Some characters work, and some don't. When a character that doesn't work keeps hanging around a story, and especially a video game, you have a recipe for frustration. Game characters can go bad in a lot of ways, ranging from poorly balanced enemies to flat-out irritating concepts. Here's a rogue's gallery of the eight worst, most annoying game characters ever to cross Nintendo hardware. These are guys who ruined good games or turned great games into exercises in controller-breaking frustration. I hate them to degrees not comprehensible by mortal man.
Let's liven up this slow news day with a list-type feature that'll give you some ideas for stuff to play over the weekend. Here's a collection of what I think are probably the nine best turn-based strategy games (defined broadly) that you can play on you DS. So, really, the best DS and GBA titles in the strategy genre without significant real-time elements. Also, it has to be out already, since& why recommend games you won't be able to buy for a month?
To keep this list interesting, I decided that popular multi-game franchises should be represented with one title, generally whatever came first. You may consider most other games in that series recommended by association. If I had done otherwise, this list would be half Advance Wars and half Fire Emblem, and recommending things that are already popular isn't too much fun. Instead, I hope you read this and learn about at least one portable game you hadn't otherwise considered playing.
Feel free to speak up in the comments to defend a favorite I left out, or disparage a game that you think doesn't really belong here. "Best" is, after all, highly subjective.
I leave for E3 this weekend, which is going to put omg Nintendo into rapid-update write-till-we-drop E3 Mode. There are going to be a lot of games to play on the show floor and a lot of stuff to see behind closed doors, and we're going to take a stab at covering all of it with two people, two laptops, and probably enough junk food to make my Wii Fit very, very unhappy with me.
This year's show is going to be special for me. It'll be the first time I got to set my own schedule and spend all of my time focusing on the DS and Wii stuff I like best anyway. For this week's list I decided to try and vent a little of the internal hype that's building up, 'cause I won't be in L.A. until Monday and may explode or something in the meantime.
So here's the seven games I want to see and/or play and/or learn more about at this year's E3. Note that these aren't the only seven games I'm hyped for, but if I listed everything I'd be here until it was time for my plane to leave. These are just the seven I'm most hyped for, myself. If you're hyped for something else, drop a comment about it-- I may be able to go out of my way to try and have a look at it at the show.
Tokyo's Akihabara district is a hardcore retro collector's dream. CrunchGear has an interesting photo-piece up that lists the ten most expensive retro games you're likely to find in an Akihabara shop, and what I found interesting about it - and what the original article doesn't cover - is exactly what the most expensive games are like. For the retro titles from the VC systems, I thought I'd go over what I knew about how the games played, since... well, for some of these titles that anyone is willing to drop the equivalent of hundreds of dollars on them can be pretty baffling.
So, I finally got Wii Fit a few days ago, and aside from the ridiculous running minigame, it's pretty awesome. The Balance Board itself is also a really fascinating piece of hardware. I went online to check and see if it was getting hacked in the sorts of hilarious ways the Wii Remote has, and sure enough, some German dudes are already breaking it open. Yes, that's right-- they got the Balance Board compatible with World of Warcraft. And why not? The massive marathon gameplay stretches a hardcore MMO demands can leave your physical health in a terrible state, especially if you eat a diet high in junk food and low in fiber. But what if you had to move for every in-game step you walked, or every menu you wanted to navigate? In this spirit, I'd like to humbly suggest seven more games that could be vastly improved with the simple addition of some hacked in Balance Board support.
I've just gotten done wrapping up a strategy guide for Operation Darkness, an Xbox 360 game that's interesting if seriously flawed. That said, it's still a game where you have a giant boss fight with Hitler, and that's the sort of ridiculousness that makes gaming a fantastic medium.
Nintendo's Seal of Quality, however, did not let you kill Hitler. You couldn't even kill Nazis, even though the NES's heyday was also the era of Harrison Ford punching out Nazis left and right. So, there's a famous trilogy of Hitler-killing Nintendo games from the NES and SNES eras where Nintendo required all the Nazis and Hitler-killing be taken out. This left the games as far more sterile and generic exercises than they might have been otherwise.
They also mandated swastikas be removed from games, but that sort of thing still goes on today, so I won't complain about that. I am going to take this opportunity to complain, at great length, about games where Nintendo's damned Seal of Quality denied me my game-given right to kill crazed cyborg future Hitlers. These are the bad old days for a reason, and here's hoping they never come back.
You've probably seen this floating around the internets lately. Yes, someone is taking Metroid II, the probably the single most disliked Metroid title, and is attempting to use the Zero Mission engine to make it into something the feels more like a traditional Metroid game. Why are people so excited about it, when Metroid II isn't well-regarded?
Well, aside from the prospect of a new Zero Mission-quality Metroid game, I think it has to do with why Metroid II didn't work. Getting the gameplay quality of the original Metroid out of a system with a 160 x 144 screen resolution and four shades of grey fro graphic display just wasn't happening. There's hope burning in every Metroid-loving gamer's heart that maybe Metroid II is actually an awesome game that just needed to be set free of the Game Boy.
Metroid II isn't the only sad story of developers trying to cram too much into a Game Boy game. The following seven titles are all potentially great, but they'd be tremendously better if they weren't Game Boy games. They deserve to be remade for modern hardware.
Since the last good game featuring Sonic the Hedgehog was Super Smash Bros. Brawl, I figure Sonic by default belongs to us now. That means it's time to talk about a more painful subject: why the core, console-release Sonic the Hedgehog games aren't good anymore.
The situation is so dire that Susan Arendt of Game|Life has issued a call Sonic's head on a platter. Her Sonic the Hedgehog Must Die simply states that Sonic's games are an embarrassment at this point, and Sega needs to stop making them entirely. It's an understandable viewpoint, but I don't agree.
Sonic is a popular enough character that it would only take one really good game to turn the series around and get people as excited again. Note that I don't mean a decent, playable game; I mean something really good, a must-play 4.5/5 masterpiece.
Sonic Team can still make that game, if they're willing to throw a lot of the current Sonic game formula out the window and start over scratch. Here's a list of the seven most important design principles I think our revolutionary, franchise-saving Sonic game would need to follow.
There's nothing I hate more than realizing that the children of today have it better than I did, and especially when it comes to video games. And not only do modern kids get to grow up playing the excellent Nintendo DS, some of the little jerks get to play it in school.
Right now a Scottish school is testing out a pilot program that gives every kid in math class a Nintendo DS and a copy of More Brain Training (a.k.a. Brain Age 2 in the US), which they're given twenty minutes to play every day when class starts. The results?
The performance of the class was compared with another which was taught normally and, given the common prejudice that computer games are a mindless waste of time, the results were surprising.
Teachers reported improved maths scores, better pupil behaviour and cooperation and a greater focus on the work at hand.
Geez, why stop there? If something like Brain Age 2 makes math bearable, I can offer school systems everywhere-- free of charge!-- a list of seven other curriculum-appropriate games that would surely have the same positive effect on students.
There are many articles about box art on the gaming internet. Some mock terrible box art, some praise the greats, many are just about that impressively terrible Mega Man box. Me, I want to take a look at a specific facet of box art's function in the process of convincing you to buy a game: its ability to lie.
A little bit of lying from box art isn't bad. The job of box art, after all, is to convince you that the game looks interesting and exciting. If the cover makes you want to flip the box over so you can read the little blurb on the back, then the box art has done its job. Unfortunately, some boxes try to achieve this by totally misrepresenting the game concealed inside the packaging. This can lead to the wrong people buying the game, or even worse, nobody buying it all.
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