Sno

If you just keep an eye out for them as you traverse the world between the colossus lairs, you'll likely end up with enough. There are a ton of those things in the game, you can expand the health bar and stamina gauage to some pretty ridiculous extremes. Additionally, what are the current feelings about the two week cycle? How many of us have finished the first colossus? How many of us haven't? In a world where there is a doujin fighter based on Les Miserables, it seems like a fair expectation that there would also be one based on the Ghibli canon, but my googling is turning up nothing for this. I am forced to conclude that you are a liar. There are, also, actual Nausicaa games that are old and terrible.

I am enough hours into this game that i am at the point where i would have been finished with Wind Waker or Twilight Princess, but it looks like i'm only a little ways past the half-way point in this game. It is definitely one of the longer Zelda games. So, as the game gradually starts asking for more precise and demanding actions out of its control, there is a point where it starts feeling kludgy. The game is still really good about quietly reorienting the control, i've actually had to recalibrate the wii-remote only once, which is something i absolutely cannot say about other wii motionplus games. Still, when it loses tracking in the middle of a long and difficult fight, that completely sucks. (What seems to trip it up is holding the wii-remote at an angle for extended periods of time.) I mean, and there's still just all of the ambiguity about that input. It wants you to carefully time your attacks and defense, but as the window closes in on that stuff, it still comes back to feeling like the kind of stuff that waving a controller through the air can't be offering the kind of precision you need. I'm still pretty on board on with game though, it mostly works, and it's trying really, really hard to justify its control scheme. The problem i had with Twilight Princess was that it so clearly would have been a better game with the control scheme it had been designed for, because on the Wii version there are a lot of basic inputs that are totally unreliable. Skyward Sword never gets there, it's never missing inputs. (Except for when it is obviously my fault and i am trying to do something else in the middle of another animation.) It's also a design that i don't think could work without the motion control, and its uses of the motion control are interesting enough that i am not soured on the game by its failings. I mean, it's also one of the most genuinely challenging Zelda games in ages, and i have not died to motion control hiccups or anything. (Not to say that it's actually all that difficult, i think it's just about right. Twilight Princess and Wind Waker were particularly effortless games.) Actually, my biggest issue with the control in the game has nothing to do with motion control. I hate that the aiming modes orient to the camera instead of the player facing, fuck that. (Though the underwater dash is really finicky, i feel like you could sigh in the general direction of the wii-remote and trigger that.) The constant load screens are also a big bummer, it's a huge game environment, but it ends up feeling incredibly small. Loading into the market, loading into the town, loading into the sky, loading into the map screen to select a drop location, loading into the area below, loading through the doors, loading into the dungeon. If it streamed through all of that stuff, the game would seem massive. I also wish they went further with their impressionistic art style. When you catch a hint of it, it looks amazing, but it's so subdued. I realize now that i am not saying anything nice about this game. I really like Skyward Sword.

SotC has a really superb camera just in general.

I wouldn't set out to hunt down all of the fruit and white-tailed lizards right up front though, you'd just throw off the difficulty curve in the game. You're kind of meant to come across them as you traverse the world to get between the different colossus lairs, going to more and more distant areas of the map as the game progresses. It's quite like the towers in Assassin's Creed, hey?

^ I don't know how i feel about the PS3 version turning this into a trophy. So many of the things about SotC's world felt so natural and organic, tacking rewards to them seems wrong. Some other various hidden things in the game that are only mild spoilers, but tagged as a courtesy:

Alright, just did the first colossus, it took like... twenty minutes or so. I'm playing on the hard difficulty, so i was checking out some videos on youtube to confirm the differences between the two difficulties, and noticed that the PS3 remake has a ton of tutorial prompts that do not exist in the PS2 game. That's kind of weird. The game has a strange and elaborate control scheme though, so it's probably for the best. The first colossus and notes about the different difficulties: As another random note, when i had first played this game, i think i had just assumed that the language being spoken was japanese. Playing it now, it is clearly not the case. In the interim, i've probably just played enough japanese games with enough japanese voice work to be able to tell the difference. Heh. The colossi also apparently all have individual proper names that were revealed by the development team only in a japanese art book, i don't know if we want to make note of those here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yv04c6bpMY Also, just... that ost is phenomenal.

There are save points scattered all around the game world.

Yaaaay, I was right! Additionally, i wish the 3DS came with a dummy cartridge like the DS Lite had for its GBA slot. With the 3DS's huge emphasis on digital distribution, having a way to protect an empty cartridge slot would be nice.

Not just lizards, specifically the white-tailed lizards. Kill them with arrows and then eat them to increase your stamina, you can usually find one hanging around each of the save ruins. (If you're having trouble hitting them, don't forget that you can zoom in with the bow.) There are other lizards, but i don't believe they do anything. There's a lot of wildlife in the game that is just there to be there. Additionally, there's a certain kind of tree that you will notice throughout the game world that will frequently be bearing fruit, you can shoot those down with arrows and those will increase your health. The stamina upgrades are actually much more important.

I understand it to be a made up language, from what i've read.

As it happens, i don't like Metroid Fusion much either. You can definitely see a lot of what was wrong with Other M all the way back in Fusion. The uncharacteristically linear progression, the extremely deliberate narrative pacing, and the goofily ponderous navel-gazing introspection. The game is meant to be finishable in under three hours, but like half an hour of that ends up being fucking incessant unskippable dialogue scenes! A huge chunk of their fanbase are speed runners because they specifically fostered that culture with the multiple endings, but Fusion is just bursting with unskippable dialogue scenes. (Were those incredibly overlong cutscenes and events in Other M unskippable? I can't remember, but if they were, fuck that too.) I feel like the Prime branch of the series has had an infinitely better grasp of what made those first three games so incredible. (Which is insane! Those dudes in Texas are making better Metroid games than the actual direct sequels to Super Metroid.) The story in Other M is just so offensively bad though, the way it casts Samus as this weak willed girl desperately in need of a father figure's approval, it's gross and it doesn't fit that character at all. When Samus loses her shit because Ridley shows up, in the chronology of the series she has already fought and defeated Ridley multiple times, without even counting the Prime games. (Never even mind Other M's numerous plot holes and heinously awful writing.) You put all that aside though, you have a pretty tightly designed character action game with impressively precise 3d platforming and some interesting, albeit clunky gameplay mechanisms. It's more linear than most people would like to see the series be, and it definitely has other problems as well, but at least it's an interesting game doing new things with the series. It's just, then you have the story on top of all that, and it's so up in your face throughout the game, and just... uggh. So yeah, maybe not Team Ninja's fault.

I remember spending months trying to get a Wii, they were sold out constantly. At a few points i was checking with some local stores on a nearly daily basis. It was a good six months before i found one. Red Steel was the first game i played and i was super bummed out. (Still the worst game i've played on the Wii, it was fucking broken! It's barely playable.) Wasn't the best first impression. Anyways, I think the thing that stands out to me the most about the Wii was the "blue ocean" strategy, trying to reach for that broader market. I mean, it worked! Nintendo found their new audience, but then that audience changed and they didn't try to keep up. They didn't keep providing new software for those people, and the best things were completely lost amongst the shovel ware, while smart phones showed up and offered similar experiences for vastly cheaper, and many more people still simply lost interest. In a lot of ways, it's kind of been Nintendo's track record, to innovate and then stand by while everybody else is eating their lunch. So somehow the Wii, Nintendo's most successful home console ever, has become a symbol of failure. The direction the 3DS and the Wii U are going, doubling back down on their core audience, i think shows that Nintendo isn't prepared to continue the fight for that broader market. As for the hardware... - It should have been HD, even if it wasn't as powerful as the 360 or the PS3, it should have been HD. Games like Xenoblade, Metroid Prime 3, and Super Mario Galaxy would look phenomenal in HD. - The motion control never worked, and the motion plus brought with it many new quirks. + I think the pointer does work and i think it ended up being a fairly successful addition. (Just be careful about bright light sources drowning out the hidden sensor bar LED's the Wii-remote uses to track position.) + The shitty little speaker in the Wii-remote was a fun gimmick, i think some games put that to good use. + The core Wii-remote is an interesting piece of hardware in that pretty much any way you can think of to hold it, is a viable way to hold it. The way it cleverly evokes both a TV remote and a NES pad makes it just the least intimidating thing ever. (It's super strange to see the Wii U have, essentially, the exact opposite design philosophy.) - The creeping realization that because of all those shitty peripherals, i have actually ended up spending way more on Wii hardware than i have on 360 hardware. + I actually really love the Wii-remote/Nunchuk combo as a way to play games. Give me a sweet split ambidextrous controller like that on the other systems, just nix the motion control, and that's something i would use. (You can be soooooo lazy, you don't even have to hold up your arms!) - The online functionality is busted. The most advanced online implementations on the Wii are quite obviously straining against some really primitive infrastructure and technology. - WiiWare is a near wasteland. +/- Virtual Console is too expensive, but there are some incredibly rare games available and the emulation is nearly perfect. I appreciate what Nintendo is trying to do with this service, and i was willing to support it. I feel like if everything was a dollar or two cheaper, just across the board, Virtual Console would have been an unqualified success. - The lack of an account infrastructure is bizarre and continues to be bizarre. + The universal backwards compatibility for the GC is pretty stellar. (Compare to what a trainwreck backwards compatibility has been on the PS3 and the 360.) As for the games, there have been some pretty dire stretches, and just so fucking much shovel ware. Still, I think here on the final stretch, the Wii ultimately ended up with a library that has just about as many great games as the GC did, but it got there in a span of time twice as long and with far more market share and success, which does not draw a favorable comparison. That said, looking back, the games that stand out most to me are: Xenoblade - I looked at that Nintendo Channel thing that tracks usage statistics about the games you've played, and apparently i played Xenoblade for over three times longer than any other individual Wii game. (Around 180 hours.) I think there is a case to make for Xenoblade being one of the best RPG's in years, and it is absolutely insane that it took nearly two years for it to be released in North America, and then only through the european localization and largely in response to fans losing their shit about it not being released in North America. If you need any proof for how much Nintendo stopped giving a shit about the Wii in the last couple years, that is it. The thing is, Xenoblade is exactly the kind of game they need out here if they're really going to try and have the Wii U be another go at the hardcore. Either way though, it's out and it's an incredible game, people should play it. It's a briskly paced, open ended, and uncharacteristically modern game that is quite unlike what that JRPG's have come to emblemize. Super Mario Galaxy - Is, i think, the best Mario game Nintendo has ever made. I think that game inspires a childlike sense of wonder, i absolutely love it. Metroid Prime Trilogy - So, Metroid Prime being one of my personal favorite games, i immediately noticed a lot of the things wrong with it in Trilogy. There are tons of small visual effects that are completely missing, and it makes for a visually much less interesting game. That said, it plays really well with the Corruption control scheme, and so does Echoes, which is much more faithfully represented in this collection and even benefits from a number of rebalanced boss encounters. By inclusion, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is also relevant to this, and it's a fine game. It's obviously the most technically impressive, and with the action having been specifically designed around the higher fidelity control scheme, it manages some really excellent things. It's one of those few games that actually makes really great use of the wii-remote. It is also, however, much more cinematic and linear than the other two games, and while by no means a disappointment, is my personal least favorite of the three. No More Heroes/No More Heroes 2 - They're crass, clunky, and aggressively strange. There's some clever use of the Wii-remote on, a debatably worthless open-world component, and some relatively competent core action. For the most part, though, they get by on buckets and buckets of style. Love it or hate it. (I do really like the games, but i don't love them like i love Killer 7.) Mad World - The other mature-rated Wii brawler oozing style, though i personally found it to be a much duller and less interesting game. (Subjecting generic enemies to the same canned environmental kills over and over so you can grind out enough points to progress through the level ended up, to me at least, being incredibly boring.) Sin & Punishment: Star Successor - I've been a big Treasure fan for a good long time and i think this game really exemplifies what those guys do so well. They've taken a well worn formula and put together a game that is absolutely bursting with clever and creative uses of that formula, while holding it together with tight control and demanding challenges. I'd also really recommend checking out the original Sin & Punishment, which was made available to the west for the first time through Virtual Console. (Sales of that game through VC led to this sequel being made.) The two games are also quite amusing for being narratively incomprehensible. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories - It's definitely a growing trend now, but Shattered Memories was kind of at the forefront of survival horror games doing away with combat entirely to focus on puzzles and stealth. It makese sense, of course. Giving you weapons makes you feel empowered, and that is counter intuitive to creating horror. To cut it short, i think Shattered Memories is a wonderful game filled with clever ideas, and i think it's a small tragedy that this was regarded as essentially a dead end for the series as Konami instead continues to chase the post-RE4 survival action design. Metroid: Other M - Other M is baffling. It is filled with plodding narrative, linear progression, and offensively sexist undercurrents that completely undermine Samus as a character. (Other M was developed by Team Ninja of Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive fame, go figure.) It's a real bummer then, that there's some pretty solid character action here, and some really interesting not-quite-2d gameplay going on. It controls well and plays well... When it's not asking you to flip the wii-remote around mid-fight and suddenly point it at the screen, throwing you into a first-person aiming thing that is as clunky as it is jarring. Baffling. (I never said I liked all the games i was going to talk about.) Monster Hunter Tri - When friends talked me into playing Monster Hunter Tri, i thought i was going to hate it, and i kind of do. That said, i still ended up playing like sixty hours of it and will probably end up buying Monster Hunter 4. So the first rule is that you absolutely should not play Monster Hunter if you don't have a friend to mentor you through it, because it is a gruelling learning curve and a huge grind. Once it clicks though, it's completely enthralling, it is a profoundly deep and demanding game. So there's a great game in there, but it's buried in layers of shit. There are definitely ways to be both a hardcore experience and even the tiniest bit accessible, but Monster Hunter is completely blind to them. As for Tri, specifically, it's the only game in the series that you can play online in the west and it's... Well, it's the Wii, right? My group usually just ended up skyping alongside the game to communicate, while the game itself struggles with tons of latency and just a weird, massively convoluted in-game infrastructure. Monster Hunter is great though, you should probably play it, but maybe not. (Seriously though, If you're the kind of person that was into Dark Souls, you might also find things to like in Monster Hunter, but you absolutely need to have a mentor and a party.) Endless Ocean/Endless Ocean: Blue World - I really got into these very chill and relaxing games, they're definitely worth shining a light on. Just huge, largely unguided exploration games with some very loose goals to pursue. ... I think those are mostly the games i want to talk about, yeah. There's definitely other things. The Art Style games on WiiWare are pretty great. (Check out Cubello and Light Trax.) Nothing needs to be said about Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and i don't think anybody would care to hear about Tatsunoko Vs Capcom. (It's awesome though.) Super Paper Mario is kind of dull, but has a wonderful and hilarious localization. Kirby's Epic Yarn is a profoundly charming and clever game, but as slight an experience as there can possibly be. I found Donkey Kong Country Returns to be a slightly misguided revival, but challenging and totally competent. Wario Land: Shake It is a frequently overlooked gem. Boom Blox is in equal parts Jenga and Angry Birds and is better than that sounds. Battalion Wars 2 offers more of what the first game did, but done better and with online play. Super Mario Galaxy 2, of course. Dead Space: Extraction is probably the best light gun game on the Wii. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a fine enough game, but one i have some problems with. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is a game i am enjoying a lot more than i thought i would, I only didn't include it up top for the fact i am still playing through it. Geometry Wars: Galaxies is a surprisingly elaborate spin-off of Geometry Wars that never gets the attention it deserves. ExciteBots is a hilarious and awesome arcade racer. Zack & Wiki is a charming and surprisingly ruthless take on old-school adventure games. Wii Sports Resort is what Wii Sports should have been in the first place.

I don't remember feeling particularly strong one way or the other about it. I thought Ocarina and Majora were really ugly games and that the Wind Waker style seemed more in tune with earlier games like LTTP and Link's Awakening. Once i played it and saw it in motion, i fell completely in love with it. If it wasn't for the big problems that game has on the back half, the giant barren gameplay wasteland that we would eventually learn was the product of a ton of cut content, it would easily be my favorite game in the series. Twilight Princess is debatably a more consistently entertaining game, but it always kind of came across to me as the most pandering Zelda game, it seemed like such a direct result of a vocal minority being not so into the Wind Waker aesthetic. Additionally, i just realized that i want the inevitable Majora remake to use that Wind Waker aesthetic, that would be a perfect match of tone and art. (Majora essentially being a dark fairy tale and all.)

Alright, i guess we're on, then? Two weeks from today for the first colossus, so take your time with it. (So the fourteenth, a monday, would be the last day.) If everybody blows through it, we'll talk about shortening the time frame. Spoiler tag story and colossus talk and helpfully label for other people the general details of what is being spoiled. Other things like broad gameplay discussion and development trivia should be fair game, but use your discretion. If you jump ahead, don't talk about it until the group is caught up. Enjoy the game, and probably set aside some time to explore for fruit and white-tailed lizards. Heh.

I wouldn't skip the first Super Mario Galaxy. Galaxy 2 tends to feel like the leftovers, and speaking personally, i really fell in love with the strange melancholy story-book thing the first one had going. (It was, apparently, by the request of Miyamoto that Galaxy 2 get back to Bowser kidnapping Peach.) Some other things worth looking at - Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Sin & Punishment: Star Successor, The two Endless Ocean games, The two No More Heroes games, Mad World, Metroid Prime 3/Metroid Prime Trilogy, Super Paper Mario, Kirby's Epic Yarn, Zack & Wiki, Excitebots, TvC, SSBB, etc. (Monster Hunter Tri is a great way to make friends hate eachother.)

Dude, the 360 is 7 years in and still has another year or two in it. This has been a stupid elongated hardware cycle.

They should go back and complete the dungeons that were cut from the game too. Instant best game ever.

As somebody who played all three of the original DKC games, i was not so into DKCR. I felt they were missing a lot of the things that made the original DKC games really distinctive. (DKCR is, for example, missing the tag-team mechanic and the tag-team co-op. Diddy is reduced to being a glorified jetpack and an extra hitpoint.) DKCR is a fine platformer, but i don't feel that it actually had all that much in common with Rare's games.

We haven't started yet. Do you guys want to start on monday?

Along with Last Window, that is one of those precious few DS games that got completely localized and released in Europe without actually being released in North America, and they're both games i would have really liked to play. I should probably just go ahead and import them or something. I am also seriously disheartened by the lack of Tingle in the last several Zelda games.

The way Wii U is booting out into a separate Wii shell is insane, you even have to use the original WiiShop to buy Wii stuff. Compare that to how the 3DS pools in all the DSi-ware stuff with the new 3DS eShop, and boots DS/DSi games from the 3DS' usual front end. I mean, all of these systems use hardware-based backwards compatibility, so that's not an excuse for what the Wii U is doing.

You can probably get by just fine button mashing, it might just necessitate grinding out a couple extra levels to brute force it. (The different jobs also all require very different playstyles, so if you want to stay as far away from combos as possible, the mage stuff is actually pretty fun. Painting across multiple targets to release a flurry of lightning is awesome.) Couple things to keep in mind: The particulars of stat growth for you and your pawn are determined by whatever jobs you have set when leveling up occurs. It doesn't usually end up being something you need to pay a huge amount of attention to, but it's worth being aware of how your choices are affecting your characters. It would also be worth having an understanding of pawn inclinations, so you can understand what role your pawn best fills. (There are a few ways to force changes on their behavior, but for the most part they'll just gradually adapt themselves to how you're playing.) Some things to look over in a wiki, i guess. There's also a romance thing that can theoretically occur with any NPC in the game. It can kind of break the game if the guy in the inn of Gran Soren gets sweet on you, so punch him or something if he has a pink aura. Heh. As for Halo 4, i don't think the AI in the game was as good as it has been in Bungie's games, but i still found it totally competent and well above the average that can be expected from most shooters. (If you're going to tell me that you thought it was terrible in Bungie's games too, we're just going to have to disagree.)

You're looking at this in completely the wrong way. If you play on Legendary, or even on Heroic, you'll realize this behavior is actually quite intelligent and almost certainly intentional. Not being able to easily bait enemies into situations favorable to yourself is a hallmark of good FPS AI. You have to take risks fighting them, and that is conducive to interesting gameplay. No, it's not Monster Hunter at all, the people who keep saying this are wrong. It's you with a party fighting large enemies, but the similarities cease there. It's an open-ended action RPG with a lot of depth and freedom and a supremely excellent combat system. (Like, we're talking parries and combos and cancels, this is where Capcom's expertise with fighting games and 3d action games shines.) Your party members are AI's that learn as you play and will develop strategies and unique "personalities" with regards to how they approach battles. You have one primary pawn that will stick with you throughout the game, and you can go online to temporarily recruit pawns from other players to fill out your party. You will have to keep finding new pawns to replace them with, because only you and your main pawn gain experience in your game. You may also find that other players have recruited your pawn and returned it to you with additional knowledge and increased fighting ability. There's some other really wacky stuff in there, it's a great game. (It even has kind of that SotC climbing system, you can scale larger enemies and hack at weak points.)

5 frames a second seems like a huge exaggeration, i'm pretty certain it never got that bad. Digital Foundry did some comparisons between the HD re-release and the original version. The framerates they found were generally in the 15-20 range for the original release, with the occasional burst of 30 fps, while the HD re-release runs at a consistent 30 fps. http://www.eurogamer...s-hd-collection

This is a weird game. There are a lot of little things that feel like legitimate modernizations that the series has needed. Some things as simple as being able to disable the incredibly garish "WE'RE GOING TO MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT THESE BUTTONS DO" portion of the UI, but also having save points in the middle of the dungeons. For all of those things though, there's still shit like the game forcing you to read each and every item description once per gameplay session, and the continued absence of text scrolling options. I am enjoying this though, i like Skyward Sword. The overworld also reminds me quite a lot of Minish Cap and some of the older 2d games, being not so much a wide open hub space, but in many ways an outward extension of the dungeons.