Mega Bits

I decided that I couldn’t call myself a gamer without at least dipping a toe into the world of MMORPG. Especially since I’m a big RPG fan. So I downloaded the trial version of World of Warcraft, the quintessential game of its genre. I have played the original Warcraft and Starcraft series, so it was an easy transition into the world. I’m not rating the game on its own because I’ve only done the ten-day trial and because the overall experience varies based on who you play with.

Overall, I enjoyed the game. I devoted large stacks of time since I only had ten days to experience as much as possible. I liked the overall immersion into the world, and the way the quests, important and inane, kind of led you on to accomplishing more and more as a player while rewarding you significantly for doing so. I started on a server for newbies, and that was frustrating because we were all fighting over the same quests. Not recommended unless you like waiting around for something to spawn so you can kill it for the quest completion. If you have someone specific you’re playing along with, go to another realm.

Probably the most impressive feature about the gameplay was tied to the multiplayer part rather than to the RPG part. The quest sharing was really easy to understand and seemed pretty fair. Since there are like five races for each side of the world and ten character classes to choose from, not everybody can use the uncommon and rare items that you find. When somebody in your party happens upon such an item, you are given the choice to choose if you need it (which gives you a higher score and increased likelihood you will gain the item) or if you just want it. You can also choose not to bid for an item if you have no use for it whatsoever. Gold is shared automatically when taken from a defeated enemy, and all your party members heath shows in the upper part of the screen. This made questing in a party pretty exciting. I can’t imagine a quest of over 10 people, but I saw on the chat boards a lot of high level quests where they needed 30-80 players together. Crazy.

On the downside, I didn’t feel like the story was really that compelling on its own. I could probably really get into a role play focused server so we could encourage each other in character to go on quests together. Once I reached my experience cap after about six days, I almost stopped playing altogether. There was no point in playing if my efforts were not rewarded. I gave up and started a new character with different class and abilities. It is definitely important to have a good mix of characters in your party to maximize their effectiveness and minimize your weakness.

So it was definitely a downer, but there was nothing driving me to fork up the extra cash to keep playing. People have told me how fantastic it is, but I didn’t see it, and I probably won’t pick it back up unless I find a really good friend to pal around with in-world. I may have missed out on some of the best parts of the game, but after twenty levels on my first character and fifteen on my second, I was just left feeling like Final Fantasy would be more rewarding overall.

My final verdict and sum-up is don’t bother picking it up or downloading it unless you have someone to play with, experienced or not. You’re in for a major disappointment if you don’t heed that advice, and who knows, you may still be disappointed. Or you could think it’s the best game ever like most of the players. Enjoy!

Title: South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play!
System: Xbox Live Arcade
Game play rating: 3
Plot rating: 2
Replayability rating: 2
Bonus points: 0

Overall Score: 7

South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play hits it right on the mark, combining an otherwise rather boring game of “watch the baddies walk past your defenses and hope that you have enough money to upgrade on the next round” with the witty and crude commentary of the Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and, of course, Cartman. With 12 additional unlockable characters, each with their own abilities and attitude, this will tickle you for many hours. High marks all around!

Highly recommended!

Plot – 2 stars
As an Xbox Live Arcade game, you don’t expect this to have any sort of real plot. And while the plot is kinda…contrived, it at least exists, and there’s some kind of cohesion between what’s happening in the gameplay and what happens between the gameplay. Not only that, but it has a twist ending that leaves you chuckling and wondering how they came up with THAT. Way to go Matt and Trey!

Game Play – 3 stars
This is one of the most complex tower defense games that I know of. I was first introduced to tower defense in the original Warcraft game. Although it was not meant to be a tower defense game, you did have to defend your peons somehow. We learned quickly that forcing the enemy through a corridor of towers was a great way to decimate entire raiding parties without losing your precious troops…until they could build those stupid catapults and ballistas. Anyway, traditional tower defense games give you space to build towers and sometimes walls, but that’s it. You get money for the baddies you destroy so you can build more towers and upgrade them. This game adds an element of interaction and cooperation, movement, and special abilities to add to the mix. And it’s awesome.

Replayability – 2 stars
I mentioned above that there are twelve unlockable characters. Each of these characters have differing statistics for movement speed, throw rate, damage, AND a special ability. While there are only eleven campaign levels to play, there are also five challenge stages to test your adaptability. That’s a combination that gives you a potentially new experience every time you play. Also, play with friends. It’s better and more hilarious. Trust me.

Bonus Points – 0 star
I didn’t give any bonus points because while this game is super duper fun, I can’t think of anything it does outside of the stuff mentioned above. Maybe if the Xbox 360 Achievements were a little more creative or difficult…in fact, if you’re a gamerscore snob, get this game also, because the 200 GP are definitely doable within a day or so…if you have at least one buddy.

Title: The New Super Mario Bros
System: Nintendo DS
Game play rating: 3
Plot rating: 1
Replayability rating: 1
Bonus points: 1

Overall Score: 6

The New Super Mario Bros seems to be a return to the simplicity and difficulty of the original at first glance. However, after you breeze through the first world, it becomes apparent that Mario needs some additional skills for you to accomplish all of the feats and secrets that are available in this Mushroom Kingdom. Taking cues from Mario 64 with graphics and wall jumps, and adding a few new power-ups, this Mario title is certain to please the newcomer and the returning Mario fan alike.

Overall I give this a timid recommendation. It didn’t blow me out of the water, and the extra items introduced, while fun, did not significantly add to the game play. This title will be a pick up and play while you wait game, and not one you’re likely to return to over and over again.

Plot – 1 stars
Mario games have very rarely had strong plot lines. Bowser, or in this case, Bowser Junior, kidnaps the princess. Mario fights millions of minions on eight different worlds to save the princess. Basic, yes, but somehow there’s still that satisfaction when you get the kiss at the end of the game.

Game Play – 3 stars
This Mario release features the standard game play that has been integral to the platformer since its inception back in 1985. In fact, some elements from Mario’s debut in Donkey Kong in 1981 are still present in almost every Mario title. With the addition of the mushrooms that make Mario gigantic and tiny, this has added some new and fun levels of play that haven’t been seen before. It has served Nintendo well for over 20 years, and it continues to deliver solid fun on each and every level.

Replayability – 1 stars
I’ve played this game through twice now, but nothing begs for you to play it again, from what I can tell. After you rescue Princess Peach from the evil Koopa clutches, you get a code that lets you play as Luigi. However, the levels are all still completed if you did them all as Mario. The only difference, from what I can tell, is there’s now a blue mushroom house on World 1 that allows you to change the skin on your lower screen while you play. The rest of the levels – exactly the same. I didn’t want to play it much after I beat it the first time or the second time. If you’re a Luigi fan like I am, I recommend playing it with him from the start. Just hold down L+R when you select your game file, and the green bandit will be glad to save Peach instead.

Bonus Points – 1 star
I’m giving this a bonus point for throwback. Since I’ve been around since Nintendo was a babe, I appreciate throwbacks to the original 32 levels from the first game. While they weren’t necessarily obvious, if you died by the spineys in world 4 in the original as many times as I did, you can appreciate and recognize that they used the same block structure at certain points instead of only recognizing the obvious ones for worlds 1-1 and 1-2.

Four hours and forty-one fun-filled minutes of my life were spent last night playing two-player on one of my most beloved games: Super Mario Brothers 3.  This game was so big at the time, that it was introduced in a feature film called The Wizard.  That movie got me and the rest of the NES geek boys and girls excited about the upcoming new Mario title.  Considering the ending of Mario 2 was waking up from a dreeam, it’s a wonder I even gave it a try – I guess my requirements were not as high back then.  The first game I bought with my own money was Jackal, I mean come on.  Contra 2 was better.

After its release, it was offered as a replacement for the original Super Mario Brothers/Duck Hunt cartridge, which I played into the ground when we first got our Nintendo.  But I think that more than any other game, this game embodies the best of 8-bit gaming.

In addition to being a side-scrolling platformer like its predecessors, Super Mario Brothers 3 added a game board overview of each world, and allowed choices, secrets, and bonuses more than any Mario title before.  This template would carry the Mario series to a new level, spawning the two successful Super Mario World games for SNES and carrying that theme of choices all the way to Super Mario Galaxy, the latest in the series.  For the first time ever, there were levels you didn’t have to play!  In fact, if you used your items wisely, you could skip several levels and never have to play them again.  Before this, your only choice was to know where the secret warp pipes were – and they were only on specific levels – which dropped you somewhere down the otherwise strictly linear game.  The choices offered in Super Mario 3 allowed for a much more dynamic game, and a higher replayability.

Among the cool things that this game introduced to Mario were the four new suits that Mario could wear – the raccoon, the frog, the tanooki, and the hammer brother (and the boot!) – that gave Mario additional abilities until he was hit by an enemy.  Also, you could keep certain items for use before you start a new level, allowing you to power up before a more difficult level, helping you get to the end of the game.  With enough secrets to keep the enthusiast occupied and enough simplicity to make the game beatable, this game is what I think of when I think Nintendo.  This was the NES’s masterpiece.

If there is one game that embodies the essence of the Nintendo Entertainment System, it is without question Super Mario Bros 3.  Play it if you haven’t!

Title: Zelda: The Wind Waker
System: Nintendo GameCube
Game play rating: 2.5
Plot rating: 2
Replayability rating: 2
Bonus points: 1

Overall Score: 7.5

The Wind Waker is the penultimate installment in the Legend of Zelda, chronologically speaking, occurring several hundred years after the events in Ocarina of Time, which, if you don’t know, predates the original NES game and its prequel, A Link to the Past.  Ocarina of Time is considered not only the masterpiece of the Zelda series, but the starting point of the legend itself.  Overall, I give the game a score of 7.5 stars for its familiar and fun gameplay and its less-than-epic plot line.  This game still hits recommended status, so this is definitely a game to play, but at only 7.5 stars, it’s not a must.

Plot – 2 stars
In Wind Waker, Hyrule has been buried under an ocean.  After Link defeated Ganon at the end of Ocarina of Time, Ganon was sealed by the sages.  When the seal started to weaken, Link was nowhere to be found, so Hyrule was flooded to prevent Ganon’s complete takeover of the land.  The triforce of Wisdom was split in two and half was kept in the kingdom while the other half was passed down in generations.  Ganon still had the triforce of power, and the triforce of courage was broken into (an unsurprising) eight pieces to prevent Ganon from capturing the Triforce and getting his wish granted.

The legend of the Hero of Time (a la Ocarina of Time) was passed down as well, and when boys come of age, they spend a day wearing the garb of the hero.  It just so happens that’s where you come into the story.  You are playing around town in your hot new hero’s clothes when disaster strikes and sends you on a journey to save your sister, become the Hero of Winds, find and restore the legendary Master Sword, and defeat Ganon once and for all by resting the blade for all time in Ganon’s skull.

The reason I scored this one down is only because it didn’t have that epic world-will-end urgency to it that nags at you when you aren’t playing.  In fact, at the end, when everything is happy, I didn’t get the sense that I had saved the world because the final boss battle was just a swordfight with Ganon.  No crazy alter-Ganon that transforms into this gigantic monstrosity that’s about to eat the world, you just…win.  And then it’s over.  For all of its Zelda goodness, this one let me down at the end.

Game Play – 2.5 stars
Most of Wind Waker is played sailing the oceans in search of new islands and sunken treasure, some of which are heart pieces, some of which are triforce pieces, but most of which are rupees.  Fortunately for this game, the big wallet allows for a whopping 5000 rupees, and for the first time in my Zelda history, I didn’t fill it up and wish I had something to spend it on.  That was a plus, but really, after I had 3000 rupees I had bought everything I needed and was off to decapitate Ganon.  I really liked the sunken treasure part, even if it was anticlimactic to get a red rupee after sailing around for 20 minutes and finally getting your boat in the right place.  As far as flavor goes, the ocean idea was fresh and offered up a lot of play with pirates, ghost ships, sea monsters, cyclones, and whirlpools.

Land battle was essentially taken directly from Ocarina with a few enhancements to the B-mash combo.  If you collect enough of an item, you can get additional techniques, but overall this has been a stellar feature since the N64.

Also, I walked away with the prize in this game while only having achieved 12 out of the 20 available heart containers.  And while I used a potion on the final boss, the only time I ever used a bottled fairy was on a lesser boss that I couldn’t L-target correctly, so I died.  This game wasn’t hard enough.

Replayability – 2.5 stars
The one part that I didn’t like about the game was that there was too much to do.  Much like Oracle of Seasons, there is this sidequest to get pictures of rare locations and people.  Not necessary, and too huge of a quest to finish in one play-through.  In fact you get another quest at the end just so you can go and finish all the sidequests you neglected the first go-round.  I didn’t complete this quest.  I tried, but it wasn’t at all obvious without a walkthrough what you needed to take pictures of.

What this game lacks is a reason to play it again.  That being said, if you’re the type that likes to finish every possible aspect of the game, this game is one you can sink a whole week into – without sleep.  And get a walkthrough, because this game is big, and there’s lots to do.  In fact, if you’re into those 16-square shift puzzles, you can spend days before you get that last triforce shard finishing those and laughing when the butler door pays you out of his ass.

As far as picking this one up later, I might do it for fun, which is why I scored it as highly as I did.  The game is easy enough to remember what to do and how to do it, but there’s enough that it doesn’t feel like you’ve just done the same thing over again.

Bonus Points – 1 star
Wind Waker scores mega bonus points for its throwbacks.  Having played as many of the previous games as I have, I can appreciate the way it integrated the sacred instruments from Oracle of Ages into the plot.  There were a lot of throwbacks in the music, but updated so you didn’t necessarily recognize them at first.  And finally, the breathtaking Master Sword room, which may be the greatest tribute to a previous game that I’ve ever seen.  This looks and feels like a Zelda title, even though they moved to the cartoony cel-shading rendering on this and Phantom Hourglass.  I was worried it would be too kid-oriented, but this is a fully grown Zelda game, and it’s worthy of the title!

Growing up with a Nintendo Entertainment System, the original 8-bit NES, some of my most memorable moments were playing the first game in the series that has propelled a franchise that includes 15+ games, a cartoon, several manga, and several live-action YouTube videos.  If it can be said that a game can be loved, then I love The Legend of Zelda.

To date, I have played all but two of these titles all the way through, including the rare Master Quest to Ocarina of Time.  In fact, it is my current gaming goal to complete all of these games.  As you can see on the sidebar there, I’m currently playing Zelda: The Wind Waker.  The remaining title to complete the set is The Minish Cap.  You will certainly be getting the reviews of those two when I’m done.

The great thing about this series is that every title is so familiar, yet so different.  In every case, there have been throwbacks to the previous games, like items, bosses, dungeon layouts, and secrets while keeping the puzzles and dungeons fresh.  One of the greatest tributes I’ve ever seen in any game was in the Wind Waker when I retrieved the Master Sword – the room was lined with stain-glass renditions of the six sages from Ocarina of Time.  Having just finished the Master Quest a few days earlier, it was so fitting and so real that it took my breath away.

This series has everything in it that make a good game, and you can tell from its high marks on any list of the top games of all time.