Category Archives: Wii

I Almost Forgot What It Felt Like

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Yesterday I managed to do something that I haven’t done in a while now: complete a game. And not just one game, but two games!

First, I played Flower, which I bought a while back but hadn’t even tried yet. This one was actually pretty quick to finish as it’s fairly short, but it’s still pretty good. You control a petal that glides around on the wind, and it’s serene and relaxing to start, and then suddenly develops into something much more game-like. It’s really more about the emotional effect it induces than gameplay, though.

And second, I finished off Little Big Planet’s main story levels. I did about half of them two weeks ago (and forgot to write about it), and went back and did the rest of them today, along with some of the community levels with a friend riding co-op. It was a decent enough game, but the controls and physics were frequently aggravating enough that I don’t think I really want to spend any more time on it. It treats everything, yourself included, as real objects, and the momentum makes it really difficult to do things like jump on small platforms. The lives system also seemed a bit unfair at times; there would often be one really difficult section and if you failed it, you had to go back and redo the much-easier rest of the level all over again, and the aforementioned control issues didn’t help.

I’ve also recently played through a bit of New Super Mario Bros Wii, and so far I’m up to the middle of world 2. I don’t know if the game’s getting harder, or if my reflexes are getting worse (I used to be able to finish the original SMB no sweat), but it feels a lot tougher than I’m used to. Making jumps doesn’t seem as precise as I’d like, which leads to a lot of deaths.

And I also fired up Lego Rock Band and worked through the first two tiers of songs. The presentation is cute, as expected, and there are a few good songs in there, but a lot of them are teen-oriented ones that I haven’t heard of before, and don’t really appeal all that much to me. I’m thus still not sure whether I’ll export the songs back to RB2 or not. I’m not sure how far into LRB I’ll get when I’d prefer to play songs back in RB2 either. LRB does have at least one new feature: occasional rock challenges where you do something storyline-related, like demolish a building or scare ghosts with your music. They don’t really play that much differently, with just some restrictions like not being able to use star power, but they have custom background animations at least.

Peach Owes Me Bigtime Now

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As expected, I finished off both Braid and Paper Mario: TTYD today. Some of the later puzzles in Braid are fairly devious, but I wasn’t stuck for too long on most of them. There was one though, in world 5-4, that I had to get a hint for from a forum. I would never have solved it myself, since I wouldn’t have even thought of the trick necessary. The final world was fairly clever, with one long ‘chase’ sequence that winds up being the game’s big emotional reveal.

And the ending is…rather difficult to interpret. You can read in all sorts of metaphors about loss and guilt and experience, depending on your own perspective, but I’m not really enough of a smarty-man to fully evaluate it.

Paper Mario: TTYD took a bit longer than expected, and I almost failed to finish it since I wasn’t really well-prepared enough. Grinding levels turned out to be extremely slow, so I just barged ahead with the final chapter. It was full of the requisite puzzles that require you to exercise all of the skills and use all of party members you picked up along the way, of course, but at the end was a sequence of boss fights that depleted a few too many of my healing items. The final fight was fairly long and had two stages to it, and I wasn’t very confident of success at the midway point since I was almost completely out of items, but I just barely finished the boss off, with stats low enough that I probably would have only survived one or two more rounds. I had a similar problem with the GBA Mario & Luigi game, where I have a save right before the final boss but still haven’t beat him in the few attempts I tried.

But it’s over, at least, even if it’s a fairly traditional everything’s-back-to-normal Mario ending.

The Moon Is Full Of Surprises

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I’m on to the last chapter now of Paper Mario: TTYD, as Chapter 7 turned out to be pretty short and I finished it off in one go tonight. It was a fairly simple revisit-each-previous-area quest to find someone, and then a trip to the moon to infiltrate the X-Naut base. The weirdest part here was encountering another Thwomp in the base, upon which a quiz show broke out…

Before going on, I think I’m going to grind xp a bit (I’m still a few levels below the recommended point), and do a few other things like climbing the wrestling ladder again and doing the Pit of 100 Trials, since I suspect this will pretty much be the point of no return.

Pow, Straight To The Moon

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I got back to Paper Mario: TTYD today and finished off Chapters 5 and 6 in one shot. The most notable bit of this stretch was a segment where you solve a few mysteries on a train ride, right out of the old detective novels. Well, with less murder, this is a Mario game after all… It did turn into the usual bit of exploration and combat at the end, but at least it didn’t make me backtrack a half-dozen times like other chapters have.

I must be pretty close to the end now, as there’s only one more star to collect. For that, I apparently need to convince a village of Russian-like bob-ombs to shoot me out of their cannon…

An Explosive Development

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I also kicked off Chapter 5 in Paper Mario: TTYD tonight, this time with a seafaring theme. Of course, our group was almost immediately shipwrecked and split up… It didn’t take long to find the others though, and after rescuing Bobbery, the Bob-omb navigator, he joined our party. As a bomb, I can now use him to open up cracked areas that I’d seen in other spots before, and he’ll undoubtedly be necessary for the rest of this chapter.

Now I have to figure out how to get into a cave where the alleged treasure is hidden…

Wait, Cars Can’t Drive On Ladders…

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While sorting some CDs away, I stumbled upon the Trackmania United disc and couldn’t resist firing it up for a bit of online play. My ladder ranking had fallen a lot since I hadn’t played in a while, but with the way the rankings work, I was gaining hundreds of ladder points per track. If I had kept playing, it wouldn’t have taken long to crack the 100,000 rank mark again. (That might not sound impressive until you note that there are now well over a million players on the rankings…)

And then it was back to Paper Mario: TTYD, where I did Chapter 4 all in one go. This one took place in Twilight Town, with the expected spooky theme and Boos all over the destination. Though I wasn’t expecting to see villagers being turned into pigs… Unfortunately not only do they make you run back and forth between the town and a steeple numerous times, but the plot twist (Mario’s name and body is stolen) essentially has you redoing everything you just did in the chapter all over again after the chapter has supposedly ended. Clever, perhaps, but annoying.

One interesting thing it did was that in order to get Mario’s name back, you had to guess the enemy’s name. But in order to prevent people from just plugging it in from a walkthrough, the enemy had also stolen a letter of the alphabet that you needed, so you had to go ‘rescue’ this letter before you could properly enter his name.

Lost? Seems Like Plenty Of It Around

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I was going to play a bit more of Paper Mario today, but instead I got distracted by something I’d been curious about for a while now: Lost Winds, one of the launch WiiWare titles.

It turned out to be, as expected, a rather short little game that only took a little over three hours to finish. I think that’s a fair length for it though, as any longer and the more annoying aspects of the controls would have become far more frustrating. You move the protagonist with the nunchuk, but use gestures with the remote for any other actions, including jumping, lighting torches, blowing objects around, attacking enemies, and so on. It works pretty well most of the time, though sometimes it’s a bit hard to push that rock just where you really want it.

It’s fairly easy, since it’s generous with the revives and most of the enemies aren’t much of a threat to begin with, and I didn’t even get hit once during the final boss battle. The only real challenge was figuring out where to go next, since you have to backtrack to some areas and it’s not immediately obvious were the new part you can go is. It’s definitely not the game you want if you’re looking for a challenge, but it was decent enough for a relaxing weekend time-killer.

Mario Retires From The Ring

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Fiddling around with all these other games is all well and good, but sometimes I have to remind myself that I’ve still got six zillion other games left to finish off first. So, today I finally got back to Paper Mario: TTYD.

I finished off Chapter 3, which was a fairly uneventful climb through the rest of the wrestling rankings, with the obligatory twist about who was really behind all the recent disappearances, and after beating the real enemy I got the star for that chapter.

Since I had recently picked up Yoshi in my party, I could explore a few new areas in the sewers and found some more star pieces and shines there, and finally remembered to go use the shines to upgrade party members (Yoshi and Goombella, for now). And I went and did a few more jobs from the Trouble Centre that had opened up, though in the end I think I pretty much broke even on the costs and rewards.

Next up, the Twilight Woods.

And Now It’s Nintendo’s Turn

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MotionPlus: The cynical side of me might think of it as a fix for the remote not being as good as it could have been in the first place, and I didn’t really have a problem with it in the first place, but oh well, more accuracy is still better than nothing. Wii Sports Resort might do a good job of showing how useful it’ll actually be.

Animal Crossing: City Folk: I enjoyed the DS version of Animal Crossing a fair bit, so I’ll almost certainly pick this one up. It doesn’t really look like there’s an awful lot new over the DS version so far though, aside from the setting.

WiiSpeak: Dammit, I’ve already got way too many accessories and cables running around here…

GTA DS: I still have yet to finish the other GTA games, first. I passed on the PSP-based versions of it, so I’ll probably not bother with this one too.

And there was a bunch of other stuff that I’m sure will keep the kids busy, but wasn’t really interesting, and a distinct lack of Mario or Zelda news.

Sudden Career Change

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Paper Mario: TTYD has taken a bit of a twist, as Mario has now become…a wrestler? Apparently wrestling is the big thing in Glitzville, and the champion’s belt looks like it’s the Crystal Star, so I need to fight my way to the top. There are 20 rankings to fight through, divided into the big leagues and little leagues, and each match has a random special condition attached to it, like not switching partners, or appealing to the crowd at least once.

The first 10 rankings were pretty easy, and I got an egg that hatched into a Yoshi that I needed to beat the 10th rank team since I can’t harm them any other way. Unfortunately I got screwed on that battle the first time around because you have to use Yoshi’s special attack to harm them, but the random condition for the match was that no special attacks were allowed…

It was then discovered that the star in the belt was a fake, and upon reaching rank 8 I got a strange delivery from a Mr. X of a hammer that I can use to break certain obstacles, and directions to use it in the minor league locker room. Unfortunately to get back in there I’ll have to let myself drop in rank a few places, and I’ll do that later.