because doing so would be like “yelling at a cute puppy to put on a hat.”

Truth be told, the Wii game I’ve spent the most time with is Wii Sports, but that was mostly because it was the game I used to introduce people to the Wii, all those years ago. With a $50 price tag (and it comes with the MotionPlus peripheral), it’s looking to be a very tempting addition to my #3 most-used (and #1 least-used) home console.

Why So Violent, Nintendo?

What’s the deal with Nintendo’s advertising? It seems like every commercial I see for a Nintendo game has to do with intense competition and major trash-talking.

First, there is the one for Force Unleashed where the two nerds are calling each other out with Star Wars-related names while flailing their arms toward the TV. Then there is the DSi commercial where the two closets are playing with pictures of each other’s faces and hurling half-assed ugly jokes around. Finally, I just saw one for Punch Out!!! Wii where a defeated dad says that he’s going to make his son cry and wipe the floor with his tears. Yeah, Nintendo, child abuse is a great way to move units.

It’s weird to me that the advertising for such a family-centric console is all about beating each other down over working together. Few people know that the there is an extended version of the Animal Crossing commercial where the shells girl sleeps with the other girl’s boyfriend, and they get in a fight at the beach. It’s pretty sexy.

This Is What You Get For Not Being Fun

During a routine trip to GameStop today (the second one of the day, actually) I saw that they are offering $50 towards the trade-in of Wii Fit and the Balance Board. To me, that seems like an almost too-good-to-be-true deal, seeing as how it currently sits under my TV stand with a half-inch thick layer of dust on it.

I really wish it would have provided me with a little more entertainment with the money that I paid for it, but it just really never took off. Right now they are going for about 80 bucks on Half.com, so maybe I’ll go that route instead. Either way, it’s time for it to go.

No Matter How Old It Gets, It Will Always Be New

Now that I have a DSi, I actually have to *ahem* buy games that I want to play, but you know what? It’s actually pretty nice. I now have a reason to visit that entire section of whatever game-selling store I’m in, and stand in awe of how many different “Imagine: Something,” and “My Whatever Coach,” games exist.

Last night while perusing the DS games section, though, I found a diamond in the rough that I had to pick up: New Super Mario Bros. Russ let me borrow the game one time when I had to take a flight (to Vegas for his wedding, actually), and I didn’t put it down the entire time. Even playing that much, I didn’t finish it, but I still would have bought it if I had. New Super Mario Brothers is an essential part of any DS owner’s library.

Review: Rhythm Heaven

One of the only major games to launch more or less alongside the DSi last week was the tap-and-slide-’em-up rhythm game called Rhythm Heaven. It is a collection of “over 50″ individually themed mini-music games that will have you doing tasks such as tossing dumplings into a monk’s mouth, taking part in a three-man chorus line (which is what Threevue did before we discovered games), or playing ping-pong to the beat. Think WarioWare meets Elite Beat Agents.

These little themes are inconsequential, as the main focus are the beats themselves, and most of the time it actually hurts you to watch what is going on in the background as it will cause you to rely on what you are seeing (a la Rock Band/Guitar Hero), as opposed to what you are hearing. I have to give the devs credit for coming up with such a wide variety of different rhythms based off of essentially only two different mechanics, tapping and sliding.

My main beef with the game is how cripplingly unforgiving it can be. If you are not absolutely spot on with your rhythm, you will miss it. It might be a bad time for me to write this review right now, because I have a bad taste in my mouth about the aforementioned part with the monk and the dumplings. For some reason, I just cannot do it. I can’t even get past the little training part that it gives you before each level. Also, there are only three ways to complete each minigame: fail, OK, or medal, with a very thin like between the three. Just one mistake can bump you down a notch, but you never actually know because there are no stats or anything to tell you.

In the end though, this is a very fun game and perfect to pick up alongside a DSi with its big, bright screen, and beefed up sounds. There are a few other goodies and features inside that add some depth to it and keep it fun, so you won’t be disappointed with a lack of depth. This isn’t just another game cashing in on the music genre, and I definitely recommend picking it up.

The New Internentendo

You know what I like? Cheese danishes. You know what else? Free stuff. That’s why I was so pleasantly surprised when I saw that DSi Shop has the Opera web browser available for a free download.

I remember buying the brick-and-mortar (plastic-and-silicon, actually) web browser for $30 a couple of years ago, but never even used it. Honestly, I’ll probably never use this one either as it is now the sixth piece of internet-connective hardware in my apartment (and the slowest and clunkiest), but hey, it was free.

New Bedroom Setup

When we first moved to the Baltimore/DC area last year, I went through all my old video game stuffs and turned them in to GameStop for some GameBucks. They were only going to give me something like $12 for my beloved Nintendo Gamecube (still my favorite console of the last generation), so I decided to keep it instead.

As you can see in the picture above, today I added my little purple box to our bedroom TV setup, which is mainly used for late-night movies and continuous re-runs of Style Network shows. Next on my list? Finding my damn memory card, and shelling out $30 for a Wavebird controller (I told you they were going to get expensive!).

Games I’m intending to play around with: XIII, Tales of Symphonia, F-Zero GX, Soul Calibur II, Timesplitters 2, and Battalion Wars. Mark, Tyler, do one of you still have my Gamecube copy of Resident Evil 4? Yes, I know I just used the internet for personal correspondence.

The TV you see is a 26″ Vizio LCD (self-mounted, yo!) that we picked up a couple of years ago during Black Friday.

My Day (Read: Hour) With Nintendo

Lotsa Nintendo news today, courtesy of their GDC keynote this morning. Some of the biggies:

- Store and launch games from your SD card
- Some Final Fantasy games are coming to the Virtual Console
- A new DS game called Rhythm Heaven is coming out April 5th
- “Virtual Console Arcade”, complete with crappy arcade games

The news about the SD card support was enough to get me to turn the console on for the first time in a while. I didn’t do much other than move all of my Virtual Console games to a 4GB SD card I had lying around. I did get a chance to play the first two levels of Life Force and I downloaded my first Neo-Geo title, King of Fighters ’94, only to find out that I have to do a workaround just to get the damn game to work at all.

This Is Redonkulous.

Look at that picture above. It’s a Commodore 64 game. I bought a Commodore 64 off of a friend in 1995 for $20, it came with about 50 games that looked as good as The Last Ninja, featured above. How much would you pay to play this game on your big HDTV at home, in its original state?

5 bucks? That’s what Nintendo hopes you’ll be willing to pay.

They released three C64 games today to the tune of 500 Wii points each. There’s a fine line between nostalgia and idiocy.

Cleaning House: Super Mario Galaxy

Cleaning House is where we post some of the game reviews/articles that for one reason or another, we never posted. Instead of just letting the hundreds of words we wrote gather cobwebs, we’re putting them out in their current format. Better late than never!

Tyler:
Picking up Galaxy for the first time, I smirked to myself. “Come on”, I coaxed the Wii, “let’s see what you’ve got”. I anticipated this version of Mario to be a diluted and “family-friendly” bastardization of the one game that quite literally symbolizes my favorite pastime. Well, I can vouch for the game by telling you that it is far from cookie-cutter (except for one level in the Sweet-Sweet Galaxy which is a giant cookie cutter). I was coming fresh off of COD4, and, admittedly, rejected the idea that such a cartoony and saccharine looking game would be able to hold my interest for very long before the siren song of sniper rounds would pull me back in to the trenches. Alas, Mario found a way. The attractor of this game is the sheer amount of diversity in the gameplay. From level to level you find yourself doing the most imaginative and enjoyable tasks required by some of the most well thought out level designs I’ve ever seen. It seems like the main goal of Team Nintendo was to make the game fun (imagine that). And that they did, without the oppressive constraints of frame-rate, or online, or bump mapping or any number of things that convolute the vision of the folks that make other games.

What Galaxy does right is it diversifies level structure, theme, play style and pacing without hitting the player over the head with tutorials or jarring them out of their comfort zone. The segue from one planet or galaxy to the next is a light transition, noted by the fact that you are now entering a lava level, or an ice level, or whatever. Galaxy delivers so many interesting elements with the Wii controller that all I can think about while playing the it is how lesser game makers would probably build entire games around just a few of the control schemes found in Galaxy. They really packed this game full of clever ideas. It’s the complete opposite of my fears about a simplified Mario Game made for Grandmas. Good work Nintendo, keep doing this until it’s not fun.

94/100

Mark:
There are three must-play games for the Wii, and Super Mario Galaxy is one of them. It’s true, Nintendo didn’t take the Mario franchise in any new or bold direction with this installment, but it did heavily improve on everything that has been done for. Graphically, it look amazing. While the other two more powerful console are dealing heavily in grays and browns, SMG is bright, vibrant, and full of color. It handles like a dream, leaving the precision movements (jumping, rotating the camera, etc.) mapped to face buttons, and gives actions like smashing things to the waggle, perfectly utilizing the Wii remote. This was the only game at the time that I would look forward to playing while I was at school or work, and played nothing else until I finished it.

Like I said, though, it’s kind of the same old Mario Universe. Bowser kidnaps Peach, Peach needs saving, Toadstool hangs out, and of course Luigi makes his usual appearance. One thing they did change, though was they made it a little more open ended. There is a central hub where you walk around and talk to your new friends and hear bedtime stories and stuff, and then you can choose to enter whichever galaxy you want from there, giving it a much less linear vibe.

Overall, this is a great game with many great surprises, and if you have a Wii and haven’t played it, you are crazy.

93/100

R4 + DSi = Do Not Play Well Together

Via Joystiq

Break out your hankies boys and girls, because it looks like everyone’s favorite method of playing downloaded Nintendo DS games, the R4 card, doesn’t work with Nintendo’s new, recently-released-in-Japan-but-coming-here-next-year handheld gaming platform, the DSi.

I also want to take a moment and note that the last sentence has so many commas and dashes that Faulkner would be proud.

Though this may be bad news for some, something tells me that a lovely software update is in the works that will get our little R4 buddies back on top, once they crack the DSi.

Cleaning House: Threevue Review: The Legend of Zelda – Twilight Princess

Cleaning House is where we post some of the game reviews/articles that for one reason or another, we never posted. Instead of just letting the hundreds of words we wrote gather cobwebs, we’re putting them out in their current format. Better late than never!

Mark:

TwiPri is a great game trapped in an okay game’s console. It takes place in a massive setting with enough main and side quests to keep a player occupied for weeks, but then it throws in a bunch of filler, like bug collecting and cat wrangling.

This being the first Zelda game I’ve ever spent so much time on, I was surprised with how much I enjoyed it. What’s even more impressive is how it’s still one of the top five best games for the Wii, and it was a launch title originally made for the GameCube. There is some room for improvement, like better graphics, and maybe a voice here or there would be nice. Overall, though, if you have a Wii and haven’t played it yet, you’re at least half-crazy.

92/100

Russ:
My forage into Zelda games started late – Wind Waker was my first exposure, and I didn’t even beat that until 2006. I had a good time with it, although I was disappointed in its lack of depth; you get a weapon/tool, and then you use it to get through that level, and then you move on to the next. Wash, rinse, repeat. The main thing that Twilight Princess did for me was help me to realize that I am in no way, shape or form a “Nintendo fanboy”. I quickly caught on that this game was exactly like Wind Waker, just with new graphics and a few new tricks (which actually ended up being old tricks that I hadn’t experienced because I didn’t play the other games).

I was quickly embittered. I appreciated the detail and care that went into each “dungeon”, but when it came down to it, I just wanted to get through the levels so I could advance the plot, quietly hoping that the next level will have something unexpected. If Twilight Princess had been my first Zelda experience, it may have received a higher score from me. If Nintendo tries to rehash the same deal for the next Zelda, I probably won’t even buy the next game.

80/100

Tyler:

Let me take you back, my friend. Back to the year 2001 when I lived in the flooded basement of a taxi driver in Monterey and played through Ocarina of time on a rented N64 from Blockbuster, yes that’s right…I spent the majority of my time living the high life in true bachelor style. The good thing was that I had plenty of time to devote to the game. Friends, you are reading the words of someone who actually killed all of the golden spiders in Ocarina (hold your appluase). My Cheeves aside, let’s talk about Twilight Princess.

Who wants to know my biggest gripe about the game? You? Great, I’ll tell you then… It’s Midna. When will Miyamoto and his crew realize that no one wants an annoying side kick holding your hand all the way through the game (Navi/Midna)? A better question is: Why do I love it when Legend of Zelda keeps copying the same old formula for its games and I can’t stand other games that even remotely resemble any thing else I’ve ever seen. I don’t know the answer, man. I just don’t know. I guess that if it ain’t broke then don’t try and fix it.

Twi-Pri has it all though, a sweeping orchestral score, a slowly maturing Link-centric story, Ganondorf, Zelda and Epona (AKA the best animal sidekick in Hyrule) and excellent control for a Wii-mote.

If Nintendo tries to rehash the same deal for the next Zelda, I probably won’t even buy the next game.

I’m going to hold you to that, Russ.

93/100

Lotsa Nintendo News To Wake Up To

I woke up this morning to all sorts of Nintendo news: a new DS model (with two cameras, SD slot, larger screen, no GBA slot, $180), new Wii games (new Punch Out!!, Pikmin remake, Sin and Punishment 2), and the fact that you’ll be able to load games straight onto the Wii’s SD card slot. That last one is a biggie because up until now we’ve only have 512mb of storage on the Wii.

Is this the shot in the arm that Nintendo’s needed, in my book? Not necessarily. I’m still waiting for some improved, 21st-century online features, like, you know, voice chat. Or a friends list that isn’t tied to a code for each individual game.

New DS (“DSi”):

E3vue: Nintendo’s Wii Music Gameplay Video

One of the big news items of this past week’s E3 conference wasn’t Nintendo’s announcement of Wii Music, but rather the horrible rendition that the Nintendo crew did of the Super Mario Bros. theme while onstage. After some searching, I found a video of the performance.

…enjoy!?