The Gamer's Quarter

[Cycle]

I thought this was a GC title?
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[dessgeega]

it was.

not no more, though.
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[Shapermc]

Knowing that this game is out makes all other games that I have the ability to play currently seem less interesting and hence I went to bed early last night depressed at my financial situation.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dessgeega]

so hey, i've been playing super paper mario!

it's really vapid! it's really a puzzle adventure game, so the platforming just paces out the puzzling. but the platforming requires no skill! in the other paper mario titles, battling enemies takes both strategy and skill, and between fighting and puzzling you have a game that's consistently compelling and challenging. all i feel like this game is testing is my ability to press the a button when i reach a dead end.

i've only played the first chapter, though, hopefully the game gets better. other quibbles: too many power-ups right at the start, the plot is cliche and the script is full of internet humor, and the wii remote adds nothing to this game. they should have released it as a gamecube game and marketed it as being "for your wii or gamecube!"

EDIT: also, i find it a little obnoxious that there's a timer on your slip-sideways ability. (the build i played at gdc didn't have that.) it's as though this was actually some kind of arcade-y platformer and not what is essentially a puzzle game.
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[dessgeega]

kororinpa secret stage 3, on the other hand, is inspired.
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[Ethoscapade]

yup, um, exactly what i was worried about (and nobody seemed to be vocalizing prior to release).

i just bought it, at any rate, and i won't be able to play it for three weeks. that was probably not the best move!

as regards kororinpa: gosh darnit dess, your impressions are usually spot on in every category save for "getting one's money's worth" (heaven help us), and to this end the game still costs too too much (well aware that i just bought spm but cmon the production values) and i'm afraid it'll go up before it goes down.

[dessgeega]

well, i didn't actually pay for kororinpa!

my mother bought it, because she's the one with the wii. which means i don't actually get to play it that often! my sister has apparently already completed all of the standard stages, and my mother's purportedly further along than i am (i've cleared forty stages so far).
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[Nana Komatsu]

[SuperWes]

I like Super Paper Mario, but I don't LOVE it like I was expecting to. It's just a bit too conflicted in what it wants to be. I think the best way to describe it by using other game analogies is that it's a Metroid game without backtracking, and with the towns from Zelda 2. You're always learning new abilities but it's always just to give you a reason to switch characters or partners so that you can pass an obstacle, and never really requires much though beyond that.

And the towns and story are really a waste of time. I didn't feel that way about either of the Mario and Luigi games, but I truly do about this one. I'm wondering if it's the change of focus from RPG to puzzle game that does it of if it's just because there's too much writing, but I guess it doesn't matter. What matters is it kinda feels like a waste of time.

Also Paper Mario 2 had better visual design than this does in a lot of ways. Kinda surprising considering some of the early screenshots and movies!

Overall rating: A disappointment for sure, but not quite a waste.

-Wes
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[Nana Komatsu]

I am really enjoying the game, but I guess I'm a mainstream gamer who doesn't know better anyway!
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[dessgeega]

also if i have to listen to another "what's this a button i refer to? never you worry your pretty head about it, someone will understand" someone's getting five across the eyes.
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[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

i think i agree. actually, i think the visuals of the first paper mario had a lot more character to them than super paper mario, which is visually cleaner (and the character designs more boxy) and subsequently emptier. i've only played a small part of the game so far, though.
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[Shapermc]

Well, I was just making sure he wasn't talking about visual quality, because this stuff can be deceptive when moving from one source to another. I wasn't saying that he was wrong. Also, he was compairing it to PM2, not 1, just to clearify.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[SuperWes]

For comparison's sake:

Paper Mario 2





Super Paper Mario





I'm not talking about image quality, I'm talking about how interesting the design is. Maybe it's an unfortunate byproduct of moving from 3D to 2D-that-can-be-turned-to-3D, but there's something going on there!

-Wes

-Wes
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[dmauro]

I think what I really want more than anything is to just play Super Mario Bros. 3 with Super Paper Mario graphics.

Paper Mario 2 and Super Paper Mario both tie for best in-game trees.

After the first screens of Paper Mario 2 popped up, I started seeing these MoMA design store lamps around that I refer to as "Paper Mario Lamps":

[dessgeega]

[Ethoscapade]

paper mario 2 was better than any first party effort on the cube except - maybe - the first prime, junglebeat, and melee.

[Shapermc]

[SuperWes]

[Tim]

[dmauro]

when you fall off the course in kororinpa, is there anything keeping you from flipping the controller so that you land on the course again? It looks like from the videos that the rotation of the levels is centered around the ball so that this would be possible.

[dessgeega]

there are some nice tricks a skilled player can pull - i once watched my sister fling the ball all the way from the starting point of the stage to the exit. that's why you need to collect all those gems, though.

i started using a normal ball as soon as i unlocked one, and then switched to a hard ball as soon as i could (i played through toy land with saturn). once i clear all the stages i'll probably go back and play through all the earlier stages with a hard ball.

i do like that they let you set your own level of difficulty - that you can, if desperate, waddle through a stage with the panda ("last resort"), but you'll never get a good time with it.
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[JasonMoses]

[dessgeega]

i finished kororinpa. it gets mighty hard! now i've unlocked mirror versions of every track, but i'm probably going to play through the originals again first. there are lots of secret tracks i havn't unlocked yet, either.

and i played through chapter 3 of super paper mario. it's such an improvement - in premise, in platforming, and in visual design. usually lol internets humor in videogame scripts annoys me, but when it's as overt as this i can deal. this chapter as a whole is pretty sassy! it's also more clever than anything in contact.
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[helicopterp]

[dessgeega]

45.
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[dessgeega]

strike that! there are apparently hidden bonus stages in addition to the "secret" stages, and they are super hard!

i have been replaying the earlier stages. barreling through the earlier stages at high speed is pretty incredible. each stage has a bronze, silver or gold trophy you can earn by finishing it fast enough; the gold trophies require you to be ludicrously fast. i've gotten gold on all of the first ten stages except that goddamn wavy one.
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[dessgeega]

super paper: the boss of chapter 4 is pretty boss. the first part of that chapter was a neat throwback to super mario land, but the platforming sections grew tiring.
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[dessgeega]

also, the pacing of this game is pretty weird. in chapter 3 i got two new abilities, while in chapter 4 i got a single ability that i had to use once and serves no practical purpose otherwise. what's the deal?
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[dessgeega]

i got halfway through chapter 5 and just quit. i can't really stand this game much more. all the puzzles are stupid, arbitrary things! some character will tell you, "okay, you're gonna want to find a red tree. to the left of it there's a hole in the ground - jump in there. you'll be taken to a set of three blocks. you want to hit the one on the right, the one on the left and the one in the middle, in that order." (sorry, SPOILERS.) also, you'd think a game with numbered, left-to-right scrolling stages would have less back-tracking! and enemies come back while you're back-tracking, and while they only do two points of damage here, three points of damage there, that damage adds up while you're running back and forth, because the game mechanics just aren't precise enough for you to dodge 100% successfully.

and the script is terrible. i'm not cragging your crag, brah.

also there's only like one interesting character in the entire story. (hint: it's nastasia.)
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[JamesE]

[dessgeega]

it only actually happens once, right at the beginning. after that when you get a new ability it just says "press button 1 to do a butt slam" or whatevs. it's not as obnoxious as the underside.
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[dessgeega]

so matt called me up to give me a HOT TIP for that goddamn wavy stage, and between it and my own fortitude i was able to get a gold.

then i spent, no foolin', half an hour doing one of the bonus stages. those things are ludicrous.

then i got a couple golds on the candyland stages. i unlocked the final ball and, oh goddess, it's amazing. amazing.

i also played some more super paper mario. it still sucks.
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[SuperWes]

Level 3-3 of Super Paper Mario totally fucking blew. The game makes you get a part time job doing Mario stuff. The entire level consists of jumping up and down to hit a block 100 times, then running to the right in a hamster wheel for 10 minutes. It's great that it's self-referential and all, but it's really, really boring. Then I got to Level 3-4, forgot about the whole "pointing at the screen when you're lost" thing, got stuck for an hour, and forgot about how bad 3-3 was. Now I'm looking back at levels 3-3 and 3-4 and wondering if I should even keep playing.

-Wes
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[Intentionally Wrong]

Sure you're not thinking of 2-3 and 2-4, Wes? 'Cause those are the "Mario's workin' in the sweatshop" levels. 3-4 is pretty worthwhile, compared to a lot of stages. I can't remember anything about Level 4, but Level 5 is as stupid and ridiculous as Dessgeega suggests it is. Level 6 impressed me a little, as did 7, and I had mixed feelings about 8.

We need, like, a synopsis of every level in Paper Mario games for reference. I suspect the levels in Thousand-Year Door are objectively better than those of the other two games.

[dessgeega]

thousand year door is kind of a mixed bag. the original's dungeons are consistantly excellent (the crystal palace trumps anything zelda has done in a long time), while thousand year door's range from the bland (pirate's cove) to the brilliant (glitz pit).

also, yes, if i recall correctly, the sweatshop is chapter 2. chapter 3 is the bitlands, easily the hilight of the game so far.
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[Harveyjames]

I've not bought so many Wii games but I'd like to contribute my impressions of Rayman Raving Rabbids:

-Within the first hour, you will have heard 'Mirislou' by Dick Dale about six times, to the point where you will suspect they only had the money to license one song.

-It's not fun by any stretch of the imagination

-One of the costumes you can unlock is called 'Gangster'. If you select it, Rayman's face turns black!

I wish there was a games shop nearer to my house to I could trade this piece of shit in and get Kororinpa

[simplicio]

[dessgeega]

the amount of back-tracking in super paper mario is insulting. aderack is fond of saying "the worst thing a game can do is assume i have nothing better to do than play a videogame". super paper mario is that game.

i'm going to finish it. i want it to do something brilliant in its final act.

i got the last pure heart. notes on chapters six and seven:

chapter 6 starts with an amazing premise. i really wanted to see them go through with it, but they give up a fifth of the way through.

then there's something interesting.

then there's a place with a great premise but boring execution.

chapter 7 is awful. it is full of boring platforming which you're required to back-track through over and over and over again. there is a boss fight in there that is neat, though i think there's a more clever solution that i couldn't figure out.

the end boss of this chapter is actually the best in the game so far. this is no great feat, as most of the boss fights are awful, but this one was actually really satisfying, and reminds me of doki doki panic.

then, the longest, most awkward conversation in the world. at the end, everybody does a dance.

i think when i finish this game i might play through the original paper mario again, for like the fourth or fifth time.
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[dessgeega]

also the hub town is way too tedious to navigate, and the flipping and its timer compound the problem.

i did locate the entrance to this game's pit of a hundred trials, though. and i'm curious about it because the game cheated me out of what had promised to be it. i only managed to make it halfway through thousand year door's, but i wonder how they've implemented it in a game with non-turn-based fighting.
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[dessgeega]

so not only does this game suck, it apparently also destroys european wiis.
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[simplicio]

I traded in Super Monkey Ball for half of Kororinpa! Worth the expense, just to get that abomination off my shelf and stop feeling all growly every time I see it there. What an upgrade, too! I'm only 10 levels in, but I'm having lots of fun throwing the ball around and trying to make impossible jumps. The physics and controls are so much better than SMB it's not even funny.

Super Paper Mario may be the loneliest game of this generation. I decided this when I flipped and snuck around behind a row of Thwomps, feeling like Achilles strapping on a pair of steel anklets.

[dessgeega]

i finished super paper mario.

spoilers: the game sucks.

the last chapter was a major disappointment. it was pretty much just enemies on shelves. compare that to the super long final dungeon of the original paper mario, where the developers throw at you everything they can come up with with wild abandon.

this game has the worst plot ever. well, probably some other jrpg that i havn't played is worse. it really disappoints me that for all its pretensions of platforming, this game is closer to a jrpg than any other episode of the series in a lot of ways. my mother was watching while i played, and in the middle of the game's climax said "this is the dumbest thing ever". and it was.

also, the ending itself. instead of a parade, as is traditional (reward the player with content that appears nowhere else in the game), you get sepia-toned screenshots. and then it's over. on the plus side, though: it's over.

i did play through thirty floors of the pit of 100 trials. it's pretty good! each "trial" is a (possibly randomly-generated) maze on a giant game & watch (you can see ghosts of cells that aren't active, etc.), filled with an assortment of enemies. one of them is carrying the key to the next room. you have five minutes to get it. the game & watch screen is two-dimensional, of course, so you can flip sideways to zip around, but you can reach anywhere in the maze without needing to.

every ten rooms you get a prize and the option to leave. the prizes are just cards of unique characters, not useful one-of-a-kind items as in thousand year door. i never figured out what the cards were for the entire game. anyway, the pit is kind of neat.
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[Shapermc]

I figured that I should say a bit more about Kororinpa now that I’ve played it a bit longer.

This game is better than it should be. At first I thought that I may be disappointed with the game because it seemed like it probably would have been better as a downloadable game (i.e. too short and easy). Then, after the first level I was a bit disappointed that the game seemed like it wasn’t going to require as much crazy flipping as I had hoped (i.e. it was going to be on a fairly level surface like monkey ball), but this isn’t the case either.

The game is really competent, shockingly so. After getting the last game that Dess recommended--because “OMG LIKE CAMELTRY BUT DS!”--I finished in about 45 minutes (some where less than two hours anyways) and felt like it was pretty disappointing. I was just happy that I had gotten it fairly cheap. I had kind of been keeping up with what Dess had been saying about the game and it seemed like it wouldn’t end up anywhere near as short, and I started thinking about how great is would be to play with a physics engine in a sort of psudo-VR environment.

The game starts out fairly easy. The pacing is pretty much perfect: you start out with only the easier balls available so that you’re not overwhelmed at first. As you progress you slowly unlock things in a manner that somehow feels entirely natural to your progression with the game. By performing above average on the first level I was rewarded fairly early with the harder balls, and secret levels. The game doesn’t really dangle these over your head either: like how some games say “you have 5 out of 250 secret items!” this game seems as though there could be infinite hidden items. (I’m honestly holding out a freakish hope of a speed run mode where there are no gems to collects.)

I have been playing the game in a manner that seems a bit different from other reports of people. I complete the level, the first run is solely for collecting green gems and completing the level once. Then I go back through all the levels to gain the silver medal. At first I thought that perhaps the medal system was broken because I couldn’t get a gold medal to save my life, even on the easiest stage. So after doing this I progress onto the next level. I complete that once, go back through for Silver medals, then I go back to the previous stage and work on the gold medal. So far I have gold medals on the first 19 stages (screw that last level on the candy world (and I also have silvers on all of the first eight sekrit worlds)). The levels are so well crafted that replaying them over and over for time isn’t boring or insipid, they just continue to reveal their genius more and more. At worst they’re just straight forward, and at best they require full use and abuse of everything the game has to offer.

As for a difficulty curve, well, if you look at how I’ve been progressing with the medals (Silver, wait a level and then come back for gold) you’ll see that the curve works well for learning. You’re forced to learn techniques and control of the world that will make earlier levels easier, but those levels still hold a challenge to get the gold. After the second level don’t expect to be able to beat these levels on your first, second or even fifth run. Some of them begin to become exceptionally challenging, but these levels allow for something else entirely: full control creativity.

See, it wasn’t until one of the earlier stages in the third level (city themed level) that I started to go a little nutty from repeat play throughs. Since you only have to pick up the gems on your first run and there is no time limit with infinite retries, you start to see if you can jump certain sections, or take shortcuts, that will get you to that last gem or to the exit, without needing to go through the part you keep falling off of. So I started to get creative: as soon as the time counted down and my ball began to roll I would kind of flick the controller to throw the ball in the direction of the goal. I would do this over and over again, just slightly adjusting the trajectory and speed of the throw. I finally got it once and was shocked that I actually accomplished the feat because it landed the ball in the corner of a small square with the exit that was the entire distance of the level away.

In summation: the game is very malleable and expertly crafted. If just making it through all the levels is your thing, there’s the Panda ball which is very easy (described as a last resort), if you want to fly through the levels to get the best speed, the ball is available, but expert precision is required. The game has a lot of hidden and unlockable items for people who have the sick need to do that, but it doesn’t beat the more casual player over the head with the fact that they’re missing part of the game.

I want to give this game a score, and score it nearly perfect for a skill based game, but I refuse to score it!
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Pijaibros]

[dessgeega]

the bonus dungeon is probably the best part, but it's not really outstanding. if you could hit enemies from below mario bros.-style, then we might be talking.
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[dessgeega]

okay, i played through the entire pit of 100 trials.

it ends exactly how i expected it to, which is to say, how the thousand year door pit ends: a swap-palette version of the chapter 1 dragon boss. the only change was that it had more hit points, so i beat it easily. then i was rewarded with an ability i should have had from the start, and challenged to attempt the other pit of 100 trials.

which i will, because i'm hoping it's a completely different format. i'm expecting to be disappointed though.
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[dessgeega]

i tried the flopside pit. it's exactly the same as the flipside pit, except with harder enemies. and by harder enemies i mean they're the same enemies but with more hit points.

this series used to have such good ideas.

i quit and played kororinpa. i've got all the green things now and a trophy of some sort on each of the normal stages, except for that frigging risky tightrope stage. there is one more secret stage to unlock and two more secret secret stages.

i think i may take a break from kororinpa and try to complete super excite mode in excite truck.
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[dmauro]

Kororinpa is just about everything I've been looking for in a game for some time now. It's probably displaced Kirby's Canvas Curse as my favorite time attack game.