The Wii's biggest weakness has nothing to do with the hardware itself.

For the record, I camped out for the Wii on launch day, I got one, I absolutely love it, and it has become a total hit in my household.  I am repeatedly amazed at this system, from motion controls, to the ease of connecting wirelessly to the internet, to creating Miis, to using an SD card to edit photos, and so on.  This system is incredible, but there is one considerable flaw.

Developers are not putting in the effort to optimize the graphics.  Ubisoft has confirmed that the Wii is overall more powerful than the XBox, yet we have yet to see anything that truly displays that.  Some games look the way they do because of design choices, like Wii Sports, and that's fine - that's just their graphical style.  A whole bunch of other games though, are just not being pushed graphically as far as they could.  Tony Hawk, Call of Duty, Far Cry, and GT Pro Series do not even attempt to go beyond GC/XBox graphics, and that's ridiculous.

I have hope for the future though, hope in games like Metroid Prime, Mario Galaxy, Smash Brothers, Red Steel 2, and others, to take advantage of what the hardware can do.  For all the other games, I gotta say to their developers, you have got to get it up there, this just isn't acceptable.

If the average Wii game had excellent motion controls plus better than xbox graphics, the Wii would be unstoppable.

My last blog post was about how I think abortion is wrong...and guess what happened!?  Gamespot got rid of it!  This is so insane, I can't believe it.  See how "tolerant" the supporters of abortion really are?

Hey, mod, if you are reading this and you are the one that removed my post, I've got something to tell you (and go ahead and kick me off gamespot if you want) - F UCK YOU

So it looks like I'm going to actually camp out in front of future shop just down the hill from my place to get a Wii on launch day.  I've never done anything like this before, but I've been thinking about the Wii every single day for the last 2 years, and all of a sudden it has hit me that I can literally play it in just two days.  Gosh, that would be crazy.  Anywho, should be fun if I manage to get one!

I just read on ign.com that if you have a 1080i screen that can't do 720p, and you play a 720p PS3 game, it gets displayed in 480p!  Meanwhile, the Xbox 360 will keep the 720p resolution and just upscale it to fit your 1080i screen.

I am looking forward to Zelda, I am a huge Metroid fan, Brawl looks fun, and I have high hopes for Red Steel. None of these games truly got me excited though, and neither have any of the games on the competing systems, including Metal Gear Solid 4 and Gears of War. Now I have finally found it.

Far Cry Vengeance looks fantastic. If you haven't seen the first trailer for it, stop reading and go watch it immediately. This game looks sick! The controls work so well with the gameplay, I've never seen anything like it. Well, I've seen Red Steel, but this honestly looks more fun. It's more of a run around and kill everybody experience, rather than a walk through Japan and swordfight guys. Both sound good, but I am totally going for Far Cry over Red Steel now.



There ya have it, Far Cry, the first next gen game to truly excite me. It now is in the same class as Rogue Leader, Mario 64, and Zelda:Link to the Past, all these games I got early on for each of their systems; all of them were the first games for their respective systems to get me pumped for that new hardware.

Btw, go check out the water graphics in the trailer, not bad at all.

I just bought Final Fantasy 12, this is nuts.  From the end of august to now (just a little over two months) I have bought a PS2 and all these RPGs:

1-Tales of Legendia
2-Final Fantasy 8  (in progress)
3-Final Fantasy 9  (completed)
4-Chrono Cross
5-Final Fantasy X  (completed)
6-Tales of the Abyss (completed)
7-Final Fantasy 12

Now I gotta decide which game to focus on, that's four different games to choose from.

I've completed yet another RPG.  This one was Tales of the Abyss, a solid yet repetitive game.  So since I got me a PS2, I've beaten FF9, FF10, and Tales of the Abyss.  Now that that's done, I have returned to finish FF8.  Fingers crossed, I'd like to get the majority of these RPGs finished before the Wii comes.

Life is going so smoothly for me right now, but I see a storm cloud approaching.  Experiencing rejection from the girl of my dreams nearly drove me to true insanity last spring.  Now, I'm slowly accepting that it just won't work between her and I, and I'm trying to look elsewhere.

I think I may be starting to like this other girl now, and I'm terrified that I'm going to go through the same blasted thing all over again.  I desperately want to find out what the hell went wrong last time so that I don't experience that again.

I never used to show enough interest when I liked someone, so I fixed that last time, in the spring.  In the spring, I showed interest and initiative, I really tried.  I still failed, and I can't think of a single thing I did wrong, so maybe the wind just wasn't at my back, she just wasn't the right girl.

Maybe that was my only mistake.  I didn't calm down and think through whether this was actually the right person.  There we go, that's probably what I should do this time.

Ok, deep breaths.  Must.  Stay.  Calm.  Don't get your hopes up Mark.

E3 2004, I was blown away to find out that a new Zelda with realistic graphics was coming to my beloved Cube.

As the next year or so rolled by, I became obsessed with it. It would be an epic adventure, it would breathe new life into my favourite gaming console, and would push the system as far as it possibly could go from a graphical perspective.

Now there are two versions, and the GameCube one has been delayed left and right. I feel gypped, like my dream is stolen from me. Here's the two versions, and how each of them are not what they could have been.


Wii version: It's may be the best looking launch game of the Wii, yet ironically it has the graphics of a system with half the processing power. This should be an all out Wii effort, not a GameCube game with Wii controls. If this were a full Wii title, there could be larger environments, more detailed bosses, better lighting/shading, more advanced bump mapping, reflections, light blooming, and so on. This game will feel sort of graphically raped on the Wii. It could look so much better as a full Wii game. But it's not. It's a Cube game with Wii controls and widescreen support.

GameCube version: This isn't too little, but it is too late. The game has been delayed so much that it doesn't feel as relevant anymore. It's hard to get pumped for this game when it's coming out after the next Nintendo system launches, and when everyone has moved on to the next generation. It should have come out in 2005, it would have helped the Cube stay afloat better over the last year and would have been alot of fun to have, but now it feels more like "oh ya...I forgot it was still coming to GameCube." As if that weren't bad enough, Shigeru Miyamoto claims that after playing the Wii version, he can't go back to the Cube version, that's how much better it is with Wii controls.

So that's just great. The GameCube version will never get to reach it's full potential as a huge game (it's not even going to be sold in retail in Japan), and the Wii version is only taking advantage of 70% of the Wii's capabilities at best.

How there're all these love stories in books and games and movies that are so unrealistic. It almost always seems to work out for people, where there is a mutual attraction.

Why don't they make a story that someone like myself, and others, can actually relate to? One where a character is in love with the other, but the other doesn't care about them. A story full of pain, and realism. Or even a story where there isn't some cop-out ending where everything magically works out (I'm talking to you Final Fantasy IX).

Mind you, some games have really sad endings, like Star Fox 64, Final Fantasy 6 (in regards to shadow commiting suicide), and in Halo 3 with Cortana being deleted (SPOILERS!!11!). I'm just saying that these are far too few. Zidane should have died at the end of FF9, and Tidus shouldn't have come back in FFX-2, and Padme should have died in Episode 3 (oh yes, she did).

Seriously though, I want a game with a story that has some more realism in it. No more of this "ooh, it all worked out!" crap.

On a side note, I loved FFX's ending. Having my two favourite characters die at the end made the story so much cooler, so much more serious. Mind you, one of them comes back after FFX-2, and I already mentioned above how I wish they hadn't done that.