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Two Bestsellers & Two Capcom Games

 
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helicopterp
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 6:05 pm    Post subject: Two Bestsellers & Two Capcom Games Reply with quote

Super Mario Galaxy. Call of Duty 4. Contra 4. Zak and Wiki.


Anybody playing these? Reviews aren't as nice as the opinions of internet friends.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 6:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i'm going to try contra 4 as soon as it's dumped. i honestly don't have very high expectations for it: it's by the creators of sigma star saga, and they seem to view hard corps as a misstep. i'm expecting a game that's too unbalanced to get through without lots of continues, but i'd love to be surprised.
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aerisdead
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 8:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I reviewded Zak and Wiki:

Here!
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Shapermc
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 10:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

CoD4 has really awesome Multiplayer and I hear excellent things about the single player, but I haven't touched it yet.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 10:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i watched someone play the beginning of call of duty 4 the day it was released. it's clearly inspired by half-life 2, and the game never takes the camera away from you during exposition. one first-person cutscene near the beginning of the game particularly impressed me.
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daphaknee
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 12, 2007 10:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

you guys call of duty 4 has ridiculous silent movie mode and i went from hating the game to loving it for this impossbily hard to play addition oh my god
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simplicio
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 12:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm happy I rented Zack and Wiki. It's very nice and full of good ideas about Wiimotes and adventure games.

But I'll likely never finish it, and certainly never play it a second time.
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player 2
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 4:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If someone wants to talk about Medal of Honor Heroes 2 or Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles (both for Wii), I'd be pretty stoked.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 6:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i've played through the first "galaxy" of super mario galaxy (which comprises three stages). there are a lot of good ideas here - and the setting allows for just about anything - but there's way too much text, both in the game's opening and in the interface you use to access the worlds. super mario 64 got it just about right: find a portrait, jump into it, play! i'm wondering if nintendo can even make a game without text any more, a mario game with the purity of a bit generations title. maybe not: the franchise itself is cluttered, there are so many mario games shadowing this one, with all of their respective ideas and vocabularies mashed together. player intuition is dwarfed by the learned experience of a thousand thousand mario games.

or maybe nintendo just doesn't trust player intuition. here's an example from the first "galaxy". i'd just been told that i can pick up these little rocky bits and shoot them at people. there was a little tutorial before the stage, where a chubby star had me feed him by shooting little rocky bits into him. now in the stages themselves, there are chubby stars all over, and i can fire rocky bits anywhere. in this stage, i encountered a chubby star who wanted to eat a hundred rocky bits. i only had eighty-five. i shot rocky bits at him until the number next to him read 85/100, then i went to find fifteen more. i gathered them from around the small planet, aimed my cursor at the chubby star and shot them into him. after a while of this nothing had happened. "i must have fed him fifteen more by now." i ran up to him and the number reappeared: 85/100. i shot fifteen into him, the number went up, and he turned into a planet. it only counted rocky bits i fed to him while the number was visible. that's arbitrary and counter-intuitive, and flies in the face of the logic of the game: it feels like the game wanted me to follow instructions rather than teach me how to play.

there have been a few other examples of text hints for things that should be natural, and what it expresses to me is a lack of trust in the player. but hopefully this sort of thing will let up as the game goes on and the player's earns the game's trust. i'd hate to see this whole game sabotaged by this kind of fear, because it's beautiful and clever and inventive.
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SuperWes
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 6:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Call of Duty 4 is very good, but not great. It has probably the best graphics of anything I've ever seen and is worth playing in both single player and multi, but doesn't really do much - aside from an awesome exp. system in multiplayer - to set itself apart from the rest of the fps games out there.

Zach and Wiki is also very good but not great. It's a point and click adventure that makes you feel really smart whenever you can figure stuff out and really indifferent whenever you get stuck. It's charming as hell, but it's a hard game to go back to when there's a good chance you won't make any progress in doing so.

Contra and Mario both come out today so I've got no comment, but based on what was there at E3 I can't imagine it not being amazing.

-Wes
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WarpZone
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 7:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dessgeega wrote:
it only counted rocky bits i fed to him while the number was visible.

Wow, that's disappointing, being (1) arbitrary, (2) doubting the player's trust in an idea already introduced, and (3) basically the opposite of their last game, Jungle Beat, which had seamless visual tutorials and no text.

The feeding, though. You really have to just stand there and hit B 100 times?
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 7:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

when the number's on-screen, you can just hold the button to fire a rainbow stream of tasty crags into the little chubster. it still seems like an arbitrary way to test that particular skill: what about giving me a target to shoot at? unless they're setting up for more COLLECT X DINGLIES TO PROCEED gates, which would be unfortunate.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 9:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i've played through the first two hubs now (each of which contains several "galaxies" of three stages, a couple of one-note challenge worlds, and some kind of boss stage). it's managed to stop being patronizing and let me enjoy it. and the stages move through so many nice little challenges. it actually reminds me of metroid prime, where the player will turn into a ball and the game will suddenly shift from three-dee to two-dee for a quick puzzle and then shift naturally back to three-dee.

the objects-hovering-in-space motif gives the level design the freedom to be as abstract and videogamey as it wants, and a super mario platformer benefits from that. the strongest parts of super mario sunshine are probably the parts where the player is asked to jump between unexplained platforms in space, and much of super mario galaxy is unexplained platforms in space.
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Harveyjames
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 14, 2007 9:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ace. I can't wait to be able to play it.

dessgeega wrote:
it actually reminds me of metroid prime, where the player will turn into a ball and the game will suddenly shift from three-dee to two-dee for a quick puzzle and then shift naturally back to three-dee.


Funny, I was thinking that looked a lot like Link's Awakening. Those bits are really clever. They somehow really give you a sense of being somewhere secret and enclosed.
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daphaknee
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 14, 2007 12:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i still dont have mario galaxy, ive been crying myself to sleep at night.

hopefully by the sixteenth it will be mine please dont rub all your fun in my face until then
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ionus
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 14, 2007 8:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

An odd question to ask, but how go the Deaths/Game Overs in Super Mario Galaxy? Come to thinking of it, how were they in Sunshine as well? Because they were hilarious in Super Mario 64.... and silly most every other Mario game...
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 14, 2007 10:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mario spins into a singularity while screaming in his ridiculous falsetto, and the game says TOO BAD!
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 14, 2007 10:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

incidentally, i'm enjoying contra 4.
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Cycle
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 14, 2007 10:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

what, hook me up plz
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Cossix
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 14, 2007 10:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Call of Duty 4 is one of my favorite titles this year. I thought the singleplayer was exceptionally well done and had some twists to it that I didn't really see coming. Visually, this game is one of the most impressive titles on the Xbox 360, and that's hilarious because apparently it's one of the lowest tech games on the 360 too. It also runs at 60FPS constantly. Other developers should really take notice of what Infinity Ward has done here and attempt to follow suit I think.

Also the multiplayer has been excellent. The game throws advancement at you like it's going out of style, so you always feel accomplished. Playing online at night, it's always "one more unlock and I'll go to bed, I swear".

The game doesn't really innovate a whole lot, but it takes everything about corridor shooters, opens it up a bit (there really are multiple paths to some of the objectives!), and polishes it until it's pretty goddamn amazing.
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ryan
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 2:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, Call of Duty 4 has been something else so far. It's surprising how insignificant it makes you feel now. The series has always been great - the abomination that is 3 aside - about putting the player into a situation larger than themselves, but that is especially the case here where I might get one or two kills for an entire engagement. I would say the friendlies are too good, but then I recall how shitty 3 was about making me kill 500 Nazis before continuing and realizing that it's pretty much how it should be.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 2:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

i like contra 4 a lot. it has absolutely no identity, though. everything i've seen so far has been straight out of the original contra: a jungle full of robot turrets, a climb up a waterfall, dodging falling rocks. contra 4 happens to do it well, and it looks and sounds gorgeous (and i appreciate the way the game uses the ds's vertical space), but i have no idea what'd i'd point to if someone were to ask me what contra 4 is.
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ionus
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 6:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, it has to have already been said, but I kinda figured Contra 4 was going to be more a tribute than a game on it's own.

Must track down video of TOO BAD!

One of these days, I want to record a good video compilation of glorious video game deaths and game over screens.
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Harveyjames
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 7:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Someone at Nintendo really decided 'Game Over' had had its day at one stage, didn't they? I remember Luigi's Mansion had 'GOOD NIGHT!' when you lost, and the German version of Mario Sunshine had 'Arrivaderci!'

I heard some of the death animations in Galaxy continue Nintendo's ongoing flirtation with the macabre which I first noticed in Pikmin 2 and Sunshine (namely the pulling legs off of giant squid segments); apparently there are instances where Mario's flesh can burn off and he collapses into a pile of bones, Ghosts 'n' Goblins style.
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friedchicken
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 8:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

dessgeega wrote:
the strongest parts of super mario sunshine are probably the parts where the player is asked to jump between unexplained platforms in space, and much of super mario galaxy is unexplained platforms in space.


To be fair, a few levels are more unexplained-platform-esque than others. I just played a few of these last night, and I was relieved that they were in there--I'm thinking especially of the Sweet Sweet Galaxy.

I like how the game manages to have a falling hazard despite the 'space gravity'.
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helicopterp
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 11:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Harveyjames wrote:
I heard some of the death animations in Galaxy continue Nintendo's ongoing flirtation with the macabre which I first noticed in Pikmin 2


The pikmin series are very disturbing games.
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Cossix
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 3:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Man the first thing that blew me away in Call of Duty 4 was in the first real mission when I noticed the fucking boat was LISTING

I was all

THE BOAT IS LISTING

Just ask Dess. She was there. That's next gen, people. Boats that can rock.

Also I told Daphny she could play Mario Galaxy first and that makes me sad because she's playing it and I'm just on the internet Sad
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 4:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

he was pretty excited, yes.

friedchicken wrote:
I like how the game manages to have a falling hazard despite the 'space gravity'.


in a bizarre way it's the natural extension of the bottomless pit in the 2d mario games. the pit in super mario bros. is a singularity: the pit in super mario galaxy is a black hole.

the "dustydunes galaxy" is wonderful.
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 7:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i'm getting close to the end of super mario galaxy. you know what? the hub world sucks. hub worlds in general tend to suck, because they reduce the game world to a checklist. but super mario 64's is at least interestingly laid out, and full of secrets. mario sunshine's delfino plaza makes the unveiling of each new stage feel like a great big event. mario galaxy's hubworld is a series of doors that light up one at a time. you enter one, and you get a list of stages, including those that would be secret in either of those earlier games.

what happened to the days when mario was actually trying to get from world one to world eight?
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 7:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

the best part about the mario 64 hub was diving into paintings

mario sunshine lost about ten thousand points for not letting me jump into the world entrances.

i guess galaxy is also going to lose points?
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 15, 2007 8:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dess that's extraordinarily disappointing about the hub world
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dessgeega
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 1:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

i finished super mario galaxy. the bosses aren't very interesting. you'd think they should be, given how many times the game reuses them.

the princess writes the same letter over and over.

most of the stages are wonderful, though. whenever the game does anything with unusual gravity, it's fantastic.
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friedchicken
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 16, 2007 9:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, the bosses are definitely not where it's at, despite being kindof pretty. I guess, though, that looking back all the way to SMB1, this is nothing really new, although I guess bosses aren't even really the point in SMB1.
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