tegan

YES. It usually happens with coins for me.

If you shoot as soon as its mouth opens, it doesn't work. You have to wait a moment for some bizarre reason, and even then it might not work. There's really no clear reason as to why it will or won't count.

Motion detection made it much easier for me to use things like the Bow and the Slingshot in Ocarina of Time 3D, but it really didn't help much in that boss fight. Both because it seemed to keep changing where it thought the "center" position was and because it wasn't entirely clear whether aiming actually did anything or not. My shots almost always went right to the very bottom.

I skipped NSMB2 and NSMBU after finding NSMB okay enough but being really disappointed with NSMBW. I guess those games just aren't my thing. I almost made the mistake of skipping Super Mario 3D Land after disliking super Mario Galaxy 2, though. I'm glad I eventually caved and bought it, because it's probably my favourite 3DS game, and rivals Super Mario 64 as my favourite major Mario game.

I hope the soundtrack is even half as good as the Nitronic Rush one. By the way, for anyone who does have a wired 360 controller (or is less of a klutz with keyboard controls than I am) who wants a taste of what these guys can do, Nitronic Rush is completely free.

I've been trying to find a wired 360 pad for ages so I could properly play Nitronic Rush, the spiritual predecessor to this game, because I'm super keen on the whole Speed Racer-esque arcade driving game idea. I love that with the aesthetics of Distance they basically went "hey, Nitronic Rush looked like TRON, so let's make this one look like TRON Legacy."

Oh, so am I! And it's not without precedent, it's just funny to me that we got so many options this gen when the only redesigns last gen were a second model of the PS2 and three variants on the GBA.

I'm more interested in this: I would probably finally buy a 360 if it were $100. Also, if it's true, do you realize what this means? It means this past generation will have had three visually distinct models of Xbox 360, three PS3s if you ignore backwards compatibility junk, 3 Wiis, four DS variants, and five PSPs. Truly we were spoiled for choice.

I have never ever seen decilitres used as a measurement in real life before.

I didn't even realize I was being timed until it hit six or so. I just strongarmed it in one go. I totally understand, though, because the timed parts of this game are easily the worst thing about it. The first boss is still the best, because it's the only one that really feels like it belongs in the game. It's an elaborate puzzle rather than some dumb action minigame. Also, I beat the game last night. The last boss is actually pretty good and the boss before that is tolerable, so that's a plus!

New Pokémon info today! It looks like Mewtwo has some kind of new form! Oh Mewtwo, what have they done to you? This was actually leaked a few days ago and turned out to be the only thing revealed on the show, but at least we have a good picture of it now! It's not actually confirmed to be related to Mewtwo, but it seems extremely likely given both its extreme likeness and the fact that the newest movie is going to prominently feature Mewtwo. I can't say I'm a fan of the streamlined look or the disproportionately large but "cute" head. Mewtwo is very emblematic of the original games' strong themes of scientific progress: cloning, genetic modification, hybridization, etc. Mewtwo being an ugly copy of Mew was pretty integral to its whole thing as a design and as a character, so I'm hoping that they don't take this in a stupid direction. I choose to speculate that maybe this isn't an alternate form but a new monster altogether. People have being speculating about X and Y's Japanese logos, which have a double helix symbol embedded in them, as having a genetics theme again. Given that the Pokémon games like to tie themselves to each other in both small and large ways in terms of plot, worldbuilding, etc, maybe they'll continue the original plot thread and have this thing be the result of someone continuing the Mew cloning project from the original games. It's just a theory. One other thing that I just thought I'd call attention to: in the fifth-generation Pokémon Games, there's a ferris wheel in Nimbasa City where the player can go on a date with an NPC. The NPC is determine by the season, which switches over every month. In each game, one of the four available dates will be a same-sex one. In typical Nintendo fashion, all of the dates are super tame (though allegedly filled with double-entendres in the Japanese version), and the male/male choices are kind of butt (depending on which game they're playing, dudes get to date either a big sweaty bear who's significantly older than themselves or a very sweet crossdresser; while girls get either a super femme waitress who's scared of riding the ferris wheel or a punk rocker girl who serenades them), but I still just wanted to give props to Game Freak for quietly adding a gay option to Pokémon of all things. I would have loved to have that in the games when I was growing up. I'm only bringing it up right now because the month just rolled over and female players can date the rocker girl in BW2 right now.

The one after that one actually. And just now I played through a boss that was a callback to my most-hated part of the first game: followed by a really irritating That part just goes on forever. This is a really sour way to end the game, especially considering the first boss is so good.

When I was a little kid, someone gave me a hand-me-down floppy copy of The Secret of Monkey Island (which, in retrospect, was probably older than I was) and I loved it to death despite never figuring out how to get past the piranha poodles until years later when I had learned more French. It was a really unique experience in retrospect, because I was too young to understand that it was supposed to be funny. I just took it all at face value. I hear I'm not the only one who got confused by that stump gag. That was really my only experience with Lucasarts until I was a teenager and decided to finish the game on ScummVM, then played LeChuck's Revenge and Sam & Max. I kind of wish I had gotten to know them better while they were still around. I also wish their swan song hadn't been this.

That concept trailer was all that existed until summer of last year when it got picked up for production by Ankama, the studio responsible for the excellent animated series Wakfu. Ankama is kind of notorious for long waits between output, so it's probably going to be at least another year or two before they have anything to show for it.

So I guess Dark Moon carries on the Luigi's Mansion tradition of having one really awful boss battle, because the fourth boss in this game is astonishingly terrible. It feels really lazy and totally different from the rest of the game. Thanks, Miyamoto.

Bioshock is one of the few franchises that make me wish that I could play first-person games at all without hurting myself. Hearing that this one is really easy makes it a bit tempting, but I've also heard that there's at least one very crucial story moment that hinges on the player sooooo... Also: congrats Jake, fuck Jake.

I marathoned Adventure Time this week and felt like changing to Marceline the Vampire Queen. I also felt like explaining what the heck my old avatar was, because I always knew it was shrunk and cropped so badly that it was pretty much impossible to figure out. It's a piece of concept art for a French animated series called Baidir that's been in development hell since like 2009.

So did everyone just give up because Celosia is such a butt, or what? Twelfth Colossus (Pelagia) thoughts: Next time: most peaceful colossus!

The weirdest thing about Roger Ebert dying today is finding his last ever blog post from just two days ago. It's an odd mixture of him showing off all of the plans that he had for the future and something that sounds almost like he knew he was going to die. Reading this feels really creepy to me.

The World Ends With You had kind of a weird take on currency. The battle system basically has every action your character can take as a physical, equippable item -pins with different designs on them- which can be sold at any time just like any other item. Pins gain experience, level up, and evolve like Pokémon under different circumstances. They cheat a little by making certain pins unsellable so you can't screw yourself over and making some pins explicitly meant to be sold, but it presents a lot of potentially interesting situations. ie: "Do I sell my best attack to buy better gear?" "Do I waste one of my precious combat action slots on a 1 Yen pin so that it will eventually level up into a 10,000 Yen pin?" Stuff like that.

The original has a really obnoxious boss battle right in the middle, but otherwise it's fantastic. I feel like it got a bad reputation because people were expecting the established pattern of getting a Mario game at launch and got a weird spin-off game instead.

24/7 Pokémon coverage, weekly retrospectives on how The World Ends With You is an under-appreciated gem, "Gameboy Micro Appreciation Month," and rampant lesbianism.

I've only just reached the boss of the first mansion, but I love all of the delightful little details everywhere. I'm getting lousy scores on each mission because I insist on taking half and hour and exploring every room in every mission, since they can change ever so slightly each time. I got Professor Layton at the same time, though, so I'm constantly torn between playing the two most charming games on the 3DS. Oh, two things that really stick out: Using an original DS Phat as a replacement for the Gameboy Horror is the most adorable thing, and those rare few rooms where the framerate bumps all the way up to max because it's not rendering as much stuff are really weird to see. I'm down for Scarescraper at some point. Do we have a 3DS friend code thread?

I was cleaning a glass and it shattered in my hand, which gave me a bit of a gash in a very difficult-to-bandage area. It's my drawing hand, too.