Push Button B

I hate watching youtube videos and being blasted with those stupid popup annotations, heres how to get rid of them.

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.

I now have 100% more internets than I had yesterday and I’m trying to get caught back up with what’s happened with the world. A note for all of you internet users out there, if your connection dies and there is an up coming holiday weekend you might as well rent a boat and go fishing cause its not getting fixed anytime soon.   But I digress, you came here for a game and that’s what I’ll give you.

Robot Wants Puppy is a sequel to Robot Wants Kitty, which is another great game you’ll have to play for yourself.  Its obvious that you accomplished the mission of the first game because you are a robot with a cat on his head (sorry to ruin the surprise).  Your goal is to acquire the puppy by unlocking doors and defeating enemies and even defeating bosses to open up the puppy’s cage.

Starting off you have no attacks and limited mobility, and its your job to find power ups and new attack modes (throwing your cat at bad guys to attack them).  You use the arrow keys to move and jump and later on perform special moves.  You progress by finding door keys 1-9 to let you through the corresponding door and finding the next power up or key.  Its a pretty basic puzzle platformer with simple controls but it can get frustratingly hard as the game progresses.  Expect to die…a lot, but unlike most games there is no penalty for dying you just respawn at the nearest spawn point and continue on from there. 

Go on on over to Kongregate to play and sign in to get the achievements.  And if you get stuck hit the jump for a video walkthrough.

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One week is enough time to become familiar with a game like ModNation Racers, but not hardly enough time to master it. I’ve really spent more time watching it be played than actually playing it due to my wife’s fascination with the game’s creation and customization process. There is literally no limit to the amount of personal flare you can add to your character or racer (called a Mod) and cars. There are thousands of variants to choose from or combine while making your Mod, you literally start with a blank canvas similar to a Munny doll and build from there. Similarly, when building your car you can start with the frame and start customizing from there: everything from body styles, lift/lowering kits, paint styles and colors, decals, steering wheel, etc. If you’d rather not spend your time creating your racer and car (you might consider playing a different game) you can choose from several dozen pre-made racers and cars or check out what the ModNation Racers community has come up with. You have the option of sharing your creations with the rest of the game’s community and can likewise use their cars and Mods in your game.

From a racing game’s perspective, ModNation isn’t really anything new. It feels a lot like the newer installments in the Mario Kart series with it’s item cubes, silly weapons, and speed-boosting sparks. Now imagine that there are two tracks worth of learning curve and then a spike in difficulty that jumps from 50cc to 150cc and all of the other racers seem to have unlimited blue shells. I’m not good at racing games, but some of these races are ridiculously frustrating.  In the game’s so-far predictable story mode, you play the role of an up-and-coming racer who catches the attention of a grizzled old timer who now spends his days in the garage instead of the race track. I think you can see where this is going. Every track in this story mode has three main objectives, each increasing in difficulty and each opening up a new set of customization options for making new cars and Mods. So the draw isn’t just to come in first, that would only net you the goodies from one objective – say one new hair style, sun glasses, and some outlandish new spoiler to put on your car. The goal becomes something like coming in first while making sure to blow up three competing racers (2nd objective) and get 300,000 points from drifting (3rd objective). If you can manage to do that, then you’re swimming in new stuff to use while making your Mods and cars. See the dangerous cycle this creates?

Neither my wife nor I have really done a whole lot with the tack creation mode, but it is equally as impressive. If you’ve got the time, I’d suggest taking a look at some of the work the ModNation community has done so far. Click here to see some of the most popular Mod creations and use the green buttons under “My Profile” to switch between Mods, cars, and tracks that some folks have made.

Since Cameron is having Internet troubles this week (no Internet = Trouble), I’m going to take this space to tell you about a web game in his stead: Tuper Tario Tros.

The title of this game might lead you to believe that this game has something to do with the Super Mario Bros. games, and you’d be kind of right. It starts off like a clone of Super Mario Bros. (albeit with a huge playfield)

Looks are deceiving

But very quickly, you run into a brick wall (literally)

I don't remember this part from the original

And if you hit Space like you’re instructed to, you suddenly switch to Tetris Mode, and have to start laying down bricks in the familiar Tetrimino shapes to build platforms to proceed.

Which means that you have to try and manage Mario jumping around like his shoes are on fire, the endless stream of Goombas that fall from the pipes above, and build platforms to make it across the increasingly impossible-to-cross gaps

The stage culminates with you having to build a castle out of Tetriminoes (kind of like Tetris Party’s Shadow Mode) so you can go in and do whatever it is that Mario does at the end of the stages in those little fortresses.

And that’s it! The game’s actually kind of on the short side with the one level to go through, but that might be enough for you. The novelty of switching back and forth kind of wore off for me about halfway through playing the thing. But it’s worth it to get to the end at least once, so you can say that you did.

And it’s not even that hard.

You can play Tuper Tario Tros. at Newgrounds.

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?

You’ll have to excuse the indulgence, but with last week celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man (and a playable version taking over Google for a couple of days) I figured it was about time that I tried out a Pac-Man-styled energy drink, called, rather unsurprisingly, Pac-Man Bonus Fruit Energy Drink.

What wonders does this can hold?

How can you go wrong with that? Pac-Man, monsters turning blue, and lots of fruits floating in the background?  I sure would like to have that kind of energy!

I’ve played a lot of Pac-Man, and I’ve got a lot of experience eating the bonus fruits from the game… except for the green things (which I’ve been lead to believe are durians), the bells, the keys, and the Galaga ships, so odds are good that this stuff tastes like something I’m familiar with.

Look & Smell:

Immediately after opening the can I was hit by a smell I couldn’t immediately place. It smelled kind of like marshmallows mixed with Kool-Aid powder, and was mostly clear with an orange tinge.

First drink:

Taking a drink from this thing was like biting into a handful of orange peels, almost like someone took a bucket of orange Sweet Tarts, ground them into powder, and mixed them with some carbonated water.

Additional drinks:

This stuff is really hard to drink. Chugging it is definitely a mistake. My throat nearly closed itself off almost immediately after it hit my tongue. And the aftertaste! It’s hanging around in the back of my throat like someone shoved an orange up my nose and it’s draining down the back of my throat. Sipping is even worse, it lets the ridiculously concentrated orange-like flavor wash away every trace of everything I’ve had in my mouth today. Kind of like eating out of a volcano… actually, that might be slightly more pleasant.

At this point, I was finding it hard to press on. But after letting it sit for a few minutes, hoping for an errant bolt of lightning to hit it, I decided to press on. With over half of the original 8.4 ounces remaining, I decided to guzzle the remnants.

Huge mistake.

This might be the first time that I’ve drunk something that tasted so heinous that I had tears welling up in my eyes. I couldn’t see out of my right eye for what seemed like several minutes afterward, and my face was locked in an expression that you might assume if you ate a piece of cake, but the person who made it ran out of sugar and decided to substitute cat urine.

Energy levels:

But all of this is totally worth it if I get some kind of energy boost, right? Well, I didn’t. An hour after drinking this melange of flavors that’s just one step up from drinking a solution of that juice that spills out the back of a garbage truck mixed with kerosene, I felt no noticeable increase in alertness. In fact, I felt as I’d drunk a soft drink or a cup of coffee. Which shouldn’t be much of a surprise, caffeine is one of the major ingredients.

But is that a good trade off for drinking something that makes my tongue taste like I swam through the storm drain underneath the local zoo with my mouth wide-open?

No, not really.

I’ll be brief. The ModNation Racers demo was so fun, I pre-ordered the game (which was on my doorstep when I got home today.) Here’s the premise: you get to create and customize your driver from the ground up. Then you do the same for your car. After that you can build a track of your own, race on one of the pre-loaded tracks, or download a track that someone else created. The racing is fun, but the creation process is really what sells this game hook, line, and sinker.

Here’s a link to the official website.

Here’s the obligatory picture:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go start playing. See you next week.