Today you guys get a double dose of awesomeness. Not only am I introducing a new segment title Dewmandew7's HO (Humble Opinion), but you also get a complete update on what I've been doing with my gaming time. I will start with my HO. My HO is quite excellent, if I say so myself.
Dewmandew7's HO: The Wii Has Won
Blah, blah, blah. We've all heard it before. The Wii is winning because it reaches the casual market. The question is, to what extent? However, the animal that is the Wii has now him my home, and unlikely parasite has leeched on... my mother.
Now, the last time my mother had played a game was probably about 6 years ago when we had her play a game of Super Smash Bros. with us on the Nintendo 64. Needless to say, she didn't find it that exciting. You see, my mom is an accountant. A bean counter. A controller. Whatever you want to call it. She works from home and does her work in peace from the office. Well, after we got the Wii this Christmas, we brought it over to our grandparents' house and, of course, Wii Sports was a big hit, more specifically Wii Golf. My uncles and dad were all playing it. Well, a couple days later, my dad convinced my mom to play it... and she liked it. :o
Well, of course, a 9 hole golf game surely is not enough, so my mom plans on buying Tiger Woods 08. :o The last time my mom has owned a game for herself was when she was a kid and her family had the original Atari. :o So, :o my mom :o is going to :o buy a game :o for herself! If a console can make my mom play games, then that console must have won, plain and simple.
Now of course, it's a question of what kind of victory it won. Sure, it will probably win in sales, but will it make gaming better? That's only if it can convert these casual gamers (my mom is now included in this group) into hardcore gamers... this is unlikely. The chances of my mother moving from Tiger Woods golf for the Wii to Super Mario Galaxy or Zack and Wiki or whatever is highly unlikely. Most of the casual gamers (like my mother) are going to jump into a game, play it a bit, and then jump out. They probably won't play often. I can't imagine my mother playing Wii more than one or two times a week, if even that.
So, Nintendo, I salute you for your ingenius idea of getting everybody hooked on "waggle", though I loathe you for your corruption of the gaming industry and shifting almost all of the major game production companies to a more casual video game development approach.
Dewmandew7's Gaming Updates
I've made it to Crushing difficulty in Uncharted. This, my friends, is where the enemy AI really comes into its own. The enemies will grind down your health until you go back behind cover. Then, you'll hear one of them yell "I'll get him!" or something like that and they'll rush your position. So, you're badly injured, there's a guy coming right towards you with an AK-47. You have few options: You either hit him with a brutal attack as soon as he comes around the corner, or you peek out of cover and pray to God you get a headshot.
I've also got Orange Box now. I'm on puzzle 15/19 on Portal, which is probably the best game in there. I tried playing the Orange Box... it was the laggiest piece of &#$% ever! Characters were popping from spot to spot, it was impossible to him them, and AAAAAA!!!! I just gave up after the first game. I might try again later and see if I can get in a server that doesn't make it look like everybody is teleporting from place to place. I also started Half-Life 2. I think that the story is so-so at this point and the gameplay is so-so as well. It will probably get better as I go, but the "Best FPS EVARz!1!!!1!!" is rather disappointing, IMO.
Also, another problem I have with this game is that it seems like EA forgot which console they were porting this to. The primary weapon fire is mapped to R2 by default!!!! How in the world does that feel natural? The trigger buttons no the Sixaxis/DS3 are completely different than those on the 360 controller. The trigger buttons do not work well at ALL as fire buttons. Thankfully, you can change the controls, but gosh, that's annoying. What was EA thinking?
Another problem is that there is a loading screen every ten freakin' minutes! If I can go through the entire game of Uncharted and only see a load screen once when I boot up my game, I shouldn't have to look at a twenty second loading screen every ten minutes in this game. They wouldn't be that much of a problem if they weren't so long. I think what Valve should have done is made the game like Oblivion where the next area loads in the background instead of telling you, "Guess what! The game is loading! Isn't that happy fun times for you?" I mean, in Portal, the game loads between most puzzles while you're in the elevator. Instead of telling you its loading, just keep you in the elevator and make it just seem like a really long elevator ride. I'd rather have that then have a loading screen. Just put in some nice elevator music, mask the loading screens, and it would be fine.
I've been playing a lot of Super Mario 64 and Paper Mario on my Wii. Both great classics and if you have a Wii, you should definitely download them, unless you own physical copies of course. We gave our N64 and all of our games for it to this home where children that were abused by their parents/guardians go. :P Makes me feel good inside, but now I can't play Donkey Kong 64 anymore... Hopefully they release that on the VC. :P
I've also finally gotten into Super Mario Galaxy. The game starts off really easy and the level designs aren't very fun. However, after a galaxy that was strictly platforming where you only have to move on one plane instead of always switching gravity and worlds and what-not, they throw you into a strictly Mario world where you have to jump accross a moving platform with holes in and laser beams above it. I think it was called the sweet, sweet galaxy. Also, there was this spider boss fight that I really liked. Maybe this game wasn't so undeserving of its awards after all...
Finally, make sure you guys all check out my Golden Ottsel awards nominees. You can even guess which games I'll pick for each award and your blog could win a spot at the top of my user page for the rest of the year if you are one of the two most accurate guessers. So, read that and enter your predictions by the 5th to receive some love in my blog.
P.S. Have a free Avalanche gameplay video:
http://www.gamespot.com/users/dewmandew7/video_player?id=IiFnxGT85bwIuzLd