deKay’s Blog

Basketball is rubbish. But NBA Jam? It was AMAZING. So a new NBA Jam is VERY EXCITING!

Nintendo’s Wii gets a bit of a hard time on gaming forums and newsgroups. In the eyes of many, it’s still a console for kids and/or old people. If you enjoy playing Wii games, the 360 and PS3 owners sneer at you as if you can’t afford a “proper” console (even though the 360 is cheaper!). They wonder how you can possibly like playing games with “last gen graphics” and “tacked on waggle”.

What they’re not realising, is that graphics do not make a game, and not all Wii games are $some_activity Party – even if most are.

Take for instance the games I’ve been playing recently: Mario Kart Wii, New Super Mario Bros Wii, Castlevania Rebirth, Mega Man 10, Ghost Squad, House of the Dead: Overkill, The Conduit and Rabbids Go Home. None of these are available on another current console (although Mega Man 10 will be out on XBLA and PSN next week), and yet all get blasted for one or more of the issues listed above.

Some, such as Ghost Squad and HotD, would simply be rubbish on the PS3 or 360 as they don’t have the controls (a light gun) necessary to play them. Others would be just the same, only perhaps shinier (Mario Kart and New Super Mario Bros). Some would actually be exactly the same (Mega Man 10, Castlevania). However, if all these games were released elsewhere, nobody would look down at them, pointing and laughing.

Instead, people ignore the great titles available on the Wii and settle back to “enjoy” the latest Call Of Duty: Dull Soldier Shooting and Generic Racing Game X, because they look great. They may well play great too, but that doesn’t mean they’re better.

So while I’ll happily play Batman: Arkham Asylum and GTA IV in glorious HD, I’ll have at least as much fun shooting mutants in the face in SD House of the Dead, and BWAAAAAAAHing at everyone and everything in Last-Gen-Graphics Rabbids Go Home. Because, y’know, fun is in the doing, not the seeing.

I made a custom Wii case today. I’ll make you one, if you like: just £49.99!

Note to self: Stay away from forum trading folders.

It’s been a while since I “reprinted” any of ugvm. In Issue 07, the last under my editorship, we looked at multiplayer game etiquette, the CD32, the NeoGeo Pocket Colour, and about ten million game reviews. Including Knights of the Old Republic, a pre-cursor to Mass Effect – a game I’m currently enjoying very much.

Anyhoo – the magazine!

If it’s even one tenth the game Fallout 3 is, New Vegas is worth getting very excited for indeed. And look! He’s got a glowing red face!

Just over two years ago, I came up with the £25 Game Challenge. In summary, it was a rule preventing me from paying over £25 for any game.

And, in that time I only broke the rule once, except that somehow, I hadn’t.

So the time has come to update the challenge. Looking at every game I’ve bought in the last year or so, not a single one has cost me more than £20. Why not, then, drop the limit to £20? It should be perfectly do-able, right?

Lets hope so!

Here’s the rules, recycled from last time:

I will no longer pay more than £20 for a game.

Hopefully the pay-offs will be three-fold:

1. I will save money (obviously)
2. I will, in a very small way, be protesting about the high cost of games
3. I won’t buy so many launch-day games that I don’t play for months

The latter in particular is a big thing. If I pay £40 at launch, and then don’t play it for six months, the chances are the price will have come down. OK, so I run the risk of never actually buying the game, but that’s better than the risk of buying it and never actually playing it, yes?

However, there will be some exceptions to this £20 Rule:

• If I have loyalty points, gift vouchers, store credit, etc. then these don’t count in the £20.
• If the game is, say, £25, but is in a “2 for £40″ offer, then the price counts as £20 if I buy both.
• For games that include extra hardware (Guitar Hero, for example) I am allowed to pay over £20, but never full price.
• Any postage costs are not part of the £20.

So, anyone fancy joining me in The £20 Game Challenge?

Oops!

After scraping together all my Club Nintendo stars loyalty points at the end of last year (some were due to expire on the 31st of December), I had a look through the Club Nintendo Stars Catalogue for things to spend them all on.

Of course, it had to be this:

It’s three old Game & Watch games – Oil Panic, Donkey Kong, and Green House – all for the DS. Which is oooh shiny enough in itself, but becomes even more oooh shiny when you realise it isn’t available for sale anywhere. Excellent.

I was surprised that, despite having a baby at Christmas last year, I was still able to play games in 2009. It seems babies sleep! Not that I’d have imagined that in our first few days with her at home.

More surprising, is that I’ve somehow managed to complete a total of 43 games in the last 12 months. In 2008, I “only” completed 33.

But the best games of 2009? That’s an ask, isn’t it? Mainly because I’m pretty sure a lot of the games I played in 2009 were actually out in 2008. Or earlier. Much earlier in the case of some of the Megadrive titles I blitzed in the middle of the year! Apologies, then, if some of these are of an older vintage, but I’ll try to stay on-target with the year.

5. Words With Friends (iPhone)

Because it’s one of the games I’ve played the most. It’s just Scrabble, only legally not (so different letter scores and board layout), but the fact you can play others online and have a billion games on the go at once, makes it somewhat addictive.

4. Lit (Wii)

I seem to be the only person in the world who actually bought this, which is a shame. It’s a puzzle game, played out like a sort of reverse stealth game -you have to stay out of the dark or evil beasties eat you. Unusual and challenging.

3. New Super Mario Bros Wii (Wii)

This would be one notch higher if it wasn’t for just one thing – I’ve not played it enough yet, having only got it for Christmas. Perfectly built, inventive and clever. Nobody makes games like this any more – only Nintendo.

2. Little King’s Story (Wii)

Pikmin was an amazing game, and Little King’s Story owes much to it. You control a (growing) army of followers, of different types with different skills, and roam the world defeating bizarre bosses and collecting strange objects in order to “unite” the world essentially through ethnic cleansing. It’s cute, it has a few huge difficulty spikes, and it’s story can only be attributed to a loon. And it’s great.

1. Shadow Complex (360)

I love Metroid games. And I love Castlevania games. And Shadow Complex is the same sort of game – lots of exploring, and picking up new powers and items that open up more of the map. There’s nothing really new in it, and it’s got terrible, grating, voice acting. But! It’s the gameplay, the spot-on controls, and the amazingness of going from feeble weakling with a water pistol to an indestructible killing half-man, half-machine. So great is it, that the doable-in-5-hours story was done so many times, on every difficulty (bar Easy), that I’ve racked up over 60 hours on the game. And the OCD sufferer in me loves the item collection. 100% complete or nothing! It’s also a staggeringly good bargain at 1200 MS Points (it’s an Xbox Live Arcade title). My Game of the Year, for certain.

And the rest:

Other games of note from last year include the GTA IV add-on The Ballad of Gay Tony, which is another excellently written, funny, and fun to play GTA romp, Fallout 3 and it’s extra DLC (yeah, Fallout 3 was 2008 – but not all the DLC was) because it eats time itself, and GTA Chinatown Wars for the DS, which somehow managed to be a proper GTA without much compromise.

And hurrah for point-and-clicks! They made a return for me last year, with the last few Strong Bad episodes, Sam & Max, and Monkey Island. Thank $deity for Telltale Games!