Roderick

Nice! The trailer looked like fun and I have a co-op person nearby. I just missed the Swords & Soldiers II eShop sale, which is annoying because I bought eShop monies and had worked it out precisely to get Ace Attorney 6 and the discounted S&S2. I'll have to wait another cycle before it's on sale again. Oh well, enough stuff to play.

Jesus, Dark Reign. That's a blast from the past. I grew up in the 90s (as did a lot of us here, I'd gather) and this was just one title in the veritable deluge of RTS me-too's. War Wind, anyone? KKnD? Dark Colony? Conquest Earth?

Thanks, I'm adding all of that to my list. I got the Rayman Legends demo a few days ago and it was chaotic and fun. Already in the demo I was getting vexed because I hadn't found all the sprite thingies, which is good. The craving has started. (Meanwhile, I finished COD:BLOPS 2. It had some fun entertaining levels and some stupid ones. An overall haphazard experience that isn't helped by the developers' poor choice to end the game on a post-credits scene where the character models are suddenly playing in a digitized, existing rock band (that I didn't know), playing a godawful song. That was baffling, undermining.)

That is damn imaginative camera work. I'd love to see more of that (in this film and in modern cinema).

Nice! Don't forget to give us staaaaaaaars (if you like the levels).

I saw BRONSON yesterday. That was something rather special. Check the trailer. I don't know if it's already out (I saw a screener from a film festival), but I'd definitely recommend it. It's iconoclastic, strange! http://www.apple.com/trailers/magnolia/bronson/

Thanks for the endorsement. I'll try out Woolly World when I get a good deal on it. I can play with my gf (who has also made some Mario levels, hers a little more chaotic and less structured than mine), so that should be fun.

Cool, I want to play levels made by one of Commander Keen's designers! I already had my eyes on DK Tropical Freeze. Played it once at a convention and it was already so nice to see a Nintendo platformer in HD. It's a pretty cheap game nowadays, so I'll get it at one point. On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of Yoshi, and I somehow expect it to be a little light on platforming. Like, a game more geared towards kids, like Kirby. Is that at all true? Woolly World is still an expensive game, so it'll probably wait until I can get it for a lower price. (You guessed it, I'm on a bit of a budget here!)

Soooooo, I finally got a Wii U (wow, I've never been this late to a party) and am having a blast with Mario Maker and... you'll never believe this... Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Yeah. It's the first time I've ever played a CoD game, and one of my first games on the Wii U. The reason is obviously because I could pick it up for 2,98, so I gathered that even if I just liked the intro cinematic I'd have had my money's worth of fun. Turns out it's pretty OK. Nothing great. Nothing like Spec Ops: The Line. Its story is messy, the gameplay often incomprehensible and chaotic, some levels laughably bad and others kinda cool. I'm glad to play it. But the real deal is of course Mario Maker. I had not expected this to be such a good title. Before, I assumed it was more like any level editor: only for the hardcore fans, I guess? I had not anticipated how much it already feels like a game to make a game. Over the years I read all those stories on how the original Mario taught you the skills necessary to play it, and I was finally able to put that into practice. My first two levels are up (and you'll probably never find them because the search engine for this game is so woeful as to beggar belief - why can't you just search for level or user names?) and they're called 'Maze of Mild Despair' and 'The Strange Armada'. (My Nintendo Network ID is HeerRood.) https://supermariomakerbookmark.nintendo.net/profile/HeerRood?type=posted Plus, it's so much fun to just play a bunch of random levels and see what weird things people have come up with. The sheer diversity in levels is astounding. This pushes so far beyond what Nintendo ever did with Mario, all the while using the same toolbox. None of this would've ever happened without Mario Maker - it's a fountain of creativity. (If all goes well, today a bunch of new games arrive from Marktplaats. There really are advantages to stepping into a console cycle at the eleventh hour.)

I liked the interlude sections with goofy Reggie and Bill outtakes. In terms of games, the Woolly World 3DS port/update looked super cute.

I was, unsurprisingly, struck by the typography on the cassette decks out in the woods.

I'm sorry to break up the gnashing of teeth for a moment, but last weekend there was a big anime convention in the Netherlands and I spotted this, the greatest cosplay, in the crowd.

Mozart Ghost! (.net)

Pretty cool, thanks!

HeerRood is who I am! (I need to factory reset my Wii U first though, but I'll probably be online soon.)

There's a topic for that, right? I'm HeerRood.

After trolling for Wii U's on the Dutch market place site Marktplaats, I finally found one yesterday - a really good deal. Got me a Mario Maker bundle for 190 euros. Good as new and with factory warranty (from a dealer who specializes in returned goods that they buy wholesale from large internet vendors). Haven't hooked up the machine yet, but I'll start making troll levels today. Expect horrible, unplayable bullshit.

This is a thing of beauty. Currently at the entrance of Gamescom in Cologne: "Half-Life: 3 editors who played it back in the day"

You're not wrong!

When we're talking about the retail market, I think it's purely based on one factor: Nintendo will always refuse to sell hardware at a loss. Even if the device is not selling, they'd rather discontinue it than slash the prices. Whenever they do slash prices, they do it prudently and only after much deliberation. Nintendo gather that it's better to launch a new console and try again than lower the perceived value of their products in the eyes of the consumer. The reasoning is actually kind of solid: Nintendo products have a history of being both value for money and remarkably stable in price. Stunting with prices would hurt the credibility of future products. As for the second-hand market, I have no fucking clue. Apparently there are enough people buying it, and the supply is low enough that prices remain high. This might make sense too: few people who weren't already crazy about Nintendo bought the Wii U, so there will inevitably be less of a trickle of 'regret-buyers'. Put differently: The few Wii U's that WERE sold, were sold to people who would dependably love them and keep them. This in contrast to for instance the Wii, which everyone bought and flooded all markets, driving the price down.

I get that, but that's not how the market works. If it was awesome enough for people to pay a lot of money for it, it would've been a much bigger hit. It doesn't make sense that it would continue to cost a lot of money, especially on the second hand market. As if there were a scarcity or a high demand.

For the past week I've been browsing around for Wii U's, both in stores and on the second-hand market place. I've been shocked to see how expensive the thing still is. For a console that's basically written off and dead in the water, soon to be replaced, why is the retail price still a gross 288 - 300 euros (with a bundled game)? Come on. Second hand prices are often no better, with prices going upward from 250 euros. I understand disappointed people don't want to give in too much, but consider the PS4 market. Second-hand consoles easily take 100 euros off retail price. There's something about the Wii U...

I finally did Firewatch, in one single, four hour sitting. Absolutely gorgeous looking and the interactions between Henry and Delilah were so sweet and believeable. I loved how you could tell so much about Delilah just by the way she responds. I saw her as willful, cheeky, kind of nerdy in her own way and sometimes a little childish (in the way of not wanting to own up to responsibilities or her actions). A great foil for Henry. What a neat, compact experience.

I've been digging up all the info on the Wii U and NX there is. It's a funny thing - I had up until this point viewed the Wii U as the stepping stone to the NX. The NX, in many ways, fulfills the promise of having a console that is also portable. But, viewed through the lens of backwards compatibility, I now see the two in a different light. All things point to the NX as being a fresh start for Nintendo. Though (3)DS backwards compatibility might be feasible in terms of operating system, the output will be broken in some ways. Simulating two screens on the tablet or the TV won't be an ideal way to play. Rather, I think Nintendo is chucking all of its history overboard and saying: 'Let's start anew.' And since the NX will be the only hardware for the company, they'll have twice the software output, in theory making for a huge lineup of really terrific titles. How could you not be excited? Nintendo is going to be a brand you can buy into with a single hardware purchase (mobile excursions aside), which is neat. Color me excited. Where does that leave the Wii U, though? Turns out it was (and will remain) the legacy machine. The one console you can own that can play almost anything NIntendo has produced in the last thirty years. Virtual Console has tons of games and it has Wii backwards compatibility out of the box. The only, major oversight is Gamecube. And that smarts, since I have about eleven noteworthy Gamecube titles that I'd be loathe to store away. Mind you, this problem is solvable by installing a homebrew app on the Wii component. You'll have to extract an .iso from your Gamecube discs to get it to work though, so it's hardly ideal (and skirting the lines of legality, though I don't have any moral problems with so porting games that I've purchased years ago). It'd be fantastic if Nintendo would release some sort of compatibility patch for the Wii U so it supports Gamecube (they won't). This has actually made me more enthusiastic to buy a Wii U in the next half year, before it's taken out of production, on top of the upcoming NX.