Gaming madness

Dude, WTF.  I love Megaman and all, but this burns my eyes.  And now yours too!
Dude, WTF. I love Megaman and all, but this makes my eyes bleed. And now yours too!

As I write this post, Megaman’s got a Jewel Satellite shield up and is sitting under two Telly spawn pipes at the end of the Plug Man stage in Megaman 9, harvesting bolts and extra lives.  In the meantime, I’m doing something productive, like writing on my blog.  This is how weekends should truly be spent — doing absolutely nothing of consequence!  And to top it off, I have Monday off for Turkey Day, and expect to be gorging myself on pumpkin pie in short order.

But before I get to Turkey Day, I’ve got two free days that I desire nothing more than to be spent playing video games.  It’s been a bit since I’ve talked about video games, so let’s catch you up on what I’ve done lately.

Borrowed Pickles’ copy of Wii Fit and played around with it for about two weeks, and while it was fun, I certainly couldn’t get myself into a routine playing it.  I’m pretty fit as it stands, though, and the game told me I was pretty much at my ideal BMI, and while I know body mass index is a flawed metric, I could have told you that I’m perfect already.

I asked Doctor Who to play No More Heroes.  This is what happened.
Doctor Who tried to play No More Heroes. This is what happened.

I also recently beat No More Heroes, as mentioned in a previous post.  The game is absolutely fantastic, and even the grind-ish parts where you have to make money don’t seem all that bad because of just how much fun it can be to run back and forth chopping people in half or killing seven or eight bad guys with one swing.  The plot, on the other hand, is an absolutely ridiculous tangled web where plot developments and twists throughout the game follow a trend of starting at one, then doubling after the fourth stage, then again after the eighth stage, and then again every stage after this.  By the time you hit the “real ending”, you’re not sure if anything that’s happened through the rest of the game was even planned out or not, or if there’s a coherent story flow.  Spoilers after the break…

Big spoilers, highlight to read: Your ex girlfriend is also your half-sister who killed your parents because your dad molested her, and she serves as the last boss of the regular game, having manipulated a con artist named Sylvia into making up the whole “assassin’s guild” deal so you’d train your way to being able to kill her; Sylvia in the meantime convincing people to go out killing each other for absolutely no reason whatsoever, all the while fleecing these supposed assassins for everything they’re worth; and once you get the “real ending” it also turns out that Sylvia is married to Henry who stole your rank 5 kill of Letz Shake, depriving you of a battle in a long, super cool cut scene, and that Henry turns out to be your twin brother (even though you look nothing alike and he speaks with an Irish accent). Get all that?  Good, because I sure as hell didn’t.  I’m amazed I could even type all that, because in the course of this game I’ve probably said “what the fux yo” eight billion times.  I can’t honestly recall ever being as thoroughly dumbfounded, and I’ve watched Lost.

So, after beating NMH, I needed to cleanse the palate with some good old fashioned 8-bit ass-kicking, and purchased Megaman 9 on WiiWare — best ten bucks I’ve spent in a long time, because, for those of you who don’t know, Megaman games make you fight for every inch of ground you get.  There’s a ton of cheap deaths — and I mean a TON.  In playing the game, I’ve commented out loud frequently as to how much like Asshole Mario it’s been.  I’d think I figure out a room, and make an attempt, and the bastard game designers would throw some new complication into the mix that you won’t see coming until after you find yourself thrown into a wall of spikes.  Cheap deaths galore, but that’s what Megaman is, and for that, I have to give these designers credit — not only have they successfully revived the original Megaman series, but they’ve done every 8-bit game justice, and have proven that the game design is every bit as viable as it’s always been.

Now, as much of a hardcore gamer as I am, I had to do something to placate poor Jodi, who has been very good to put up with me trying the same section of a stage eighty times in a row, so I also got Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, which can only be described as SimRPG.  Now, I don’t mean it’s part strategy game — there’s a little strategy, but it’s hardly Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Imagine a cross between SimCity, and a traditional RPG with exploring, treasure-obtaining, stats-building, and equipment-improving, now take out all the fights — since they all happen out in the field between your hired adventurers and the monsters, and you’re just the king and have to stay inside town.  The game itself is surprisingly fun, despite the fact that they took an RPG and removed everything that makes an RPG fun to play.  They’ve supplanted all the actual RPG-type fun with SimCity-type fun, where you have to build the infrastructure, the staging platform on which these adventurers can successfully tackle the world’s dungeons.  It’s surprisingly long, as well — there are four chapters in the game’s plot, and we’ve gotten to Chapter 4 before we’ve cleared even 1/5th of the dungeons.  I’m a bit of a completist, so I’m likely to want to keep playing the game after Jodi’s seen the ending, but I don’t know how long it’s going to continue to hold my interest.  One surprising aspect of the game is that there are a good deal of extras available for downloading after the initial purchase — however, none of them are worth the price tag in my opinion, given the steep price — you’d pay double what you paid for the game to get all the doodads and whatnots that you can purchase separately, and none of them would affect the game in any significant way.

There are a few games on the horizon for the Wii that I’d like to play, including Pirates vs Ninjas Dodgeball (and as if that weren’t badass enough, there are two extra races — Zombies and Robots — and a fifth, unlockable race that is yet to be revealed), Tomb Raider: Underground (trailer) which is looking to be absolutely phenomenal, and a third game that Jodi wants to try but I’m not so sure about, being The Dog Island.  That last one sounds just way too saccharine.  I’m likely to have to leave the room when she’s playing it, I get the feeling.

You folks playing anything interesting lately?  Anything I should be trying?

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Gaming madness
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3 thoughts on “Gaming madness

  1. 1

    I’m eagerly anticipating Dead Rising :Chop Till You Drop for the Wii.
    http://www.gamespot.com/wii/action/deadrising/index.html?tag=result;title;0

    There will be a No More Heroes 2 in 2010, so that’s a bit of a wait, but worth it.

    I’d also like to try de Blob.
    http://www.gamespot.com/wii/action/deblob/review.html?tag=topslot;thumb;3

    And can’t wait for the new Punch Out!
    http://www.gamespot.com/wii/sports/punchoutwii/index.html?tag=result;title;0

  2. 2

    Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop — WANT
    Punch Out! — EPIC WANT

    de Blob reminds me a bit of a cross between the old game Color Wars for the PC, and Katamari Damacy.  Definitely looks worth a rental at least.

  3. 3

    I can’t WAIT for Tomb Raider! 😀 I can’t remember how many of them I’ve played but I’ve been hooked since the Dreamcast lol
    My Life as a King was good until I started running out of things to build 🙁 I’ll have to go try to finish the plot line now so I can say I kind of beat it.

    *Edit* ooo this is the first time I’ve seen the edit feature, I know I’m so behind.
    Edit
    Edit
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    😛

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