http://jiggmin.com/play_game.php?title=Effing+Hail

The annoying gameplay mechanics I was worried about when I first started playing did rear their ugly heads in a couple of spots as I pressed through the game. Most notably, there were parts when I had to jump around and the camera angle would change mid-jump, making it tough to land in the right spot. And at the end of the game there were some super-annoying sections where I had to walk across thin platforms and climb these huge pillars with spinning knives. Frustrating.

There were definitely some innovative gameplay elements though, like the "finishing moves" for certain enemies. If I hadn’t already played Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, I think it would have seemed fresher. God of War definitely introduced this first, as far as I know.

Finally, the graphics were good, especially for a PS2 game. It doesn’t compare to Gears of War by any means, but considering the relative power of the PS2 compared to the 360, it’s incredible what the development team was able to do.

All in all, a great game. I am psyched about God of War II coming out soon. Hopefully within the next couple of months.

The RPG elements are there, but it’s clear that this is aimed at players that are not hardcore about their RPGs. By default all of your leveling is done automatically, and I mean automatically. It chooses everything for you. You can opt out of this on a character by character basis, which seems annoying if you want to do it for every character, but in reality you settle on a half-dozen or so that you want to be OCD about and let the rest upgrade automatically.

Like X-Men Legends, the combat gets a bit old about halfway through the game. It’s pretty much just button-mashing and using special abilities every once in awhile. There’s some God of War-style cinematic moves every once in awhile, where you have to press buttons as they flash on screen in order to complete objectives, but other than that, it’s pretty straightforward.

I finished it just because I like comic books, easy games, and the story was interesting enough. Plus, there are some awesome rendered cut scenes. Specifically, there’s one with Nightcrawler that is incredible. Worth playing if you enjoyed X-Men Legends at all. If you didn’t get into X-Men Legends, it’s probably not interesting to you.

First, some bitching about Wii:

Up until 10 minutes ago, all I’ve ever done with the Wii is played games. Very easy, very fun. However, trying to use the internet connectivity and adding friends made me want to punch a little Japanese person in the face. Do they actually expect average people to be able to do this? I’m an embedded systems designer, and I was frustrated with it. Other than letting our Mii’s travel back and forth, is there even any benefit to doing it? Shame on you Nintendo.

Second, games only save to the internal Wii memory. If you want them on the SD card, you have to copy it over manually. Of course, you’d have to do that each time you play the game in order to keep the SD card up to date. It pretty much makes the $50 1G memory card I bought completely useless.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The Wii online setup is pretty bad. I’m really surprised people are getting it to work without wanting to gouge their own eyes out with a spoon. As for me, I am still using it on my neighbor’s wireless because it won’t work on mine. And yes, I have changed to channels 1/11 on the router. Yes, I have followed all stupid suggestions in the forums and on the support site. Nintendo could take a few pointers from Microsoft in this particular part of the experience.

The SD thing seems strange. I haven’t tried to use an SD card yet, but it does seem odd that you can’t save games directly to it. This does seem like something Nintendo could fix change with a firmware update though.

Wii Sports – It’s ok. Fun little games to showcase the controller abilities. I’ve found tennis to be pretty fun with multiple people, and you can avoid the dreaded Wii tennis elbow once you learn that a skilled flick of the wrist will do just as much as a full blown swing. I brought my Wii home for Christmas, and since I have a zillion siblings we had continuously rotating doubles matches which were a blast.

Super Monkey Ball – I usually only play the mini games. Not as much fun as the versions for GameCube. I think they tried too hard to incorporate the motion control into the games, and many of them are just too touchy, or they should have put more time into making it fun. I guess they were pressed for time trying to get that one out for launch. There are a few that are pretty entertaining though.

Zelda: Twilight Princess – This game rocks. It’s hella fun to play. They used the motion sensors in moderation, which is good. The game itself is really fun – plenty of puzzles and tangent adventures to try out. I haven’t played any Zelda games since the one for 8-bit Nintendo, but I can still blindly say this is probably the best to date.

Excite Truck – So much fun my head almost exploded. It’s a very fast paced, physics defying game. There’s actually a lot of strategy needed for the more advanced tracks, but at the same time you can just pick a level and have fun doing 720’s at 1000 ft in the air and smashing through trees with power-ups. Definitely one of the best games I own.

Red Steel – I haven’t played this game very much. The reason? My damn arm gets tired. Another example of how not to design a game interface. I think it would be much better if I could play for more than 20 mins at a time, so my review may be biased. Basically, you are required to use the Wii-mote pointer continuously to aim and steer in the game. That’s not even too bad because you could rest your arm on your knee; then they thought up the great idea of requiring you to extend your arm towards the TV to zoom in/out. Combine all of that movement and you have to hold your arm straight out for extended periods of time during game play. Very annoying. Maybe I need to hit the gym.

Haven’t gotten into Twilight Princess yet myself. Elebits should be here from Gamefly this week, though in retrospect maybe I should have put Excite Truck at the top of my queue instead. Oh well, way too many awesome games these days to get to. I still work occasionally, you know.

But these are minor issues; I definitely plan on finishing the game, which means it’s pretty good. :-)

When I got home I plugged it in and got everything wired up. It was pretty straightforward. I didn’t have component cables yet, so I had to use the composite cable. My gosh, does 480i suck. Ever since I got my new 50" plasma last month I haven’t been able to watch low quality signals for long. I had initially planned to wait to get the component cable, but I ordered one from Nintendo the very next day. They must have shipped from Redmond, too, because I got it the following day, which was awesome. 480p makes the picture less nauseatingly bad. :-)

Anyway, the Wiimote is surprisingly easy to set up and use. Just put the sensor bar in the appropriate location, and you’re pretty much done. I expected to have to do some sort of calibration like you do on a PDA touch screen, but there wasn’t any. Mnoving it around to select things on the screen is easy, and it has a very mouse-like feel. One of the coolest things is that it can detect the orientation of your hand, so if you hold the Wiimote upside down, the pointer icon on the screen goes upside down as well. This capability is important in games too, most notably in Wii Sports Bowling. Pretty cool stuff from a technological perspective.

I had a ton of problems getting my Wii on the internet, though. I still haven’t gotten it working with my own network. I’m mooching off a neighbor’s until I get mine figured out. I keep getting random errors when testing the connection. The Wii of course just gives you an error code, and then you have to look it up on their support website to try and figure out what it is. And then, you have to type in the error code and hit search, because they don’t just have a flat list of the codes and what they mean. And to add insult to injury, they have ranges of error codes that all have the same recommendation. Change the wireless channel to 1 or 11. Check your SSID, blah blah blah. None of it has worked for me. This is one area where I think Microsoft really has it down when you compare the 360 experience to the Wii.

Once I got it online, updating it was painfully slow. It took about a half hour to get all the updates downloaded and installed. Compare this to the 360, which has taken less than 3 minutes for every update I’ve ever applied.

The Wii UI is very minimalistic. There’s not a lot of color, just grey, black, and white, and the occasional blue. And it has this annoying pinging sound that it makes whenever you’re applying an update or testing a wireless connection. It gets to you after awhile. And the Wii Store has this background music that is fun at first, but you get sick of it real quickly.

After all of the fooling around with getting it online and updated, I was pretty frustrated. It took me the better part of the day to get it up and running. So when I finally decided it was time to play Wii Sports, I was in a kind of bad mood. But within 5 minutes of standing in front of my TV, gesticulating wildly, my attitude had changed. Wii Sports is just freaking fun! I majorly suck at baseball and tennis, but I bowl pretty well, and I find boxing pretty fun. It took me awhile to figure out that I could use both hands while boxing. Yeah, I’m an idiot. :-)

I also got Zelda, but I haven’t played it yet. I also have a ton of GameCube games that I haven’t tried yet. That is one really cool thing – my Wavebirds are still useable, as are my memory cards with all my save games. I could fully retire my GameCube if it weren’t for the Gameboy Player, which I use to play Gameboy games on the big screen.

I still have a lot of stuff to check out. I added Patrick to my address book (seriously, this is a painful experience compared to the Xbox Live accounts and friends list. A 16 digit number? Come on! I can’t remember that to tell my friends!), so hopefully we’ll be exchanging Mii’s soon. Not sure what that means, but no doubt it will be a cultural experience.

It’s clear that this console was designed by a Japanese company. The design and focus are very different from something like the 360. And that is awesome! Variety is good. I look forward to better online experiences as they roll out new services and channels. There’s a lot of potential, and just like Xbox Live, it’s going to take some time to really grow.

Until then, anybody up for a round of Wii Bowling? :-)

The puzzles were pretty easy, but still enjoyable. There weren’t too many places where I was annoyed by the platform mechanics. There were still some times where I died unnecessarily because the camera angle was a bit off and I couldn’t tell exactly where my character was going to land. But it was all pretty forgivable.

Playing through the game in Story mode was really only the beginning, though, since you can then play every episode through in Free Play mode, which allows you to access a bunch of secret areas and collect items. I only managed to unlock 60% of the game before I got bored, but if you’re really into finding and collecting items, then this one is definitely worth a rental.

So what do I think of it? Well, in a word, it is awesome. It outputs beautifully on my 480p HDTV (alas, I don’t think my TV supports 720p – time to buy a 73") in glorious widescreen deliciousness, and it was brain-dead easy to get logged on to XBox Live. Once there, I downloaded a bunch of Arcade game demos, including the utterly fantastic Geometry Wars, which I bought for 400 Microsoft Points ($5) within 20 minutes of playing. There is so much awesomeness in this sexy little machine that it is tough to write it all down. But there are a couple of areas that really stand out, so I thought I’d write a little about them.

Achievements

The concept is so simple – set mini goals within games and award players points when they achieve these goals. Then centralize everything on a website so players can compare their results to all players globally, or just amongst their friends. This is what the XBox team has done with Achievements. An example of an achievement in Geometry Wars is the Pacifism Achievement, which is awarded for playing the first 60 seconds of the game without shooting (pretty tough when you first start out). Another is awarded when you earn 100,000 points, and still another when you make it all the way to 100,000 points without dying once. You get the idea. Because achievements are super-public – you can go visit my profile on xbox.com and see all the achievements I’ve attained for a certain game – it adds a huge competitive edge to the games. For example, because I can compare my achievements with my friends, I am more apt to keep playing so that I can keep my edge over other players. It also adds extra incentive to purchase full versions of games, since you can’t earn achievements in demos.

Demos

And speaking of demos – the online nature of XBox Live allows publishers to put up downloadable game demos in the XBox Live Marketplace. So if you have the hard drive, you can download demos of games such as Condemned, Fight Night, Full Auto, etc. before you buy them. It’s great – but unfortunately the demos are very large (nearly 600 MB for the Condemned demo), and there is no way to a) queue up multiple downloads and b) download in the background. This actually really sucks – it means that while you’re downloading a demo, or any other type of content, you can’t do anything else on your 360. The only silver lining is that downloads are resumable, so if you get bored downloading something and want to get in another round of Geometry Wars, you can cancel it and resume it later. You’d think with 3 cores on the CPU, they could spawn a background thread to handle downloads in the background, but whatever. Its still freakin’ cool.

Media Center

The original XBox had a Media Center extender that you could use with your Media Center 2005 PC (I’m ignoring the hacks you could use to get XBMC or Linux on there). Unfortunately, there were two core faults – it required a disc to be inserted into the XBox, and it was pretty low quality because all the graphic processing had to be done on the Media Center PC and then transmitted through the network. Plus the XBox couldn’t be turned on and of remotely (the 360 does this beautifully). In short, I bought it and did not like it at all. The 360 changes that. It runs the media center app natively, and connects up to your Media Center just to start streaming the video/music/pictures. I think all the graphics processing is done on the 360 itself, so it just looks better and is more responsive. Plus, it uses the same remote as a typical media center remote, so you can move your large, loud Media Center PC (which is what you wind up with when you build your own on a budget as I did) into some dark corner of your apartment and use the 360 as your sole media center. Trust me – words cannot describe how freakin’ awesome this is.

Well, there’s a ton more to say about this stunning piece of hardware/software engineering, but I am already suffering Geometry Wars withdrawal, so I’d better get back to it. I have achievements to earn, after all. :-) Look me up if you’re on XBox Live – my Gamertag is Diametrix.