Wednesday, March 16, 2005  

Reading Jeremy's Yoshi Touch & Go review prompted me to break the game out and give it another shot. And you know what? I still don't like it.

I'm a lot harder on it than Jeremy probably because I expected so much more. I still retain the hope that somewhere Nintendo has a DS killer app that actually uses the DS' features properly; as cool as Animal Crossing Online and 8 player wireless Mario Kart are, they're hardly games that make original use of the touchscreen or dual screens. And come on, a sequel to Yoshi's Island with unique DS twists? How can you not be excited?

Contrary to Jeremy, I don't think this exorcises the demon of Yoshi's Story. This sits right alongside it as a failed sequel to Yoshi's Island in my mind. Part of it is the lack of interesting levels. All Mario games are essentially about exploration, but that element is gone from Touch & Go's "Beat the High Score!" world. I also feel the control method -- not directly controlling Yoshi, but drawing bridges, directing egg fire and prompting Yoshi to jump -- doesn't really work. It's a little klutzy, but more importantly it doesn't give you a proper connection to the character. You're less inclined to properly preserve your rate of fire with eggs or guide Yoshi smoothly because you're effectively controlling the environment, not Yoshi.

On the other hand, you have Pac-Pix. I really rather like Pac-Pix. OK, so it's also a little basic and a little easy, and suffers a bit from the general DS minigame feel. But on the other hand, this to me is something original and clever that uses the DS' capabilities in a unique way that you can't get anywhere else. And it's FUN.

The idea in Pac-Pix is to eat all the ghosts. To eat the ghosts, you draw Pac-Man on the screen with the stylus, and off he goes. To direct him, you draw a wall -- the direction you've drawn the wall being the direction he'll turn in (so if you draw a line upwards, he'll hit the wall and turn up). That's the basic premise. In reality is more of a puzzle game, because you have limited Pac-Men and limited time to clear the stage of ghosts. Stages ramp up in difficulty both by introducing new enemies and new wrinkles, like firing arrows and bombs. It's definitely on the easy side, but it's entertaining enough to occupy you as you play around with the stylus.

In some ways these two games are fundamentally the same, in that they're fairly basic tech demos scaled up to be full games. But where Yoshi is more of the same old problems for DS software, Pac-Pix actually offers something fresh and new -- even if it isn't quite fully fleshed out yet. I get the feeling that if the DS had more games like Pac-Pix, it'd be less of a disappointment in some people's eyes.

Posted at 3:56 AM

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Saturday, March 12, 2005  

Another day, another trailer. This time it's not a game, but a movie: Star Wars Episode III. Lots of talking... but man, I had goosebumps during some of those scenes. Evil Anakin, Palpatine emerges, the Jedi forcing a confrontation, and of course Obi-Wan bellowing "YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE!" at Anakin. Just wow.

Posted at 4:38 AM

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Friday, March 11, 2005  

After watching that new (and quite awesome) Zelda trailer on Gamespot, two things came to mind:

1) They've been watching a lot of Lord of the Rings. You can spot approximations of The Army of the Dead, Shelob (Gohma in this case) and even wargs there. Which is pretty cool, really.

2) That trailer looks like it has a lot of actual gameplay scenes instead of scripted cinematics. The way the characters move, the reaction to attacks, etc all looks like gameplay (with a free camera swooping around for drama). Which means while I don't necessarily believe that the game is 100% finished -- I do think it's pretty damned far along.

Posted at 4:06 AM

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Saturday, March 05, 2005  

Remember this? That's my angry rant from November 2003, when I swore off buying CDs forever. Now, in March 2005, I do believe I've taken the next step. I bought The Complete U2 off of iTunes, and in doing so, I have officially bought more music off the Internet than I have from CDs. In fairness, in my 12 or so years of CD-buying I really didn't buy that many CDs to begin with, but I've now bought 491 songs from the iTunes Music Store, which is a pretty decent achievement I reckon.

The Complete U2 is pretty cool. It's about as exhaustive as you'll get, has tons of cool live versions (and U2 are supposedly one of the best live bands), great extra mixes, and everything a U2 fan could want. I also rather like the "Digital Booklet" that came with the set -- it's a slick little document with a blurb on each album giving the historical context, influences, factors behind it, and so on. Nice little extra.

Posted at 4:11 AM

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