Until the current console generation, I’d not gotten into the Zelda games. But when I tried out Twilight Princess, I fell in love. You’ll notice that when I listed my top five favorite games, Twilight Princess was number five. “So!”, I said, “This is what all the fuss is about. Zelda games are awesome! I needs to try me some more! That Ocarina game seems to be one that everybody loves; I’ll try that.” I downloaded Ocarina of Time on the Wii Virtual Console, played for about an hour, and got bored. Or maybe I got distracted. What else was I playing back then? No More Heroes? Oblivion? Elite Beat Agents? Not sure. But just recently, I started playing Wind Waker based on a friend’s recommendation. He said that Wind Waker was his favorite Zelda game. I finished the game yesterday and I really did enjoy it. But did I enjoy Wind Waker more than Twilight Princess?

Wind Waker had a number of things going for it. The cel-shaded art style was a big one, although I felt that the cel-shaded graphics in Okami were way better. Wind Waker’s music was also stellar. The music in Wind Waker was even integrated into the combat, with musical hits coinciding with Link’s sword strikes. The “Mini Boss” battle music is fun, “Graaandma” is a very simple piece with a lot of heart, and I particularly enjoyed the music for the battle against Gohdan. The various themes for the island towns are all good. The sole advantage that Twilight Princess had in its music was the fact that it was performed by an actual orchestra, whereas Wind Waker’s music was synthesized. Nonetheless, I preferred the songs in Wind Waker. The ocean travel music was amongst the best bits of the Wind Waker soundtrack, which was good given that you do so damn much travelling in the game.

And that was one of my main complaints about Wind Waker – the monotonous ocean travel. Whereas Twilight Princess had scenic views, forests, and fields with landmarks, Wind Waker had just… water. I suppose it was a cheap way to make the game world big, but I much prefer Twilight Princess’s Hyrule over the vast “fishless oceans” in Wind Waker. And on that note, I really hated the sea battles. Whenever possible, I avoided them. Fleeing was so much easier than spending five minutes trying to hit some swimming enemy with a cannonball, getting knocked off of my boat four times, and ending up at half health all for no reward at the end. Those Gyorg were the worst. They’d pursue me for fifteen minutes straight while I sailed from one corner of the world to another. Often I’d set down the controller for five minutes and surf the web while travelling from place to place since it was so boring, but those damn Gyorg would force me to spend the time dodging instead. Once I got the Song of Winds this was less of an issue, but still a pain.

Looking back now on my original review of Twilight Princess, I remember many of the things I’d forgotten about Twilight Princess. It did so many different things, and it did them all so well. I’ve discussed gameplay variety a number of times before, and Twilight Princess accomplished that variety better than any other game I can think of. In Twilight Princess you snowboard, herd goats, go fishing, hang-glide from a chicken, sumo wrestle, and a number of other things I’m sure I’m forgetting. And Twilight Princess’s dungeons were the most creative I’ve ever seen. The water temple with its waterway-related puzzles was a standout, but Twilight Princess’s other dungeons had you swinging from ropes, swimming underwater, walking on walls, and hook-shotting on a floating island. I’ve heard people speak of the game’s muted colors, and I guess that I can see them if I really look, but to me the pros far outweigh the cons. Wind Waker had a bit of stealth gameplay at the very beginning which I really liked, but not nearly the variety of Twilight Princess.

All this talk really makes me want to replay Twilight Princess, but it was such a long game, and I’m wary of Zelda burnout given the upcoming Skyward Sword game, to which I’m very much looking forward.

Insanely ridiculous. That’s how I’d describe No More Heroes. And I love it.

I was a fan of the first game, but it had issues. In the sequel, many of those issues have been fixed. And as far as over-the-top goes, they’ve outdone themselves. It’s like the boss battle in the first game in which the boss kills himself before you have a chance to fight him. It’s like the shopping cart lady with the giant laser.

I’m not far into No More Heroes 2, but in one of the boss battles, I was surprised when my opponent suddenly flew away. To outer space. Then, he got into a mech. I was further surprised when my own character (in a cutscene) mounted his motorcycle, fired its rocket boosters to follow his opponent into outer space, and nonchalantly entered his own mech, commenting on how he’d been itching for a chance to use it. The boss battle became a mech vs mech battle. It’s insane out-of-the-box moments like this that make me love No More Heroes.

No More Heroes consistently goes where I’m not expecting it to go, and it makes me laugh my ass off.

It will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine.

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

I was never a huge fan of the earlier Mario games. I played Super Mario Brothers on the NES and the black and white gameboy, but never got past world 3 or so. I played a few of the later sequels, but probably spent even less time on them. Super Mario Galaxy is the first Mario game that I’ve really gotten into, and the first one I’ve completed. I only got 96 stars, so I didn’t really fully complete the game, but I did see the “ending”. I think the last 20 or 30 stars are really only for hardcore completionists anyway.

Mario Galaxy does some very cool things. Even aside from the wacky powerups, the underwater and flying levels, the ray-surfing levels, and the crazy monkeyball level, there are absolutely tons of really creative and fun aspects to the game. Every so often, I’ll go back and try to get an extra coin or two. It’s pretty hard, especially when you’ve put the game aside for as long as I have.

My first take after reading this was distaste – that it was essentially a cheat added in by the game designers. And while in some ways it is, I can’t wholeheartedly object to the idea. When I think back to games like Metal Gear Solid 2 and Eternal Darkness, which I had to stop playing because of a too-difficult boss, I realize that I’d have loved to skip that portion of the game so that I could experience the rest of the story after that particular battle.

Super Mario Brothers Wii will be the first game to make use of the Kind Code. I’ll likely buy it, since it seems like a perfect game to play co-op with my wife.

On occasion I’ll read reviews that fly directly in the face of what I’m seeing when I’m playing a game.  In a lot of these cases, the differences are technical: they connected to multiplayer fine and I didn’t, they knock a game’s controls without seeing that you can change them, while I checked out the options, things like that.  With The Conduit, though, the differences of opinion have to do with the single player mode.  A good number of the reviewers find it bland and uninspiring, while I’m having a great deal of fun with it.

This brings me to the problem, that three little word: fun.  Fun is one of those words you’re supposed to shy away from in reviews because it’s completely arbitrary.  Granted, a lot of opinions put forth in game reviews are commenting on arbitrary things, but at the same time, if you have a 360 game that looks like an SNES game, even allowing for differences in opinions in regards to graphics, most people will agree that those graphics aren’t up to par.  Tom Chick, who is one of the best video game reviewers on the planet as well as an incredibly nice guy, never uses the word “fun” in his reviews as it’s unimportant.   What is important is if the game is designed well, does it do the right things and do them well.  It makes sense, as things that I find fun, say grinding for achievements, others may find stultifying.

The problem with this is that, in the case of The Conduit, I can see the points of the reviewers in regards to the single player story, however I’m having a great deal of fun with the game so those problems don’t matter to me.  So then I have a hard time reconciling if these problems are actually problems or the other reviewers didn’t have as much fun with the game so the flaws become much more apparent. I have no idea.

Now, arguably, I don’t play a lot of shooters as, for the most part, I find them boring.  Left 4 Dead had the co-op hook, but without it, it was just moving from one room full of zombies to another.  Playing those campaigns by yourself was not at all entertaining.  BioShock had the powers/weapons combination as well as a great setting.  I’ve heard that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and World at War are great games, but honestly, military shooters bore the piss out of me, so I haven’t played them.  When I play a shooter, I’m not asking a lot from it, probably because shooters have, historically, just been about moving from room A to room B and killing everything you come across.  I want good controls, varied, effective weapons, decent enemy AI and a story that has enough to it to keep me motivated.  The Conduit has all of these things.  I’m not sure what else others would want from it.

In the end, I’m having fun with the game. When I have to put the Wiimote down at the end of the evening and go spend time with the wife, I don’t want to put it down.  I want to keep playing.  I want to see what the next alien enemy is.  I want to find the next experimental weapon.  I want to move from room A to room B and kill everything I come across.  I am having fun and I don’t want the fun to stop.  I just can’t say that in the review.

I’m hoping that by figuring out how to take “fun” out of the equation I can lay bare the design choices that make a game good or bad, but I’m not sure I’m talented enough to do that. There’s always the concern that if I take fun out of things, I may end up shortchanging a game.  Some games are repetitive and derivative and fun as hell any way.  Treating a game like that with more of a clinical eye may do that game, and those that might miss out on it a disservice.

I don’t know.  Maybe I need to stop reading the reviews of others so that I don’t overanalyze things.  In the meantime, you should totally play The Conduit.  It’s a lot of fun.

Greg wrote about how MadWorld disappointed him, so I figured I’d offer an altenate take.  If you haven’t read his take on the game, please do so.  I’ll wait.  Oh, spoilers will be included so if you don’t want to have things ruined, now is your chance to leave.

Ok then.  So here we go.  MadWorld is, so far, one of my favorite games to come out of this year.  I gave it pretty high marks at GameShark and generally think that it kicks a whole lot of ass.  I loved the style, the humor and the various ways in which you could dispatch foes.  Initially the level structure bothered me, but once I got into the groove of things, I quite enjoyed it.  In MadWorld, you have thirty minutes to finish the entire level, boss battle included however you can’t just stroll in and take on the boss.  The boss battle itself doesn’t unlock until you’ve scored enough points with points scored by not just killing but killing with style.  For example, simply beating a guy to death, while effective, doesn’t score a lot of points.  Stick three signposts in his head, jam a tire over his arms and then chuck the whole bloody bundle into a giant spike will net you considerably more points.  Along the way as you score points you’ll unlock new weapons, new challenges and new enemies.  Oh sure, it sucked when you died during a boss battle and had to do a level all over again but honestly, in this case, it’s not that bad.  Now, usually if I hear that a death during a boss battle means you start over, I won’t even pick up the game in the first place, so for me to say it’s not that bad means that it’s really not that bad.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, I’ll speak to Greg’s various points as I’m not feeling particularly creative today and pulling my own opinions into a cohesive whole is tantamount to inventing cold fusion.

“After the thirtieth time of putting a tire around a guy’s waist, spearing him through the head with a street sign, running around to find a garbage can to jam over his head, and then picking him up and walking very slowly over to some spikes to impale him, it gets old. Actually, for me, it took less than thirty times to get old.”

Yeah, for me, it never got old.  Part of that is because I thought it was hilarious, part of me was because doing all of those combos was necessary to get the boss battle to unlock so that you’d have enough time to beat the boss, so the combos become a necessary evil.  Plus, as you progress through the game, the levels start offering more and more variety as to what you can use to kill guys and the enemies start getting wise to your tactics, requiring you to change things up.  Everyone’s tolerance for repetition is different, especially if one person finds a game engaging and another doesn’t, but for me, I never got bored.

“It doesn’t have even the depth of combat that Double Dragon 2 had.”

I can’t speak to this as I don’t think I’ve ever played Double Dragon 2.  Does Jack have a large set of moves?  Well, no.  He has a few chainsaw moves, some fist moves and a dash and a dodge.  Instead of moves though, he has the environment and there is plenty to use there to take guys out with.  Now, you can certainly say that picking up a lamppost and jamming it through someone’s head is no different than doing the same thing with a signpost and you’d be right, but it’s when you take what you can do with the signpost combined with what you can do with this weapon and this moving train and Jack’s weapons and there is a lot to do.  Is it really, really deep?  No, but there is a lot to do.  Personally, with a game like this, I want simple.

“But this one stayed easy for a while, right up to the point where a grim reaper on roller skates with an instant death attack appeared. This is how the game increases difficulty: instantly killing you.

I found that the difficulty curve ramped up nicely.  Yeah, the roller skate guys were annoying, but they never killed me so I can’t speak to the annoyance of them.  I think there were two levels that I had to repeat and one was because I was being stubborn during the boss fight.  The second one was just straight up difficult, however things seemed to level out after that.  I never felt that the game wasn’t so hard that I couldn’t handle it, as long as I switched up my tactics and got creative, which is a big part of what the game was all about, killing creatively.

“Probably because while the other games used violence to tell the story, I felt like Mad World was a game created solely for the violence. The violence was its raison d’etre.”

I think that Greg hit the nail on the head here.  The game’s entire purpose was violence, but for me, that only increased the impact of the story.  The basic premise of the game is that terrorists take over the city and infect all of the citizens with a virus.  They then tell the citizens that if the citizens kill each other, whoever does the killing will get an antidote.  In short, the only way to survive is to pick up a weapon and kill.  The terrorists have also released horded of psychopaths into the city for the citizens to fight as well.  Jack enters the city with the intial intent of rescuing the mayor’s daughter, but as the story goes on, his real motivations are uncovered.

I guess what go to me about the game’s violence is that as the player, we’re supposed to be appalled that the terrorists would do such a thing, after all, we’re in the city to stop it, yet we’re so eager, and happy to take part in it ourselves.  As the player you’re encouraged not to stop whoever did this horrible thing, but to enter the games and win them.  That’s an important distinction. Instead of getting into the city and only killing those that get in our way of investigating the attack, we’re supposed to win the game which means taking part in the very thing we’re supposed to be condemning the terrorists for.  To this end, the violence is important because by taking part in the violence, it makes us complicit. It shows us that if we’re willing to do these horrible things to these guys, even if they’re “bad” guys, we’re really not any better.

Finally, once you do everything you need to and you win the games and you find out who is behind the whole thing, Jack is standing over his enemy who is hanging off a building.  The guy asks for help, which Jack doesn’t provide, and then plummets to his death.  Looking over the newly smashed corpse, Jack delivers the last, and best line of the game: I don’t help people, I kill them.  For some reason, this line stuck with me for days and days.  It felt like almost like a condemnation of sorts of all of these violent games we play.  So much of what we play involves killing and while it may be done in the interest of saving the day or being the hero, what stands out is the violence, not the end results, which is to say nothing of the countless multiplayer matches played every minute where the sole objective is just to kill.  We don’t play games to help, we play them to kill.  There are very few games out there where the job is to work with another person towards a common, non-violent goal.  Most of what we do is kill, kill and then kill some more.

Now, I’m not saying that all of this is bad, although I’m sure that it ain’t entirely good, I’m just saying that between the violence, the premise and that line, it made me think about this hobby and about the types of games we enjoy and what that means about us.  It probably doesn’t mean anything.  Kids have been playing soldier or cowboys and indians for generations, shooting each other with their fingers or with sticks so all we’ve done is gussy up the stick, but at the same time, the game gave me pause and made me think, and honestly, I wasn’t expecting that.  Not from this game.

So yeah, I loved it.  I enjoyed it while I was playing it, but I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more when I was done and could take the time to think about it.  Based on the sales numbers, I’m one of the few, which is a shame because games that make you think and examine your actions are never a bad thing.