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The Podcats: Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword

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Now Playing: Donkey Kong Country Returns, Floods

I’ve finally managed to bust out DKCR on the Wii. My average of one Wii game a year continues unless I decide to pick up Goldeneye at some some stage on the cheap. I’m currently enjoying the hell out of it though I can see how I’m going to find it incredibly frustrating down the track much in the same way I found New Super Mario Brothers similarly frustrating back in 2009. One measly checkpoint in the middle of a level may not counter the fun to play levels.

It’s colourful and vibrant too look at, sounds wonderful and plays like the older game, but more fluidly. It’s like if in the first Back to the Future, Marty McFly had scored with Lorraine after all. I still don’t get very far whenever I try to play the original I bought through WiiWare. But I just sat and played through the whole first world in or DKCR this  morning.

I was holding off on playing DKCR for a few reasons. One, I was too involved with Fallout New Vegas and BLOPS on PC but those single player campaigns are now finished. I still had Medal of Honor and Enslaved to play on 360 but MoH has also been finished and Enslaved just isn’t enough fun to make me keep playing. Lastly, my 46″ Samsung HDTV has a small issue with it. It doesn’t switch on immediately (it will eventually activate after about 5 minutes of trying to switch on by itself) and I’m expecting it to be carted off for repair under warranty (once things locally get back into swing). The plan was to cart out one of the older CRTV’s in the spare room to play DK in SD.

So floods. Lots of rain. It has been fairly wet here for several months, much more than usual for the time of year. Brisbane is split in two by the Brisbane River and it’s this river that has flooded many suburbs near to the river and parts of  the Central Business District.

Now the last time we had floods of a similar magnitude was in early 1974, when I was just a few months old. My parents lived in a low lying area not far from the river and their house WA swamped. They lived in a typical house in that area- older, wooden single story cottages, but raised about eight feet off the ground. You would park your car underneath and maybe your laundry appliances. My parents tell stories of having hearing the floating washing machine bounce against the floorboards, which signalled to them it was time to get out. After those floods, my parents and most of their relatives who lived in nearby suburbs all moved to the newer housing developments on the southside, a long way from the river. There had been flood mitigation works carried out by governments for years yet we flooded again, almost as badly (but probably not as bad as it would have been had those mitigation works not been carried out).

So I and most of my family are some way from the flood affected areas though my wife has not been able to go to work in the city due to the flooding. As far as I know most of my friends are unaffected. One thing I have to say, there doesn’t appear to be a lot to criticise about the way our governments have handled the situation. Our State Premier, who was considered highly unpopular before this event has shown her worth as being compassionate and on top of things. Our Prime Minister, on the other hand, is a robot and hasn’t done her reputation any favours by spouting the same platitudes over and over.

Julia Gillard, Australia’s first Fembot Prime-Minister, surveys the flood damage from a safe distance lest she short circuits

On the brighter side, the TV coverage has provided us with a drinking game by their constant use of the same few words OVER AND OVER again. Now, everyone is going to use, misuse, overuse, abuse and misspell the words inundate and vision (as in ” we now have vision from the scene” ie- video footage).

Review: Punch Out

Reviewed by Lisvender

Available on Nintendo Wii. Developed by Next Level Games. Published by Nintendo.

I hate fighting games. They’re archaic, frustrating things that only elitist enthusiasts appreciate anymore. Punch-Out!!, however, is not a fighting game. In fact, you could argue that it’s not even a boxing game. Punch-Out!! is to boxing as NBA Jam is to basketball: it’s a simplified and exaggerated caricature that takes only the most exciting moments of a sport and condenses them into one hell of a video game.

after lots of scrolling, a SFW image from Punch Out

Little Mac, a junior from some Bronx high school, has teamed up with retired fighter Doc Louis to claim the championship of the World Video Boxing Association. It won’t be an easy trip, as the WVBA is quite possibly the worst-regulated sporting association in history. It has no weight classes, and no rules against flagrant cheating. Most of Mac’s fourteen opponents are twice his size, and could probably snap his neck like celery. Thankfully, they also have about half of Mac’s intelligence, as they all announce their punches with peculiar tells.

Your challenge is to recognize these tells, avoid the incoming punches, and then respond with a flurry of counterpunches. Little Mac can make left and right jabs to the face and left and right hooks to the gut. He can duck down, dodge left and right, and block jabs. If you manage to slug the other guy at an opportune moment, you can earn stars that can be used to throw a powerful uppercut. Knock him down three times in one round for a TKO. This is the way of the Punch-Out, as it’s been known for decades, and though it appears simple, it’s amazingly addictive.

this one, not so much

Mac will take on thirteen fighters in order to become champion. That may not sound like very many, but once you have the belt, you’ll have to defend it. All your old foes will line up for a chance at the new champ, and they’ll come at you with new tricks and techniques that will trip you up and make you search desperately for openings.

Since Punch-Out!! only involves Mac and his opponent at any given time, a lot of effort is put into making those opponents interesting. Next Level Games must have a platoon of expert animators under its employ, because they’ve done an amazing job at filling the fighters with personality. Your opponents preen, strut, taunt, and smirk like God’s gifts to video games, and you’re going to like some of them in spite of yourself. Glass Joe, the lovable wimp, displays a delightful mix of haughtiness and fright, while Aran Ryan, known only for being indistinct in his SNES days, has been turned into a wild-eyed madman who smuggles weapons into the ring. Even the speechless Little Mac is likably determined. The voice acting is excellent, with Doc Louis providing mostly useless moral support from the corner, and your international opponents firing threats in their respective languages. Strangely, the game’s Subtitles option only works for Doc, but not for your opponents. You’ll have to be multilingual to understand their lines.

The incredible soundtrack boasts catchy Bill Conti-style tunes with electric guitar, piano, and lively brass. You’ll hear a lot of rearranged versions of the NES Punch-Out!! theme, but they vary enough to keep you from getting tired of it. Some of the themes, like those of Russian soft-drink guzzler Soda Popinski and the monstrous Mr. Sandman, are iPod-worthy. This is some of the best music I’ve ever heard in a video game.

Here are some outrageously homoerotic pics of Nintendo’s Fellate Out!!

The only aspect of Punch-Out!! that makes me shake my head is the control. The game offers three options for control: using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk for motion-controlled punching, the Wii Remote turned on its side for button-controlled punching, and then the same two options combined with the Wii Balance Board for motion-controlled ducking and dodging. I don’t own a Balance Board, so I can’t give an opinion on it, but I’ve heard that using it sucks. I used the Wii Remote and Nunchuk successfully through most of the game, and I personally prefer it. Like other games that use motion controls for canned animations, the game doesn’t register a “punch” until you’ve a made a sufficient motion with the controller. Mac’s punches are so quick, though, that by the time you’ve extended your arm, Mac’s fist is in his enemy’s face. The motion controls work well up until the last few Title Defense matches, when beating and countering your opponents requires wicked-fast speed and reaction time. Even the split second that it takes to make a punch motion can ruin your timing and cause you to lose. You’ll have to unplug the Nunchuk and resort to old-fashioned button control to win here.\

Especially against that Bald Bull. God, I hate him.

This is the disappointing thing about Punch-Out!!: it demonstrates the faults of motion controls in video games. They’re only effective and responsive when the onscreen action corresponds to the player’s real-life movements one-to-one. Unfortunately, this drops the capabilities of the game character to the limits of the player’s big, flabby body. Contrariwise, games in which characters can do amazing things, like knock out a giant Turkish boxer, force the player to move in very specific ways in order to trigger canned animations that are more easily controlled by buttons. With games like Punch-Out!!, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Kirby’s Epic Yarn, all of which are played with archaic, NES-style controls, Nintendo is more or less apologizing for the steps they’ve made, and admitting that video games really work better with buttons. It’s too bad that Microsoft and Sony didn’t get the message.

Despite this embarrassing backpedaling, Punch-Out!! is a ton of fun. The give-and-take of the fight is timeless, and far more logical and enjoyable than the overblown chaos of Street Fighter. If you or someone you know expects a Wii beneath the tree this year, be sure that a copy of Punch-Out!! winds up beside it. No matter how you choose to play it, you’ll find it’s one of the best games on the system. If more fighting games and sports games followed Punch-Out!!’s ways, it would be a merrier world. This is one of the best games on the Wii.

Controller1.com rating: 3/3

Review: SUPER MARIO GALAXY 2

Reviewed on Wii. Developed by Nintendo. Published by Nintendo

Mario is back. Again. So soon?

Super Mario Galaxy came out in 2007 and had Wii gamers not yet accustomed to feeling cheated after E3 cheering for Nintendo’s latest take on 3D Mario. After the minor let down (ie WORST MARIO EVER) of the Gamecube’s Super Mario Sunshine, Galaxy felt like an exciting move back to the more abstract worlds we all know and love in the Marioverse. But near perfect review scores didn’t translate to the multi-quadtrillion unit  sales Nintendo had expected from their flagship and despite being reviewed highly, it was an imperfect game with too many cool ideas not fully developed. Here in 2010, in the wake of the continuing success of the 2D Mario games on DS and Wii, Galaxy 2 has arrived. And it’s taking names.

SMG2 is more or less a refined expansion pack to the first game, but one that substantially improves on it in nearly every way (ie Uncharted 2 is better than Uncharted). Gone is the mind-numbing-to-navigate hub, replaced with a simpler, smaller hub in the shape of Starship Mario (if you need to ask…) with world selection far more streamlined, harkening back to a Super Mario World on the SNES level of simplicity).

So you pilot Starship Mario, them select an available galaxy, then Mario will fly there (as he did in the first title. Each Galaxy may have a few stars to collect, some only appearing later on to encourage you to revisit some levels later, but often in a way that you don’t feel you’re playing the exact same level twice to beat two different objectives. Traversing the same geometry on revisits is thankfully kept to a minimum (I mean you’ve selected what star you’re aiming for) but there are still the mystery stars that are hidden throughout. I just ignored these troublemakers since they are just trouble-making belligerent drunks.

Green mushrooms giving you another life? Check! Red Mushrooms temporarily doubling your max health? Check? Bumblebee suit? Check. Fireflower? Check? Princess captured by Bowser? Check?

The puzzles on each level, much of which has brought over from the first game, feel more organic and less forced overall. Perhaps it’s just that the game feels so much more polished than the first game. Not that the first game was rough, but SMG2 feels like the gameplay has been polished so thoroughly that Nintendo is almost daring you to find something wrong with it. I dare you. Dare to hate.

The thing that really makes this game stand out for me is Yoshi. Now, I’ve never really played games with Yoshi outside of Super Mario World on the SNES but here my favourite levels have been those with Yoshi and his abilities. The Drill is also a favourite of mine, though it’s hard to say how much of this is new since I only got about 50% of the way through SMG. This game has made me think about revisiting the original. But there are obviously things I like about the sequel that just weren’t there the first time around. And I HATED New Super Mario Brothers on the Wii.

Your brother Luigi is back and at times you will be given the option to play as him. Not that I’ve found much of a reason to play as Luigi but he’s there all the same. A few new suits and talents are used really well but for the most part, if you’ve played the first game, you’ve played this. If you haven’t played the original, play this. It’s just better.

The graphics are perfect, everything looks crisp (even on a Full HD TV with upscaling) though with some jaggies of course. I do know that the Wii doesn’t translate well to using a computer monitor, but a game like this works so well with the hardware. Maybe that’s the lesson of the Wii. If you can make the art look clean and bright, it well sell to people regardless of high poly character models with realistic textures.

The sound is what you expect of a Mario game, even though most of the sound and music is recycled from the first game- not that you can realistically change the sound of a Mario game. Going down a pipe sounds the same as always, collecting Yoshi is the same as it was on the SNES, etc.. Charles Martinet is back as Mario and Luigi  so you can expect all manner of falsetto Ethnic stereotyping as you play this delightful title.

I wasn’t sure I was going to stick with it, but it grew on me more and more as I played it. Earlier this year, I toyed with selling my dust-gathering Wii but SMG2 has made me glad I haven’t (yet) disposed of the console.

Controller1.com Rating 3/3

The Top Games of 2009 According to this Site

Controller1.com’s top games of this past year.

Sleeper of the Year (aka The game that came out of nowhere, the one you expected to ignore but couldn’t because of the great word of mouth)
RED FACTION: GUERRILLA. Volition and THQ’s third RF game came out of nowhere to be one hell of a blast of supercharged entertainment. Sure, Volition misunderstood the difference between easy and insane. But the core mechanics of the game and the freedom you had to progress meant few stumbling blocks to gaming nirvana. I have no idea what the story was about so let’s assume it’s rather ordinary and skip to the good bits: blowing things up. I can’t name a game where destruction has been done better.
Runner Up: Borderlands

Overhyped Game of the Year (AKA The game that was expected to make coffee, bend time and rule all but in the end was a bit meh)
KILLZONE 2. Sony and Guerrilla Game’s follow up to the justifiably ignored Killzone was meant to be many things. Here’s what it was and wasn’t.
IT WAS: A decent FPS, put together well and looked beautiful.
IT WASN’T: a system seller, or a particularly great game.
Year of PS3 got off to a false start and was almost disqualified from the race with KZ2.
Runner up: Scribblenaughts

Most Disappointing Game (AKA Games with buzz and hope that just didn’t deliver)
Wolfenstein Coulda, should but didna. Wolfenstein squandered the hope that long term fans had for a worthwhile follow up to Return to Castle Wolfenstein. What they got was a good single player that seemed to need a teeny bit more polish and content and a terrrrrrrrrible multiplayer. Do you get this game? Do you like MP more than SP? Flip a coin.
Runner Up: Modern Warfare 2

MOST IMPROVED (AKA They fixed the shit in the first one that was busted)
Assassin’s Creed II. Oh Lord is it ever so much better than the first game. In every single way, this game is more fun than the original. The content is better organised so that the game is not “here are 10 things you can do, go do each of them 500 times.” The whole concept is still a bit silly and Kristen Bell’s character looks like she had a lip transplant from the original Kryten but overall any game that has Uncharted Guy doing voices is good.
Runner Up: Uncharted 2

BEST DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT: SHADOW COMPLEX

BF1943, GTA episodes and Trials were there but Shadow Complex was by far the best DL only game released in 2009. A Metroidvania that’s probably more palatable to a modern audience (since it has Uncharted Guy doing voices, of course), the game managed to astound, entertain, stir up controversy and offer a good few hours of gameplay.
Runner Up: Halo 3 ODST (no, not really, but it should have been)

Best Game Only on Wii: NEW SUPER MARIO BROTHERS WII
OK, so it was really only one of two Wii games I bought this year. But it was the one I didn’t sell (HotD: Overkill). It’s frustrating as all fuck, has a save system that’s as pointless as the one in Dead Rising and I’m not playing it right now. Why am I not playing this right now? I don’t know.

Best Game Only on PS3: UNCHARTED 2
Sony had two really good games this year. Uncharted 2 and Infamous. Infamous is blown out of the water by Uncharted 2. Uncharted 2 is the quintessential adventure game. Whereas the first game promised platforming but delivered a gears of War Clone, the sequel mixes things up so successfully that you never realise when the game is going to go from one style to another. yes, you know at least once per chapter there will be something you’re standing in collapsing around you leaving you hanging from one arm but that’s beside the point.

Best Game Only on Xbox 360: SHADOW COMPLEX The 360 almost had a gap year with the only big exclusives being Forza 3 (which a LOT of people love and recognise as the driving game of 2009 to play), Halo 3: ODST which really was just a bit too much recycling with such a short single player campaign.

Best Game Only on PC- this is the year 2009.

Best Game on Everything: Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. IW may have pissed off as many people as they please with MW2. There’s the story that eschews any semblance of realism for moments of turkey-slapping-a-sleeping-lion thrills, OTT Multiplayer perks and combos, poor matchmaking and the various PC issues that made the game into a must play for many into a meh for some.

Best Pissing Away Goodwill. TIE: Infinity Ward and Activision.
Infinity Ward for doing the dirty on PC gamers and Activision for driving Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero into the ground. Oh, and splitting Starcraft II into three different games.

Most Improved: Sony. They cut the PS3 price from hysterical to merely funny (after three years it’s finally at the PS2 launch price), released the Slim and released Uncharted and Infamous. It still takes way too long to download and install a patch and most people still spend more on Blu Ray than they do on PS3 games, and PS3 ports are still often slightly lagging behind 360 in terms of graphics but it’s basically where it should have been three years ago. Just in time for God of War III

Most Potential for 2010: Microsoft. Really, they sold the 360 well but didn’t release that many 1st party games so you’d think game over, but then you see they have Crackdown 2, Halo Reach and Alan Wake. And then there’s Natal.

Least Potential for 2010: Wii
So we have a vitality sensor as the big piece of hardware? Really? Few games still support Motion Plus. Few gamers care and the signs are than grandma doesn’t either.

Game of the Year: Uncharted 2. Are you at all surprised? Naughty Dog redeem themselves after the disasters that were the Jak and Daxter sequels. This is the only game this year that a non-gamer will sit and watch as if it were a movie and enjoy it.
Runner Up: Modern Warfare 2.

It was a pretty good year overall. The only disappointing part of the year was the end. While we had some cracking titles such as Uncharted 2, ODST, Left 3 Dead 2, Assassin’s Creed II, MW2 and Super Mario Wii it still felt like something was missing.Oh that’s right about 2 or 3 more must-haves in the lead up to Christmas that we wouldn’t get to play till 2010 anyway. Having them all come out in the first quarter of 2010 seems to have upset the natural balance.

Controller1.com THE PODCATS- Super Mario Brothers Wii

Mario Brothers games have traditionally been single player affairs but the latest game for Wii allows you to play with up to 3 other people who are going to fuck it up for you. Cam and George try Mario and Luigi for size.

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NOW PLAYING: Super Mario Bros Wii

A 2D Mario platformer on a console. It has been several Ice Ages (though 3 sucked) since the last one came off the shelf in the early 90′s. Since the DS version came out in 2005 and has sold more copies than even Nintendo expected, the Wii version, rather sensibly builds on the foundations of the handheld game. In fact it does little more than iterate on the DS version, which is a shame, but it doe it in a way that the Wii desperately needed- something old skool from Nintendo that’s fun for people who enjoy playing games rather than toys.

I’ll assume you’ve played the DS game (or even Super Mario World on the SNES). Here you hold a wiimote sideways  with two hands like an NES controller that’s even less comfortable (D pad on the left, 1 and 2 buttons on the right) with 2 being the jump button, 1 being the do everything else button. Some actions do require motion control (mainly just waving the controller up and down). Nothing suss. There is a control scheme that uses the nunchuk but the classic controller is not supported- which is a shame.

It looks crisp enough on a HDTV, but it’s still got that Wii Blur (of course, it will really pop on an old fashioned CRT TV). Colours are vibrant and music is bouncy. How does it play, you ask? Like a 2D Mario where you hold a Wiimote on it’s side. You could in a pinch use the Mario Kart wheel if that’s your fancy- which is a shame. The first world does trick you into thinking it’s an easy game but world 2 is where it starts to get hard. Bloody hard. Since Mario games use a green 1up mushroom as currency, Nintendo still insists on Mario having lives. If you die eight times doing the same thing you get prompted if you want Luigi to play a level for you/ This is great if you have more than 8 lives on a tricky bit. Of course, if you have fewer than eight, and if you’re likely to need Luigi’s assistance, chances are you won’t have many lives up your sleeve.

A nice touch is now you can store more or less as many power-ups as you like, these are accessible from the map screen (where you get booted to after every death). So if you keep dieing because of a particularly hard piranha plant, you can pop a flame ball in his ass to get you by. Other than that, It plays like the DS game in so many ways that if you close your eyes and pretend your 46-inch HDTV is a new DS, you might have the long awaited sequel. Just don’t put your fingers on the screen to activate a power-up.

Controller1.com Focus Test #34: GHOSTBUSTERS: THE GAME

So who you gonna yada yada. Busting makes me fell yada yada. A Twinkie the size of Clint.

Its all here in our latest Focus Test. Hopefully, normal service has been resumed.

also, if you haven’t already seen it, c1.com’s own Gothbusters in HD

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Controller1.com Focus Test: Wii Brew

Homebrew. It’s not a dirty word. Fecal Figs- now that’s dirty. Cam explores the wonderful world of playing old games you already own on a different system on a newer system in preference to games on said newer system.

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NOW PLAYING: BOOM BLOX

also: not playing Burnout Paradise DLC. Thanks Sony. Thony.

Its a long weekend where I live and I decided to try out the recent DLC for Burnout Paradise. Well, after about 5 hours of patching Burnout, updating the PS3 firmware, updating my CC details on PSN, buying the DLC and the finding out that for some reason DLC is coded to the region of the game on a region free consoles where game patches are region free.

So after flushing $28 down the Sony toilet (unless I can borrow someone’s local copy), I popped in Boom Blox, a game I’ve had sitting around for 5 months into the Wii, a console I have not played at home in over a year. Boomblox is one awesome puzzle game.

The premise is the game is quite simple. You have a puzzle and rotate the camera around the puzzle to get a good angle, use the pointer to aim at where you’d like to hit, lock on, then through the miracle of waggle, throw the ball at the piece. You knock down some colours, avoid knocking others and otherwise play variations of this theme.
There’s not much else to say about it except its a helluva lot of fun.
Whether there’s enough of a game to justify this as a full price game is rather debatable. As it is, I can’t see how I could pad it out to a full review.

I have to say that Halo 3 is still a great MP game. Call of Duty 4 and WaW are very good experiences but H3′s Mythic pack has been a lot of fun. Sometime I get bitchslapped and other times, I do ok. But the game is rarely laggy for me (compared to WaW- which must have a sizable install base of its own). And I’m not even using the Good Connection option in the matchmaking options.

ODSTSTSTSTSTSTD might be an expansion pack but the fundamentals are so good I don’t think its an issue.