Push Button B

Upgrade Complete is a top down arcade shooter with a twist.  Your goal is to not only beat the game, but fully upgrade it as well.  You have to upgrade everything, and i mean EVERYTHING.  You start out with a simple black and white screen telling you that you need to buy the menu screen before you can play the game.

From there you then have to go upgrade your menu buttons and buy a proper game preloader to load the game.Once you do that  you will finally be greeted with a menu, and you can start playing the game from there.

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Most people today play games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Halo 3. But a lot of you people will read this and say something along the lines of “Ome-ga, no dude!? I play games that are different and a lot of people don’t really play like Fallout 3 and Oblivion.” Oh really now? That’s cool, and different, seeing as they were being hyped up and discussed about all over the internet and video game magazines starting when their development was first announced, even now that they are both released talked about all over the place. They are definitely not unheard of. On top of that, they are both sequels to superior games. Morrowind is better than Oblivion. Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 are both better than Fallout 3. Don’t get me wrong though, people. These newer games are great games and very well made, and people who like them aren’t wrong. It’s just a matter of personal of preference. My only point is that nowadays it seems that developers sacrifice content and/or creativity so that they can focus on stunning HD visuals and/or great online multiplayer.

In general the newer games are, it seems the less hours of single-player game play it has. Even games that don’t have multiplayer seem to have less game play hours compared to older games. Sure, there are DLC’s for newer games, but this seems to just give developers an excuse to make a the initial game at release not that long and also the DLC’s are just more money for the gamer to have to spend.

Call it old fashioned, but the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis era was the best era in the history of video games. Chrono Trigger, Super Mario World, Phantasy Star IV, The Lost Vikings, Earthbound, Legend of Zelda: a Link to the Past, and Super Metroid. All these games had either deep immersing plots or fun quirky ones, and sometimes both. The characters on these games were memorable and unique, not cliché like so many of the characters from today’s games. The villains on these past games too are great. They were evil, cunning, and sometimes hilarious and goofy. Other than the SNES and Genesis era, we have the NES era and the PSX and N64 era (no, my order of discussion here is not chronological). The NES games were all games that you could just pick up and play. Mario, Final Fantasy, Metroid, and Zelda all have their roots in this system. The PSX and N64 have some of the most highly praised games to this day. If you were Final Fantasy VII and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are both receive praise from countless games as perfect.

I can go on about this for days, but at this point all you readers are probably feeling like my ranting is some kind of cruel punishment for that piece of bubble gum you stole from the grocery when you were five. If I were to go on with this, you will probably feel like you are in Hell with Satan telling you about his tastes in video games while you are there waiting hours to relieve yourself by unleashing the most voracious piss in your life. My rambling is done!

Lately, I’ve been feeling very nostalgic for Ms. Pac-Man.
I spent a decent amount of time in arcades when I was little. I liked most games but Ms. Pac-Man was always my favorite and playing it is how I spent most of my money.

For awhile, my Mom and I would play it at the convenience store near our house after school every day.

Years later, we’d play it at the laundromat every week and I never got sick of it.

Someday I’d love to have a Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine but for now all I have is a gameboy version to play which is entirely too tiny on my ds screen to truly be enjoyed.

Inspired by my love of Ms. Pac-Man, I’ve assembled an image post that features the work that others have made in homage to one of my favorite games.

Enjoy!

Game: Samba de Amigo
Purchased from: Toys ‘R’ Us
Price paid: $5.00
Platform: Wii

Samba de Amigo has a kind of convoluted history. It went from arcade game (that I could never find) to Dreamcast game (that I could never find), to re-released Dreamcast game (that I could never find), to Wii game (which I kind of forgot about). The manual to this game has a kind of a backstory, but it’s completely inconsequential. It stars a monkey that plays maracas, and that’s really all you need to know about that.

The premise is really simple. You hold either a Wii Remote and Nunchuk or two Wii Remotes kind of like you would hold maracas. Each ‘maraca’ has three positions, up, middle, and down, detected by which direction the Remote is pointing (ceiling, straight ahead, or floor). Each direction is indicated onscreen by a colored circle, and balls will flow from the middle of the display to the outside. When they’re in their respective circles, you give the ‘maracas’ a little shake. It’s one of those things that’s easier to show than it is to explain so…

And it’s really as simple as that. On the tougher difficulty levels you get alternating ups and downs, wacky dance moves you have to do, and that kind of thing, which is one of the big reasons I recommend playing with two Remotes instead of a Remote and a Nunchuk: that tether that keeps the two pieces together tended to get in my way and get snagged on things. Both could be detrimental to your experience.

The variety of songs in the game is actually pretty impressive, they run the gamut from the above ‘Papa Loves Mambo’ to ‘Low Rider’ to ‘Tubthumping’ to even ‘Pon de Replay’. 48 songs in all, which is a huge step from most of the other rhythm-based games that end up on Nintendo platforms, DDR Mario Mix had a paltry 29, Elite Beat Agents had 19. So that’s a plus.

I won’t lie, I looked around the Internet to find out what other people had to say about this game, and they all were pretty positive, but one issue kept coming up, so I should probably address it here: the accuracy of the motion detection.

This game came out before the Wii Motion Plus accessory did, and that really would have helped with the accuracy. But, by and large, it’s unnecessary. I only ran into problems with the controller not knowing which direction I was pointing in four specific situations:

1. The batteries in my Wii Remote were running low
2. I was sitting down instead of standing up (you really need to stand to get the full enjoyment out of this game)
3. The action got fast and furious and I forgot that you have to orient the controller vertically to hit the ‘up’ beats and instead just raised my arms over my head, but kept the remote level and
4. I tried to go from ‘Down’ to ‘Up’ too fast and the controller couldn’t keep up, this was usually in conjunction with #3

So, yeah, Wii Motion Plus would be nice, but not needed.

I should also note that there are three ‘download packs’ of songs available for this game, each containing three more songs. Each of the packs costs 500 Wii points, which at current exchange rates is $5, so I haven’t downloaded them. I have a mental block about paying triple the cost of the game to get all of the extra goodies (though, ‘The Rockefeller Skank’, ‘Mickey’, and ‘Love Shack’ should be fun songs to do).

It kind of makes me sad to buy an actual good game on the cheap, well, for this cheap. That usually means that the game didn’t sell very well to begin with for whatever reason. And that means that there probably won’t be any sequels, no remakes with the Wii Motion Plus, and no more song packs (the last one came out around 18 months ago). But on the flip side, it’s probably the best $5 I’ve spent in weeks.

Having lost track of Sam and Max for the past few years, I was excited to see Episode 1 of their new series, The Devil’s Playhouse, pop up on this week’s PSN demo list.  Try to imagine my delight when I read the title of the first installment of this five part game: “The Penal Zone”. Indeed, the cartoon free-lance police that I first met in a mid 90s point-and-click PC game haven’t lost their edge when it comes to adolescent, anatomical humor.

Unless bodily humor is a sin, don't read too much into the title.

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Well its Monday again and if you’re anything like me you could use something a bit relaxing to start your week with.  So today i present you:  Small Worlds.  Small Worlds is an award winning  8-bit style exploration game that is quite beautiful in its simplicity.

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When I saw this amazing, handmade Scribblenauts plush, I couldn’t believe how awesome it was.

It was expertly made by Rosmary Travale.

See her post about it for more amazing details!

Game: Farm Frenzy
Purchased from: Wal-Mart
Price paid: $4.96
Platform: PC

It’s not too often that I’m lured into purchasing a game simply because it has cartoony farm animals on the cover. In fact, I can’t think of any time that’s ever happened. No, what drew me to this game was was the giant, red $4.96 price sticker on the box, the promise to ‘Join 20 million players!’, and the promise to ‘Show Old McDonald how it’s done!’ (No, not the five star review rating. Sorry, Gamezebo, I don’t take your reviews too seriously.)

So what’s Farm Frenzy all about? Shockingly, the back of the box isn’t real helpful, so let’s take a quick look at a screenshot

A typical Farm Frenzy moment, geese being terrorized by bears.

The game mostly revolves around caring for animals on your ‘farm’. The only things you can do to them are: purchase more of them, and water the ground, which produces grass. The animals eat the grass and fart out goodies for you to collect. Collect the goodies and either send them to the shop in town to sell them, or spend a few seconds processing them into finished goods. For example, eggs become ‘egg solids’ (whatever that is), egg solids, become tasty cakes, and tasty cakes become $80 when you sell them at the market (eggs go for $10).

Occasionally bears will drop from the top of the screen where they’ll rampage through your farm and punt your animals off into the horizon, which is pretty hilarious to look at, but ultimately bad for your progress.  Since a goose hurtling through the ionosphere is laying eggs you can’t get your hands on, you’re going to want to trap the bears by clicking on them a bunch of times, which puts them in a cage. You then put them in your warehouse and then ultimately sell them somehow at the same shops that take eggs, egg solids, and cakes.

So what you end up with is a game where you manage workers that produce resources while consuming other resources, build buildings to produce other, refined goods, and unfriendly-types that occasionally come in to wreck up the place. Sounds to me like we’re dealing with a simplified real-time-strategy game, and while it’s no Warcraft, it’s still decent.

It’s interesting to note that this game is also available for free (as in, $0) from the developer’s website, and lots of other sites around the ol’ Internet. The catch? You only get to play the thing for an hour before you’re expected to pony up a few bucks for a full version. Sounds like a fair deal, right? My only problem is that one hour was about all of this game I wanted to play. Mostly because I got past the ‘gimme’ stages and the difficulty ramped up further than I wanted to go with it, but also because clicking on animal products, turning them into sellable goods, and catching bears with repeated mouse clicks gets old kind of fast.

Or at least fast enough that I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen everything that I want to in this game.

As a general rule, I don’t play strategy games. If a game requires me to move small battalions around a map attempting to capture key locations while at the same time defending my base, I’m going to fail on at least one of those two fronts. Honestly, I’ll probably fail at them both. However, Creat Studios’ PS3 exclusive Mushroom Wars looked innocent enough, so I gave them five of my electronic dollars – a recent price drop from the initial ten dollar tag.

With adorable avatars like these, how hard could the game be? Right?

The premise is pretty simple: you (the red mushroom army) are trying to defeat the enemy (the blue mushroom army) by completing whatever set of guidelines are presented. That about sums up the amount of customization you have in your troops. Sadly, there aren’t different types of mini-mushroom men like Full Metal Armored Mushrooms, ready to lead the front lines or Super Secret Ninja Spores, stealthy and cunning units lying in wait to unleash massive amounts of mushroom pain – you just get to control hundreds of normal, unassuming mushroom minions.

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