gamecube

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (GCN/Nintendo)

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [name redacted]

Miyamoto comes from an older school of game design, from a time when we didn’t know as much as we do now — and so we didn’t know what was impossible. We also had little history, so it was up to bards like Miyamoto to create one for us.

With a handful of details, a rough outline, and his whims, Miyamoto spins tales for his audience. With every telling and every audience, his stories go down a slightly different path. No one performance is more accurate than any other; the truth is in the telling. Save the odd sequel, every Zelda game is a new beginning, with a new, yet always familiar, Link and a new Zelda. It’s getting so there are nearly as many interpretations as of Journey to the West or the legend of King Arthur. And for the same reasons.

Legends like these are ancient; they’re from a world before our linear sense of time and our concrete idea of history. Back then, the world moved in cycles. The seasons came and went; life flourished and waned — and then it began again, a little different, mostly familiar. Reality is in the moment and in that faith in the cycle.

The way that videogames age, this cycle has turned into a death spiral. Every five years there’s a new generation of players, with its own collective assumptions and its own built-in innocence to history. For each new wave of gamers, the story must be adapted and retold again.

The problem is this modern concept of progress. Whereas only a few generations ago one year was much the same as the next, technology has now placed us on a non-stop rocket train to anywhere-but-here. So our perception is warped from the speed, and so we are blinded to the cycles that used to define our reality.

Our rhythms have been broken, replaced with the dull whine of progress. The future is our salvation, while the present is a blur and the past is our collective shame. We live in a society that has invented history as a straw man for our pursuit of an illusory perfection.

Wind Waker is a game caught in an unfortunate dilema between these two world models.

( Continue reading at Insert Credit )

Finis.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

g’gnahrnnndje…

Okay. It’s over with.

It’s almost random that I actually beat Ganondorf in his final form; all of my fairies were gone, I only had a few hearts left, and I just happened to hit the right button at the right time — a button I didn’t even intend to press.

Worth noting: There is a second quest of sorts in this game. There are a number of obvious changes that I’ve noted so far, although they’re mostly cosmetic. Some of them were on my wishlist the first time through the game, so — well, good.

I’m not sure how substantially the game is altered, however.

I’ve got… about a quarter of my review written. It should be done reasonably soon.

And…

yes.

Those a’ nae the jaws of which I speak, lass.

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I still taste the bread from a submarine sandwich that I ate over twelve hours ago. Talk about value for your dollar!

My toy symphony, as it were, is beginning to find some kind of direction for itself. I’ve come to the conclusion, however, that I need a good sample or two which comfortably sit in the bass range. As one might anticipate, were one to pay attention to such spectral issues, all of these dinky instruments and knicknacks tend to be pretty strong on the high end, but they generally cut off somewhere within the midrange.

Maybe I can fudge a bit by introducing a couple of pure waves; square and triangle, say. They’ll sound cheesy, and yet honest and warm enough that they might not clash as an overly synthetic addition.

Plus, they can be cleanly downsampled as much as I care to do so.

I really am not fond of square waves when used in the mid-range; I’ve known this for a long while. They just sound hollow. But my word, do they make good bass patches. They even have some neat uses in the higher registers, as a chirpy kind of seasoning.

Wind Waker is sitting in my Gamecube, very close to completion (as it has been for a few days) — but I return to it joylessly at this point. I suppose I might as well just get the darned thing over with. If I didn’t have a review to write, I don’t think I’d have the motivation to finish.

Today has been a day of crankiness. Perhaps repeating another three or four boss battles is just the cap that I need.

What does a genius need with pants?

  • Reading time:10 mins read

The Metroid 2 score really gets a bad rap. Actually, Metroid 2 seems to be the whipping child of the series in general.

I think it’s worth pointing out that when the music is good, it’s really good in this game. The main tunnel theme, the Metroid battle theme, the revamped Samus and Item themes.

Where it begins to get a little controversial is in the various ruins. Once the player wanders out of the central tunnel and into any of the larger playfields, the music switches to an atmospheric pattern of bleeps. Not a lot of melody. Not a lot of rhythm in particular.

If you’re looking for Hip Tanaka’s tuneful power-ballads, I can see how it should be easy to feel let down. But the music serves a different purpose here.

Metroid 2 is by far the creepiest, most clautrophobic game in the series. It’s lonely, unnerving, frustrating, almost trance-inducing. It has a tangible atmosphere which I think is wholly fitting to the game’s setting and general purpose. (This atmosphere is most obvious when the game is played in full black-and-white, as originally intended, rather than with the upgraded Gameboy Color palette.)

The music is an important element of that formula. It exists to create and sustain a particular mood. I feel it was composed very deliberately; Ryohji Yoshitomi could have written anything, after all. But he chose to go the avant garde route.

There is a method to the music, as you can tell if you listen closely enough. It’s not random, and it’s not careless. It’s an attempt at an unsettling ambient soundscape.

The problem that Yoshitomi faces in this instance is the limited sound capacity of the original Gameboy. Melodic fare is easy. More experimental music is a bit tricker to pull off convincingly with only a few triangle and square waves at a person’s disposal.

Whether Yoshitomi succeeds in his goal or not is up to the listener. But for what it is, I think his score works very well.

Combined with the excellent quality of the more melodic portions of the soundtrack, I’d easily rank the Metroid 2 score up there amongst my favourite original Gameboy soundtracks — somewhere in the neighborhood of Gargoyle’s Quest.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that Yoshitomi was never asked back for the future games.

The music in Prime does something odd to my head.

It all began with the theme which plays behind the game-select screen. For whatever reason it might be, that theme moves me pretty strongly.

The last time I felt this way about a videogame theme was in 1986, when I first slotted my copy of Legend of Zelda into my NES. At the time, I was struck with a profound awe and wonder. I knew that I was seeing and hearing something important. And my whole body reacted.

The Metroid Prime theme (from it’s use later in the game, I’m assuming that this is intended as the main theme to the game) has a similar, if somewhat more muted, effect on me. And the deeper I crawl into the game proper, the more impressed I am with the music in general.

In the case of the main theme, I think a large part of it is the uncommonly synchopated rhythmic pattern. Short-long, short-long, long, long, long. Another part of it is the weird, theramin-like lead instrument. But it’s just the overall weight of decisions made in the tune’s composition, arrangement, and production that make it so strange and so captivating to me.

The rest of the score seems a bit more tame — although there are more touches of experimentation, the deeper I crawl.

In my view, Kenji Yamamoto makes some very tasteful and wise decisions in terms of references to earlier themes. I particularly like his restructured Metroid and Brinstar themes.

Some of the earlier, more traditional soundtrack fare (particularly during the pre-Tallon introduction sequence) isn’t altogether interesting. And the planet-side music does take a while to build up to anything. But I’m beginning to sense a sort of a method behind the score’s evolution.

If it keeps going where it looks to me like it’s headed, this is going to be a pretty darned sensitive and impressive work. I don’t really know that it has much comparison in terms of what else is out there at the moment.

The Prime soundtrack is, so far, perhaps the most original and generally satisfying one for my tastes.

However: as for the soundtrack which I find the most memorable, well-written for its time, and which I personally enjoy the most — I’d have to go with Hip Tanaka’s original Metroid soundtrack.

There’s not a dud in the bunch. It consists of some of the best themes ever written for any videogame. And it made the game far more interesting to play than it really should have been.

I do quite like the Metroid 2 score, for what it is. Super Metroid’s music was… functional, to my mind. It was very Metroidy. To my mind Yamamoto has improved greatly since 1994, however. I don’t have much comment on the Fusion score. It, too, was Metroidy — though in a way which fit Fusion.

Return of Samus is really what comes to mind when I think of Metroid.

The first game was a bit of a fluke; the elements which make up the game don’t really cohere as well as they might. There doesn’t seem to be much of an overall vision. It was done on a pretty low budget. It seems rather random to me that it turned out to be as memorable as it was.

Metroid II was the first game where all of the elements really came together. Samus was retooled to look more or less as she does now. Her ship was introduced. The game upped the creepiness level several notches, along with a deep sense of disorientation and paranoia.

It’s perhaps the loneliest game in the series. The grainiest. And also the most wonderful.

More so than in any of the recent games, there is a sense of nigh-unlimited possibility in Return of Samus. You just don’t know what’s out there. Anything could be important. Anything could be a threat or a relief. You just don’t know where a new item will turn up. Or where the end is. Or where you’ll unexpectedly blunder into another Metroid.

I think the most important factor in so establishing RoS in my mind has to be the spider ball. The way it’s been retooled in Prime is interesting, but the item was far more flexible in RoS. (It was also probably a nightmare for the level designers, so I can see why it’s mostly been left out since then.) The way it was implemented in that game opened up a wealth of possibilities for exploration.

Super Metroid was certainly enjoyable. But it was a bit over-polished and conservative for my tastes. It was engineered to please as wide an audience as possible, while feeding fans exactly what they wanted (rather than what they didn’t *know* they wanted). Sort of like Phantasy Star: End of the Millennium. It didn’t really do very much new; all it did was take the best of the first two games and make it all a lot more palatable.

Basically — the first game establishes the concept of Metroid. The second game begins with that template, and then goes on an introspective search for identity. The third game takes most of the new ground blazed in the second game, combines it with the charm and trappings of the first game, and puts as much shine on it as the SNES can muster.

Fusion tries to be a very different kind of a game, and I respect it for that. What’s more, I think it succeeds quite well in its attempts to reinvent Metroid as a tense action-oriented game. I feel the level design is severely lacking, though; I’m not all that fond of some of its lazy logistical constructs. The game comes off almost feeling like Super Mario World in terms of how special moves and blocks are used.

Prime, I really like a lot so far. I didn’t honestly expect it to be as good as it is. I can’t comment very well on it until I’ve finished the game, though — as it seems there’s still a lot of odd stuff coming up that could effect my evaluation.

I think it could be interesting if the next game were set somewhere after Fusion. That game sets up a ton of change for the Metroid universe, and it would be intersting to see how Retro might follow through on it.

On the other hand, I tend to see the main linear series as Intelligent Systems’ duty. If there’s to be an out-and-out Metroid 5, it would make more sense to me if it came from the original Metroid team.

What seems to be Retro’s duty is to fill in the cracks and to attempt to explain all of the peculiarities introduced in the main series. To dig deeper into the groundwork set by Intelligent Systems.

And on that note, I think a Metroid Zero of sorts (as someone mentioned above) would make a lot of sense.

In early interviews, it was suggested that Prime was going to be set before the original Metroid. I think they chose wisely, in their decision to instead make it a direct follow-up to the first game — but that still leaves the backstory concept to fulfill.

In terms of bonuses, I agree that it would be keen to include Super Metroid — and for exactly this reason:

That way, every single Metroid game would be playable on the Gamecube.

Metroid 1 is included with Prime.
Metroid 2, you can play with the Gamecube Gameboy Player.
Metroid 3 would be included with this sequel to Prime.
Metroid 4 would again work with the Gameboy Player.

Kind of keen to have everything in one place, y’know?

I would also like to see the ability to turn power-ups on and off, as in Super Metroid.

Honestly, I’d just like to be able to take the Varia suit off every now and then. Those oversized shoulderpads just keey getting more ridiculous with every game; I much prefer how her raw Power Suit looks.

Also, it would be nice to be able to combine the various beam weapons (as in the third and fourth games).

I’d like to see young Samus, somehow. As a child, in a flashback, perhaps.

I want those Chozo statues back again, for holding power-ups.

And I want Retro to feel free to try out some more radical, experimental ideas that I would probably never think of on my own. I want to be surprised, above all else.

* * *

Regarding the spiky, butch hairdo from the concept art: Yes. That impressed the hell out of me. And it seems to match my interpretation of Samus’ personality, really well.

And honestly, doesn’t it make a lot more sense to have short hair if you’re going to be wearing a suit like that? Imagine it getting caught in the helmet. Yowtch.

I’ve yet to pay for a Gamecube game.

  • Reading time:6 mins read

I’ve got the OoT disc now. It’s… a decent port.

At the point I’m at now, I just beat Gohma and hit Hyrule Field again. Golly, it was a lot quicker this time around. The first time I played this portion of the game, I think it took me several hours to get as far as this. Now it’s taken me only around half an hour. Of course I did poke around quite a lot, before.

There are a lot of ads included for Wind Waker (both on the disc and in the packaging), which seems superfluous considering that the only way to get this disc is as a pre-order bonus with that game.

This compilation disc is apparently labeled, officially, as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Master Quest is called “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Master Quest” Which… makes sense. It’s not really a novel game in its own right so much as it is a second quest of OoT. (The instruction booklet doesn’t even bother to distinguish between the games.)

So collectively this disc kind forms the complete version of OoT. OoT DX, as it were.

The actual presentation of this package, I’m not sure about. It was thrown together pretty quickly.

The game disc is printed with the logo and the game title in red and black. The side of the case again simply lists the game as OoT. The back of the case actually goes into a fair amount of detail, considering that this isn’t intended for direct sale. The front is graced with a disappointing excuse for cover art (even more so than usual for Gamecube games). heh. It’s just the two logos against a gradiant background, with a few blurbs.

Just the logos would have been fine, if they were presented elegantly. Not so here. It’s not terrible; it’s just not… amazing.

When you boot up the system, tou’re presented with a screen that’s got an ocarina in the background and then logos (with corresponding pictures of link) in the upper-left and upper-right, for each of the two quests. Then down at the bottom is an option to allow you to view trailers to several other Gamecube and GBA games.

A new mix of Hyrule Field/the original Zelda theme plays in the background.

Below the logos, some… rather loud, overly large text explains the current selection in greater detail; a one-sentence synopsis which honestly seems a little condescending to me.

When you choose either quest, it gives you a splash screen that illustrates the controls for you and asks you if you want to use the rumble feature. Seems again kind of superfluous; they could have just thrown that into the options menu. And the game already teaches you how to play, and the instruction booklet is quite thorough.

The game takes a good while to load once you select one of the two quests. I understand why, of course. But you just get a black screen with a progress bar and a bit of related clip-art pasted above. That could have been more seamless.

The only changes are that it’s in a higher resolution now (and there’s no more of that palette dithering), and the issues with the controls. Any text and icons in the game have been altered to reflect the Gamecube pad a little more closely. The button colors at the top of the screen, for instance.

It’s strange. Not even the frame rate has been brought up. It’s just as choppy as on the N64. Draw distance seems the same.

It’s basically a perfect port. It emulates the positive and the negative of the original game. Including all of the text that you can’t skip and Navi’s over…Naviness. Even the small issues which could have been repaired, generally aren’t. Or they don’t seem to be; all of the graphical and camera engine peculiaries.

The controls are fine. They feel as natural as possible considering the differences between the N64 and Gamecube pads. I think the L trigger, being analog, is a little mushier than what we had before with the Z trigger.

The secondary items work okay. Right now I have slingshot on Y (the missile button in Metroid). Deku nut is X. And I’ve the ocarina set to Z.

It’s a little annoying to have to reach for the C-stick every time Navi starts to whine, though. And I’m not sure yet how it’s going to work once one has to start playing melodies on the ocarina (that’s the only place to access one of the notes).

So that should be… interesting.

The music stutters slightly when one brings up the menu screen.

The game takes a lot of memory for saving — fifteen blocks, to compare to Metroid’s two. This accounts for both the normal game and Master Quest, though.

It also takes a while to save. And as with the loading sequence, the method isn’t as polished as it could be. The screen just goes black, and a clumsy message appears to instruct you NOT to touch the memory card or the power button. Then it says the game has saved, and requires the player to hit “okay” to continue. And it drops back into the game.

Again, that could have been more seamless.

I also… Hmm.

The demo movies are interesting, but I think they’re kind of out-of-place here. They take down the tone of the disc in general. If it were just the two quests, with an elegant selection interface, I think that would take up the respectability several notches. As it is, this feels like… a free bonus disc.

Oddly, Sega’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on the F-Zero trailers. Nor does that of Amusement Vision. I’m not as surprised that Treasure isn’t mentioned in relation to Wario World.

In a big, edited sequence that shows off most of the big games which have been released since the Gamecube’s launch (all the way back to SSBM), PSOep1&2 and Super Monkey Ball 2 are amongst the last two or three items shown.

And there are some odd ones in there. A random James Bond game from EA. Timesplitters 2. Some other things which have little specifically to do with the Gamecube.

It’s more like “we’ve got this too!” than “look at what we’ve got that no one else does!”.

There’s nothing really wrong with the disc, and it’s certainly worth having around. It’s just — I’m surprised that it wasn’t handled with more care than it was. It wouldn’t have been at all difficult to have made things feel a little less cheap.

The games themselves are basically fine, from what I’ve seen so far. It just feels like an N64 perfectly emulated on my Gamecube.

Things To Do!

Brinstone, you say?

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So my GameCube came today, with its complementary copy of Metroid Prime.

My comments so far:

  1. Whoa. Damn.
  2. … I need a memory card.

Is it just me, or do Nintendo really pack their stuff well? Opening each of my GBA and my Gamecube for the first time (in their respective moments), I got a rush of nostalgia. When was the last new device I opened which seemed so lovingly, sturdily boxed? I can’t remember. My Genesis?

Opening this thing, I got the distinct impression that I was unveiling to myself something uncommonly important. Something which would stick with me and last for years.

Not a feeling one gets much from electronic devices these days.

Particularly not Sony devices.

Odd, that.

Wow, that remixed music sounds good.

Why does it make me giggle, the first time I hear Samus’s theme in any new Metroid game?

Or the item power-up theme, for that matter?

Wow, there’s a lot of text in this game. I wonder who thought up all of this background info. Does it say in the credits? I don’t want to walk downstairs for my game case. I’ll look later. Was it someone from Retro? Would NCL have given them such free license? The game does a better join tying together and explaining the Metroid universe in the first half hour than the other four do, put together.

Intelligent Systems, my hindquarters!

Yes.

You just don’t know, I tell you.

I think this is an example of how the third dimension can be used to add more than just spatial depth to a game. It’s a similar phenomenon to what I saw in Sonic Adventure, only… much more so. Much more seamless.

To mention:

This game doesn’t seem to come from anywhere. It doesn’t feel Western. It doesn’t feel distinctly Japanese. It… feels like the love child of Metroid and Myst. Only more so.

Oh god. Oh god. The nose. Must do something.

Juice me up!

Oh GOD, is that Samus’s…

  • Reading time:9 mins read

Something weird about Metroid Fusion… it doesn’t let you get all of the items the first time through. The last powerup you get in the game is the screw attack (obtained through a very strange source) , and about 40% of the breakable walls in the game require said screw attack. And yet, once you get said screw attack, the plot leashes you into exactly one path and locks all other doors which might be a distraction to you. So all you can do is go forward and beat the game, essentially.

And so I wasted all of this time prowling around, flaunting my curiosity against the linear paths along which I was directed, expecting to be able to at least find all or most of the items if I wasn’t going to finish the game quickly enough. No, though. I take forever to finish and I’m only allowed to collect just over 60% of the items in the game. Hrmn.

One thing which might balance this out is that I now have a “complete” save that apparently unlocks all of the doors which should have already been that way and allows me to play from my last save point. Now my only problem is all of the blocks which are supposed to be broken with a dash attack yet which aren’t surrounded by nearly enough space to allow said dashing to occur. Not sure what to do about that.

But yeah. I’ve finished the game. I got the “Hi, I’m Samus. Admire my armour.” ending, as expected — but it does appear that the game leaves open the possibility for more.

The last portion of the game seemed somewhat unfulfilling to me. Things were just starting to get interesting, when the game merely… ended. There weren’t any really interesting showdowns or anything — at least in terms of boss mechanics. I’m not sure how thrilled I am by the choices for final bosses either, though. I mean, they were all either pretty much expected or… well. The last boss really fell pretty flat. It’s obviously intended as an homage to Metroid II, to which this game tries to be a sequel as much as it does to the third game. But… hum.

The endgame just feels rushed to me; a last-minute shuffle of Metroid elements from the past (there was almost literally nothing new here), plus the forced linear path. The plot was just beginning to pick up some steam. The tension was just starting to build. Things were just starting to get really difficult. The level design was just starting to fall together. And then that was it.

That said, the series now seems to have been kicked off again on a new path. Where Super Metroid did its part in ending things, Fusion finishes the job and then opens up some new threads for the future. This is… well, a decent bridge game. I guess. It had all of the elements to be something really momentous, but in the end this is just Chapter Four. It’s King of Fighters ’99. (Okay, ’99 was chapter five — but that’s also including ’94, which was more a prologue than a plot chapter.)

Hey, KoF began the same year that the last Metroid game was made. And now that it’s gone through two plot arcs, Metroid’s come back for what looks like it’s intended to be the beginning of its second arc. Hmm.

Fusion, for me, does more to raise questions about the next Metroid than it satisfies as a game on its own. Sure, it’s by leaps and bounds the best game on the GBA so far (since mine is still in the design phase). It’s captivating for as long as it lasts. There’s a lot of great stuff introduced here, and there’s more plot than in the other three Metroids combined (and probably Prime as well). But very little of that stuff is really exploited as well as it could be.

There’s not enough game here — and I don’t just mean that the thing is short, which it certainly is (albeit longer than Harmony of Dissonance). It feels more like a test run for a New-Style Metroid, to see how well it works out. It works just great! But… I’d like more than just a demo, y’know?

All three of the previous games felt satisfactory. If nothing else, there was a bunch more to explore, and they’d let you explore it rather than blocking off entranceways and locking doors whenever they felt the need to confine you for reasons of the plot. Once you got a new ability, you had a chance to use it for a while. I mean. What the hell is the use of the screw attack in this game? And why does… he give it to you?

Fusion is an experiment at making a linear Metroid. And… it succeeds to some extent, but it takes things too far. The level design is not constructed around exploration; it’s constructed as a cleverly-intertwined series of more or less direct paths from point A to B to C to D. There are some detours allowed, and a few confined bits of mandatory tile-searching thrown in attempt to appease the audience — but they’re all more or less scripted events within that linear framework. It’s got an interesting plot which falls into cliche near the end and then is abruptly cut short at what feels like the three-quarter mark (without really capitalizing on some of the tension and the setup established through the earlier portions of the game).

So. Hrm. How do I feel about this game? To be entirely honest, I think it thrills me the least of the four main Metroids so far. (Prime is another story, as I don’t even have a GameCube yet.) Some of this I know is just due to my expectations for what a Metroid game is supposed to be — as not all of them are met to my utmost satisfaction here. I came in anticipating one thing and then I was constantly pulled in other directions the entire way through, no matter how much I attempted to force the issue and to play the game like, well, Metroid. I didn’t want to rush through, and in the end this reluctance got me nothing. The game essentially gives you no good reason not to blow through it as quickly as you can manage. Then later it gives you the opportnuity to poke around for whatever you might have missed, after-the-fact.

So okay, let’s take it as a linear, plot-based action/adventure game. The plot is intriguing, but it doesn’t follow through on some of the major themes and tensions that it spends hours building up. The end doesn’t do much except serve as an ending by default of it being at the end. I really like the addition of plot sequences to Metroid, and the new action-based mechanics are terrific. But the bosses in the middle are astoundingly, overwhelmingly difficult while the last few bosses only took me a few tries in total to get past. That one boss requires nothing more than to stay away from him and to shoot missiles as quickly as possible. Compared to some of the earlier bosses in the game, this is just silly. As a linear game, Fusion feels incomplete. It feels like the beginning of the soap opera era of Metroid. Stay tuned for Metroid 5, where we might actually do something with all of these neat new ideas with which we’ve taunted you for the last ten hours or so.

And yet, aside from all of these complaints, it’s still Metroid. And it’s enjoyable, for what it is. And again, there’s a bunch of great stuff in here — including some pretty daring experiments with what Metroid can be.

Is Metroid falling into one of those odd/even sequences, like Star Trek and Final Fantasy? Metroids 1 and 3 are the “standard” games in the series. 2 and 4 are both experiments with the formula, and both introduced a bunch of plot elements, experiments with the game mechanics, and a redesign for Samus. Maybe Metroid 5 will do with what’s been created in Fusion what Super Metroid did with what was introduced in Return of Samus, sifting through for the best of the new elements and then threading them back into the traditional Metroid framework?

I guess that’s not a bad way to go. Make a safe game, then experiment. Use those experiments to make another safe game. Then experiment. And so on.

Maybe Fusion will grow on me if I spend more time with it. The only problem is that every time through the game, I’ll have to deal with the whole linear aspect again. When I replay the earlier Metroids, I’m left alone to do whatever I’m able and to explore in peace. I don’t feel like selecting “restart” without finding the rest of the items in my complete save, so I can’t test out how much the game will meddle with me the second time through or if it’ll leave everything unlocked (as it’s done for the moment).

One other thing — you get to see Samus’ eyes once in the course of the game.

So.

I guess I should write that review, now. Then maybe get started on that Sonic thing. But then I’ve got both homework to do and a test to study for in Physics. (I figure the one should suffice for the other, given that the test will be over the very same material that’s in the homework.) I also need to ask for help from a guy who doesn’t particularly like me. And there’s a bunch of stuff I’ve been putting off in concerns with the game.

Thanksgaming

  • Reading time:2 mins read
  • Luigi’s Mansion, as I’ve commented before, is a lot more fun than it looks to be. I actually really dig it at this point.
  • I’ve not played with Wave Race at all since getting back here
  • Mars Matrix isn’t the best overhead shooter ever (that’s Fire Shark for me; Radiant Silvergun for the people who’ve actually played it), but it’s solid, it has a heck of a lot of replay value, and it’s actually a two-player co-op game! One red ship; one blue! Amazing!
  • Capcom vs SNK is… okay. It’s got nice new sprites for the SNK characters. Okay music. Nice interface. A lot of extra features. But it’s hard as hell, the SNK characters have been (as reported) stripped down appallingly (leaving Terry as one of the few who can actually still be used properly — he’s okay!), there aren’t enough stages, and I’ve serious issue with the groove point system. In theory it’s nice, but it makes it hard to get anywhere, especially when combined with the ridiculous difficulty of the game. When Ryu is the character in the first round of the first fight, I can consistently be defeated by him when I choose any SNK character other than Terry, for the most part (though I’ve now gotten more used to how cheap the AI is). This is a big problem.

Out of everything, I’ll probably be going back to Mars Matrix the most.