Stephanie and I finished Super Paper Mario over the weekend.  It was a pretty good game I guess, although it had quite a lot of reading.  Voice actors next time please?  Anyway, what I was going to mention here is something that’s pretty unique to the Paper Mario games (at least the last two, I don’t remember if this was the case with the first one).  After you beat the game, you are given the option to save, and then you can go back into the game and still do stuff, with the final boss defeated.  It’s not a “second quest” type of thing where you start the game over and play through a harder version.  And it’s not that you start over just before the boss, with the option of backtracking.  You’re actually in the game world, and the final boss is defeated, and the people are no more on the edge of doom.  In fact, some of the former bad guys can be seen around town, moping about how they messed up but they’re going to start over fresh and do things right this time around.  There is even a challenge that doesn’t open up until after beating the game.  Although really there’s not that much of a point then, I still think it’s kind of neat that you get a glimpse of the world restored to order that you can still interact with.

I just finished playing through Resident Evil 4 last night, and even though the game came out over two years ago, I’m going to post my thoughts here.  For those of you unfamiliar with the game, it is a survival/horror(/action?) game in which American agent Leon Kennedy (who is possibly homosexual?) must save the President’s daughter (Ashley), who is being held hostage in Europe (Spain I think?).  In his adventures he discovers that a mind-controlling parasite has infected all of the locals, causing them to attack him relentlessly.

I should preface this by saying that I have only played one Resident Evil game before, which I think was Resident Evil 3 on the Nintendo 64.  Whatever game it was, you start out in a burning building and I never really got past three rooms before getting too frustrated by it (I had only rented it).  If it werent for the extremely good reviews the game has received, I might have had the same experience with Resident Evil 4.  This game was just not very accessible to new players.  There is nothing resembling a training mission or in-game tutorial.

One of the things I didn’t like was the feeling of scarcity that you don’t typically have in video games.  For instance, you can actually run out of ammo if you’re not careful.  And you’ll play some parts of the game over and over again because you keep dying because health items are so rare.  And I usually had to play for about an hour between save points (counting the times I died and restarted).  I think as a survivor/horror game this was the intention, in order to put you in suspense.  According to the Wikipedia article, though, this game gave out many more health and ammo items than any of the previous Resident Evil games.  I didn’t find that to be the case until I was into the second disc.  Of course this could be because I had learned how to play the game well by that point, or because I had read the weapon upgrading FAQ on GameFAQs and figured out how to pick which weapons to buy/upgrade.

As for the graphics, which are often heralded as the best the GameCube has to offer, I wish they had used all of the screen.  The entire game is forced into letterboxed widescreen.  I guess this is because the GameCube only outputs 4:3 graphics and they wanted 16:9, but I wish they had included an option to render it as anamorphic widescreen (so that it would render the 16:9 view fullscreen, so that it would look correct when stretched to fill a 16:9 TV).  I mean, Eternal Darkness was able to do that four years earlier on the GameCube.  Letterboxing the display means they are just throwing away 25% of the pixels that the system can output.  And it means I need to zoom in on my widescreen TV, making the graphics look more pixelated.

When I finished the game it said I had played for 27 hours, but I don’t think that includes cutscenes.  If you include cutscenes, and all the times that I died and restarted, I probably played the game for twice that long.  So for twenty dollars I definitely got my money’s worth.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s really a great game, but in my opinion not as great as most of the reviews say it is, mainly due to a lot of frustration (especially at the beginning of the game).  I’d give it 8 or 8.5 out of 10.

mah fat baby loves tuh eat

A new senator from Iowa, eager to make America a better place to live, is shocked to find out that everyone on Capital Hill is bored out of their minds, and no one pays attention to anything!

Well, I paraphrased a little.  He was embarrassed when some kids came to see how our nation’s laws were made, and found out it involves many games of Solitaire.  The most interesting (shocking? sad?) part is a quote at the end of the article:

Senate Minority Leader Mary Lundby, R-Marion, a 21-year Statehouse veteran and occasional video gamer, shrugged off Heckroth’s advice.

“Freshmen are always shocked by what goes on. Next year he won’t even mention it. He’ll probably be playing games,” Lundby said.

I guess this is what a 90% incumbency rate will do.

I don’t understand why WarioWare: Smooth Moves costs the same as Twilight Princess.  WarioWare is kinda fun when you have people over or something, but not fifty dollars worth of fun.  Plus, have you seen the graphics?  Seriously that game couldn’t have taken more than two months for a team of like two programmers an artist and a helper monkey to create, whereas Twilight Princess had a three year development cycle or something.  Why do the casual games cost the same as the serious games?

I may pick up WarioWare used in a year, when it’s like fifteen bucks.  But not new for fifty.  At least Wii Play is only ten dollars (kind of).

The top ten best-selling video games of 2006 (as reported by NextGen):

10. Need For Speed Carbon
9. Fight Night Round 3
8. Call Of Duty 3
7. Kingdom Hearts II
6. Gears Of War
5. New Super Mario Bros.
4. NCAA Football 07
3. Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy
2. Cars
1. Madden NFL 07

Cars was the 2nd best selling game in North America of 2006.  Seriously.  I was surprised too.  But Madden is no surprise, selling two-and-a-half times more copies than Cars.  I don’t understand the drive to play the same game over and over again every year.  I know someone who didn’t get a new system last time around until they stopped making Madden on the N64, at which point he bought a GameCube (as it was the cheapest).  He will probably buy his next system when they stop making Madden for the Cube.  That makes no sense to me.  I’m also kind of surprised to see Gears Of War in the top ten, not that I’m implying it is a bad game, I just didn’t realize there were enough 360’s for it to be a top-ten game.  The full article is interesting but kind of long (16 pages long), so if you’re bored you should check it out.

On a side note, why do online news article insist on using “pages” anyway?  Nine out of ten dentists agree that webpages can now scroll vertically without negatively affecting their usability.

We finished The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess over the weekend.  I’ll try my very best to avoid spoilers, but I do have to tell you that at the end of the game you find out that Ganondorf is Link’s father, and Zelda is Link’s sister, and they had a retarded inbred love child at the end of Ocarina Of Time and that is what the Ooccoos are descended from.  Sorry, I couldn’t just keep that to myself.

We clocked in at just under 60 hours, including finding all the heart pieces, which I am proud to say did not require GameFaqs (although we did use the assistance of the fortune teller to find three of them).  That also includes hunting down all the Poes, something for which I did use GameFaqs (but just for the last ten).  If there were some way in-game to tell if you got all the Poes in a given area, I wouldn’t have cheated.  But with the entire game to explore, I just didn’t have the patience.  In Ocarina Of Time, there would be a Skulltula icon beside the name of each area on the map for which you had found all the Skulltulas.  Something like that for Poes would have been nice.  A way of changing day to night would have helped too, since most Poes are only out at night.

The weirdest thing about the game is that Link is not left-handed (something I wondered about last May).  If you’ve not heard about this, allow me to explain.  The game was developed (as a Game Cube game) with a (canonical) left-handed Link, just like Link has always been (except when facing east in A Link To The Past, naturally).  When they decided to move the game to the Wii, they found that people wanted to control a right-handed Link.  But all the maps had already been designed for a left-handed link, and they didn’t have time to change them.  So they did the easiest thing possible—they flipped everything in the game.  What you see is a mirror image of how the game was designed.  Link is right-handed.  Most other characters are left-handed.  Characters will shake hands with their left hands.  The layout of Hyrule was supposed to (approximately) line up with the map from Ocarina of time (i.e. desert and lake on the west, Kakariko village on the east).  The sun rises in the west and sets in the east.  Maybe they thought no one would notice that, but I used the location of the sun to determine if it was morning or evening, and that messed me up a bit.

Lastly, I’d like to mention the Wii’s notorious battery usage.  After going through two sets of batteries in about a week’s worth of Wii Sports and ten hours of Zelda, I bought some rechargeable batteries (the kind that claim to work 4x longer in high tech devices).  For the rest of Zelda (about fifty hours of gameplay), I didn’t need to recharge the batteries once.  This could be because the batteries actually last longer (hey, anything’s possible, right?).  But I think the main reason is that I played with the pointer functionality turned off.  Since using the pointer basically turns the Wiimote into a low-res IR video camera, I think that drains a lot of battery.  I set it to not use the pointer because: a) I kept selecting the wrong things in the menus, b) “calibrating” it to my TV actually made it worse, c) I hated having a fairy on the edge of my screen all the time, d) when I went into first-person mode I had to hold my hand awkwardly to look around, and e) if anything was on my coffee table the view to the sensor bar would get blocked.  Now I can add another reason to play without the pointer function, if any other games give that option.

In conclusion, if you’ve been avoiding Zelda games in the past because the great fairies weren’t topless, then Twilight Princess is the right game for you.

In the month since the Wii was released, you’ve probably heard about problems with the wrist strap breaking, causing considerable damage.  I personally find it difficult to comprehend a scenario in which this would actually be a problem (and I’m not alone).  This past week our Wii moved out from under an evergreen and was placed beneath a television, and since then we have put in a lot of time on Wii Sports.  My two brothers especially enjoyed it, putting in nearly six hours of play time on Sunday alone.  In all of this time, there was no wrist strap present at all.  It only took about ten minutes for us to realize that the wrist strap did little besides get in the way.  I’ve yet to see a Wiimote even get dropped, much less thrown, even though we are all using full-force baseball swings and bowling ball tosses.

Is anyone else actually using the wrist strap?  If so, is it actually preventing anything?

Update:  My Wii friend code: 1974 6315 2837 8279.  Let me know your code if you want our Mii’s to mingle.

If you’ve not heard about Nintendo’s press event from a few weeks ago, they unveiled lots of details on one of the features of the Wii:  the Mii channel.  Check out this video if you want to see an example of what I’m talking about.  Stephanie was much more excited about this feature than I was, but it does seem kind of neat.  You’ll be able to store your Mii avatars in your Wiimote, and use them in some games (noticeably the launch title, Wii Sports).

Someone has gone out and put together a Flash application to simulate the Mii channel, based on the footage of the menus that have been seen so far (source article).  So Stephanie and I played around with it tonight.  You can see Kiip over on the right, and Stephanii just to your left.  Pretty cool huh?  Make your own Mii and post a link, we’ll see how close we can get.  It’s not quite as robust as the real one I’m sure (for example, it’s really tricky to position hair anywhere but the default location, and you almost indefinitely have to lower all the facial features).  But still fun to play around with.

FYI:  These were the reference photos we were kinda going off of: Kip, Stephanie.  You be the judge.

Well it’s been a while since my last post, so for you, dear reader, I am making another.

The launch details of the Nintendo Wii were announced today:  November 19 at $250.  I’m a little disappointed.  I was really hoping for a $200 price point. Not that it matters, I’d get it either way, and they’ll probably drop the price next year (or maybe they’ll wait till 2008 for the first price drop I really don’t know).  And it’s bundled with Wii Sports, which.. I don’t really care about.  The launch date also doesn’t mean much to me—I won’t be getting mine until December 25—but it seems like they should have beaten Sony’s launch date (on yours truly’s birthday) of November 17, especially since Nintendo (unlike Sony) can ship enough systems to meet demand.  But here’s my biggest disappointment:  getting a second controller (like, a fully functional one) is sixty dollars (forty dollars for Wiimote, twenty for the nunchuck attachment).  Sure, I’m still not going to be spending as much as I would on, say, a PS3 with no games or accessories or anything.  But as long as I’m going to have Wii Tennis I’d like to be able to play it with my wife, without having to spend more money on her controller than I would on a new game.

I apologize if my thoughts are overly disorganized.  I am feeling quite under the weather and debating whether or not I should tell my boss that I’m taking off the rest of the day as a sick day.  I’m certainly not in a state of mind for something requiring the level of concentration of, let’s say, refactoring a O(n²) algorithm down to a O(n) or O(n log n) algorithm (what I was working on before taking a ten minute break to blog).  But I’ve never taken time off for sickness and I probably won’t unless it’s the kind of sickness where I need to be in or near a sanitary bathroom for an extended period of time.

Recently a few friends of mine have posted their top 20 or top 25 favorite games of all time on their blogs.  Not to be outdone, I have compiled this list of my top twenty-six games of all time.  :)

26. Metroid:  Should I have included this?  I never truly played the game as it was meant to be played.  I just entered the “Justin Bailey” code and explored to see how far I could get.  This was how I would frequently spend several hours in the afternoon when I got home from school.  But this game was more or less my introduction to video games so I think it must be included.
25. New Super Mario Bros.:  I ranked this game kind of low because it is very recent and may not stand the test of time, but the game was fantastic.  It was a little on the easy side—I mean, I managed to get everything in the game without using any FAQs.  But it was great, and I liked that they resisted the urge to include elements like flying from SMB3 and SMW—you actually want to get fire flowers again!  What I’d really love to see next is New Super Mario Bros. 2, such that NSMB2:SMB2::NSMB:SMB.
24. Half Life 2:  Another one that might be higher if it weren’t for the fact that I am just now playing through it, but it has every indication of being a favorite.  With PC games I don’t mind waiting until they are cheaper and patched.  I consider any PC game straight out of the box to be more like a public beta than a final release.  But I’m a console gamer at heart.
23. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles In Time:  This may seem a little out of place, but it was a really fun beat-em-up game.  Not sure how well it would stand up now though.
22. Mario Kart: Double Dash:  This game was lots of fun as long as you played it the right way—two people to a kart.  I can imagine that I wouldn’t have liked this game so much if I hadn’t played through it with Garrison.  It suffered from the same problem as every other Mario Kart though: once you unlock every track you don’t really want to play anymore.
21. Goldeneye 007:  A classic.  Caverns and Frigate were my favorite levels.  I got all the cheat codes.  That was not an easy task—to get the last one I played the same stage (Facility on 00 Agent) over and over for like four hours straight!
20. Unreal Tournament:  The only FPS that I spent significant time on in multiplayer.  Morpheus r0x0r3d.
19. Donkey Kong Country:  The game that pushed the limits of 16-bit gaming to new levels.  I remember being on the phone with Peter as we tried to figure out where the last two secrets were, in order to get the coveted 101% rating.
18. Metal Gear Solid 2:  The only game for a Sony system that will make it on this list, this game was really cool.  I haven’t played MGS3 yet, maybe some day...
17. Super Mario Bros. 3:  What list would be complete without this game?  This was the upper limit of what an 8-bit system could do.  I have to confess that I never beat the game without Game Genie until I played the Super Mario All-Stars version much later.
16. Banjo-Kazooie:  3D platformers never managed to take hold like they did in 2D, but I liked them a lot, and this one was lots of fun.  I don’t really have a problem with collecting five thousand tokens in every level.
15. Animal Crossing:  I would be remiss as a list-maker if I didn’t include this game, even if it calls my sexual orientation into question.  Non-simultaneous multiplayer!  A game that you never really beat, you just sort of get tired of playing it!  Interesting sidenote: my in-laws love this game and have two avatars each.
14. Final Doom:  For those unaware, Final Doom was the Doom 2 engine, playing two complete, 32-level games (TNT: Evilution [sic] and The Plutonia Experiment).  I also loaded the “Ultimate Doom” levels (the original game plus a few new levels).  Anyway, I remember playing this when I was in high school.  Anytime I hear a song from Live’s “Secret Samadhi” album I think of this game, because I listened to it while playing for a while.  I also had a lot of fun creating a few Doom levels, and playing multiplayer with Garrison and Peter.  Of course, this was back in the day when you had to have no less than four phone lines to do a 1-on-1 death match: one for each computer and one for each person so that you could decide when your modem should call their modem.  Fun times.
13. Mega Man X:  I liked the X games much more than the main series, although I do have fond memories of holding “left” on controller 2 with my foot while playing Mega Man 3.  I remember X2 and X3 being pretty good too, but I never owned them, so only X1 is represented here.
12. Roller Coaster Tycoon:  Countless hours freshmen year of college were spent designing wicked roller coasters.  So much fun.  I’ve recently gotten Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, which is the same thing but 3D and you can ride the rides.  Only difference is I have less free time now.
11. Super Mario 64:  The first thing I did was climb a tree.  The second thing I did was jump in the moat.  So much freedom!  It was amazing!  I’d really like to see a remake of this game with modern graphics (kind of like Super Mario All Stars did with the original SMB games).
10. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest:  The best of the DKC games.  Graphics were actually improved from the first game, and gameplay was expanded, and the difficulty went up a little bit to more or less exactly where I would like it to be.
9. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem:  This game was amazing, with an unusually good storyline.  I went back through it two summers ago and still enjoyed the story.
8. Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time:  An amazing game, with innovative controls that allow you to easily do things that look incredibly cool.  Unfortunately the sequel sucked.  Anyone know if the third one was any good?  I never bothered to give it a try..
7. The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time:  Link made a transition into 3D flawlessly.  I can’t wait to play Twilight Princess this year.
6. Metroid Prime:  Another great transition to 3D (despite what Ryan says).  This game really felt more like a first-person Zelda game than a first person shooter.  All the exploration from Super Metroid was still there.  I didn’t like the sequel quite as much because it felt much more FPS-y, even though it was a decent game.
5. Super Mario RPG:  This is the only RPG I’ve ever really played unless you count the “sequels” Paper Mario and Paper Mario 2.  Owning only Nintendo systems has made it difficult to play them..  I really enjoyed watching Garrison play Skies of Arcadia though.
4. Super Metroid:  I remember the day I got this game I played for like six hours straight without a Player’s Guide or anything, made it all the way to that big room in Maridia where you use the Grapple Beam to get across the top of the room to the door going up, and there’s a platform under the door and you can use the grapple beam to spin all the way around it.  I eventually beat this game with 100% in less than three hours to get the best ending.
3. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island:  My favorite Mario game.  The graphics were a nice break from what everyone was used to, and the levels were really fun.  Too bad the “Yoshi’s Story” pseudo-sequels weren’t very good.  But now they’re actually making a true sequel for the DS!
2. The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker:  A lot of people shied away from this game because of the cartoon graphics, which is really a shame.  This is definitely my favorite Zelda game.  I loved the exploration and the vastness of the world (even if it was all water).

Drum roll please!

1. Super Smash Bros. Melee:  The best game to have in a dorm, hands down.  Junior year of college was awesome because of this game alone.  Garrison and I even organized tournaments.  I put the tournament posters back up on my site today, in case you’ve never seen them.  I wonder.. will we still be playing this game thirty years from now?  The gameplay is perfect and I think the graphics will hold up (unlike.. say.. Smash for the N64).  I am concerned that Super Smash Bros. Brawl will be unable to live up to this game.  I guess time will tell.

Some honorable mentions go out to the following great games, left out to give the list more variety: The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, Metroid Fusion, Metroid: Zero Mission, Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble.

It is now year 20X5 of the history of the cosmos, and something terrible has happened.