Push Button B

In lieu of the standard Friday fare, I present this unrelated screenshot.

His girlfriend drew maps of the levels on huge sheets of graph paper.

I preferred Zaxxon, which came for free on a copied floppy disk. It was ported to the Tandy Color Computer by Steve Bjork.

I never drew maps. But I did finish the game.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 is what I’m discussing this week ladies and gentleman. As you all my have figured by now, I’m a huge Nintendo fan boy and I was anticipating that I was going to give this game a 9/10 as soon as I first played it. The world surprises you sometimes, however. I inserted the game into my Wii and started a new game. What is this? Could my guess have been wrong? It was like some kind of drug! It was a 15/10! IT WAS AMAZING!!!!

Everything that was beautiful about the first Super Mario Galaxy is still there with the addition of Yoshi. The controls are still as user firendly as ever. Believe me, there’s a reason why all Mario home  console games since Super Mario 64 haven’t had many changes to the controls. In this one there is the addition of the chance for a second player to pick up a remote and play as a “Co-Star Luma” to assist Mario in his planet trekking.

The most interesting difference between this one and the previous one is the addition of the old “World 1, World2, etc.” format of the older Mario games. On the map a big spaceship which is also an effigy of Mario’s head zooms across the planets carrying Mario to his next stomping grounds. Ahem, that pun was intended!

It may not have stunning HD graphics but it looks great for what it’s purpose is. All the planetoids look good. The cartoony appearance of the game is done perfectly yet again as it was with the first Super Mario Galaxy.

If there was a Nintendo theme park, this would be my favorite ride!

Mamma-mia! My pizza! Itsa done! Itsa time-ah to go back to playing Super Mario Galaxy 2-ah!

(No offense to any Italians or Italian Americans who may read this =])

You might think of a soundtrack as mostly inconsequential until you hear a very bad one or a really great one.

One of my least favorites is the soundtrack for Loaded which is a Playstation game I played for a while in 1996.
The game itself was frustrating and hard to look at and the soundtrack began to eat away at my sanity after just a week of playing. It didn’t help that a few of the songs included on the soundtrack featured lyrics. They weren’t just background noise… they were imposing, distracting, fully realized songs that seemed to start over every 10 minutes. Why did anyone think that was a good idea?

Did you play this game?

I’m extremely thankful for the advancement in game-making since then.

My favorite soundtrack belongs to Final Fantasy 9 which is my favorite of all the Final Fantasy games.

The sound ranges from pleasant, cheerful, sentimental, melancholy, & foreboding. It’s perfectly balanced and enjoyable. It rises and falls with the game.
This is one of the only game soundtracks I’ve ever listened to away from the console.

Here is just a little medley sampling on youtube:
Top 12 Final Fantasy IX songs

What’s your favorite video game soundtrack? Or your least favorite?

I’m just going to start with a not-so-well-composed review for Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom. The Wii generally has games that are made to be easy to pick up and learn. Which if done right, that is a great thing so you can open it up and get to playing quicker. Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom does that. However, they also have more complex controls for more advanced players. You pick two characters for a tag team style play similar to Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 with two fighters instead of three. The first time I played through the arcade I used the Wii Remote and Nunchuk and set the difficulty sort of low, it was quick to get used to the style of play. After that I set the difficulty up a little bit and changed my control style to the Class Controller and then it started to feel more like a traditional fighting game.

The character roster has famous Capcom characters and some unfamiliar ones for those who may have not been playing video games that long. The real excitement comes from the Tatsunoko characters. I have never really watched any of the Tatsunoko anime shows before so all the characters are new to me and that just makes the game more appealing for me.

The characters are interesting with flashy and over-the-top (in good way) signature moves. The controls can be changed to work perfectly with brand new players and for fighting game veterans. Overall, the game is great.

PS. I’m picking up Super Mario 2 Sunday morning and I will write a more thought out review for that next Friday. See you all next week =].

The TRS-80 Color Computer 2 would still function with two pieces of pizza laid across its bare motherboard.

(Photographic proof not available.)

That is an acronym for Video Game Attention Deficit Disorder. I have to say that I do have ADHD, which is the same thing as ADD but with the inclusion of hyperactivity. I do have medicine to control it, though. There is one problem that still persists though. I never find myself completely playing through a game anymore!

I am starting to believe that it is not even linked with my mental illness. I think it is something deeper than that. There are those of us who don’t have this problem. However, those that do not have the problem are those that only play a few select games because they have more self control and do not have to go out and buy every single game that looks fun to them. I have the problem of broad taste. I’ve always had broad taste in everything: music, movies, TV, and now video games.  We can not know for sure if broad taste is the only cause for this problem however.

NOOOO! Stop making games until I beat all of the ones I have please!!!!

I have a feeling that one of the big causes is the fact that the video game market is like a pen full of bunnies. A new game comes out so often nowadays. This is causing some gamers to experience VGADD. I know I’m not the only one out there. I have talked to some friends about it who share the same problem. I have even searched the web for others with the problem and found “Game Boy” a member of gaygamer.net (yes, it is a real site, and for the record I am not gay, but I am not prejudice towards people who are) posting an opinion discussing his problem with not being able to beat games. He stated, “As much as I like a lot of games today, I sometimes get bored playing some of them, especially towards the end. Gameplay might get too repetitive, a spike in difficulty may exceed my patience, or, as it happens too often, something new comes out that steals my attention.”

I think there is only one cure for those of us who have this problem. We must learn some self-control and start keeping our video game playing to a stable amount of games and not go overboard with how many games we get. Thanks for reading, everybody!

Earthbound, I swear to you that one of these days I will beat you even though I always get sidetracked from some other game.

I want to point out that this headline is intentionally written in all caps because the title of the game itself is screaming at you. The official website displays it as such, so who am I to tone down their obvious fervor? A quick Google search leads to several sites who dared to deflate UFC UNDISPUTED 2010′s intensity. I expect to see those websites sporting casts, crutches, and many bruises before long.

That being said, I’m not going to spend much time talking about this week’s PSN freebie demo. It’s an Ultimate Fighting Championship video game – you probably know what to expect. I loaded it up, picked a random fighter from the 6-7 man roster, then mashed buttons. I’m sure that the truly hardcore UFC fans will get more out of this demo and game (which releases May 25, 2010) than I did, and I’m happy for them. I feel like I played a boxing game instead of a mixed martial arts game, but again, I’m sure this is largely due to my ignorance in the ways of the UFC and its caged, octagonal bloodsport.

The demo touted UNDISPUTED 2010′s new tournament modes, career building, and online capabilities. Graphically, it looked like a fighting game should look in  2010: the character models were lifelike in that they sweat profusely, bled appropriately (unlike some games), and noticeably wore down as the match went on. The mechanics of the game, admittedly lost on me, were at least responsive. Seriously, by now, you know if you’re going to pick up a game starts out with the letters UFC. If so, then you’re likely going to enjoy UNDISPUTED 2010. If not, take comfort in the fact that you’re not playing a UFC game.

I like adventure so this week I tried something new and downloaded a DS game demo to my DS through the Wii’s Nintendo Channel. There were plenty of demos up there, but the only one that seemed to not be a puzzle game was a game called Battle of Giants: Mutant Insects. The title of the game will make you think of a horrible movie with cheesy special effects that you could probably find on SyFy. Battle of Giants: Mutant Insects was used by Ubisoft before SyFy got a hold of it thankfully. The game description mentions that it includes four mutant insects to choose from to duke it out with other mutant insects with a new and unique control scheme. Before we forget, this is a demo and unless I somehow missed something, you can only play as the scorpion in this demo. Funny, seeing as scorpions are arachnids and not insects. I don’t even know what the other three mutant insects in the game there are.

From the title screen I picked Adventure. What an adventure it was! I walked around a destroyed city as a giant scorpion and killed two other scorpions. While in the “field” you move your scorpion with the stylus and like most DS games that have you do this, you just place the stylus on the screen and the scorpion will walk towards the point where the stylus is touching and keep walking in that direction until you lift the stylus or change directions. When you happen upon another mutant (in the demo’s case, another scorpion) the screen will change.

This is a battle. When the battle starts you have a aerial view of the two mutant brawlers with one on the bottom left corner and the other on the top right corner. They are facing each other and that’s where they will stay throughout the battle. The first battle in the demo’s adventure guides you through the battle and teaches you how to play. This new and unique game-play style that the game’s description discusses is a system involving tapping and sliding the various body parts of the insect to make him strike, charge, or sting the opponent (I would imagine there will be different attacks with the other insects in the game). In order to dodge you tap the scorpion and then drag the stylus to the right or left (the scorpion’s right or left that is). In order to block you tap the scorpion and slide the stylus toward the back of the scorpion. To jab with the pincers you tap one and slide it toward the opponent. You can do the same with the scorpions head to charge or with the tail to shoot poison from the stinger. After landing two consecutive hits you can initiate a Supercombo. To do the Supercombo, you need to draw a line from dot to dot. The quicker you do it, the better the combo. If the opponent is trying to land a Supercombo on you, you can minimize the damage by erasing the lines between their dots. The game did not lie; the fighting system was new and unique. It is to me, however, but I haven’t played every game in the world.

The bad part of the demo is that I really can’t tell if the game has a plot or if it’s just a giant insect version of Rampage with a different control system. This game must have been under the radar because the day I played it and wrote this is the first time I have ever heard of the game but I did research and discovered that is in a line of other Battle of the Giants games. All I can say is that its game-play style is kind of neat and maybe it deserves a try before the exterminator or Starship Troopers are called.