Category Archives: Specific Games/Series

It’s Okay, They’re Spheres, Not Balls

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Since there was still time to kill, the other big chunk of the evening was spent in Super Mario Galaxy, and although I’m not very far into it yet, it’s definitely a winner.

It continues the 3D platforming as seen in Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine, but with some important differences. Instead of the typical flat hills or vertical towers you normally expect, most of the action takes place on small planetoids, with the camera following Mario from above, with the occasional trip inside the planetoid where Mario runs around inside like it’s some kind of giant hamster ball. Gravity can vary wildly as you find yourself running up walls and jumping around edges to ‘fall’ on the other side, and it’s a bit disorienting at first, but you quickly get used to it.

There are multiple galaxies you can visit, each made up of a bunch of different planetoids, and each planetoid has a minor task you have to accomplish on it before you can rocket off to the next one in the series. Most of them are your traditional spherical planet, with different types of rocky/grassy/metallic/etc terrain, but there are also things like pirate ships and cylinders containing platforming sections that you can land on.

There’s not much control over which planetoids you visit, though. Unlike Mario 64, SMG is a lot more linear. Instead of having a bunch of different paintings you can choose from, galaxies are unlocked in a series by reaching star counts (so far, at least), and the stars in each galaxy can only be collected in a specific order, whereas in Mario 64 you could accidentally find or deliberately decide to go for a different star than you first selected.

The controls are pretty effective, with the nunchuk controlling movement and ducking, and the remote controlling jumping and attacks. You can defeat enemies both by jumping on them, as usual, or by shaking the remote and causing Mario to spin around and stun enemies. You can also use the remote to control a cursor that you use to collect ‘star bits’, which you can then also shoot back at the screen to stun enemies. There will probably be more advanced gymnastics required later on, and it’s been pretty easy so far, but I’m still fairly close to the start.

My Wii has been somewhat neglected lately, but SMG is the game that’s finally made me glad I picked one up.

Here Feeshy, Feeshy…

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Not much of note today, as most of my time in WoW was spent working on raising my fishing skill, first by Ratchet and then over at Zoram Strand. I stopped once I hit 125 so I could use the Expert book I picked up in Booty Bay earlier.

I’ve heard that fishing is more profitable now, but my main goal at the moment is to use it to help raise my cooking skill, and with tonight’s catches I managed to get cooking from 70 up to 127.

And To Round Out The Day…

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Speaking of cleaning up quests, I popped onto WoW briefly and finished up some in the Stonetalon Mountains range. And picked up a few more, of course. I hate the quests that tell you to report to Soandso over on the other side of the world; if you take it, it clutters up your quest log for quite a while since you might not be heading there anytime soon, but if you don’t take it, you could forget about it, you might miss out on an unsharable chain quest, and have to go even farther out of your way to go back and get it.

And to kill a bit of time while waiting for other things to download, I finished a few more Switchball levels, and am now halfway through world 4. Timing is becoming a bit more important, but it’s still mostly puzzles, and my overall completion times continue to be nowhere near the times needed for medals. I don’t think I’ll have the time to go back and practice them enough to get medals, but it’s still pretty fun.

Mmmm, Tubers…

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It was back to WoW for a bit tonight, as I first finished off some of the simpler quests around Stonetalon Mountains and then our regular group hooked up and we did Razorfen Kraul. I’m still too low for most of the quests in there though, so I could only do the escort and tubers ones.

Afterwards I then made it over to Booty Bay for the first time to turn in a quest there and at least get the flight path, and then it was back to the Barrens to head to Dustwallow Marsh to pick up the expert first aid manual.

Blizzard Presses The Turbo Switch

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Today was the release of the long-awaited 2.3 patch for WoW, and aside from various small UI improvements and the usual class changes, the major new feature is supposed to be faster leveling and better loot at lower levels.

So, tonight we decided to put it to the test at Shadowfang Keep. I couldn’t really tell if the experience was that much better since most of the critters were green even to me, but the loot drops were definitely better than usual, with far more blues dropping than you’d expect in a single trip.

The drops are probably better to counterbalance the fact that you’ll probably be in the instances less often if you’re leveling faster. Now to see just how fast that is…

Edit: Ah, here’s a list of all the new loot in the lower-level instances.

Okay, Maybe A Bit More

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I still had a bit of time to kill before bed, so I figured I’d celebrate the release of Super Mario Galaxy (though I haven’t picked it up yet) by playing a bit of Super Mario Bros 3 via the ol’ GBA cartridge.

I last left off partway through World 3, and it didn’t take long before I remembered why — World 3-4 was a royal pain in the ass for me. Either the flying goomba or the Lakitu just past that would inevitably finish me off; SMB3 was a lot less forgiving about the temporary invulnerability you’d get after taking a hit, so I’d often die even if I was big when I’d take a jump only to hit a thrown spiny and then hit Lakitu himself a second later.

Tonight though, after failing 3-4 a handful of times, I was about to try 3-5 instead as an alternate path, but actually managed to beat 3-4 for once. The rest of the world was much easier, and now my game is saved right at the start of World 4.

Them’s The TCP Breaks

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Well I *had* intended to spend the rest of the evening in Hellgate: London, but I kept getting disconnected every ten minutes or so, so screw that. The launch of the online play has had…problems…

So, instead I found myself back in WoW again. I was just going to do some of the more tedious quests around Taren Mill, but wound up signing the guild charter, managing stuff at the auction house, and working on mining and smithing more than anything else. Nothing in WoW ever truly goes as planned, of course.

Adjective: Possessive Noun

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Tonight was fairly productive in WoW, with a run through Wailing Caverns and some quests in Hillsbrad giving me a few useful new pieces of equipment. I also hit level 25, though leveling is definitely getting slower now, so the good ol’ 2-levels-per-night days are nearing their end.

During a lull I got a chance to check out the demo for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. It initially feels and looks a lot like a Tomb Raider clone with a male lead instead, but it puts more emphasis on making the shooting parts less arcadey than TR, forcing you to use the cover system, not letting you take too many hits too quickly, and requiring careful aiming. I didn’t get too far though, as I ran out of ammo and got slaughtered at the big fight at the ruins. There were some bits that required you to use the motion controls (walking across logs, throwing grenades) that felt awkward.

I’ll have to try the demo again to see if I can get farther, as it hasn’t really sold me on it so far. Or maybe my skills have just degraded to the point where I need to start playing on Easy… :P