More than anything, I really want to love Nintendo. I don't mean on the level of getting a Triforce tattoo and setting up a Shigeru Miyamoto shrine or anything -- I just like the idea that a video game company can be successful and innovative and kinda weird at the same time. My DS is going to almost singlehandedly preserve my sanity during a 16-hour round trip via train to Chicago later this week (at least after I'm done reading The Crying of Lot 49 and Carl Wilson's 33 1/3 book about Celine Dion), and every time I wonder if my Wii was worth buying I remember the sparse but highly entertaining times I've had with Resident Evil 4, Super Mario Galaxy and No More Heroes. They're two of the most well-thought-out and compelling video game platforms in ages -- and sometimes, I think it'd be nice if Nintendo actually remembered that.
Well, that didn't take long: in a surprise move that'd make the Raconteurs envious, Harmonix announced Rock Band 2 yesterday and stated that it was actually coming out in less than three months. Now when a new Rock Band (or Guitar Hero) game is announced, the first thing people typically do is go nuts hoping and speculating over which bands are actually going to be in this iteration. Are we finally going to be able to play "Comfortably Numb"? "Stairway to Heaven"? Maybe even the Beatles? (And if we get the Beatles, can we get some solo George Harrison, too? I really want to five-star "The Art of Dying".)
But there's one thing that's been at the forefront of my mind since the first Guitar Hero came out what seems like ages ago. I love all kinds of music – this is where you'd expect someone to say "except rap and country", but my Nas and Willie Nelson records say otherwise – and few things have tempered the awesomeness of rocking out on "Billion Dollar Babies" or "Reptilia" more than the feeling that there's still a pretty big chunk of pop history that’s been overlooked by this game series. There's practically nothing that predates the British Invasion, a notable shortage of blues and – this being a personal pet peeve – almost no funk whatsoever. Sure, in Rock Band you can create an in-game avatar with a Bar-Kays afro and full Bootsy-caliber spaceman attire, but he'll look a bit out of place with nothing to play but Stone Temple Pilots.
CAUTION: This blog contains Metal Gear Solid 4 spoilers – specifically, discussion of a location in the game. Don’t click through if you care about that sort of thing.
I’ve never really gotten into the Final Fantasy games. I don’t hate the games – I’ve liked some, detested others – but if I had to come up with my top 10 favorite game series, Final Fantasy wouldn’t even rank. Actually, Final Fantasy wouldn’t even occur to me long enough to dismiss.
There are different reasons why, but the biggest? There was no continuity between games. You spent weeks earning a hard-fought victory in a Final Fantasy, saving the world and becoming a hero only after dozens of hours of grinding, searching, mapping, talking and fighting… then all your accomplishments were swept away, forgotten by the next game in the series. Nobody in Final Fantasy VII cared about your triumph over Kefka in Final Fantasy III1. It might not have even been the same planet.
To me, this was deeply unsatisfying. I cut my teeth on RPGs like Phantasy Star and Ultima – games that not only had a timeline and a sense of continuity, but the events of each title often directly influenced a sequel’s plot. Best were TSR’s legendary AD&D “Gold Box” games, where Pool of Radiance players were able to transfer their characters right on over to Curse of the Azure Bonds with levels, experience and inventory intact.
That sort of continuity was rare in console games, but as a kid I craved it. I was proud of my virtual heroics, and wanted them acknowledged in some way. When a game actually did, I loved it all the more for it. A few examples stick out in my mind, one very recent.
Posted by Jonathan McNamara at 3:39 AM Jun 17, 2008
By PJ Standlee, Phoenix New Times
Gamers seeking digital camaraderie and elbow-rubbing competition have a place to call their own. Located at the historical McCullough-Price House opposite the southwest corner of Chandler Fashion Mall in Phoenix, AZ, the "ZAP! Vintage Video Games" exhibition welcomes gamers of all ages to come in and pick up the joysticks of challenge and test their skills on some of the oldest and most beguiling games ever created.
Atari 2600: The archaic Atari 2600 entombed in glass as a reminder of gaming’s humble beginnings.
Guests can try out games from the archaic Atari 2600 game console on a vintage 1980s TV or practice their rapid-fire fingers on arcade classics such as Centipede. If classic games aren’t your thing, current generation home consoles such as the X-Box 360 are also available to play — all for free from June 14 to September 6.
Best of all, players with more ambition may also compete head-to-head at the ZAP! Vintage Game Tournament, which will be held on June 19 from 2 to 5 p.m. for youths; then on June 20 from 1 to 4 p.m. for teens; and finally on June 21 from 3 to 6 p.m. for adults.
Admission to the tournament is also free but with a limited number of spots, so first come, first served. Players will have a five-minute warm-up round and then head off to compete using the Atari Flashback 2 system, which will use an undisclosed range of Atari games. After banging on the controllers for two and a half hours, the top three players will advance to a championship round. Prizes and honors are up for grabs to the vintage gaming king.
And I found another use for my Wii Fit Board, too!
Welcome to episode two of Unboxing Porn, where I dig into some more-expensive SKU of a new game. It's June 12th, so that makes Metal Gear Solid 4 Limited Edition the lucky title. I'm also very excited to unveil my new Unboxing Porn Minitable, the Wii Fit Balance Board. It works smashingly, you can expect to see it in every future Unboxing Porn post.
SHOWN: Shit-ton of peripherals accumulated in just a few short years. NOT SHOWN: Broken guitars, dance mats I gave to my brother, Rock Band 2 equipment, Guitar Hero 4 equipment, Guitar Hero 5 equipment, Guitar Hero 6 equipment...
I’m absolutely dreading Guitar Hero 4, and feel panic-stricken just thinking about it.
It might sound like insanity, given that the fourth installment in the Guitar Hero franchise could end up being the most successful game of 2008. It won’t even hit store shelves till late October, but details announced recently have set off an alarm in my head. Guess what GH has in store for your ever-shrinking, fake plastic life?...
Gamasutra has an interesting blog up, one I wish more gamers would read and get fired up about.
In a mea culpa over some inordinately kind words gushed in his review of Grand Theft Auto 4, UK journo Simon Parkin points the finger at Rockstar for the admittedly absurd conditions the game was reviewed under. Initially promised review copies of GTA4 a mere week prior to the game’s release, even that scant amount of time was shaved down:
...when review code failed to turn up the week before release, many were left panicking about how they were going to serve their readers in a timely manner with any integrity.
Rockstar’s justification (emphasis added by me):
The reason for the withholding of review code was, according to Rockstar, a result to the game’s leaking onto the internet seven days before its release. Speaking to the company at the time it was claimed that this leak came from an unscrupulous journalist.
As a result, there was a lock down on all review code: everybody would get their copy just one day before the game’s release, and, despite the wonky logic (after all the game had already leaked to those with the capability to play it so why punish the many for the indiscretion of the few) there were to be “no exceptions, no arguments”.
At best then, by the time the game had been played, copy written and subbed ready for the Tuesday morning, most journalists (both in the UK and the US) had played for only a few hours, experiencing just a fraction of the game’s content, a situation testified to by various admissions in professional reviews.
Can we talk like grown-ups? Can we be real? Let’s be real.
However good your intentions were when you bought Wii Fit, the fact is at some point – sooner than you think, and maybe already – you’ll realize you’re never going to use it again… just like those weights in the garage with a fine layer of dust on ‘em, just like that gym membership that deducted $19.95 from your account monthly for a whole year before you finally admitted defeat by pulling the plug on it.
You thought Wii Fit would be different. “Maybe Wii Fit is so fun it can trick me into exercising!” you hoped against hope. “Maybe this is the answer!”
It’s not. Even if Wii Fit didn't have the same weaknesses of other home exercise programs (i.e., there’s always a hundred other things you could do at home), it’s not an especially good workout. Not nearly as in-depth, structured or strenuous as other fitness “games” (Yourself!Fitness comes to mind), even Dance Dance Revolution is probably better exercise.
So what to do with this thing? The game is easy enough to tuck away somewhere, but what about your $90 piece of plastic, the Wii Fit Balance Board? Sure, you could just slide it under a bed, never to be seen or thought of again until some future move when you lift up the mattress and the dust bunny-covered board stares up to remind you of your silly purchase… but it’s $90. In these trying economic times, it’d be nice to find something to do with the thing.
Well here you go: 5 solid ideas on how to recycle your Wii Fit Balance Board.
Posted by Jonathan McNamara at 9:59 AM May 16, 2008
Ganon lay quivering as my master sword protruded from his slumped form on the fields of Hyrule. Evil was once again vanquished. Peace had returned to the land. I’d completed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and I couldn’t have been more pissed off.
Normally I’d prepare readers by labeling a lead paragraph such as that with the words “spoiler warning” but considering a Zelda game spoiled by revealing that Ganon dies and Link rescues Zelda is like trying to keep the fact that drinking water is essential to your survival under wraps. We hold these truths to be self-evident.
Why then was I pissed off?
How about because Ganon wasn’t so much as mentioned until the last hour of Twilight Princess? How about because in a dramatic twist that I never saw coming, Princess Zelda actually sacrificed herself halfway through the game and then is brought back during the end sequence without any trace of explanation. Let me say that again: Princess Zelda died halfway through the game only to be resurrected in the last half hour because…well that’s just the point, isn’t it? There isn’t a good reason.
The real heroine of Twilght Princess
If pressed, I suppose the only reason I can think for having her not be dead after showing the player that she clearly died is that there’s some sort of rule at Nintendo that every Zelda game must end with Link squaring off with Ganon while Zelda cheers him on from the sidelines. It’s as if Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata left the bulk of the work to a bunch of bright-eyed interns who decided to get a little creative with the formula only to pulverize their intentions by trying to retrofit the typical Zelda ending onto Twilight Princess before patting themselves on the back for a job well done and going to a board meeting to see how they can ruin the next Star Fox game.
I believe the children are our future, so enough time has passed that I can talk about my failed adventures in creating a TV show, something a few of my co-workers were successfully doing at the time by launching Robot Chicken. Maybe the little ones will learn something from my cautionary tale, or maybe they'll just wonder why I've gathered them all in my front room with the promise of "Poke-Man Cards" and "Bubble Tape" (neither of which I have, or intend to share).
Once upon a time, years and years ago while working at Wizard Magazine and slowly dying on the inside, I created a show called....
A few weeks ago I wondered what might change for Play Magazine now that Dave Halverson has stepped down (or over, or up, or however he’d characterize it) from the Editor in Chief position. Well it only took a month: the new EIC, Brady Fiechter, announced in his very first Letter from the Editor his intention to abolish review scores from Play altogether.
Maybe. His exact words:
Yes, dear reader, I am tired of scoring games, as is the rest of the Play staff, so take this as a warning: next month you may not be seeing scores any longer.
That issue's reviews reflect all the clarity and certainty of his declaration: some reviews have a numerical score, another has a “VR” (very recommended, I presume?), and their rating system key now simply says “TBA?”
Cynics might point out that given the flak Play has taken over a run of… er, "inordinately generous" review scores it’s issued to games that nobody anywhere seemed to enjoy as much, this isn’t shocking. (The definitive example being Lair, a mediocre brown-tinted Rogue Squadron rehash turned nightmare by horrendously inadequate Sixaxis motion controls, which Play awarded a baffling 9 out of 10.)
Personally, I think the lack of decisiveness is the real criticism here – especially when abandoning review scores would be such a tremendous, worthwhile move to make.
Despite the fact that I hadn't played it in years, I long considered No One Lives Forever to be maybe my favorite first-person shooter of all time. It's legit funny in a way that most spy spoofs aren’t (the humor gets borderline proto-Venture Bros. at points), the level design is top notch, it gets that circa-1967 atmosphere down fantastically, the choice of being either stealthy or guns-blazing is implemented remarkably well, you can fight bad guys in zero-gravity or while falling out of an airplane without a chute, and despite moments of ridiculous cleavage exhibition, Cate Archer has that certain kind of beguiling Emma Peel cool that works really well in a female protagonist. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, seven years after it was released, it's held up nicely – the graphics are a little clunky but the over-the-top character animations still crack me up (the enemy deaths in particular are super-melodramatic), and pretty much every PC-version control standard it used in 2001 still works today. I'm picking up this game where I last left off, Scene 1 of the "Berlin By Night" mission, where I have to sneak into an East German research facility and figure out what those wacky Reds are up to.
WED, 3AM: Professor Layton and the Curious Village (DS)
"Perfesser, why don't'cha got white in yer eyes like I do?"
So, how's my deductive reasoning at this point in the proceedings? Probably horseshit, especially after about an hour's worth of fleeing from and/or shooting a whole lot of not-actually-zombies. I made it a deliberate point to break up the stretch of typically fast action-based games with one that required attention to detail and a bit of logical thinking, so this well-received puzzle game (well, mostly well-received) should do the trick nicely. This is basically an exhibition in brainteasery, and while it’s rendered with characters that look a bit like toned-down and friendlier versions of the character designs in The Triplets of Belleville and apparently involves some sort of plot revolving around some kinda will, this seems to be largely a modernized update on an old issue of Games magazine. Which I am totally cool with.
Well, here goes nothing: 24 video games in 24 hours. I can do this. I will get through this. I will persevere.
First, the ground rules:
-Every hour will consist of 45-55 minutes of actual gameplay and 5-15 minutes to write, post, use the bathroom, eat or whatever else I may need to do to stay awake and alert and prevent this whole thing from falling apart.
-This will be liveblogged and divided into three parts, covering eight hours each. Various impressions, observations and borderline-narcoleptic laments will be updated every so often. If you want to follow this in realtime, I recommend checking back every half hour or so.
-In the event that any of the games or consoles I have pre-selected are inoperable for any reason, I will more or less panic and try to wing it, since I didn’t think ahead when it comes to any sort of backup plan. Whoops!
I should also note that when I fired up my 360 at 6PM, I had 14 friends online, 13 of whom were playing Grand Theft Auto IV and one of whom was on “Away” status. Yeah, I think I might be missing out on something.
TUE, 7PM: Forza Motorsport 2 (360)
I made this. Then I steered it into a tire barricade.
I’m not even that big a GTA fan – I’m the sort who does a few missions, loses interest, and then just drives around the city raising hell and seeing how long I can fend off the police – yet there I was last night, in line in front of a local game shop, waiting to get my hands on GTA4. I guess I just like the community aspect – lineup events remind me there’s an actual physical community out there; real people, not just semitransparent swearing poltergeists floating around on Xbox Live and PSN.
And oh what a community we are. Actually, I was surprised by how diverse the turnout was: all ages, all races, and a range of economic classes were represented – the only scarce demographic being, unsurprisingly, females. In the line of 75 or so people, I counted about 8 women – and two of those, interestingly enough, were moms there to purchase the game for their accompanying underage sons.
(By the way, that’s some fucking balls; when I was that age I didn’t even want my mom to pick me up at school. Not only were those kids able to bamboozle mommy into sitting in line with them for a couple hours on a Monday night to buy them an M-rated videogame, but they clearly didn’t give a shit if the whole rest of the line saw it.)
The other girls were wives and girlfriends along for the ride, the one right behind me so insanely stoned out of her mind (I’m sure I got a contact high from just breathing the fumes coming off her stained sweatshirt), she was there a full 20 minutes before the daze lifted a bit and she asked her boyfriend:
“So we’re buying a videogame?”
Genius.
Anyway, I picked up the Special Edition. Yes, the big boy. Yes, the one with the $90 price tag. Save your snide, smart-ass “must be nice” bullshit, because it’s not like I have all the money in the world or anything. In fact given how lukewarm I am on the series it’s probably downright stupid I bought it… but I did, because I have a terrible (and expensive) weakness for collector’s editions of games, DVDs, albums… you name it. It’s a disease. Truth be told, you should pity me1.
So for everyone else with my proclivity but without my means, I took pictures of the whole un-boxing ritual for you to stroke yourself to. Enjoy!
God help me, this is a stupid and crazy idea, but it has to be done. You see, there was a time -- let's call this time "until this upcoming Wednesday" -- where I had a whole bunch of games I was planning on eventually getting around to playing. First-person shooters, racing games, sports games, puzzle games, adventure games, music games, beat-em-ups, strategy games, you name it. And then, gradually but surely, time did its thing and eventually the realization hit me: hey, wait, it's going to be April 29th soon. And while some people may celebrate this day for different reasons -- for instance, you are Master P and it is your birthday -- to me, it signals Hour Zero: put everything else away for a long time, because Grand Theft Auto IV is coming out.
But you know what? I'm not going to let the rest of my game collection go quietly out into the night. Before I take what looks to be an extensive trip to Liberty City, I've got other things to get out of the way. And I have 24 hours to do it.
Even though Forza Motorsport 2 has locked down a stranglehold on the part of my gamer-brain that desires to drive fast, flashy automobiles in a way that more or less reflects real life physics, I’m still pretty geeked for Gran Turismo 5. Part of that hinges on the fact that GT covers some of the bullet points that Forza misses: even if it doesn’t have the paint job customization, robust damage system, clever AI and the Lamborghini and Porsche licensing of the 360’s flagship racing sim, Gran Turismo 5does have a cockpit view, staggeringly beautiful graphics and - best of all - the probability that they'll sneak in some really weird surprises in its car roster. Sure, Forza has almost every single modern high-performance supercar you'd ever want, but Gran Turismo has wonderful car-geek obscurities like the Ginetta G4 and the Dome Zero. And think back to '98: had you even heard of a Nissan Skyline GT-R or a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution before the first Gran Turismo hit the PS1?
Well, I've read yet another "BEST VIDEO GAME BOSSES EVAR!!!" list. Hooray.
I'm not even going to bother linking it, since you've seen it all before. Maybe not that specific list, but come on, they’re all the same. Bowser. Ganon. Ridley. Dr. Wily. Sephiroth… Jesus Christ, wake me when it’s over. Hey, I loved all those badasses too, but seriously guys: Covered Territory.
The ironic1 thing about all those legendary video game bosses is that they usually weren’t the game’s fiercest, most dreaded adversary. They were CEOs of evil; softbodied industrialists with a mission statement about a reign of terror, surrounded by the really scary motherfuckers who actually made it happen.
No, in those games it wasn’t the head honcho you feared… instead, it was some innocuous denizen working some humdrum corner of the game, just waiting for you to step into the invisible octagon he’d marked out in his mind’s eye. He wasn’t a boss; indeed many didn’t even have a name. But every time you saw this foe, your heart sank and you let out a groan because you knew no matter how righteous your gaming kung fu was, he was sure to hand you your ass 6 times out of 10.
This one goes out to those guys, the dirtiest-playing (and in one case, just plain dirty) sonsabitches from my youth, my Top 5 Most Unforgivable Video Game Enemies, ever.
Posted by Jonathan McNamara at 1:37 AM Apr 11, 2008
It's less than 5 months until September and you know what that means; time for Lucas Arts to start beating us to death with inane amounts of coverage for their latest attempt to make a pile of steaming, hot money fall out of the now rotting, dead horse's ass that is Star Wars. I'm talking about Star Wars: Force Unleashed of course.
Issue 76 of Play Magazine marks the end of an era: Dave Halverson, a fixture in the games journalism biz for a little more than 15 years, is relinquishing his title of Editor in Chief. Though he’s quick to reassure:
I’m promoting myself to Publisher/Creative Director so I can pursue growing the Play, Geek, Girls of Gaming, and Play Japan brands; finally trying my hand at manga (yes, I have two in the works) and spend more time doing feature work in addition to my infamous “Dave game” reviews.
...yet reading his entire Letter from the Editor (entitled “Now you see me…”), the tone is distinctly swan song, with much reminiscing on his career and thanking everyone who’s been along for the ride.
If you follow game mags, Halverson should be a recognizable personality; yet given the nature of the mainstream gaming press it’s likely few or none of Play’s competitors will mention Halverson’s “passing”, regardless of how noteworthy. Fortunately, I’m not mainstream gaming press, so I’m not worried about violating mainstream gaming press decorum, or burning in mainstream gaming press hell.
A friend of mine passed this along to me some years back and, just like the Monkey's Paw, I can't get rid of it. Over countless moves across the country, it keeps popping up somewhere in my house. More smut after the jump....
As you all well know, today is Sunday; more specifically today is the Lord’s day. But like so many others, I struggle with the dilemma: how do I reconcile this day of rest with my crippling gaming addiction? I can’t rightly wait ‘till Monday for my gaming fix, and yet, like every gamer, I am very, very concerned about how an omnipotent, omnipresent oversoul feels about my gaming habits. Is a good, challenging gameplay experience too much work on this day of rest?
I’m sure you’ve all agonized over this yourselves!
So I watched "Joysticks" again over the weekend, and I think this movie deserves a hell of a lot more cult status among gamers then it actually has. The fact that it's on DVD is nothing short of a black magic dealing with Pan, the Goat God. The fact that it's supposedly "Digitally Re-Mastered" is something that makes sense only to the fully conscious beings like the Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you are a serious gamer, there is NO REASON not to own this movie, to hear its theme songs ("Totally Awesome Video Games" and "Totally Awesome Video Games (feat. T-Pain and Fu Schnickens)" and to see Joe Don Baker phone it in even more than his appearance in "Mitchell."There are 35 for 7 bucks on Amazon, for Christ's sake. Here are just a couple reasons this is a must watch, as if an 80s sex comedy cashing in on video games, with an hour and a half of thinly veiled dick jokes weren't enough.
In this week's news story for City Pages, I went to Rochester, MN to pay a visit to Chris Chike, the 16-year-old Guitar Hero phenom that recently set a new Guinness record for highest score on the game's hardest song. Because of the constraints of the narrative, there was a lot of material that I didn't get a chance to use. Included among the cutting-room-floor scraps is an interview with RedOctane founder Charles Huang about the series, tips from Chike on how to master the trickiest parts of songs, and YouTube clips of Chike in action. All this and more you'll find after the jump.
I agree with my friend Sean's observation: Billy Mitchell, the very first man to play a perfect game of Pac-Man, is the world's biggest vagina. And if I ever cross his hot-sauce soaked face, I will kick his balls so hard, they'll land on top of the junior high school where the janitor will gladly retrieve them at the end of the semester. Of course, this is only based on multiple viewings of The King of Kong, and I'm sure Billy's a really nice guy. BM didn't even cash in on his Pac-Man cred by changing the name of his hot sauce to "Pac-Man Fever Blisters," or "A-MAZE-ing Sauce (Perfect Game Hot Sauce Edition)" or even, "Pac....MAN, that's hot as shit balls! Damn, Billy Mitchell, That's a High-Score Hot Sauce'!" Nope...It's just called "Rickey's.", a wildly entertaining name (we can agree) as far as hot sauces go. So, I gotta give him credit for showing some restraint.
Just kidding, what a world-class douche. AM I RIGHT??!?!
In my heart, though, this makes me sad—because I'm probably the world's biggest Pac-Man fanatic and Billy Mitchell has become the game's ambassador. This is ridiculous, because I should be Pac-Man's true ambassador. His PR guy. His ombudsman of Ward 5, if you will. That guy over at the vacated First Church of Pac-Man website? Respectfully, fuck that guy. His embarrassing appearance on the extremely short lived VH1 show "Totally Obsessed" made me realize that, when it comes to preaching the glory of pellet-based gaming, I am the Barack Obama of Pac-Man.
Pac-Man is a lifestyle. A sad lifestyle, yes...but a lifestyle my mustard-yellow, semi-circle tattoo and I will take proudly to the grave.
The great thing about being obsessed with something ridiculous is that your friends and family usually take notice. And when your hobby's not yet unhealthy enough to put you in a hospital, people end up buying (and better, yet MAKING) you things related to your hobby. And for FREE! While there is a ton of awesomePac-Mancrap you can buy online, neither you or Billy Mitchell will ever own the badass Pac-Man bling that has come into my possession: custom shit that can never be re-produced for any fanboy.
Just finished up my review of Viking: Battle for Asgard; it will appear here and everywhere else Game On appears a week from Thursday, a.k.a. the 10th (welcome to the world of lead times). I'll save specific thoughts about the game until then, but there was one aspect I wanted to bitch about...
At this point, I’ve been writing for Game On for almost two and a half years. The columns appear in almost every Village Voice Media paper, and all of their online spaces – which makes a combined readership somewhere in the millions.
So when I first started I couldn't help but wonder: how many people will see my work? What will they think of it? Will I hear from anybody? Will I get feedback? And being young, naïve, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as I was, I began to daydream about fan mail. I imagined reading aloud letters like the following at dinner parties crowded with friends, family members, and girls in junior high who had spurned my advances:
Monday was Major League Baseball’s opening day (or at least opening day in North America, thank you very much Boston Red Sox/Oakland A's/Japan). And with this year’s opening day comes all kinds of questions: will the Mets finally reach the World Series now that they have Johan Santana in their rotation? Can Francisco Liriano fully recover from Tommy John surgery? Can Jacoby Ellsbury and Joba Chamberlain live up to the promise they showed as rookies last year? And why do baseball video games tend to be such a tedious pain in the ass?
While I don’t think Super Smash Bros. Brawl is quite as dazzlingly stupendous as most of the review community does (including our very own Game On), it’s still a great game. The graphics are Wiimarkable (i.e., remarkable by Wii standards), the multiplayer options are endless and brilliant, and the number of hidden goodies – playing on a gamer’s inexplicable and uncontrollable need to Unlock Things – even keeps players lukewarm on the game (like me) obsessively coming back for more.
One area SSBB does fall short, though, is in keeping a dense, concentrated level of nostalgia in the character roster. No doubt, there’s a shit-ton of awesome classic characters to pick from, but the lineup’s also watered down with characters that simply haven’t earned the right to share space with heavyweights like Mario, Link, or Samus – especially when greater characters are sitting on the sideline.
