Video Games – Page 109

Drawing board

Two things to report today, first being that I’ve taken all the necessary pictures for my next article and now it’s just the writing part. No problemo. My next topic relates to this –

See this? It’s a fake X-Box controller. It’s also the most comfortable X-Box controller I’ve ever used. It’s almost as comfortable as the GameCube controller, and much moreso than the PS2’s controller. The best part about it is that you don’t have to dislocate your thumb to reach the Black and White buttons. This just goes to show that Microsoft obviously had no idea what they were doing when they made the X-Box, since I’ve never held a 3rd party controller that was better than the original before this.

But now, I have to go back to school. I might do the article today, maybe tomorrow. I just have one thing to say. USE THE DAMN FORUMS!

~Ryan out.

The Hunt for the Banded Dragonfly

Like so many others, I’ve been charmed by the little virtual world that is Animal Crossing. What is it about the sim that makes me want to play it so much? I really don’t know. What I do know, however, is that it is the perfect game for anyone. For one, it’s insanely simple to play. You don’t have to know any secret button combos or cheat codes to get through this game. You just have to do what a person with no cares in the world would do, wander around town trying to make an easy buck. Sounds fun? Strangely enough, it is.

I’ve almost been playing for a year now, and I still haven’t come close to doing everything that the game presents you with. Even if I do manage to collect everything, I think that I’ll still play. But the task of collecting every single item is one only those with time on their hands and a very long attention span should attempt. Now I have a relatively short attention span, but I’ve managed to get this far without completely losing interest, though I did give up on my ‘play every day’ campaign.

My current task is to collect all of the different species of fish and insect that are crammed onto the little game disc. I’ve come very close to accomplishing this goal, and any that I’m currently missing are either extremely elusive or out of season. I’m only missing a few of each, and I can smell the scent of victory getting closer. There’s only one big problem between my goal and me. The irony is that the big problem is in reality quite small. And fast. And yellow. This problem is the one bug that has been able to evade me every time I’ve seen it, it is none other than the accursed Yellow Banded Dragonfly.

It’s been almost a year that I’ve been hunting this little bugger. I’ve been searching so relentlessly for this insect so that I may acquire the legendary Golden Net. Why I want it so badly, I don’t know. It’s more of a personal victory than anything, but I’ve been putting off continuing the hunt for some time now and I must get back to my mission. Today could be the day that I gain the upper hand over the insect kingdom. Today could be the day that I become a legend in RyanLand. Or it might not and I’ll just try again some other day.

Unfortunately, as I walked out the door, the first sign of defeat had already reared its ugly head. It was raining outside. Armed with my trusty net, I set off anyway, because I knew that the bugs would not be stopped from their merry flitting by some water. But before the quest began, there were two things that I had to check. The first was the town bulletin board. Animals would usually post messages there a lot, but during the last month they’ve stopped completely. I’ll have to investigate this some other time. Next I had to check the mail. since I’d let it accumulate for a while, there was a plethora of letters stocked in the box. There were two letters from my own mother, and they were quite confounding in their own way.

The letter on the left is thrice confusing. First of all, I didn’t know that I had an ‘Uncle Dweezil’. Why were my parents holding this back until now? Secondly, what didhappen to him. Did he just wet his bed? The words “suffer a horrible fate” make it seem like it was much worse than just that. From now on I’m definitely using the bathroom before bedtime. And most importantly, who would name their child ‘Dweezil’? Who, I ask you!? Who!? As for the other one, my mother clearly knows that I live in a town inhabited only by animals (bar myself). Yet she asks if I’ve developed feelings for one of them, and she even suggests that I mate with one! Bestiality is a serious offense in my book, and my mother has just lost a lot of the respect I once had for her.

So after I finished with the disturbing mail, I left to find that damned dragonfly. But where would I look? RyanLand isn’t the biggest town on the planet, but it certainly is a large place. I figured that I should seek some help before continuing my search any further. The first instinct would be to ask another bug enthusiast about the Banded Dragonfly, and gather as much information on it as I could. Why I didn’t think of this months ago, I haven’t got a clue. So I went over to my good friend Tabby’s house. I’m sure I’ve heard her say something about bugs once or twice before. I got there and started asking about it, but she started going off about how she has no GameBoy Advance or Nintendo GameCube GameBoy Advance Cable so she can’t get to some island. I stopped listening and inched away as she went on furiously.

But before I could get away, I noticed a shiny glow coming from the ground. After living in RyanLand for a while, I’d learned that money can appear pretty much anywhere, and that shiny ground equals big bucks. Fortunately, I’d packed my trusty Golden Shovel so I was able to search the earth beneath the shine. To my great fortune, it was a sack nearly overflowing with bells. So now that I had some cash in hand, I thought that I’d go see if the local store had any tools that might further help me in my quest.

Another bottleneck came about as I found that the store was closed until 9:00. I learned a lesson that day: don’t wake up bright and early if shopping might work itself into your day. That lousy shopkeeper has been a lot less liberal with his hours ever since he was able to renovate from a convenience store to a real store. Since my good friend Bill lived almost right next to the store, I thought that I’d pop in and see what he knew about Banded Dragonflies. Yet again, a damper was put on my plans. Bill was also lazy, and hadn’t gotten up yet. Knock as I might, he just wasn’t going to wake up. I even banged my shovel against the door, but it was to no avail.

Just North of Bill’s house is the dump, so I went over to have a look-see at what the villagers had recently disposed of. To my dismay, there was nothing but a couple of shirts there. They weren’t even nice shirts. I don’t think I’ll ever find a shirt I like better than my Whirly Shirt. Then again, that’s what I thought about the Flame Shirt and look at where it is now. In a pear-shaped dresser. So having no success so far, I thought it best to question every animal in the village. One of them had to know something.

The next stop was the house of my other good friend Genji. Now Genji isn’t the smartest of the bunch, but he does spend a lot of time frolicking around outside, so he seemed like the next best person to turn to. Yet again my plan failed and he knew nothing. It seems that he’s gotten even more stupid from the last time I saw him. He seems to think that looking as his watch counts as a ‘cool trick’. I’d consider nothing short of finding and catching a Banded Dragonfly a ‘cool trick’ at the moment. After speaking with about a dozen of my other good friends, I’d concluded that they all knew nothing about the Banded Dragonfly and that not one of them would listen to what I had to say. And my mom thought I might be more than friends with one. Disgusting.

I’d been hunting for a good half-hour by then, and I hadn’t even seen a common, easier to catch bug. Not one. And I’d searched almost every part of town. What I did find, though, was a basketball. It seems that someone is very careless with their sporting equipment, because every time I return one of these things I find another lying about. While I was trying to catch this one in my bug net, I accidentally knocked it into the river. I tried to fish it out, but after it went over the waterfall I knew that it was gone for good. Let’s keep this between just you and me, okay?

Just before I was about to give up I was given to sign to continue. I was just strutting about when I saw a small thing moving around on a tree. It was too hard to make out what it was from that distance, but in hopes that it was the dragonfly, I lunged straight at it and slammed the net down over it. Sadly, I had only caught a stupid drone beetle. I can’t even sell those for a decent amount of money. But with the knowledge that there were bugs about and waiting to be found, I pressed on.

By the time I reached the pond, I had become bored with my current game of wild goose chasing. I thought it best to just sit back and relax for a while before I resumed my search. I wasn’t a hard rain, so I sat down by the pond and cast out my fishing line, hoping to catch the rare Popeyed Goldfish. It’s one of the few fish that’s been able to elude me as well as the Banded Dragonfly. So I sat for a few minutes, with not even a nibble. I was in a very giving-up mood that day, so I was about to pack up and go home. But then it came along.

The Giant Catfish had stuck itself to my hook. What chance! I even had to make an extremely bad joke I was so happy. Heh heh, mousefish. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. But it was very good that I caught it, because they go for a huge amount of bells down at the store. Even if I weren’t going to catch the Banded Dragonfly that day, I would surely come home richer man. So the day wasn’t a total loss. With renewed faith in my small pseudo-animal catching abilities I whipped my net back out and got back on the trail.

This time I had a much better plan. I would ask the local police chief, Copper, about the dragonfly. My idea wasn’t as good as I thought, because I had forgotten that he is totally enamored with his job and doesn’t think about much else. He just congratulated me for being a good citizen and resumed standing in one place. The only time I’ve ever seen him move is when he instructs morning aerobics, and even that only lasts for about 30 days. The poor guy never gets a break. I should volunteer there sometime so that he can go out and get a life. But not today! I have more important things to do!

Just as I was about to finish the complete lap of the town, I saw something move. It was lightning fast and I readied myself instantly. It’s a good thing that I’ve been practicing for this day. I got my net ready and slowly moved toward where I thought I saw the movement. But there was nothing there at all. It must have been the wind blowing some leaves around. I thoroughly searched the area to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but previous encounters had taught me that the Banded Dragonfly doesn’t stick around for very long after it knows you’ve seen it.

That was it for the day. I was soaking wet, and I had been out for quite some time. It seems that bugs don’t appear all too often on rainy days. But the day was still young, what was I to do for all that time? I certainly couldn’t go back to bed, I was already dully awake by then. So I went back home and did what any righteous man would.

I played NES games all day!

Ha ha! See, it was different than my usual tripe. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but I’ve been too lazy to move the GameCube out of my room to the PC, even though it’s a maximum of twenty steps between the two. And, uh, if you noticed, the date is a moth or so behind, mostly because I haven’t played the game for a few weeks and I don’t want to miss all the stuff between then and now. So I’ve just been playing a few shortened days every playing session.

The most amazing thing about this is how long I was able to drag it on for. I’m sure that I could have made it a bit longer, since I didn’t include everything I could have, but I still thought it would be a lot shorter than what’s become the norm. Actually, it is significantly shorter than the GCN Demo Disc article, but there was a lot of ground to cover in that one. Animal Crossing just isn’t big article material. It’s really more of a journal logging type thing than anything else. But I’m happy with the way it turned out, so it’s all good. I don’t know what’s next for me, but it should be soon. Later, eh?

The GameCube Demo Disc

I don’t care what anybody says, the GameCube is an all-around excellent console. It’s got all you need from a video game system; great games, comfortable controller, and it’s nice and small too. You may say “But Ryan, where’s the DVD player?” And I say, “The Playstation 2 dies after a year because of it’s DVD playing abilities”. And let’s not even get me started on the X-Box. But we could argue about that until the cows come home. Actually, when do the cows come home? Considering that people have been using that saying for ages, those cows must be dead by now. Unless they’re really cow-turtle hybrids with the physical appearance of a cow and the lifespan of a turtle. Hmmm… (Note to self: Find cows and bring them home).

Where was I? Oh yes, GameCube being perfect. There was still one small fault in the system’s obvious flawlessness; the lack of demo discs, or even a single demo disc. But a few months ago, I’ll say May, that little oopsie was remedied. Remedyed. Remedeed. It sucks when even I don’t know how to spell a word, and damned if I’ll use a spell checker. Nintendo finally released a demo disc with 5 of the “biggest” upcoming titles. And of course a bunch of movies and a couple GBA-transfer games. Only there was a catch.

The only way to get this precious disc was to get it free with the purchase of a GCN. So Nintendo shot themselves in the foot. Again. It was really no big deal to the general public, only those who had been waiting for the damn thing since the console’s release. Unfortunately, I was one of those people. Now that I think of it though, Nintendo has released two quasi-demo discs in the past. the first was before the GCN was launched and showcased the titles that everyone was drooling over. Only there were no playable demos and it was for use on a PC. Next was the other movie preview disc, mostly to sell the Metroid games. Ironically enough, was in DVD format. You can almost hear Nintendo crying about how much their feet hurt.

The other day I was out with the family, and my grandma just gave me 20 bucks. And I hadn’t even said hello yet. How does that equate? I don’t know, but I’m not one to complain about free money. So we went to the new Best Buy store and there I found it. I’d been looking for the disc since it came out, only to be stopped by the complete lack of them and the fact that you could only get them when buying a Cube. But Best Buy had broken the rules. At $15, how could I lose? I’ve been salivating over Viewtiful Joe since the first screenshot, and now I had the chance to play the first level over and over until the full game is released. Fate was on my side that day and now I’m the proud owner of the wonderful GameCube Preview Disc.

It’s a really nice case, but do you see something wrong with it? Yes, there are four games shown, but the little thing says ‘Demos! 5’. So, for the uninformed, there’s a secret game. On the cover, we can see Sonic Adventure DX: Director’s Cut, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Viewtiful Joe, and Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg. So what’s the fifth game? It’s the game that has been hyped up way more than I’ve ever seen a fighting game hyped up, Soul Calibur II. So we’ve got a pile of potential gold on this disc, but wait! There’s more?! Ah yeah! There’s the movies too! They’re much less filling than the main course of playable demos, but they do serve their purpose of whetting your appetite. Let’s take a look at the back of the case to see what we get.

F-Zero GX, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Rebel Strike: Rogue Squadron 3, and a couple of football games that I don’t care about. What it doesn’t say is that there are also movies for the games with playable demos. And finally, GameBoy Advance owners get another little treat! There are two games that you can download to your GBA/SP, Dr. Mario and a preview of Wario Ware, Inc. The Wario Ware review houses my opinion of the full game, and the preview is significantly shorter, featuring approximately 7 microgames. But, if you get far enough, the game will change ever so slightly to advertise the full game. It’s funny and a good bonus game. Dr. Mario is the opposite of all the other games, because it’s the entire game! So you can play all the way to the end instead of repeating the first couple levels over and over. A very nice bonus for puzzle fans. The only thing that’s missing is a link feature, but I won’t complain about it.

So now lets ever so carefully put the disc in the GCN and boot that baby up. Aaah, demoey goodness. The menu is exactly what you’ve seen in the demo discs at Wal-Mart and such, only the Wal-Mart version of the disc has got Ultimate Muscle: Legends VS. New Generation and P.N.03 on it instead of Joe and Billy. I had wanted Ultimate Muscle for a while. Then I played it. The cel-shading and franchise fooled me into thinking that it might be different from your run-of-the-mill wrestling game, but it wasn’t. So I sucked at it and now I don’t even want to rent it. Sorry, Kid, but I’ll still watch your show. As for P.N.03, it was definitely original, to say the least. I’m looking forward to renting it.

But back to the games on MY disc. I’ll go in order of worst to best, then movies, so I’ll start with Splinter Cell.

To be completely honest, I only tried this once, and I don’t think I’m gonna do it again. Wait, make that twice. Once to try it out, once to take screenshots. As far as I could tell, in the demo you’ve gotta spy on some Chinese guy who’s doing something bad. Gee. That’s original. Maybe I should have paid attention. So as Sam, you have to sneak around and find this guy without getting caught and killed. And if you’re caught, you will be killed. Damn realistic games. Sam should be able to take more than two shots. I’m not too good at stealth, and there are too many things to do with nowhere near enough buttons. That’s why Tom Clancy games should stick to PC, they use every button on the keyboard and then some. It just doesn’t translate well onto a controller. I hear the guy who invented Doom thinks games are getting too complicated as well. In any case, I got killed a couple times and quit because I suck at it.

If you wanna look at it technically, all the playable demos are GCN-exclusives. Although you can find Soul Calibur II on the PS2 and X-Box, only the Cube version has Link(making it best by default). As for the multi-platform Splinter Cell, the GCN version has a huge advantage, GBA connectivity. The only thing I liked about the game is that you can use the GBA as a radar, and if I didn’t have that, I would have died a lot faster and possibly more times. It did allow me to find a new route into the first building. Only it wasn’t a secret route, it was the front door. See? I’m really bad at Splinter Cell.

Next up we’ve got unnecessarily long-titled Sonic Adventure DX: Director’s Cut. it could have just been “Sonic Adventure DX”, but it seems that the longer the title, the better these days. I doubt that they added any scrapped material to this version. This is your basic good news/bad news situation. The good news is that it’s the longest demo of the bunch. The bad news is that it’s not as good as Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, which came out on GCN a long while ago. True, it’s not a bad game, it’s just that there are a lot of flaws. The most apparent of these flaws being the camera. It flies all over the place whenever you move and most of the time it won’t go where you want it to. Speaking of uncontrollable, the controls could use a bit of tweaking. And when I say “a bit” I mean “a lot”.

You can play one of each character’s missions, which equates to a whole of six playable levels. That’s about 200% more game than any other demo. It’s nice to have quantity, but sacrificing quality is not something I’m big on doing. It’s still not that bad. It sure is a lot more fun than Splinter Cell. I guess my real beef is with the Gamma, Amy, and Knuckles levels. The Sonic and Tails levels are all you could expect, and I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Big’s fishing adventures. Even better for me is that they kept the character themes in the instructions. I love Big’s theme. I even downloaded it and have listened to it several times every day. It really is an awesome song. The other characters’ themes (save Knux’s) are rather odd sounding after the remixed tunes form SA2B have become the norm. Especially Tails’ theme. Once again, I had to clean blood out of my ears.

The last three games are all great, and I really can’t bring myself to rank one above the other, so I’ll check out Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg next. The first thing you’ll notice when you start playing is that it’s gotta be the cutest thing EVER. Billy’s cute, the animals are cute, the enemies are cute, even the damn music is cute. To some this is a bad thing and will make them turn away in disgust, but I love it. To understand the entire amount of cuteness that this presents, you have to hear Billy’s “Kook-a-doo-doo!”. Possibly the most surprising thing about it is that it’s made by Sega’s Sonic Team, the same people responsible for SADX:DC. Everything about the game is great. It’s got all you really need. Music, graphics, control, fun; all top notch. It’s definitely on my buying list.

Billy’s quest in the demo is to hatch the Chicken Elder from a Golden Egg. It seems some nasty crows have invaded and sealed up all the Elders, the chicken who “make the sun appear”. So they put the roosters in big eggs. So Billy’s all dressed up in his unbearably cute chicken costume and gets to it. You can find eggs lying around everywhere and roll them around to break stuff, squish enemies, and hit switches. As you find fruit to feed the egg, it grows and eventually can be hatched. Most eggs contain small animals that Billy can team up with to attack enemies and solve puzzles. When you free the Chicken Elder, he presents you with a Courage Emblem. Then you go pick it up and the demo is over.

But that’s the tricky part, it really not. on the title screen, you can access a second mission by holding A and pressing start. It’s the same level, just a few things have been moved around and the bad guys have gotten tougher. So what’s your mission? Get to the top of the same tower you got on to beat the last mission and get another Courage Emblem. So let’s take a closer look at this: Collectible objects, different missions in the same level, excellent gameplay… I think we’ve got another Super Mario 64 clone on our hands. Yay! Maybe Banjo and Kazooie won’t be missed as much if Billy is good enough to take their place. And for what I’ve seen so far, the little chicken-suited boy will go above and beyond the crow of duty.

Next on the chopping block is the insanely popular Soul Calibur II. I often wondered why it was so popular, and now that I’ve played it I have a very good idea why. Now I usually don’t like 3-D fighting games. Tekken, Virtua Fighter, whatever. Not my proverbial cup of tea. But SC2 manages to pull off what only Bushido Blade has been able to do so far; make me like a 3-D fighting game. It’s gotta be the weapons. But I don’t just like SC2, oh no. I love the damn thing. Even if I only have access to two characters, I can see myself playing this a lot until I get the full game. Speaking of those characters, the two given are Cassandra and Nightmare. Possibly the two most opposite fighters in the game. Cassandra, my choice of the two, is small and fast. Nightmare on the other hand, is a huge lumbering monster with the biggest sword you’ll ever see. The demo is only four enemies long, but there’s two-player support so it’s got more replay value than any of the other demos.

So why is it so great? I’m not sure, but it’s got this huge appeal to it. Even my littlest brother who hates to play games with me (cause he hates to lose) was having a grand old time with it. Though I think he was doing it just so I’d let him play Billy Hatcher. When it comes down to it, it’s just your average fighting game but with permanent weapons. It can make the game a bit cheap, since some are mind-bogglingly long, but they add that extra dimension to it. It’s multiplatform, so all three groups get it, but there’s one big difference between them all. Each version has an exclusive character. Like I said earlier, we GCN owners get Link, so it’s obviously gonna be the most popular of the three. Coming in second is the X-Box version, which gets Spawn. Yeah. Freakin’ Spawn. Lastly and most definitely leastly, is the PS2 version, with their exclusive character being some geezer from the Tekken series. Heh heh. The enemies in the demo are Raphael the fencer pirate, Astaroth the Tyrant wannabe, Taki the ninja whose breasts “defy gravity”, and Voldo the bondage freak. They’re all pretty easy. Except Voldo. You can never tell what he’s gonna do, and every time he kills you he’ll whip out a new attack that you never saw coming. Like flopping on the floor and electrifying himself. This is definitely a buying game.

Now I’ve reached the one reason that I bought this damn disc. Viewtiful Joe. This is what I’ve been itching for for months now, and the release date still seems ages away. But that no longer matters, because I can play the first level over and over and over until I die of thirst and sleep deprivation and hunger and filthiness. But there’s no way I’d rather go out. My good friend thinks it’s dumb because it’s side scroller, but I’ll just be laughing at the fact that he’s missing what could possibly be my favoritest Cube game ever. Everything about this game has been worked out perfectly, even more perfect than Billy Hatcher. At least half of the gaming population hated cel-shading. But then the Wind Waker came along and most of them realized how wrong they’d been. Even I was wary of it until I bought Bomberman Generation. And as for Joe’s treatment? It looks fantastic. Capcom was going for a comic book style of visuals, and they executed it perfectly. The game does look like it came straight out of the pages of some comic. It may sound unappealing, but most of the objects in the game are 2-D, but in the end it looks more proper than 3-D objects would have. As for the characters and most of the important objects and platforms, they’re all in 3-D and have been rendered very nicely. There better be at least one sequel.

But now that I’ve spoken of the superficial stuff, let’s get down to the meat and potatoes of the game. The audio is great, music is catchy and sets a very nice tone for the game. As for voice samples, all the voice acting is great, with some well written and often funny dialogue. Some of the best being Joe’s “Henshin-A-Go-Go-Baby!!” and the “Yummy!” that’s produced when he picks up a life-replenishing burger. The gameplay itself is very simple and extremely fun. The controls are very easy to pick up and learn, as it doesn’t even use all the buttons. Not like Splinter Cell, which had like five actions for each button. The demo level consists of several parts which are cleared by killing so many enemies and/or reaching a certain location. After every little part, you’re given a rank based on your Time, Defense, and V-Combos. Ranks for each stat go from V to D, and add up to a bigger rank. So far I’ve achieved 3 different ranks; Awesome, Baaaad, and Crappy. I’m not sure if you can get a V or D as your final rank, I’ve never done that good or bad.

Playing as Joe is pretty simple. All you have to do is run around, jump and attack your enemies while throwing in an occasional dodge to up your Defense rank. But after beating the mysterious Captain Blue, you can become Viewtiful Joe! With the added powers of Slow and Mach Speed, you can pummel your enemies with a lot more style. The best part is that the powers have an effect on the surrounding area, so they can be used for many purposes. Slow is the more useful of the two abilities, as it has many uses. These include making fast moving enemies slower, stopping rotors, and slowing bullets so you can punch them back. Mach Speed is more of a “special effect” move, as it lets you attack all the enemies on the screen and if used long enough Joe will light up and set any enemies he touches on fire. What’s quite possibly the best part is the Helicopter boss. There are literally tons of ways to beat it. 1)You can knock down chandeliers on top of it. 2)Do it old-school and just pummel it to death. 3)You can slow time and bounce it’s bullets back. 4)You can kick it’s missiles back at it. 5)Slow down time to stop the rotor and then beat it to death with Mach Speed. And this is just the first level! Even better than the boss, it never gets boring! I’ve played through it at least 15 times now and I still have the urge to go back and do it again. I can say with confidence that Viewtiful Joe is the game to own this year. October is going to be one Hell of a month.

Now that I’ve reviewed all the playable demos, I’ll take a very brief look at the videos. first up is F-Zero GX, which looks very nice, and the added F-Zero AX (arcade version) connectivity sound like a great idea. The Zelda video is just an explanation of how to use the Tingle Tuner to it’s fullest ability. It is also home to a hilarious line: “Tingle is only as friendly as the person holding the GameBoy Advance, so choose your friends wisely” is spoken as various shots of Link getting blown up are displayed. The Rogue Squadron III video make the game look very promising, and I like the idea of adding in a multiplayer feature. Best of all, you can crush Ewoks in an AT-ST! You can’t improve on that! I don’t plan on watching the football videos. The videos of the demo games are somewhat less enthralling than their playable cousins, but are good to watch none the less.

Finally, there’s an ESRB video about how to choose your games depending on the rating and how if you don’t choose the right game, you’ll be in a big mess. Not only is the video great because bowling balls are flying at a guy trying to play baseball, but it’s hosted by the one and only…

Yup, Derek Jeter. Now if only they could hire a celebrity who I know to do these things, they’d have my undivided attention without having to resort to the bowling balls.

That’s it for this disc. I don’t think I could have found a better way to spend that $15. The only real shame is that I didn’t get to play SC2 earlier. Or else I would have known it was awesome before and had the chance to ask for it for my birthday. Speaking of which, there should be a new article sometime around then. For now though, just wait, my third promised article will be done pretty soon. Though it’s another thing along the lines of Hylian Idol. But this one involves people with horns, animals, and crossings. Nobody will ever guess…

In a real conclusion, I’ll have to rate each of these games. The Wario Ware Inc. demo gets a 8 for the funny advertising ploy. Dr, Mario gets a prefect 10, who couldn’t love that game? Splinter Cell scores a 5, because I suck at it. SADX:DC gets a 7, because it’s good for the most part, but has some big, ugly issues. Billy scores a 10. He’s just too cute to give any less to. SC2 gets a 9, because Voldo scares me. Otherwise it’s a 10. And I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m gonna give Viewtiful Joe a 10. I’ve yet to see any flaws at all in that game. You may not agree with everything I’ve said, but remember, it’s all my opinion, which should and most probably does differ from yours. So have a good night and give Joe a chance. Side scrollers are the best games ever. Except Super Mario 64. That’s the real best game ever.

~Ryan

The list of what, exactly?

I promised 2 articles before Sept.2, and one of ’em is up and ready for reading! And surprise, surprise! I even found a topic for a third, and it’ll be up before then too. I should have a lot of time this week, provided that I’m not forced to go out anywhere. Though I did rent Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, which is a very, very sweet game. It’s on the list, baby.
~Ryan out.

The 3ft 6 Pak! (Part One)

You know how I love video games? Well if you didn’t, now you do. But to get to the point, I’m really more of a console gamer. Sure, there are tons of good PC games out there, but most of them are first-person shooters and online RPGs (Half-Life, Everquest, etc), both of which fail to intrigue me very much, if at all. That’s half right there, another quarter are crappy games that really serve no purpose, and are boring and stupid (Lego Island, etc). Then we come around to the good games, which are primarily real-time strategy and console ports (Command & Conquer, Metal Gear Solid, etc). So like I said, I don’t play a whole lot of games on my PC.

So then what purpose does my PC serve? Well for one, what you’re reading takes up a significant percentage of my time on the computer. The rest of the time I’m usually browsing the internet for any type of interesting stuff I may be able to find. So in short, I use the computer almost exclusively for the internet. But what of the days when I had no access to the web? Well, that was when computer games were still fun, and typically 2-D. You’d be surprised at the kind of games they made back then. There were tons of things you’d never hear of unless you were into knowing every game that was ever released. Or if you had parents who randomly bought games that seemed to be of good value. I was in the latter.

Today I will once again delve into my shady and rather boring past to explore one of the oddities of my computer game collection. I haven’t touched this thing for years. Not since I was 12 at the very most. I didn’t plan to ever pick it up again, but as I write this, I temporarily have lost my connection to the net thanks to the bumbling tomfoolery of my brother.(Editor’s Note: I placed the blame a little prematurely…) So here we go, get ready for a trip into the darkest depths of edutainment as we witness PC gaming at what might just be it’s worst. Get ready for the ‘3 Foot 6 Pak’.

As I stated above, this thing is old. I’m not sure exactly when it was made, but we got it sometime around between when I got my Super Nintendo and when I got my Nintendo 64. So that’s a span of about 4 years right there. In any case, this marvel of something was apparently made in 1994, or so the packaging has led me to believe. Sirius Publishing probably knew what they were doing too, because the package also says “From the makers of the original 5ft. 10 Pak”. Wow. So that’s about 1.6 times the crap. And almost twice the size. Maybe they learned that too much crap at once was bad and lightened the load by four coasters, errr, games. The part that bothers me the most is that it’s only Volume 1, even though it’s got a predecessor.

Scratch that, the part that bothers me the most is how much my parents paid for it and that they didn’t remove the price tag. Now technically this is a great deal, seeing as most ‘full version CD-roms’ are about sixty bucks each these days. But realistically, they shouldn’t have been able to get away with trying to sell it for $15, never mind $30. I’m not sure if I mentioned it or not yet, but the ‘games’ in this ‘pak’ are total crap. I’m talking extreme craptacularness here. Except for three of ’em, but I’ll review each separate game later. Right now, let’s just make sure all the goods are here.

Sadly enough, all six games are indeed in the pak. All of the discs are unnaturally clean and unscratched too. Which is only unnatural because my brothers don’t seem to understand the importance of keeping them in working shape. But now for the real test! Do they really equal three feet? In the interest of science and filling up this paragraph with mindless banter, I shall be the first one to find out! Well, maybe. But I’m not sure that anyone else ever purchased this thing, never mind produced the effort or interest to check if it’s actually 3 feet long.

I only have two feet, so I can’t tell for sure, but it seems that all six discs do indeed equal up to a length of three feet. But on the other side, if you factor in the cover and little flap thing, if would actually add up to about 3 feet, 8 inches. A-ha! I knew it! Sirius Publishing is in for some hard times and legal battles for false advertising. I wonder if I could actually take this to court? I’m mostly wondering because Sirius Publishing might be long dead by now. But now what am I to do with this thing if it’s not 3 feet long? It’s totally useless to me now that it’s more than 3 feet. And just for the record, none of this means anything to me because I use the Metric system!

Now imagine my surprise when I attempting to fold the thing up and this fell out. Actually, I wasn’t surprised, because I knew it was there all along. I was just trying to avoid it. What did surprise me though, is that it’s in extremely good shape considering it’s age and owners. I was very shocked to see that this nice poster-thing is still in one piece. But, in the end, it’s just a crappy poster. I wouldn’t hang it on my rival’s wall. Mostly because I haven’t got a real rival yet. If you want to apply for the position, I’m taking in applications from September 3rd to 16th. So why is this seemingly useless poster included with the pack? Let’s turn it over and see.

Ah! It’s really just a cover for the instruction manual! Quite the screwed up manual if I do say so. It’s more of an instruction map if anything. But, since I’m so smart, I won’t need this thing at all! The only problem I face now is the folding of this damn thing. Yes, I’m smart, but I’m no neurosurgeon here. Although it does seem like quite the interesting field to work in, and I hear it pays quite well, too. I could be the next Dr. Drake Ramoray! …On a totally unrelated topic, if an actor is playing the part of an actor, is he really acting? What if he’s playing himself? Wouldn’t it be cool if watermelons came in different colours like in Yoshi’s Island? Okay okay, I’ll quit the crap and move on to the reviewing of the games. Damned games.

Great. First game is already the boringest of the bunch. It’s the Family Circus for crying out loud! Just associating something to the Family Circus decreases it’s interesting points by 500. This “Our House” game isn’t getting anywhere near my CD drives. I refuse to play it. What could there possibly be to play? I mean, it’s probably just clicking on stuff around the house which produces a quote which is supposed to be funny but really isn’t. Just like the comic. Stupid Family Circus. The only good ones are the ones that show the trail that the kid took from point A to point B. And that’s only good because FoxTrot made fun of it. Yes, I do think that the Family Circus is dragging down the rest of the Saturday comics. But seriously, I’m totally not playing this game. Ever.

What is this!? Cinderella? It just goes downhill from here, doesn’t it? In any case, I’m not actually going to try this out either, but not because I’ll hate it. No, that’s a given. I don’t want to play it because someone might walk in and see me playing it and then tell everyone I was playing a damn Cinderella computer game. And if that happened, my precious reputation would be ruined. Cause, you know, what others think of me is all that matters. It’s. All. That. Matters. Heck, I’ll probably be mocked for simply mentioning this entire pak of games, but I thought it would be a good thing to write about, and as usual, I stand by my decision. It appears to be an ‘interactive storybook’, and I’ve only had good experiences with those so far, so as far as actual quality and interestingness of this game goes, it might actually be good. Or it could be complete crap, like I expect. Onto the next!

Sing-Along Kids… I probably would try this out if I had a working mic, but I don’t, so we’ll never know if I would have actually tried it. A mic probably isn’t a necessity, but I’ll just say it is so I don’t have to waste more time ‘playing’ this ‘game’. It’s really more of a karaoke than a game. Or at least that’s the impression that I’ve been given. In any case, the songs on it don’t seem to fit my tastes. All I see is stuff like “Old Macdonald” and “Yankee Doodle”. Where’s “Hysteria” and “Hell’s Bells”? I haven’t even heard of some of these songs. What the Hell is “This Old Man”? For the positive though, it includes the song “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”, which is just about the greatest song to hum or whistle when doing anything that requires little to no thinking. Matt was right.

Next on the chopping block is “Basic Spelling Tricks”. See that happy old man in the corner? Until you quit the game, he never goes away. I’m serious. He never, ever moves from that position. Not even during the screen transitions. Anyway, he seems to be the leader of the tribe that your character belongs to, and he’ll instruct you as you go along and make fun of you if you do nothing for a short period of time. The zaniest part of this game is that it has a story! A spelling game with a story! Not since “Mario Teaches Typing” have we seen edutainment of this calibre. The story goes like this; the river is flooding and you have to get upstream to save the tribe. We’ve got a real award-winner here, folks. So, I suppose now that I have a mission, I should get started.

The first step is to register your name. Try as I might, I just couldn’t fit ‘AssMaster’ or ‘AssMan’ into the thing. So in the end, I just named my character Ryan. Five spaces just isn’t enough. But it is better than four. And three. But when they only give you three spaces, it’s usually for initials anyway, like in arcade games. For future reference, if you ever get a high-score in a arcade game, enter ‘SEX‘ as your initials. I’m sure that got the skimmers’ attention.

Okay, now I have a mission and a character. Let’s start the game already! This is more or less the main game screen. Sorry if the pics are a bit blurry, the jpegs were huge and I had to do a lot of size reduction to get them under 50KB each. And there was a header-type thing at the top of this screen with some angry Moais on it, but you know how it is. Anyway, I sailed in on my raft, and the old guy tells me to pick up the letters to spell “first”. I would have been fine with this had my raft not floated away as soon as I stepped off of it. So, I figured I’d try anyway and grabbed the letters. For anyone who has trouble spelling the words, there’s a sentence provided at the bottom of the screen with the proper spelling. Needless to say, I finished the level with no trouble at all. To my surprise, when I got the last letter, my raft came back! Old man instructed me to go back to the raft, and I continued my journey upstream.

Every level is divided into two separate parts; the main game, where you run around solving puzzles and picking up letters, and this typing challenge. It seems out hero can’t paddle hard enough unless you can spell, so I guess he’s just lucky that I’m playing, and my friends aren’t. This part would be a lot easier if old man would enunciate a little better. He asked me to spell “flute”, but I didn’t realize what he was trying to say until I turned up the volume about 30 decibels and had him say it roughly 67 times. Also noteworthy is that every time you get a word right a mini-villager will climb up onto the board, and when you’re done, they do a mini-wave!

I know that the first level looks pretty easy, and it was. If memory serves though, the game gets really hard later on, with some very advanced puzzles. I only played about 4 levels, and I thought to myself “How long could this game possibly be?”. Well, upon returning to the main menu, I discovered that, in the words of Def Leppard, I’ve got a long, long way to go. Oi. I’ll be damned if I ever finish this, or if anyone else ever finished it. I like puzzle games and all, but this just doesn’t cut the mustard. The most ironic part is that even though I’ve been playing a spelling game for the last 20 minutes, there are probably going to be a lot of overlooked typos in the finiched articel.

I’ve also noticed that this thing is getting horrendously long. At this point, it’s over 2200 words long, and that’s almost as much as the Hulk and AW2: Black Hole Rising articles, if not more. I think that for now, I’ll stop here. Mostly because it’s going to be a really long article if I continue, and also because I’m desperate to get a new article up. It’s been more than a month since my last offering, and any readers out there need something after waiting for so long. So I’ll just wrap it up now, and do a separate review for the last two games, which coincidentally have a lot more content and fun than the first four combined.

For what I’ve looked at today, I must say that I’m really not impressed. I’ll give them credit for the sake of they were made way back when, but somewhere deep inside I was expecting more. I’m sure that it’s the fact that I’m maturing (slightly) that makes these games less interesting than they were all those years ago. So for now, I’ll just blame growing up for the crappiness of these so-called games. Actually, I should blame growing up more often. It’s working pretty well here, so I imagine it could be used in other situations as well.

So that’s it for today’s review. We- I mean I will just have to hope that both Putt-Putt and Lenny the Penguin can provide more entertainment than the Family Circus could. Looks like they’re shoe-ins for the “best games of the pack” award. I remember these last two being the best, and I hope that memory will serve better next time around, cause I don’t wanna be stuck playing a crappy game that I used to enjoy. That would mean that I enjoy crap. And I sure don’t wanna be known as the guy who enjoys crap.

~Ryan

Game Boy Playa

As mentioned in the AW2 article, I recently purchased the Game Boy Player. Some may think that it was a stupid decision (you know who you are), but I see plenty of potential for it. For one, I can “LAN” it up with my bro’s GC and use a TV for GBA-GCN link stuff (Animal Crossing, Zelda:The Wind Waker) and if he gets a GBP too, we can play multiplayer GBA games on big screens. Also, I can do GBA reviews much easier, as now I don’t have to go searching for ROMs (if I have the game in question) which is generally a huge hassle, as ROMs in general have become much harder to find. Plus, no more cramped neck for me! Well, I just thought I’d let yahs know.
~Ryan out.

Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising

Yet again, I’ve been downloading ROMs. I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t help myself. They bring so much happiness. It’s kinda like… errr… “killin’ kittens”. Actually, that’s exactly what it’s like. They both involve plenty of use of my hands and generally make use of the internet as well. But, I digress, that’s not exactly the kind of thing that I want my site (or myself, for that matter) to be known for. So as I was saying, I was downloading ROMs yet again.

This time around, it wasn’t just to see what was there and take whatever had the most colourful screenshots. No, this time I had a mission. I was looking for Rock ‘N Roll Racing. Why Rock ‘N Roll Racing? I’m not sure myself. But it might have something to do with the fact that just before this ROM search, I read something about it on Planet GameCube. I’m still not sure why I wanted to play it. I don’t really like racing games. Especially ports of SNES racing games. Before you say anything, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity and Mario Kart: Super Circuit were not ports. Just sequels. Rather good sequels at that.

Back to the story. Have you ever been looking for something and then found something better? And I’m not talking looking for a cookie and finding donuts, I’m talking about searching for coin and finding a wad of bills. Oh yeah, what I found instead (probably) kicks Rock ‘N Roll Racing‘s ass into next week. Maybe. I never actually found the ROM, I just settled after I found Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising. Mostly because I’m too damn lazy to search any archives and if it’s not on the first page it’s not worth it to me. So with the intro out of the way, onto the review!

Way back when, sometime in 2001 I think, Advance Wars was released for the GameBoy Advance. My friends got it some time around Christmas, I borrowed my brother’s copy, and we played the Hell out of the game. Almost every day during spare and lunch we could be found in the cafeteria playing Advance Wars, or on occasion Bomberman Tournament. I still think the best time was when we were forced to spend gym class in the library and we stealthily played in the little cubicle thingys. In any case, it was a great game.

Just the beginning

Now, 2 years later, Advance Wars 2 appears. The only question that you ask is “what could they possibly add to Advance Wars?”. And let me tell you, that is a really good question. I’ll cover that more in-depth later, but for now my answer is this “Not a whole lot”. AW2 relies mostly on the greatness of the first game and the name recognition to get anywhere. It’s a lot like the MegaMan series. But like I say so often when it comes to sequels; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Go T-Copter!

“So if there’s nothing new about it, why should I buy it and not just play the first one?” Maybe I wasn’t very clear the first time around. There are indeed new things added to expand the game, but there is actually very little. I haven’t even scratched the surface of this monster, so I don’t know if my account of the new stuff is accurate or not, but I have a pretty good idea of what’s new. In short, there are a bunch of new CO’s and one new unit, which (at first) appears to be available only to the enemy. Also, a whole bunch of new campaign missions and a couple other, less impressive, features.

You just know it's gonna be good

The actual gameplay is the real gem in both AW and AW2. It’s a turn based strategy game, and obviously enough, it’s about war. While some may complain that turn based is crap and it should be more of an RTS, the majority loves AW the way it is. I agree, since I don’t think all that fast when it comes to strategy. Actually, I barely think at all when it comes to strategy. My usual tactic is to assemble a massive force and mow down my enemies. It might sound like a good idea, but it generally takes time and money, both of which you don’t get a lot of. Did I mention that it’s really, really hard?

Yeah. Hard as stone. Or at least I think it is. I’ve never been able to finish the original, and I don’t think that I’ll do much better at AW2, because they say it’s got “improved AI”. Improved AI only means that it’ll kick my ass faster than it did the last time around. I’m just asking for an easy mode. My strength lies in platformers, not strategy games. Anyway, most AW gurus will probably tell you it’s not that hard, but just ask any of them to get an S rank on every Campaign and War Room mission and they’ll lose their lustre in the blink of an eye.

Not very far yet...

I suppose I should explain what a “turn-based strategy game” is for the newbies. On the other hand, anyone who visits this site is more than likely well acquainted with AW. The general idea is that there are two armies. Each gets a turn to move their units, and then the next day starts. On the player’s turn, they can move their units, attack the enemy, capture cities/bases, build new units, look at game info and stuff like that. Sometimes, there will be three or four players, which could help or hinder you, depending on your alliances. The only real problem with this way of playing is that you have to wait for the other players to finish their turn, and if they think hard or are distracted easily, you’re in for a long wait.

Here comes the BOOM!

Now what are these “units” I have spoken of so often? They’re what you control. They can be soldiers, tanks, planes, subs, and various other crap. Each army has it’s own model of every unit type, and they range from cool-looking to “Who would build that?”-looking. But for the record, regardless of appearance, all the armies have the exact same units, and they all have the exact same abilities. The thing that makes one army different from the other are the COs, but more on that later. As for the different types of units, you’ve got soldiers, tanks, planes, subs, and …I went over that already. Damn. All the standard war-type stuff you would expect. My personal favourite unit is… ummm… I guess I really don’t have a favourite. They all have their ups and downs, mostly revolving around firepower, movement, and range. Some can hit hard, some can move far, and some can fire at ungodly distances. In the end, you have to pool them all together to be successful.

The one thing that kind of disappointed me was the fact that Nintendo only added one new unit. Yeah, that’s right, one. And you can’t even use it until you’re noticeably far in the game. Even then you have to find the four hidden plans and beat the extra missions to get it. But what is this weapon that is worth so much trouble? Well, my friends and not-friends, it’s called the “Neo Tank”. Matrixy.

Neo Tank, armed with the mighty NEW CANNON!

Look at that sucker. I thought that Tiberian Sun was the only game where tanks had legs. But since the world exists only to prove me wrong, there it is. I’m not sure if they’re actually legs, I haven’t actually used one as of yet. My plan is to beat the first AW before I move any further in 2. Looks like I might never pick up this game again. *sigh*

Look! It's Santa!

Moving on, I think I should explain the COs now. There are 5 armies/countries in Wars World (props to whoever thought that up). Every army is composed of three Commanding Officers, except for Orange Star and Black Hole, who have five each. In the first game it was every country for itself, but now Orange Star, Blue Moon, Green Earth, and Yellow Comet have formed an alliance. Anyway, you get to pick a CO to play as for every mission. Except for the ones where you can’t choose, which seem to be much more abundant. Each CO has different strengths and weaknesses. For example, Max’s units get high firepower while indirect units have lower range/firepower and Kanbei’s units are strong, but they cost a lot more to deploy. They’re all different. As a nice little bonus, Nintendo added a CO effect chart, which shows how each CO affects their units.

Unit strengths/weaknesses

The Legend

Also, every CO has two CO Powers (bar Sturm, who only has one). In AW, they only had one, but now they have two. You’ll have to take damage and deal damage to charge up enough power to use one of these Powers. Obviously, one is a Super CO Power and takes longer to charge than the other, less impressive power. As you might have guessed, the powers usually capitalize on the CO’s strength or negates their weakness. I’ll use newcomer Colin as an example. His units cost less, but in turn, they’re weak. His Co Power, Gold Rush, multiplies his funds by 1.5. His Super CO Power, Power of Money, gives his units a power boost proportional to his funds (more cash, more power).

Unlike the pitiful addition to the units, there is a significant increase in COs. The allied countries all gained one new CO, and Black Hole has recruited four of ’em. So the total number of COs has gone from 11 to 19. The only problem is that you might never be able to actually play as all of them. You’re faced with the daunting task of unlocking all of them except for Andy, Max, and Sami(the arguable ‘main characters’). Doing this will more than likely involve going through the entire campaign mode several times. I don’t know for sure, but that how it worked in the first AW game. and that’s why I’ve never gotten any of them.

Andy! Get out of my pants!

Let’s see, what haven’t I mentioned? I guess some other changes that are noteworthy should be worthily noted. Black Hole get a whole slew of special stuff. They’ve got huge canons, missile silos, pipes for blocking your progression, and that kind of stuff. I’m pretty sure that it’s all Campaign mode exclusive, because, like I said, I really haven’t explored all the game’s modes all too thoroughly. The Map Editor is rumoured to have new options(possibly the canons and such). There’s a stupid ‘Color Edit’ mode, where you can change your CO’s colours to preselected colours. Not exactly what I’d call ‘editing’. And then there’s apparently an unlockable Sound Test mode. Those are always good. Gotta love the Sound Test. I guess I should mention that like every good movie and game, AW2 gives every character his or her own theme music. I gotta get me summa that.

The laughable colour edit mode

Next is, next is, next is gameplay modes! There are a few to choose from here, most prominently would be the Campaign mode, which takes you on a long and arduous journey to stop the Black Hole army. The next most important is the Vs. mode, in which you can partake in a battle against friends or CPU players. For the hardcore strategist, AW2 brings back the War Room, with all of the original scenarios, plus some new ones. Then we have the highly acclaimed Map Editor mode, which could be glitched up in the original game to edit the Campaign levels. Then there’s Hachi’s shop. It’s where you ‘unlock’ everything with the cash you win in the Campaign and War Room. That’s about it. I can’t remember is Field Training was actually an option or if it was just integrated into the Campaign mode this time.

Aren't dawns usually orange?

Heya, Hachi!

Now that I think I’ve told you about all the important stuff, onto the review! As I’m going to make a habit of, I’ll start with graphics. The actual in-game graphics are the exact same as AW. No difference at all. Of course, that not necessarily a bad thing. All cartoony looking and happy. The CO portraits have changed from the first game, not in quality, but mostly in pose. The most notable change is Olaf, who has gone from a comical fatman to a serious blue Santa. The rest of the game’s look has changed dramatically, especially the victory screen backgrounds, which have gone from simple ‘shape’ backgrounds to almost realistic portrait-type things. Overall, the graphics look very, very nice in AW2.

I am invincible!

Next, we’ve got sounds and music under the scope. While AW2 is missing the trademark Nintendo voice samples, it’s not without it’s aural charm. The SFX are limited to mostly explosions and vehicle moveage sounds. Yeah. That’s about it. Maybe some menu sounds too. The music is a mixed bag. All the COs have their own theme, and then there’s the menu themes. Most of ’em are catchy war-sounding stuff, but a couple of the themes can get really annoying. It gets really bad when one of said themes plays over and over every turn because all the players chose the same character. But the sound is the easiest category to cope with, cause if you don’t like it, turn it off and turn on the Slipknot. Easy as pie.

Control is a bit of a gimme in this situation. You really can’t screw up controls when they involve only pointing and clicking. Even that is simplified by making the battlefield a grid. You don’t have to worry about making quick movements or something like that. Just point, click, and watch. But all in all, the controls are nice and responsive anyway.

Now presentation, oh presentation. This is where the game goes leaps and bounds above pretty much everything. The intro video alone has got enough attitude to rival a biker gang and the entire WWE cast. The menus are slick and easy to navigate. In-game meters and such are less clunky looking than last time around. It all just comes together so nicely that you wouldn’t believe. I can’t begin to tell you how much style this game has got. It’s beyond amazing. If you played AW and then immediately switched to AW2, you’d probably get the impression that you started playing a whole different game.(Technically it is a whole different game, but in reality it’s just an extension of the first. Like Mario Sunshine to Mario 64.). I’m very, very impressed by the turn AW has taken.

Great, Nell is back...

As for gameplay, like I said, it’s absolutely identical to the first except for a few little tweaks and additions. Very challenging strategy game that could easily become more universally loved than chess, if everyone had (cheap) access to it. Seriously speaking, probably the best strategy game I’ve played in a long time. Of course the experience only gets better if you play with friends. And even better if you play against greenhorns after getting your ass handed to you by the CPU. The only qualm I have with it is that it is a very, very slow paced game and can take around half an hour to finish a single mission. Only recommended for patient people who’ve got time on their hands.

Go B-Copter!

There isn’t a whole lot else I can say about it. Okay, I lied. There’s a lot more I can say about it, but more words equals more pics and more pics equals more frustration and less site space. So I’ll just finish it up now by saying that Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising would be a wise investment for anyone who owns a GameBoy Advance/SP, even moreso if you don’t have the first, because (once again) it’s pretty much the same game. But hey, who am I to tell you what to do with your cash? I’ll let the proper advertisement agencies do that. But, uh, do yourself a favour and at least borrow it from a friend. AW2 really is the kickass game of the summer.

Henshin-a-go-go, baby! That was long. I’m gonna have to start taking word counts for these things. And actually using a spellchecker rather than just skimming over it to pick out obvious errors. But maybe I won’t keep word counts, cause then I’d feel pressured to actually keep up the pace of lots of words. So far I think the Hulk article was the longest, but this one might be a bit longer. As long as you people don’t actually expect anything from me, we’ll get along nicely.

Back to the topic, I had the option to actually purchase the game recently. I passed it up for the GameBoy Player though, and I stand by my decision. My b-day is only two months away (quite literally), and I can wait that long. Then Advance Wars 2 and MegaMan Battle Network 3 will be mine! Aah sequels, is there anything they can’t do?

~Ryan

MegaMan 4 – Starring Skull Man!

To be completely honest, I’ve been wanting to do an article on a NES game for a long time. When we finished Chat Radio #2, I knew that I had found my calling. Maybe not my calling, but it was some kind of sign, because it was then that I found the perfect game for my first video game article: MegaMan 4, or as it is known to the higher classes, MegaMan IV. Damn social butterflies. Actually, damn all butterflies. I don’t know why, but I don’t really like them.

“But why MegaMan 4?” you ask, “Why not MegaMan 1,2,3,5 or 6? Or MegaMan Soccer?” The answer is simple, really. 1) MegaMan 4 features the best Robot Master ever, Skull Man and 2) MegaMan Soccer was for SNES. I distinctly said in the paragraph above this that I wanted to review a NES game. And NES game I will. Oh yes. Oh NES. Sentence that really has no use except for to make this paragraph look longer than it really is.

I can already tell that this review is going to take a long time, mostly because all of my articles have taken a long time. And also, because as I type, I’m playing MegaMan 4. I need screenshots, and I didn’t have any on hand before, so I’m multitasking a bit. I know it’s something that men aren’t supposed to be able to do, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna stick to the stereotype.

When you first boot up MM4, you are treated to a nice little “movie” of Mega’s story. It all started when Dr. Light and Dr. Wily worked together to make robots that would help the humans. But for reasons unknown, Wily went nuts, took control of the robots, and went on a rampage. Light’s remaning robots, Rock and Roll were powerless to stop them, for they were mere maid-bots. But brave Rock volunteered to become the super-robot, MegaMan. He had stopped Wily a total of three times, hopefully putting him out of the biz for good. And now we’re in the present.

Once again, 8 robots have declared war on Earth, this time led by a mysterious scientist named Dr. Cossack. His name kind of souds like cock sack. High school must have been torture. Now Megs must spring back into action and defeat yet another wave of angry ‘bots. It’s not gonna win any awards, but the story of MM4 was probably one of the best of the era. Considering the kind of crap they were marketing as “video games”(read: Jaws) back then.

Sure it looks cool, but I'm too lowbrow for Roman numerals

The key to beating any MegaMan game was always to know which order you were supposed to beat the bosses in. It was like a big game or rock-paper-scissors, every boss had a special power. When you beat him you gained that power to use on the other levels. Every boss also had a weakness to one of the weapons. So the only real trick here was figuring out which one of these guys to kill first. They were all pretty tough, but I recommend starting with Toad Man, since he’s such a wuss. Wait… I just contradicted myself, didn’t I?

Toad Man really didn’t account for much, except for that he was the only frogish Robot Master within the whole series. But I guess that counted for more than I think, because he got reincarnated in MegaMan Battle Network 2 for GameBoy Advance/SP. Which, I might add, is also an excellent game. Buy it. Back to Toadie. his special weapon is called the “Rain Flush”. How it manages to count as a weapon is beyond my comprehension, but then again, most things are. Like I said before, Toadie’s a wuss, so he shouldn’t be too hard to take down with the Mega Buster. As an added bonus, you also get the Rush Marine for beating him.

Bright Man is a bit tougher, if only because his level is rather hard. Lots of spikes, peope. And as any Mega-fan knows, spikes kill you in one hit, regardless of how much life you have left. If you have the Rain Flush weapon, he’s not too bad. Of course, every boss can be taken down with the Mega Buster if necessary. I guess Bright’s name described the guy pretty well, since he was more or less a big light bulb. The bulb on his head lit up every once in a while, but I don’t think it was ever actually used as a light source. His Flash Stopper stops enemies. That’s it.

The other day I was drawing all the boss robots from MM4, and I got to seven before I was stumped. It was a decision between StarMan and PharaohMan, and I chose wrong. I don’t know why, I’m usually pretty good at remembering which bosses were in which game. It’s probably because PharaohMan is the least memorable boss in MM4. He was pretty boring actually, all he did was throw a big energy ball. Every other boss had something that did something unique(to say the most). And if short-term memory serves, his level was pretty crappy as well. The boss himself wasn’t extremely easy, and as one would expect, his .EXE incarnation is way stronger and cooler. Onto the next.

And I STILL had to buy her a wedding ring...

This is a lot more effective than it should be.

Ring Man! For some reason, his level was space-themed. I don’t know what’s so spacey about rings, and they sure didn’t have Halo back then. In any case, he was like every other boss who attacked with projectiles. Jump, shoot, jump, shoot, lather, rinse, repeat. None of them were terribly difficult in theory, but the unpredictable jumping and aim could best even the best player. Unless they had the boss’ weakness. Then it was very possible to beat them without getting hit, never mind breaking a sweat. Only I didn’t know this back when I rented the games, so it made for some frustrating times. It also explains why most of my NES controllers don’t work very well at all.

There is no broom powerful enough to defeat ME!

Next on the list we have Dust Man. Look at him! He’s got a ventilation shaft for a forehead! Mega could just sneak in there to get into the enemy base like in the movies. Maybe not, but I think it would be pretty funny. In any case, Dust Man’s level is kinda tough, since it’s got enemies that pop out of pits randomly and if you get hit, you’ll more than likely die. Then near the end there’s one of those “crushing machine” things, which poses a problem only because there’s so damn many metools lurking around inside it. As for Dusty himself, he’s a generally easy boss, even without the Ring Boomerang. His shots always go straight, so just jump. His movement is similar, so it’s a solid strategy. Your reward for beating him is the Dust Crusher, which is remarkably similar to Junk Man’s special wepon(MM7).

It’s about damn time we got to Skull Man. He’s so cool. I’m not sure why. I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the undead. Putting zombies or skeletons in a game increases the worth by about $10 by itself. Well, at least that’s what I think. It might also explain why I enjoy Castlevania and Resident Evil games so much. Anywho, Skull Man’s level is embarassingly easy, and there are two Energy Tanks to grab along the way. Skull Man himself isn’t much of a challenge either. He’ll shoot straight and diagonally and run around, pausing occasionally to use the Skull Barrier. The Dust Crusher will stomp him down in about 5 or 6 hits. Victory secures the Skull Barrier weapon, which is a non-active variation of the Leaf Shield. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve played MM2.

Perhaps the most original of these guys, I'm a submarine.

Dive Man, theoretically, has the biggest level of all. It spans the clouds right down to the bottom of some type of cyber sea. But in reality, all the levels are pretty short. It does have a good amount of spikes though, making it somewhat tricky to get through. And, as a bonus, you can find the Wire Adapter here by navigationg a chasm of spikes. What the Wire Adapter does exactly, I have not clue, but it might allow MegaMan to cling to ceilings. Dive Man is a rather tough boss, even if you do have the Skull Barrier. His missiles will follow you forever and he moves quite fast. An Energy Tank will help here. Taking him out will result in gaining the Dive Missile power.

I think that Drill Man’s level is actually the longest. It’s hard to say for sure, but I know it took me the longest to beat. It’s got a lot of spike traps at first, then falling rocks, then falling rocks over bottomless pits. Plus, there’s a whole area where you have to turn platforms on and off to progress. And hitting a switch and then changing direction to land on the newly created platform isn’t exactly easy. If and/or when you make it to Drill Man, he’ll launch drills all over the place and pop up at random places to try and catch you off guard. The Dive Missile’s homing ability makes it that much easier. Manage to kill him and you’ll bring home the Drill Bomb.

After you beat all eight bosses, you’ll be taken to Cocksack’s castle. Then you’ll have to beat so many levels until you fight the Doc himself. I don’t have the patience to play through the rest of the game on an emulator, so I’ll just guess what happens from that point on. After you beat Cossack, you’ll reveal that Dr. Wily was the bad guy all along. What a unexpected plot twist! Then you’ll have to go through hiscastle, fight all the Bosses again, and then finally beat Wily. It’s standard fare. Every 4th game and on in every MegaMan series is like that. Well, maybe that’s being a little too general. It only happens in the original and X series. None of that crap in the Battle Network series. Ah, good old MMBN.

I suppose this review should contain the general review contents, so here goes. The graphics are great. For the NES anyway. The sprites are all nice and clear, and sized well for the levels, not too big, not too small. The backgrounds seem to be a bit more detailed than the previous three games, but that’s about all the change there is. As for controls, they’re spot-on, if and only if you’re using a controller. If you’re playing the ROM and using the keyboard, be prepaed to get frustrated with the controls at least once. It might be the emulator, but the game won’t let me jump left while charging the buster, and that has caused death on more than one occasion.

The sound is just what you’d expect it to be. Fast-paced techno-ish music that fits right in with the game. Then there’s the evil music whenever one of the Docs come on screen. And the prologue has a nice tune playing too. Of course, every other MegaMan fan will say that MM2 has the best music of them all. I’m not sure if I agree or not. It’s all really similar to me. As long as it sounds good, I guess. Of course, let’s not forget sound effects. It keeps true to that jumping sound that MegaMan makes in all the NES games. I love that sound. Not sure why, but it’s just a funny sound. And all the other stuff is standard MegaMan fare too.

Overall, I give MegaMan 4 a 10/10. It might seem a bit biased becasue Skull Man is in it, but I’d give most MegaMan games 10/10. The only exceptions are MMX6, RM.EXE(WonderSwan), and MegaMan Soccer. Sure, MegaMan Soccer is a fun and hilarious game, but it’s got control issues and I’m not a huge fan of soccer. MMX6 is a good indication of why a series should die, and RM.EXE for WS was a terrible, terrible game. But back to MM4 for a second, it is a more or less perfect game, the only faults being that it’s a bit slower than modern day MM games. Otherwise, it’s all good.

The thing that really bothers me though, is that I never got the chance to own this superb game. Back when my NES was my premiere game console, I really didn’t have any money, so I couldn’t buy it. And you know that when you let parents buy you games you’re gonna end up with a lot of crap and maybe a few good ones. Luckily, my library of 30+ was pretty well-rounded, so I can’t say my parents neveer picked anything good. They did get me Punch-Out!! after all. I suppose the moral of this story is that ROMs are a Godsend.

There, finally finished! But the intro is a little bit out of date now… this definetly isn’t my first game review, and obviously, it took a very long time to finish it. But I promised that I would, and I try my damnedest to keep my promises. So now that it’s done what do I do? I was thinking something along the lines of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow or some type of Animal Crossing article. I can never predict what my next article will be.

I also took a lot of pics for this article, and a good amount of them are rather large too, so it’s taking up a lot more space than I want it to. Maybe by the time I need it, I’ll have access to a bigger amount of webspace. If only it didn’t cost so much. If you want, you could always send me some money so that I could afford some. Or, I could just make another Angelfire account and store articles on that! But it is againt the TOS… I don’t know how long it would go unnoticed. Anyways, this is the end. You can click the back button now or click the link below the table to send me an E-mail. I like E-mail.

Hulk for GCN! Smashy smashy was never so fun!

So it’s the weekend. This is the time of the week where people can party hard, go out and do stuff, not have to worry about work, that kind of thing. Me, I rent video games. Last weekend was a bit of a bust because both games I wanted were out at Rogers Video and Blockbuster. Oh, wait, Blockbuster didn’t have either of these new titlesat all, never mind available. Stupid Blockbuster. I guess what I’m trying to say is, fight the damn Americans and rent your movies and video games from Rogers instead. Unless you live in the States, then do whatever the Hell you want.

So back to the story, both games were rented out already and there was nothing else that I really wanted. But what were these magical games that could grab my interest so exclusively? The first was Burnout 2: Point of Impact. I’d assume that it’s a great game because the first was really good. Oh, it’s a racing game of you cared to know. And I’m not big on racing games, so you can bet it’s really good. The second was even more appealing, but since it wasn’t so much of a sequel as Burnout 2 was, I must admit that I was a little skeptical.

That second game was Hulk. I’m not sure why I was at all skeptical about it. Spider-Man was great. X2: Wolverine’s Revenge was even better. So that makes a 100% success rate for next-gen video games based on Marvel movies. Why should Hulk be any different? Well, to be completely honest, I’m always skeptical about a new game that doesn’t come from Nintendo or Capcom. And it just so happens that Universal Interactive made Hulk, and they don’t exactly have the best track record. But today I went back there and took that game for all it was worth. And let me tell you, it was worth all 6 of my dollars.

If I had to sum this whole review up into one word, it would be “incredible”(pun intended). Hulkis a very fun game to play, or at least I think so. Basically, it’s just another 3-D brawler, but seeing as I love that type of game, it fits me perfectly! On the flip side, there are a few stealth-oriented levels peppered throughout the game, but they’re not all bad, and definitely not something that would take away from the overall goodness of the game. But, I’ll get to that a little bit later.

Now as I said, the game is first and foremost a 3-D brawler. If you don’t quite get that, think Double Dragon or River City Ransom in 3-D. If you’re still a bit perplexed, it’s a game where you walk around and beat up enemies. I guess if I had to compare it to any other game, it would be Minority Report. They’re the same kind of game at heart, they both have lots of fighting, they both have lots of stuff to break, and they both have a lot of the same options and special features. But, Hulk has no guns or jetpacks, and Minority Report has no Hulk. I’d say they’re about even on my rating scale, if Hulkisn’t just a bit higher.

I guess the first thing that I should cover is the main game. Or, Story Mode, if you will. What this consists of are many different levels with cutscenes in the middle. And that would be one of my first gripes. The cutscenes seem to be too many in number. It’s not really the FMVs that get to me, but the actual in-game cutscenes. In some levels there are none, but in some, there’s one every few steps. Luckily, not too many levels are like that, and it doesn’t hamper the gameplay too much. And, as for the length of the game, I’m not quite sure because I haven’t beaten it yet. But if the last two Marvel games are anything to go by, there should be more than 25.

That said, the levels themselves are actually nice and long. To be more specific, they canbe nice and long. Most enemies in the game will regenerate infinitely and you can just sit there all day pounding on the same guys over and over. But if you prefer to run from these sorts of areas, you could beat the levels a lot quicker. Not to say that they’re short if you don’t intend to waste time. They can still be pretty good length, but as in most games, they all vary. Some are long, some are short, but it all comes together in the end.

As stated earlier, you’ll be playing as the Hulk for about 70% of the game. It’s good old smashing and bashing everything in sight. You can do a lot of things to rid yourself of enemies. The basic idea would be to punch them into submission, but you can also jump attack, clap, stomp, throw, bludgeon, and squish them to death if you wish. Much like in Wolverine’s Revenge, Hulk has a rage meter, and when that gets full, Hulk gets stronger, his attacks have longer range, and he might get a bit faster. It’s hard to tell, really. The only really noticeable thing about it is that you can do this super huge sonic wave attack that takes out anything in front of you.

But of course, you can also use the surroundings to your advantage. Hulk can pick up virtually anything around him from pipes to smashed helicopters and beat enemies with them. Or if you prefer, you can just throw them. The only time the fighting can really get overwhelming is the boss stages. The first boss, Half-Life the vampire, is relatively simple to beat, but the catch is, you can’t touch him or he’ll drain your energy. The second boss fight is against a red Hulk-like guy named Madman, where you have to destroy computer consoles while avoiding him and his cronies. Then once that’s done you have to fight him in his rage mode. And if that wasn’t hard enough, there’s the constant threat of the respawning bazooka guys. And that’s only what I’ve seen so far.

For the other 30% of the game, you’re playing as Bruce Banner, scientist on the lam. His levels are a lot less action oriented, having him rely mostly on stealth to survive. Yup, just when you’re having fun pounding soldiers’ heads into the floor, the game goes all Metal Gear Solid on you. Of course, I really shouldn’t compare this to MGS, because if I did, Hulkwould rank about as highly as that fungus growing behind most department store toilets. But that’s just the Banner levels. The rest of the game still rocks the house. The only part that really amazed me about these levels is that the guys who made it have a different excuse for every single level as to why Banner can’t go Hulk. But as you can probably tell, I don’t want to write anything else about the stupid Banner levels.

So, what do you do when you’ve beaten the game? Well, first off I’d suggest beating it on the two difficulty levels that you didn’t the first time through. After that, it’s just playing for fun. Of course, there are plenty of extras in Hulk. Extras make me happy. Most notably is the Challenge Mode. It’s more or less just fighting arenas where you can see how many bad guys you can kill. There are five different Challenge games, the first two are endurance matches, the second two are timed matches, and the last one, entitled “Hulk Smash”, I haven’t played yet so I can’t tell you what it is. The first one is unlocked at the beginning of the game, but the other four open up as you progress through the Story Mode.

Next up we have the “Hulk Unleashed” section, which is comprised of a bunch of movies and such. There are two trailers for the Hulk movies, the first being the infamous “teaser trailer”, and the second being the more recent “trailer trailer”. There’s also one of those “Making of” videos, but it’s the making of the game, not the movie as you might expect. As you progress through the game, you can also view any FMV scenes that you’ve seen here. Finally, there’s a “Hulk Movie F/X” movie, but it’s locked so I can’t tell you exactly what it is. Popular speculation leads me to beleive that it has something to do with the movie’s special effects. In addition to that, they’ve added some movie production art to sweeten the deal and make the fanboys salivate.

Finally, we have the cheat menu. Strangely enough, you have to unlock all the cheats with codes. Well, maybe that’s not that strange but you have to unlock almost all the production art and one of the movies with said codes as well. Then there’s the complication. There are two different ways to enter codes. And each code works uniquely to one of these ways, never both. The first way to enter codes is to simply go to the “enter code” menu and type it in. The second way is to find a cheat console somewhere in the game and type it in there. Ant it pretty much goes without saying that these cheat consoles are only in Banner’s levels, and they’re pretty out of the way. I’m not even sure if you can find out the codes in the course of the game or if you have to look them up in a magazine or on the internet. And, a cool little rumour that’s going around says that a super-secret code will be given in the Hulk movie that opens some kind of new gameplay mode. If it’s true, I think that’s pretty cool.

So, now that I’ve covered every possible aspect of gameplay, what about the rest? I’ll start with graphics. Just to give early warning, this game is cel-shaded. But not in the traditional sense. Only the characters really look it, and it’s more of a comic type shading than a cartoonish style. All in all it looks pretty good, especially on the non-human characters. The environments are pretty well done, but some of the textures just don’t look right. Not that they’re all pixely like in Super Mario Sunshine, but there seems to be a lack of detail. Other than that small problem, the game looks very nice, and even the most spoiled of graphics babies should enjoy the way Hulklooks.

I, being the audiophile I am, place a lot of weight on the music/sound of a game. The Hulk only disappoints in the aspect that the background music is rather faint and can get annoying. It’s not anything catchy that you’ll be humming. I suggest turning the music volume all the way off (but keep the sound volume on) and put on the radio or a CD. Something like Rammstein or Disturbed would suit Hulkvery well. As for the sound effects, they’re all good. The clanging, smashing, all that stuff, it’s all there and it sounds just fine.

As for voices, the voice acting is done rather well, almost as good as in Batman: Dark Tomorrow. The fact that enemies are very vocal makes for a hilarious experience. “Oh crap!! I need backup!” and “Hey! Put him down!” are just a couple samles of the rather humourous things enemies will say as you pound your way though enemies. Even banner talks to himself while you play his levels. My only gripe is that Hulk never talks. No “Hulk smash!” or “Hulk angry!“. Just grunt and roar, grunt and roar. Oh well. All in all, I think this category did pretty well.

And now we come to control. As was Wolverine, Hulk controls a bit sloppy, but it really doesn’t matter since you’ll be mashing the A button most of the time. One significant problem is aiming. It’s tough to get Hulk to face exactly where you want him to, and using the lock-on function is mostly useless, because enemies are almost always in groups of 4-8, so you probably won’t lock-on to the guy you wanna hit. Like I said, just pounding the A button will do fine in most cases. Another problem is launching the rage attacks. One of them is B+Y, and as those familiar with the GCN controller will know, pushing those buttons at the same time is quite the task. Luckily, you can also press Y+X to do (I think) the same attack. Another problem is the first-person look. Control is way too sensitive and it’s basically useless. Final gripe here is that you have no control over the camera whatsoever, which changes angles with the wind. So, I’d say the controls are mediocre at best.

Finally, we come to replayability. Essentaily, it’s a rather reply value-less game, but you can go through it at least 3 times, one for each difficulty level. After that, it’s just Challenge Mode and playing around with all the different cheats, some of which can actually be quite entertaining. Of course, if you’re really hyped up about the movie, you an watch the trailers over and over again, as I did with my Ocarina of Time/Master Quest disc while waiting for The Wind Waker.

For a final score, I give Hulk an 8. The lack of good music and sloppy controls lost one point each. But, I can tell you enough that this is an extremely fun game while it lasts. You might just want to rent it once or twice because it’s not gonna last much longer after you finally get bored with it. Or, if it eventually goes down to $20 like Spider-Man did, then you should definitely think about buying it. I know I’m gonna enjoy this game all the way until it has to go back. Yeah. Rent good idea, buy only if bargain bin. Hulk angry if you not play Hulk’s game. Hulk want smash more little people. Hulk really need voice in game.

Yup. That’s how I feel about Hulk. If you wanna take my word for it, go ahead, but if you’re some kind of stupid person that doesn’t like beat ’em up games, you can go play some other game. But Hulkis great. I strongly urge anyone and everyone to go and at least try it out. Very, very fun game. Needs two-player smackdown mode though. Maybe that’s what the mysterious “movie cheat” will be. Who knows? It is just a rumour after all.

So this brings an end to article number 11 I think, not including Chat Radio, but including the Gallery and Guides. I think so anyway. Yeah. Well, the Easter thing was the 10th, but I did include Chat Radio in that figure. But the numbers don’t really matter, it’s the quality of my many, many offerings, right? I guess it doesn’t matter either way because I don’t really have many readers yet. But 3 is a good start. So that’s all for today, see you in the MegaMan 4 article!

Nintendo Surprise: The Nintendo surprise bag

It’s really amazing how much merchandise that Nintendo pumps out. Sadly, most of it isn’t exactly the kind of stuff you want to buy, and very little of it is worthy promotion for the GameCube and GameBoy Advance. Sure the Pokemon line goes over really well with kids, but very few older Nintendo hardcores want Pokemon toys all over their room. I don’t. At one point, I did have a small Gloom hanging out on my dresser, but it got lost. Kinda unfortunate because Gloom is one of my favorite Pokemon.

Of course, they have gone to certain lengths to make Mario and Zelda action figure lines. You saw a few of them in Hylian Idol. We even got a few burger restaurant deals, one promoting Super Mario Bros 3 at McDonald’s, which was a long time ago. Last year, there were Mario toys at Wendy’s, which I believe came along to help sell Super Mario Advance. The most recent was the Burger King deal, which was a menagerie of Nintendo most popular characters, such as Mario, Link, Donkey Kong, and Kirby. Everyone loves Kirby. Why we didn’t see any kind of promotion for his TV show is beyond me though.

(>o.o)>

Whee! Look at him dance! I guess that’s an ample intro for today. I really don’t think it’s that necessary anymore. After all, they do sway off the path of the articles a bit. But in the quest for longer and better articles, I must do what I have to do. But, enough redundant rambling, I’ll just start the article now.

A long time ago, actually, less than a year to date, I was browsing the dollar stores of a faraway land and came across quite the treasure. It was a simple plastic bag with candy in it, but that was just the base idea. This bag of goodies was a Nintendo Surprise. Of course, the surprise wasn’t really there, since there was a transparent area on the front of the bag. That and they all had more or less the exact same things in them. I went back this year to seek more of the bags-o-fun and I found them, only they had changed a bit.

The old Nintendo Surprise contained a sucker, a Ring Pop-like thing, a slab of gum, and a game tip card. They all sported different characters. The gimmick was that you could collect all of the different characters and candies. I guess the only surprise is what character bust you found in the ring pop. There were 2 different sucker “statues”, 6 character busts in the ring pops, and 18 different portraits in the gum. The only problem with this is that they seem to be extremely rare, and no kid would be able to resist eating them.

Now, produced by Au’some Candies, the “Nintendo Surprises” are simply plastic bags containing a bunch of gum. It’s really a sad story. Why? Because the gum was the only collectible that you could really eat. the others left plastic remains to collect. Fortunately, you won’t want to eat the gum after you try one piece. it tastes absolutely horrible. Bad, sinful, imperfect, rancid, unsuitable, wicked, tainted, hurtful, noxious, and terrible are all words that go hand in hand with this gum. the package says “sour” but this stuff tastes worse that eating Kool-Aid powder. I kid you not.

As I stated in one of the above paragraphs, there are 18 slabs of disgust that you can collect. Though, Au’some Candies seems to have cut a few corners when they were making them. The different characters are the following: Mario, Princess Peach, Luigi, Bowser, Paratroopa, Larry Koopa, Ganondorf, Ludwig Von Koopa, Yoshi, Ganondorf, Link, Link, Link, Diddy Kong, Link, Donkey Kong, King K. Rool, and Donkey Kong. Notice the abundance of Link. Even the two different DK gums are the same picture, just one is reversed. At least they look pretty good and not at all like some poor African kids drew them on.

I also mentioned earlier that the Nintendo Surprise contained a card with a game tip on it. These ones are no different. But the use of the word “latest” is a bit of an exaggeration. At least now. I guess that I forgot to mention one little detail. After a little bit of researching, I found out that these things were made way back in 2001. I suppose it’s not as bad as the Hulk gum that my brothers got. If you read X-Entertainment, you’ve seen it before. And if you want a bit of a more in-depth look at the 8-year-old crap, check out Matt’s Video Store article.

So, here’s the contents of one of the packages. It seems a lot more impressive than it really is. A LOT. There’s not a lot I can say about this pile of crap that I won’t say later so instead I’ll tell you about this GameBoy Advance link cable that I’m holding. Firstly and most importantly, it’s a pretty shade of white, with a white tip for the first player, and gray tips for the second, third, and fourth players. That said, it obviously has four heads to link GBAs together. It’s made by Pelican and was a lot cheaper than buying three Nintendo-brand cables. there’s also a little switch on the connector that enables it to work with GameBoy Colour units. Back to what’s important.

As you can clearly see, they come in a wide variety of colors. All three colors of the… uh… groraninkbow. Ha. Got outta that one with style. Oh yeah. Anyway, it’s plain to see that a character is not confined to a single color. They can appear on any one of the three shades of gross. If you look even closer, you can see both Donkey Kongs and how it’s the same picture, just flipped horizontally, just as I said. On the upside, I was lucky and scored both Koopa Kids. I’m at a loss to see why they didn’t use all of them. If they hadn’t repeated characters there would have been enough to host all seven of ’em.

Now, I’ll try my best to describe what all of them taste like. Orange is clearly the best of the three. Incredibly enough, it does taste like orange candy-type stuff. Only it’s way too soury-like. Bad memories of Kool-Aid powder are coming back… Yuck. Well, I guess I was wrong. Pink is definitely the best. It tastes decent, much like one of those sour soother things. It’s still not worth eating, but at least it doesn’t make me want to throw up so that there’s a better taste in my mouth. Green is supposed to taste like apple, I think. It does a little bit, but then you notice that it has a hint of BILE in it. The package wasn’t lying when it said they were sour. Maybe not as sour as some other candy, but it isn’t exactly tame.

Look, it’s the Game Tip card! When I say card, I don’t mean card in the normal sense, or even the tradeable sense. It’s just a piece of hard paper with a picture and some words on it. Oddly enough, it’s the only thing included in the Nintendo Surprise that isn’t collectible. I guess you could collect all of the different tips, but to date I’ve only seen three different ones, and I and my brothers have been through at the very least twenty packs of this stuff. Oh, I forgot another important thing. The gum’s taste lasts for an average of 40 seconds. You’d be much better off with some Wal-Mart candy machine gum.

As usual, you can click on the pics to enlarge them if you want to read them. The first tip is for the Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages. It’s pretty handy, and is something you might not think of right away. But, most people who played the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past have already figured this out. The second “tip” is both asinine and redundant. It tells you that in Super Mario Advance Luigi can jump the highest. It might have been helpful, but the game itself gives you this tip, so like I said, it’s redundant. Note that they have French tips too. If you can’t read the language, don’t worry, it says the same thing. This also leads me to believe that Nintendo Surprises were only distributed in Canada.

For the sole purpose of writing this article, I saved some of the plastic carcasses from the original Nintendo Surprise. Shown above are the sucker cases. There are only two to collect, so if you went the whole nine yard to get all the gum pieces, you’d have a lot of extra sucker cases. The two characters chosen to be immortalized as suckers were Mario and Yoshi. I don’t see why not. But they could have just as easily modded the Mario mold a little and at least made a Luigi. Oh well.

If you did manage to get you hands on a lot of these guys, they could be used as really low-budget action figures. I have several Yoshis and use them to war against my Star Wars figures with Mario as their leader. The detachable bases can also double as hats or a bad game of stack-the-sucker-bases. That’s what they seem to be doing in the picture above. To tell the truth, I’m really scraping for idea for this one. There’s a cool picture of a pelican on my GameBoy Advance link cable.

Pictured above are the remains of a couple of my Nintendo ring pops. They come in the same colours as the gum, but they taste a whole lot better. In fact, so do the suckers. Everything tastes better than that gum, except clams. I hate clams. Stupid chicken nugget-looking clams. I hate you, clams. I hate you and your cousin the oyster. In fact, I hate all seafood. Except sushi, I’ve never tried sushi. Or lobster. It’s pretty sad, but I plan to try it the next time we go to Red Lobster. Which should be in about 3 years. So I may never try lobster until it’s too late. I bet lobster tastes better than that stupid gum. And clams.

By now you should be aware that this bag of sugar was made for kids. This is further evidenced by the fact that the rings barely fit onto the second joints of my fingers, never mind the third. It also teaches us that Link doesn’t look good in pink. Red, blue, and green yes, but pink no. Yoshi can come in any colour and seems to be enjoying his orangyness quite well. I think green Yoshi is a bit jealous of orange Yoshi’s happiness. And Link seems to be jealous of both of their decent colour palettes and full bodies. Poor Link is just a bust of himself.

While I’m writing about shoddy Nintendo products, I guess I should mention this GameCube watch. It’s not really that bad, I did get it for free after all. My complaints focus mostly on the extremely easy to press buttons, causing the time to change by itself. If compared to most digital watches of today, it’s got no options, just the time and date. No fancy bells, whistles, or beeps. Then again, the time and date are all you really need. I never need a stopwatch or alarm anyway, so I guess I don’t care.

Now, back on topic, after finding my goods, I went to the dollar store next to the dollar store I had just been in. There I browsed the party favors and found some Groucho masks without the mustache. I had to have them. I’m not sure why I wanted them, they don’t fit, but I wanted them anyway. So that’s me with one of the masks on. Wow… I look nerdier than usual. It would probably have been a good idea not to upload it, but nobody who would judge me reads this site anyway. I guess I’m safe.

So to turn around the theme of the article and show a excellent Nintendo product and add some cool, I’m including another picture of my AGB playing MegaMan Zero. Once again, it’s an awesome game and if you have an AGB, you owe it to yourself to get it. Really. Or you could just wait a few months and get MegaMan Zero 2. Or you could not wait and import RockMan Zero 2 if you don’t care about knowing what to do or can read Japanese. In any case, it’s one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. Well, that’s about that for that.

So now you know what I was blabbering on about in that one news update. Ummmm… this whole conclusion part is the toughest thing to write. I guess I could mention that I have plenty of gum left if anybody wants to try some. I’m more than willing to let go of a piece or eight. That’s all I have to say for today. I have no more ideas about what to review, so I don’t know when the next article will be. Maybe I’ll finish that MegaMan article sometime within the week.