I couldn't even play it after RE4 Wii. I'm totally ruined for it now. I played the RE6 demo and was just like, "Man if I could just control this game the way it's supposed to, it might be more fun". Alas....
If only media sites paid earnest attention to such games, I might have known about it. Plenty of hidden gems in the Wii library, thanks to the lack of coverage.
I've made my achievement preferences known. The best ones encourage you to play the same game with a new style. It's nice having a system-wide tally and the ability to check your friends', but it's hardly something I'd call a crucial feature for a console.
Oops. This was supposed to be a reply to the discussion below. Now it just looks like I'm replying to myself like a crazy person.
There's just something so perfect about catching impossible air in a huge truck while Elton John hulks out. I actually didn't use the MP3 feature much because I didn't have an SD card yet, but friends would sometimes put their tunes in and we'd hurl our big damn trucks through the air to the soundtrack of our choice.
And yeah, Excitebots didn't have MP3 support, though it easily made up for it with online play and a pretty good achievement system. It was a little too spastic for its own good, I think, but there are worse problems a sequel could have. I thought it was a worthy follow-up.
Strikers, Excite Truck, and RE4 Wii were key to killing the early Wii drought, and they were good enough to keep playing even after Wii's big guns started coming out. And I feel like I would have enjoyed RE5 a lot more if I'd played it with Sony's Move controller. Not paying $100 extra to do it, though...
great installment Nate. Well done. Speaking of party games and sleeper titles, I will have to name Smarty Pants. It's a trivia game for small groups, (4 is ideal), but you can kind of play teams as well. Anyway, we had some parties with that game and brought it to some holiday gatherings and the fun we had was incredible. I mean, people laughing so hard they pee'd their pants levels of fun. And it was all built on the foundation of motion control and seeing people doing crazy stuff combined with rapid fire trivia and the push of local competition. It also did a great job of scaling the questions. You would input your age and if you said you were 10 years old, you might get questions about Hannah Montana or Mario. If you said you were 35, you might get questions about De Niro or Pac-Man. If you were 65, it would ask questions about Jimmy Stewart and Rod Carew. And, amazingly, if you were 3-4 years old, it would ask you to identify a color or shape. You could literally have an 8 year old play the same trivia game with a 45 year old and the questions would mostly work out.
Well, I must admit I am a little sad that there are people out there who don't adore this game. For starters, I'd like to say I enjoyed Persona 4 more than Persona 3, FES and P3P (I have not played the original). Persona 4 feels... brighter, I suppose. Also the ability to control your allies directly, though you can issue suggestions like in P3 if you just really wanted to, is really nice. I feel I should let you know that if you did not like Tartarus, you probably wouldn't enjoy the dungeons in the Dark Cloud games. Dunno if those games were on your radar, but I'm just gonna throw it out. I know you've said you would eventually play Persona 4, but I would urge you to play it sooner rather than later. In my opinion, the game addresses several issues that I found in Persona 3. Namely, the tiredness system, the difficulty, and the combat.
I am not a fan of the tired system they use in Persona 3. It just doesn't appeal to me. I get that it makes the game feel a little more realistic, and to an extent, I could believe that regular kids could actually do the stuff happening in the Persona games. HOWEVER, I don't want to watch my character get tired and suck in combat. It's just not fun watching my character fail to get up 3 times in a row because they are just too damn tired. An alright system in a game that doesn't require grinding, but not for something like Persona. As a person who has put more than 500 hours into Final Fantasy Tactics, I'm all about a game with entertaining grinding. Persona 3 does a fairly good job at this because the enemies are fairly tough and will make you suffer if you make stupid decisions in a fight. So, even while grinding you've still got to maintain a reasonable amount of thought, providing enough interest to stave off the realization that you're doing the same fight over and over again. Then your characters get tired. No matter how good you are at that game, the moment something messes up and you run into an unexpected critical hit or inconvenient weakness, your tired characters are boned. (On a side note, I don't think characters can get tired in Tartarus in P3P. The exhaustion kicks in once you leave, from what I've observed). Persona 4 does an awesome job simply by removing the tired mechanic. Not a huge aspect in the entirety of the game, but it mattered to me so it might matter to you. The tired mechanic wouldn't even matter that much if Persona 3 wasn't already a challenging game.
Personally, there were some days when Persona 3 (FES only. P3P isn't that bad) was just too hard. If I wasn't feeling at the top of my game, it was just a lot of thinking and paying attention that I did not want to do. Maybe it's not a good thing for everyone, but I felt Persona 4 was easier than Persona 3, and I enjoyed a more laid-back Persona battle. I played Persona 3 FES and Persona 4 on Normal, by the way. I can't bring myself to play a game on Easy and I don't hate myself so playing Hard on an RPG, excluding the Kingdom Hearts games, is out of the question.
Oh, how I adore the combat changes for Persona 4. Nothing big was really done, but the way you approach enemies in Persona 3 and 4 is vastly different. In Persona 3, it really does feel like it's Protagonist vs. Everyone else. The commands are nice, the Knock Down command especially, but I can never fully ignore the voice in the back of my head whispering "bro, you can't trust AI in an RPG..." So, dutifully flipping off the AI allies of mine, I proceed to set up a lineup of 3+ persona to deal with anything I may encounter. While this isn't a BAD thing, it certainly wasn't what was intended in the game. This lone-wolf-Rambo attitude extended to the point that, the first time I played Persona 3, I was still using Valkyrie, ROIDed to the max from the arcade games, when I fought Strega. For those who don't know, you get Valkyrie at level 11 and fighting Strega is a level 40+(ish?) fight. Another issue I had with combat with Persona 3 was, when someone was knocked down, that someone spent their entire next turn getting up. Now of course this is convenient when using it against an enemy, but the moment it happens to you or one of your allies, you're probably in a situation you REALLY don't want to be. Getting an ally knocked down when the fight is going your way is just not common, in my experience. When I had a unit knocked down, it was during a time when they were no doubt weak to an attack this enemy happened to have. So they are now low on health and unable to remedy that themselves because they have to get up (something that can take even longer with the dreaded tiredness).
Persona 4 changed this in a small, but significant, way. For starters, as I've mentioned many a-times, you can directly command your allies from the get-go. This immediately left me with a sense that it was the group progressing in the story together, not just Silent Warrior of Justice and his buddies. I was able to more reliably use my allies to their full potential and spend more time improving specific aspects of my Persona as opposed to making several "blanket Persona". Another nice change, was the way knock downs work in Persona 4. Instead of spending an entire turn getting up, the character simply gets up when it would be their turn and then can attack/use spells/whatever the hell you wanna do as normal. This applies towards enemies as well, but I prefer Persona 4's system as opposed to Persona 3's.
I mostly made this reply because, while I don't believe I can sway you to change your tone on Persona 3, I do believe you could enjoy Persona 4 (and P3P if your memory isn't too tainted by an un-enjoyable gaming experience). The Social Links are more or less the same, some characters annoying, some entertaining (they should make Tiny Tina from Borderlands 2 a S. Link. I'd play the hell out of that game). There are some gameplay improvements and I believe Persona 4 is worth the time to play, should you find yourself wondering what game to play.
On an unrelated note; I would highly recommend Grandia 2, if you are looking for a JRPG to play and cannot bring yourself to play P4. There's not a lot of grind to it and it's a nice little story. Pretty bad replay value, in my opinion, but it's an enjoyable game. Not the most stellar endorsement, but it's a fun game while it lasts.
I'd like for them to implement some sort of achievement system in theory but in practice I've come to mostly dislike the existing examples. I don't like that some games make them incredibly easy and others make them incredibly difficult. This renders the overall score meaningless. Do you have 20,000 points from all the NBA 2Kx games or do you have them from games like Dark Souls? I also don't like how few achievements are rewarded for actually beating a game. For example, I think it was CoD2 where you got 50 points for doing the tutorial and then only another 100 or so for completing the entire game on normal difficulty. All the rest of the points were tied to beating each level on harder difficulties. So, you could get more points for beating 2 levels on hard than you would for beating the entire game on normal, or thereabouts. Once the number becomes meaningless, I just wish it wasn't there at all. The trophy system is probably better overall, in that there is a ranking system. You can't get platinum trophies for doing many little things in many little games, which makes them more meaningful, but I have to imagine there are games that make them pretty easy to get. ANd if the PS3 community is anything like the 360 community, there are ample websites out there logging just which platinums are easiest to get so you can artificially inflate your score.
So, yeah, you're probably right, it's a missed opportunity to get the hardcore. But lets not kid ourselves, no self described hardcore gamer will ever take a Nintendo console seriously. Ever. I've been watching this since the SNES eliminated blood from Mortal Kombat. Even then Nintendo was "Kiddie". You still see it today, some 20 years later.
You're really blowing me away here. This is great stuff. It seems like we have a kinship in how we experienced our Wii. I enjoyed the channels. My wife and I particularly enjoyed Everybody Votes. And I frequently used the new and weather channels while waiting for my wife to get her things gathered for a night of TV. I think I still have the Metroid Preview channel on my Wii, although it won't work anymore.
It's odd to think back through the years of Wii ownership and how slow Nintendo was to comply with consumer demand (playing games from SD card for example) and even how they went backwards on some fronts. In this case, I was pretty disappointed when they dropped MP3 support for SD cards. It was only through the use of an SD card that I was able to fall in love with Excite Truck. The music in that game was so atrocious, but thankfully they allowed playing custom sound tracks from SD cards (few other Wii games did so then or now), which completely altered the feel of the game from cheap wannebe thrashmetal to super sweet big beat techno awesome. I'm not completely sure but I think that feature was removed from the Excite Truck followup, Excite Bots, which was, in its own right, an interesting departure but largely a disappointment to those of us who fell in love with Excite Truck.
Funny you should say you were standing in line in Minnesota, because so was I! I actually did the majority of my standing at a Gamestop in Eagan, MN when preorders first became available, so it was just a matter of 15 minutes in line launch night, but we could have met up and lamented the lack of component cables available at launch together!
While I've never been an achievement whore, there were a few games I liked well enough to try and go for some of their bonuses, and it sort of disappointed me that the Wii (and apparently now the Wii U) didn't have a system wide achievement/trophy system. Sure, it can be implemented on a game by game basis, but then there are no standards and nothing reported up to your friends, etc. I'm not even sure why I'm complaining because I've turned off all achievement notifications on the other systems, but it seems like another lost opportunity to attract the hardcore crowd.
Forgot to mention, I'm pretty pumped about the Wii-U. Like the Wii, I really hate it's name, but I hope to have some similarly unique and inspiring experiences with it. I really can't wait. As much as I've enjoyed my 360 (a lot!), it could never inspire me to queue up in the wii hours of dawn to get the next one, not unless they really surprise us. And the PS3, for the most part, has been little more than an expensive Blu-Ray player. I'll probably wait in line for Wii-U starting around 5AM like I did to get my launch day Wii (and which I had never done before). Although, this time I won't be in Minneapolis visiting family with a temperature of about 5 degrees.
That's probably the best Port Mortem I've read on the Wii to date. Good call on the Wii Sports Boxing. That was a fantastic game and if you took the time to understand the controls it made a great experience. I still place Excite Truck as one of my favorite games of this generation on ANY Console. I had so much fun with that game, it single handedly rejuvenated my interest in racing games. But then, in keeping with your observation, I was left in the lurch, as few other games used the controller as well. Similarly, I had an amazing experience with Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition, it was the game I always wanted RE4 to be, but never quite was on the cube. It was amazingly pretty to look at and controlled so well I'm literally ruined for RE5 or RE6. I simply can't play them now. They feel antiquated in comparison. Strikers Charged was also a serious standout for me. My wife was pregnant at the time it came out and was always very tired in the evenings. She would watch me play and fall asleep to me cursing the evil children who were better than me online. I bet I put 200 hours into that game easily.
I'm glad you enjoyed the series, Greg! I haven't played Curse, nor have I finished Escape, but I really enjoyed the 2 originals, and it was a real treat to play a new game(s?) that really carried the standard set by the originals. I told you you would like Morgan, she really is awesome. I'm right there with you, I sure hope we get to see her again in another game.
You might want to consider playing the Sam & Max games. I played the first chapter of The Devil's Playhouse, and it was pretty spiffy. Been meaning to play the rest, but you know how backlogs can be...
This movie is hilarious and is an original. Who gives a shit about the game Eternal Death slayer and its plot development? Seriously dude, you need to go back to gaming.. this review sounds like it was written by JP. lol. Nerd.
I'd give this movie a 9 out of 10, up there with Hot Rod, Happy Gilmore, Office Space. It's targeted for a younger audience... people who have actually partied and had friends and knew nerds like JP and this reviewer.
While you're probably right, I find this a little offputting. I don't want them to "manage my loot experience". That's part of what was so awesome about the first game. The loot experience was fantastic. Why make such a dramatic change? (Sure it's a small change in a normal game but in a game that's all about the loot, it's significant).
With regard to DoT effects, I love them, in any game. What I want is that the world is consistent. If I'm dealing damage over time, simply from a weapon, I'd like the enemies to have similar capabilities. Now, in BL, DoT is an interesting beast because it really monkeys things up at times. This is because ones natural tendency in a game with recharging shields is to run away a bit and hide to recharge. But if the damage is coming from a DoT effect and you run away to recharge and end up dying anyway, you've just removed (or nearly so) your ability to get second wind.
There was fall damage in BL1. However, it was very unpredictable. It had a ramp up that was pretty wild. For most smaller distances you took little to no damage. Practically speaking (mostly flat level design in BL1, it meant you could jump off whatever you wanted) For medium distances, you took a small amount of damage and then if you go a bit more you take large life threatening amounts of damage. A little more than that and you die before you even hit the ground. It was particularly weird because there were areas where it wouldn't even let you fall a survivable amount, it would just respawn you almost immediately.
I don't have an opinion on this design either way. I was ok with how BL1 did it and I'm ok with how BL2 does it. But even BL2's "no falling damage" has its oddities. There are lots of places where you're simply "not allowed" to fall. If you do, you will die, regardless of whether or not you can see something that you could land on.
I hate fall damage in most games, I like the removal of it in Borderlands 2 (I'm also like 75% sure it was in the original game). What I do find annoying are all the drop zones in heavy fighting areas where you'll accidentally backpedal into a frozen lake or lava or bottomless pit!
If I remember correctly, and I think Mike in Omaha could confirm this, in the original Borderlands, you took damage if you fell from too high of a place. This made traversing over slabs of rock or trying to make a really long jump...stressful. Uncertain. A game of risk and reward. Now, in Borderlands 2, you can jump from any height and land as soft as a feather on the ground, not a dent in your shield, not a drop in your health. There's even a mission that ends with you leaping off a really tall tower, just so you can get to the bottom of the map quicker, which is where the fast-travel station is. Guess the developers didn't want you to have to backtrack down the tower's insides or build a custom exit route. I dunno. It just seems weird and aesthetically unneeded. There's certainly less risk in exploring. Throughout the Highlands, there's a bunch of high-up bridges, with some spots to explore below; before, I might have hugged a rock wall, inching my way down on every platform that looked stable, or gone the long way around, knowing that it might take awhile, but I'd get there nonetheless. Now I just jump off and begin shooting.
Some might see this as an enhancement, but I just think it's a bizarre design choice. Unless it was actually like this in the original game, and I'm misremembering that time I leaped off of Moxxi's place to the sandy floor below to lose a lot of health and then get killed by a Drifter.
I couldn't even play it after RE4 Wii. I'm totally ruined for it now. I played the RE6 demo and was just like, "Man if I could just control this game the way it's supposed to, it might be more fun". Alas....
If only media sites paid earnest attention to such games, I might have known about it. Plenty of hidden gems in the Wii library, thanks to the lack of coverage.
I've made my achievement preferences known. The best ones encourage you to play the same game with a new style. It's nice having a system-wide tally and the ability to check your friends', but it's hardly something I'd call a crucial feature for a console.
Oops. This was supposed to be a reply to the discussion below. Now it just looks like I'm replying to myself like a crazy person.
There's just something so perfect about catching impossible air in a huge truck while Elton John hulks out. I actually didn't use the MP3 feature much because I didn't have an SD card yet, but friends would sometimes put their tunes in and we'd hurl our big damn trucks through the air to the soundtrack of our choice.
And yeah, Excitebots didn't have MP3 support, though it easily made up for it with online play and a pretty good achievement system. It was a little too spastic for its own good, I think, but there are worse problems a sequel could have. I thought it was a worthy follow-up.
Strikers, Excite Truck, and RE4 Wii were key to killing the early Wii drought, and they were good enough to keep playing even after Wii's big guns started coming out. And I feel like I would have enjoyed RE5 a lot more if I'd played it with Sony's Move controller. Not paying $100 extra to do it, though...
great installment Nate. Well done. Speaking of party games and sleeper titles, I will have to name Smarty Pants. It's a trivia game for small groups, (4 is ideal), but you can kind of play teams as well. Anyway, we had some parties with that game and brought it to some holiday gatherings and the fun we had was incredible. I mean, people laughing so hard they pee'd their pants levels of fun. And it was all built on the foundation of motion control and seeing people doing crazy stuff combined with rapid fire trivia and the push of local competition. It also did a great job of scaling the questions. You would input your age and if you said you were 10 years old, you might get questions about Hannah Montana or Mario. If you said you were 35, you might get questions about De Niro or Pac-Man. If you were 65, it would ask questions about Jimmy Stewart and Rod Carew. And, amazingly, if you were 3-4 years old, it would ask you to identify a color or shape. You could literally have an 8 year old play the same trivia game with a 45 year old and the questions would mostly work out.
Grandia 2 is pretty good (and most importantly fun). I thought the first was just an amazing experience though.
I appreciate your reply, Persona 4 is still on my radar!
Well, I must admit I am a little sad that there are people out there who don't adore this game. For starters, I'd like to say I enjoyed Persona 4 more than Persona 3, FES and P3P (I have not played the original). Persona 4 feels... brighter, I suppose. Also the ability to control your allies directly, though you can issue suggestions like in P3 if you just really wanted to, is really nice. I feel I should let you know that if you did not like Tartarus, you probably wouldn't enjoy the dungeons in the Dark Cloud games. Dunno if those games were on your radar, but I'm just gonna throw it out. I know you've said you would eventually play Persona 4, but I would urge you to play it sooner rather than later. In my opinion, the game addresses several issues that I found in Persona 3. Namely, the tiredness system, the difficulty, and the combat.
I am not a fan of the tired system they use in Persona 3. It just doesn't appeal to me. I get that it makes the game feel a little more realistic, and to an extent, I could believe that regular kids could actually do the stuff happening in the Persona games. HOWEVER, I don't want to watch my character get tired and suck in combat. It's just not fun watching my character fail to get up 3 times in a row because they are just too damn tired. An alright system in a game that doesn't require grinding, but not for something like Persona. As a person who has put more than 500 hours into Final Fantasy Tactics, I'm all about a game with entertaining grinding. Persona 3 does a fairly good job at this because the enemies are fairly tough and will make you suffer if you make stupid decisions in a fight. So, even while grinding you've still got to maintain a reasonable amount of thought, providing enough interest to stave off the realization that you're doing the same fight over and over again. Then your characters get tired. No matter how good you are at that game, the moment something messes up and you run into an unexpected critical hit or inconvenient weakness, your tired characters are boned. (On a side note, I don't think characters can get tired in Tartarus in P3P. The exhaustion kicks in once you leave, from what I've observed). Persona 4 does an awesome job simply by removing the tired mechanic. Not a huge aspect in the entirety of the game, but it mattered to me so it might matter to you. The tired mechanic wouldn't even matter that much if Persona 3 wasn't already a challenging game.
Personally, there were some days when Persona 3 (FES only. P3P isn't that bad) was just too hard. If I wasn't feeling at the top of my game, it was just a lot of thinking and paying attention that I did not want to do. Maybe it's not a good thing for everyone, but I felt Persona 4 was easier than Persona 3, and I enjoyed a more laid-back Persona battle. I played Persona 3 FES and Persona 4 on Normal, by the way. I can't bring myself to play a game on Easy and I don't hate myself so playing Hard on an RPG, excluding the Kingdom Hearts games, is out of the question.
Oh, how I adore the combat changes for Persona 4. Nothing big was really done, but the way you approach enemies in Persona 3 and 4 is vastly different. In Persona 3, it really does feel like it's Protagonist vs. Everyone else. The commands are nice, the Knock Down command especially, but I can never fully ignore the voice in the back of my head whispering "bro, you can't trust AI in an RPG..." So, dutifully flipping off the AI allies of mine, I proceed to set up a lineup of 3+ persona to deal with anything I may encounter. While this isn't a BAD thing, it certainly wasn't what was intended in the game. This lone-wolf-Rambo attitude extended to the point that, the first time I played Persona 3, I was still using Valkyrie, ROIDed to the max from the arcade games, when I fought Strega. For those who don't know, you get Valkyrie at level 11 and fighting Strega is a level 40+(ish?) fight. Another issue I had with combat with Persona 3 was, when someone was knocked down, that someone spent their entire next turn getting up. Now of course this is convenient when using it against an enemy, but the moment it happens to you or one of your allies, you're probably in a situation you REALLY don't want to be. Getting an ally knocked down when the fight is going your way is just not common, in my experience. When I had a unit knocked down, it was during a time when they were no doubt weak to an attack this enemy happened to have. So they are now low on health and unable to remedy that themselves because they have to get up (something that can take even longer with the dreaded tiredness).
Persona 4 changed this in a small, but significant, way. For starters, as I've mentioned many a-times, you can directly command your allies from the get-go. This immediately left me with a sense that it was the group progressing in the story together, not just Silent Warrior of Justice and his buddies. I was able to more reliably use my allies to their full potential and spend more time improving specific aspects of my Persona as opposed to making several "blanket Persona". Another nice change, was the way knock downs work in Persona 4. Instead of spending an entire turn getting up, the character simply gets up when it would be their turn and then can attack/use spells/whatever the hell you wanna do as normal. This applies towards enemies as well, but I prefer Persona 4's system as opposed to Persona 3's.
I mostly made this reply because, while I don't believe I can sway you to change your tone on Persona 3, I do believe you could enjoy Persona 4 (and P3P if your memory isn't too tainted by an un-enjoyable gaming experience). The Social Links are more or less the same, some characters annoying, some entertaining (they should make Tiny Tina from Borderlands 2 a S. Link. I'd play the hell out of that game). There are some gameplay improvements and I believe Persona 4 is worth the time to play, should you find yourself wondering what game to play.
On an unrelated note; I would highly recommend Grandia 2, if you are looking for a JRPG to play and cannot bring yourself to play P4. There's not a lot of grind to it and it's a nice little story. Pretty bad replay value, in my opinion, but it's an enjoyable game. Not the most stellar endorsement, but it's a fun game while it lasts.
I'd like for them to implement some sort of achievement system in theory but in practice I've come to mostly dislike the existing examples. I don't like that some games make them incredibly easy and others make them incredibly difficult. This renders the overall score meaningless. Do you have 20,000 points from all the NBA 2Kx games or do you have them from games like Dark Souls? I also don't like how few achievements are rewarded for actually beating a game. For example, I think it was CoD2 where you got 50 points for doing the tutorial and then only another 100 or so for completing the entire game on normal difficulty. All the rest of the points were tied to beating each level on harder difficulties. So, you could get more points for beating 2 levels on hard than you would for beating the entire game on normal, or thereabouts. Once the number becomes meaningless, I just wish it wasn't there at all. The trophy system is probably better overall, in that there is a ranking system. You can't get platinum trophies for doing many little things in many little games, which makes them more meaningful, but I have to imagine there are games that make them pretty easy to get. ANd if the PS3 community is anything like the 360 community, there are ample websites out there logging just which platinums are easiest to get so you can artificially inflate your score.
So, yeah, you're probably right, it's a missed opportunity to get the hardcore. But lets not kid ourselves, no self described hardcore gamer will ever take a Nintendo console seriously. Ever. I've been watching this since the SNES eliminated blood from Mortal Kombat. Even then Nintendo was "Kiddie". You still see it today, some 20 years later.
You're really blowing me away here. This is great stuff. It seems like we have a kinship in how we experienced our Wii. I enjoyed the channels. My wife and I particularly enjoyed Everybody Votes. And I frequently used the new and weather channels while waiting for my wife to get her things gathered for a night of TV. I think I still have the Metroid Preview channel on my Wii, although it won't work anymore.
It's odd to think back through the years of Wii ownership and how slow Nintendo was to comply with consumer demand (playing games from SD card for example) and even how they went backwards on some fronts. In this case, I was pretty disappointed when they dropped MP3 support for SD cards. It was only through the use of an SD card that I was able to fall in love with Excite Truck. The music in that game was so atrocious, but thankfully they allowed playing custom sound tracks from SD cards (few other Wii games did so then or now), which completely altered the feel of the game from cheap wannebe thrashmetal to super sweet big beat techno awesome. I'm not completely sure but I think that feature was removed from the Excite Truck followup, Excite Bots, which was, in its own right, an interesting departure but largely a disappointment to those of us who fell in love with Excite Truck.
Funny you should say you were standing in line in Minnesota, because so was I! I actually did the majority of my standing at a Gamestop in Eagan, MN when preorders first became available, so it was just a matter of 15 minutes in line launch night, but we could have met up and lamented the lack of component cables available at launch together!
While I've never been an achievement whore, there were a few games I liked well enough to try and go for some of their bonuses, and it sort of disappointed me that the Wii (and apparently now the Wii U) didn't have a system wide achievement/trophy system. Sure, it can be implemented on a game by game basis, but then there are no standards and nothing reported up to your friends, etc. I'm not even sure why I'm complaining because I've turned off all achievement notifications on the other systems, but it seems like another lost opportunity to attract the hardcore crowd.
Forgot to mention, I'm pretty pumped about the Wii-U. Like the Wii, I really hate it's name, but I hope to have some similarly unique and inspiring experiences with it. I really can't wait. As much as I've enjoyed my 360 (a lot!), it could never inspire me to queue up in the wii hours of dawn to get the next one, not unless they really surprise us. And the PS3, for the most part, has been little more than an expensive Blu-Ray player. I'll probably wait in line for Wii-U starting around 5AM like I did to get my launch day Wii (and which I had never done before). Although, this time I won't be in Minneapolis visiting family with a temperature of about 5 degrees.
That's probably the best Port Mortem I've read on the Wii to date. Good call on the Wii Sports Boxing. That was a fantastic game and if you took the time to understand the controls it made a great experience. I still place Excite Truck as one of my favorite games of this generation on ANY Console. I had so much fun with that game, it single handedly rejuvenated my interest in racing games. But then, in keeping with your observation, I was left in the lurch, as few other games used the controller as well. Similarly, I had an amazing experience with Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition, it was the game I always wanted RE4 to be, but never quite was on the cube. It was amazingly pretty to look at and controlled so well I'm literally ruined for RE5 or RE6. I simply can't play them now. They feel antiquated in comparison. Strikers Charged was also a serious standout for me. My wife was pregnant at the time it came out and was always very tired in the evenings. She would watch me play and fall asleep to me cursing the evil children who were better than me online. I bet I put 200 hours into that game easily.
I'm glad you enjoyed the series, Greg! I haven't played Curse, nor have I finished Escape, but I really enjoyed the 2 originals, and it was a real treat to play a new game(s?) that really carried the standard set by the originals. I told you you would like Morgan, she really is awesome. I'm right there with you, I sure hope we get to see her again in another game.
You might want to consider playing the Sam & Max games. I played the first chapter of The Devil's Playhouse, and it was pretty spiffy. Been meaning to play the rest, but you know how backlogs can be...
You sir have made absolutely NO SENSE at all in your post.
I'll take that all as a compliment.
This movie is hilarious and is an original. Who gives a shit about the game Eternal Death slayer and its plot development? Seriously dude, you need to go back to gaming.. this review sounds like it was written by JP. lol. Nerd.
I'd give this movie a 9 out of 10, up there with Hot Rod, Happy Gilmore, Office Space. It's targeted for a younger audience... people who have actually partied and had friends and knew nerds like JP and this reviewer.
"I hate your review" JP voice.
This game is funny but is not for me, my son like play this game, thanks ;)
While you're probably right, I find this a little offputting. I don't want them to "manage my loot experience". That's part of what was so awesome about the first game. The loot experience was fantastic. Why make such a dramatic change? (Sure it's a small change in a normal game but in a game that's all about the loot, it's significant).
With regard to DoT effects, I love them, in any game. What I want is that the world is consistent. If I'm dealing damage over time, simply from a weapon, I'd like the enemies to have similar capabilities. Now, in BL, DoT is an interesting beast because it really monkeys things up at times. This is because ones natural tendency in a game with recharging shields is to run away a bit and hide to recharge. But if the damage is coming from a DoT effect and you run away to recharge and end up dying anyway, you've just removed (or nearly so) your ability to get second wind.
There was fall damage in BL1. However, it was very unpredictable. It had a ramp up that was pretty wild. For most smaller distances you took little to no damage. Practically speaking (mostly flat level design in BL1, it meant you could jump off whatever you wanted) For medium distances, you took a small amount of damage and then if you go a bit more you take large life threatening amounts of damage. A little more than that and you die before you even hit the ground. It was particularly weird because there were areas where it wouldn't even let you fall a survivable amount, it would just respawn you almost immediately.
I don't have an opinion on this design either way. I was ok with how BL1 did it and I'm ok with how BL2 does it. But even BL2's "no falling damage" has its oddities. There are lots of places where you're simply "not allowed" to fall. If you do, you will die, regardless of whether or not you can see something that you could land on.
I hate fall damage in most games, I like the removal of it in Borderlands 2 (I'm also like 75% sure it was in the original game). What I do find annoying are all the drop zones in heavy fighting areas where you'll accidentally backpedal into a frozen lake or lava or bottomless pit!
Something else has been bugging me.
If I remember correctly, and I think Mike in Omaha could confirm this, in the original Borderlands, you took damage if you fell from too high of a place. This made traversing over slabs of rock or trying to make a really long jump...stressful. Uncertain. A game of risk and reward. Now, in Borderlands 2, you can jump from any height and land as soft as a feather on the ground, not a dent in your shield, not a drop in your health. There's even a mission that ends with you leaping off a really tall tower, just so you can get to the bottom of the map quicker, which is where the fast-travel station is. Guess the developers didn't want you to have to backtrack down the tower's insides or build a custom exit route. I dunno. It just seems weird and aesthetically unneeded. There's certainly less risk in exploring. Throughout the Highlands, there's a bunch of high-up bridges, with some spots to explore below; before, I might have hugged a rock wall, inching my way down on every platform that looked stable, or gone the long way around, knowing that it might take awhile, but I'd get there nonetheless. Now I just jump off and begin shooting.
Some might see this as an enhancement, but I just think it's a bizarre design choice. Unless it was actually like this in the original game, and I'm misremembering that time I leaped off of Moxxi's place to the sandy floor below to lose a lot of health and then get killed by a Drifter.
I've noticed this too, I'm guessing it's more about managing the loot experience but it is unfortunate.
Do you like how you can be set on fire, corroded, etc. in BL2? The other day I was killed by a fire DOT and had a good laugh at my misfortune.