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Posted by fatius at November 28th, 2006

I can’t believe that I forgot this on my Wii post:

This was from a game I played against my sister. Was fun.

Posted by fatius at November 22nd, 2006

The What?
I got my Wii on launch day, because I’m a nerd, a nerd who pre-orders. I love it! First up, I’m going to show you some of the stuff I love about the system, then I’ll get into what I’m not so rosy about.

The Good

1) Miis! Ok, these things are pretty silly. You can make tiny little people that look like you, or Hitler, it doesn’t really matter. So naturally, me and the lady made some of them. Here’s our Mii self portrait.

b) No mention of the wii would be complete without a picture of its controller.

iii) The Wii has this whole virtual console thing which allows you to (buy and) download games for systems that your parents were too mean to buy for you. This is nothing new, the xbox can also help you make up for a childhood ruined by scrooge. However, the download screen simply can’t be beaten.

*) This isn’t one of my favorite games, but it’s a nice photo. The game is Rayman something something. It contains activities such as squirting (rabbid) rabbits with carrot juice. It’s a lot of fun.

Lastly) Do you know who this is?

The Ugly
So what isn’t the best of all time? A small number problems are stopping this from being the best launch ever.

1) They have this whole virtual console thing but there simply weren’t many good games at launch. This is Nintendo and they didn’t have Super Mario Bros. Nothing defines Nintendo like that game. Not “Mario Bros.” Not “Super Mario 64.” They needed “Super Mario Bros.” (the one that came with the original Nintendo available on day one. I’m sure many people have this in other forms, but it needs to be here. It isn’t all bad though; a day or so after launch they put up some Turbo Graphix 16 games. I got Bonk’s Adventure which seems amazing. I’m sure that “Super Mario Bros.” will be out real soon now.

2) At launch you could not buy component cables in stores. You could buy them online, but even those sold out. I called up Nintendo World Store in NYC and they said that the official cables weren’t out yet and that I should try Best Buy for third party cables. I just can’t wrap my head around them not having those at launch at the NWS. You’d think they would. So many of the words in the name of the store would lead me to believe I could buy these sorts of products at that establishment… Nintendo. World. Store. But nope, try best buy. (Best Buy doesn’t have them, at least not around here).
3) Online Games. They should have launched with at least one online game. The DS should have as well, but that is another story. I don’t think it’s a bad sign that they didn’t launch with one (again, look at the DS), but it would have been awesome.

Anyways

The Lady is asleep, so I’m going to go work on one of my games. Playing games beats writing about them. Writing games beats playing them.

Posted by fatius at November 21st, 2006

Sometimes I take time lapse movies from my computer. I generally just start the recording and forget about it for a day or so. I just found a bunch of those old movies. Here is a still from our old apartment. I like this photo; the lady looks great and I look like I’ve got something great to say…

It’s a pretty standard day.

Posted by fatius at November 15th, 2006

While browsing parts of the series of tubes lately, I’ve started noticing a lot more mistakes and “testing” messages than normal. I even took screen shots of some of them.

First up, at gmail.com got a “test” message advertisement.

This next one is not out of context, the caption is only talking about one person, her majesty, The Boss.

And finally, I’m a Blazers fan. Since I live in New York, I sometimes watch the games by refreshing the stats pages on yahoo.com. This particular game went down to the wire, we were down by two points and one of our best players was on the foul line. He made one and missed one. The time ran out and we lost by one point. Except that we didn’t. The next morning when I woke up, I checked the rest of the scores and noticed that we’d actually won. The Hornets never made as many points as is shown in the score below. Makes you wonder how long I was following a game with the wrong scores.

Posted by fatius at November 5th, 2006

I’ve been playing tons of video games lately, because I’m kind of a nerd. So, I thought I’d write a few reviews of them. I’m new to this whole reviewing thing, so I’m just going to get started. If you’re not interested in these types of things (me, video games, 3rd grade level writing skills) you should stop reading this now. Otherwise, here goes.

What is it?

In Okami, you’re this wolf, who’s this chick, who’s this god, of the sun or something. For some reason, the world has been cursed and I’ve read “the world has no color,” so you’re supposed to help restore it. That thought always turned me off and I think it’s a bit misleading. While you do restore color to it, it never really seemed lacking in the first place. And restoring color tends to be more along the lines of watching flowers bloom. Whatever you’re doing, it looks incredible. Not with any qualifiers such as, “it looks good for a PS2 game.” It just looks good.

What do you do?

You spend most of your time running around and fighting people with one of any number of really sweet necklaces. Seriously, you press some button and your necklace whips them, or shoots them, depending on which necklace you have on. I guess that the necklace is technically a rosary, and you’re probably not actually whipping them, but who the hell can tell what is going on. All that matters is that it’s fun when you’re doing it.

So anyway, you run around and have to gather up over a dozen brush techniques. Each one gives you pretty neat powers that are controlled with one of the neatest gameplay mechanics, since… well… ever. One technique is the “power slash,” which means that when you press L2 (or something), the screen turns sepia toned and you can paint a “slash” across an enemy. Another one let’s you draw a bomb in same way. It’s a whole lot of fun.

This game is supposed to be a 30 hour game. When I finished it, it told me I’d been playing for 48 hours. I’m 100% sure that this game keeps counting time when it’s paused, and I tend to leave games paused for dinner, movies, short naps, and trips to the store to buy more string cheese. But cheese trips or not, I still played this game for more than 30 hours. Probably late 30’s early 40’s.

Is it worth my money?

As I’ve mentioned before. This game is a lot of fun. I actually bought this game on the day it came out and I don’t regret it at all. I can’t see myself playing through this game a second time, but you never know. It was less than $40 and will probably long be considered a classic.

What is wrong with it?

The worst part about this game is occasionally agonizingly slow scroll speed of the text that you need to read. For example, sometimes when someone is telling you something you are unable to speed it up. It forces you to read it at whatever speed the game makers think you should read it at: slowly. However, most of the time you can get out of those conversations or at least speed them up, but sometimes you can’t.

I am making this clear to developers all over the world. No matter how funny your cut scene is, not matter how important it is to the story, you should never ever make me sit through it without giving me the option to skip it. I’m not always good at the games that I play, so sometimes I have to sit through some stupid scene 30 times in a row because I keep dying directly after it. As a side note, pausing and rewinding these cut scenes would be nice too, but I’m sure that is pushing it.

Tell me something I don’t know.

If you pay attention to these sorts of things you may already know this, but I’m going to tell it to you anyways. This game was developed by the game studio Clover. They’re owned by Capcom and apparently operate totally inside of the Capcom building somewhere in Japan. They did some work on the Viewtiful Joe games, which bear a striking resemblance graphics-wise to this game. They made this game and another game called “God Hand,” releasing them both in North America about a month apart from each other. Okami got consistently great reviews while God Hand had them scattered all over the place; Gamespot gave it an eight out of ten, while IGN gave it a three out of ten. Everyone I’ve spoken with has told me that God Hand is a great game, despite some problems with the control.

What is my point? Well Capcom closed the doors on Clover just days after the release of these games. I’m sure the producers will go on to make neato games somewhere else, but it’s sad to see them go and almost certainly means there will be no Okami sequel… which is probably a blessing (and a curse).