Mario Kart 8

So here it is. The second post in four hours about Mario Kart 8. Though I've only beaten all 50cc cups and the first 100cc cup (all three stars!), the credits rolled and I'm putting this post in this books. Similarly to Stan, due to being about 4-5 hours in to a game I'm likely to play for 100, I am just going to post some of my impressions. My initial reaction was "wow!" This game is super beautiful. It's really the first must-have game for me on any of the "next gen" consoles, and although this could probably function easily on PS3 and XBOX 360, it's just such a fucking great feeling to be playing a Mario Kart game that doesn't look like shit. It has a smooth-as-fuck frame rate and great overall gameplay. The Wii U Pro controller really makes the experience enjoyable. Here are some other things I'd like to address:

Characters - Rosalina sucks. She's almost identical to Peach. Meaning that there are 7 characters in this game that are essentially just Peach. The Koopalings are growing on me, but it just hurts me to think that we could have had other characters if they were not in the game. So in total, we have 14 characters that are either Peach or a Koopaling.  We should have as many characters in this game as there are Grand Prix cups. I want each one to count, damn it! And if 14 are gonna be variants of two characters, let's throw in another 14. King Boo, please. But don't worry, Bowser is awesome. Despite Stan's unsuccessful attempt at using it, I still swear by Bowser in the Baby Buggy with cushion wheels. That thing flies! I've one a 100cc cup easily with it so I'm sold.

Courses - I had a similar reaction to Stan. I was underwhelmed with a lot of the new courses. They're beautiful and fun, but most aren't really resonating with me (first impression, I know). I love Sunshine Airport, Shy Guy Falls and Bowser Castle, but my favorite is easily Mount Wario. This game really shines with what it has done with old tracks. All of them have a facelift for the better. It's tough to explain, but it's just a great thing to see. Moo Moo Meadows and Donut Plains 3 really stand out to me.

Free game - Mario Kart 8 came with a free download of either New Super Mario Bros U, The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker HD, some stupid party game or Pikmin 3. So awesome! Getting Zelda free with the game I essentially bought my Wii U for is an awesome feeling.

Overall, this is everything I wanted from a new Mario Kart game. I would love to see them embrace DLC and bring new tracks into it eventually. And new characters! I want every single character and every single race that has ever existed in the Mario Kart universe. And I will pay a shit ton for that option.

Mario Kart 8

Sure, I'll start things off.

Mario Kart 8, the Wii U's last hope, came out earlier today. All four people I know with a Wii U bought it and have played it. I have beaten it, although I'm sure I'm not the only one. I still have the 150cc and Mirror Mode races left, but every course and every character is unlocked and I've played this thing for something like six hours already; it's time for a post.

Everyone who will ever read this has played Mario Kart before, and several have already played this very game. It needs no summarizing from my end. Instead, here are some of my "initial" reactions to the game.

• The reason Mario Kart still matters is because local multiplayer is a dying concept. And this franchise - along with Super Smash Bros. in particular - just makes absolute hay out of local multiplayer. Four friends, one race, endless cursing and sweating with racing hearts.
• I forget whether or not this was an option in Mario Kart Wii, but you can even do a four-player Grand Prix cup locally. That's solid.
• Unfortunately, Mario Kart 8 limits the online experience to two players per console. And there's no LAN option for connecting two Wii Us and having four people on each one. This really sucks, because before the game came out I was envisioning an entire night of twelve-man Mario Kart 8; three Wii Us in one room, four people on each one, and a tour of every single course in the game. It seemed feasible. Now, to get twelve people involved in one race, we'd need to have six Wii U systems, and again, I only know four people who own one. So, that dream is dead, but here's hoping we can get some six-to-eight-man races going on at some point all the same.
• I can't get a handle on whether online play is spotty or steady; I was booted out of the lobby with a "lost connection" message like four seconds after first entering, and before my first race began I was also booted with some kind of communication error. Fortunately, I did manage to get into four races, and I was able to complete all four. Didn't feel laggy at all, which is of course an expectation in 2014, but still nice to see.
• The anti-gravity aspect of gameplay feels like a completely equal balance of gimmick and innovation. Some of the courses just wind you around like a corkscrew, but then other times you can just kind of cling to a few walls as an option.
• The new courses will probably grow on me with time, but I was probably on the whole just a tad more disappointed than I was impressed; Rainbow Road left something to be desired and I saw no need at all for Bone-Dry Dunes or Electrodrome, and by kicking things off in something called Mario Stadium it felt like we didn't also need a Mario Circuit. Having said all of this, none of the new courses are unenjoyable to play. In fact, Shy Guy Falls, Mount Wario, and Cloudtop Cruise are instant classics for me.
• They did a wonderful job with the retro courses this time around, modifying each one for Mario Kart 8 with HD graphics and anti-gravity elements. And, man, these are stunning. Moo Moo Meadows went from being one of the most forgettable Wii courses to perhaps the best-looking Mario Kart 8 course, period. Also, it's great to have N64's Rainbow Road back, if for nothing more than the music alone.
• There are thirty playable characters in Mario Kart 8, which is awesome. 12 of them are baby versions of the main chatracters and Bowser's children, which kind of sucks. This game lacks Birdo, Diddy Kong, King Boo, Wiggler, and other series veterans… for the sake of Lakitu, Baby Rosalina and "Pink Gold Peach," among others. I actually enjoy several of the Koopalings, but their presence at the expense of Bowser, Jr. just feels weird.
• One minor change I'm not happy about, but will more than likely get over shortly? You can't drag an item behind you anymore while picking up a new one. I need layers of defense, dammit.
• Although the karts, bikes, and ATVs feel - and are - endlessly customizable, there really isn't all that much variety when it comes to end-of-the-day statistics on each one.

There's plenty more I could say, but I feel myself nodding off and I also know another three posts or so are forthcoming.

Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure

Unlike the last two games I posted which are more traditional adventure games, Safecracker is almost entirely a straight puzzle game, similar to the Professor Layton series. As some sort of master safe-cracker, you're tasked with navigating a rich dead guy's mansion, opening 30+ safes attempting to find his last will and testament. There's really very little story whatsoever, and not even much exploring to be done here- each room will contain a few safes and once you've opened them, that's really all there is to do except move on to the next room. Each safe comes with a puzzle and usually requires you to figure out some numeric code to answer it, and this is where the puzzles come in. Most of the puzzles were pretty fun even if they're not all that elegant or clever- think a lot of sliding-block style puzzles, but because of this the whole game passed by pretty quickly and I doubt I'll remember much about Safecracker in a few months. 'Ultimate Puzzle Adventure' indeed!

Misery

I mentioned in my Firestarter post that I was in the middle of another Stephen King book I was enjoying much more, and here we are with Misery. As we all know Misery got turned into one of King's more popular movie adaptations so most of us probably have some rough idea of the plot- a famous author gets into a car crash (written a decade before King's own brush with death!) and is rescued by a psychotic woman who happens to be a big fan, who doesn't bother taking him to the hospital but instead kidnaps him and forces him to write a new book, just for her. A scary prospect for sure, but there's a lot more to this book than that famous Annie Wilkes character Kathy Bates won an Oscar for playing; Stephen King peppers this one with all sorts of little details about how he comes up with his stories and how to get past writer's block and lots of info about what life's like as a famous author that I just find fascinating. Seriously, sometimes I think I like the little prologues he does before most books talking about writing that story than the story itself. The author in Misery is famous for writing a series of best-selling but cheesy historical romance pieces, feels like he's tied down to characters he doesn't even like anymore, and wants to branch out of his comfort zone, but is afraid of his audience's reaction. It's not hard to see the parallels with King who became a superstar for his horror novels, but received major negative feedback when he tried to write a classic fantasy novel, The Eyes of the Dragon. And yet in Misery, the author is forced to bring a character he killed off back from the dead for one more adventure just to keep the ravenous reader (his psycho kidnapper) satisfied. So yeah, Misery managed to pull off a bit of meta-autobiographical fiction while still delivering a very tense story.

Anyway now that I've finished off Misery it feels like I've read a shitload of Stephen King. I took a look back and realized that if you count the four novellas of Four Past Midnight as separate pieces (they're long enough, they count), then I'm up to 25 books read. It's high time to check in with an overall ranking! Feel free to comment and criticize, I know there will be some disagreement from my fellow posters!

1. It
2. Wizard and Glass (Dark Tower IV)
3. The Long Walk
4. The Talisman
5. 11/22/63
6. The Waste Lands (Dark Tower III)
7. The Drawing of the Three (Dark Tower II)
8. The Stand
9. Misery
10. The Wind Through the Keyhole (Dark Tower VIII)
11. The Langoliers (Four Past Midnight)
12. Christine
13. Secret Window, Secret Garden (Four Past Midnight)
14. Under The Dome
15. The Dark Tower (Dark Tower VII)
16. Gerald's Game
17. The Dead Zone
18. Wolves of the Calla (Dark Tower V)
19. Firestarter
20. The Library Policeman (Four Past Midnight)
21.  The Sun Dog (Four Past Midnight)
22. Black House
23. The Gunslinger (Dark Tower I)
24. Insomnia
25. Song of Susannah (Dark Tower VI)

Dark Fall: The Journal

The most recent bundle of PC games I grabbed was an all-adventure game bundle; the games are usually kinda short, focus on solving puzzles, and aren't too rough on my the non-gaming laptop I play them on. Knowing nothing about any of the games I started in with Deponia which was mostly good aside from it's terrible plot and cast of characters; I followed that up here with Dark Fall: The Journal, which is a very, very different style of game. For one this is more of a horror-style puzzle game that manages to creep me out the way Myst did years ago- you're completely secluded for the entire game, searching for symbols whose relevence won't be apparent until the final puzzle. You're exploring an abandoned train station/hotel for signs of your lost brother, and slowly unraveling the mystery of why people keep disappearing from the place. Also unlike Deponia you're not watching cartoonish characters in third-person, but exploring in first-person in that style of 3-D graphics from the early 2000s that immediately dated themselves. The game was a struggle; within a few hours I assumed I had exhausted all exploration and had no idea where the hell any of this was supposed to lead. Upon checking a walk-through however I realized I missed almost everything, including that game-length hunt for symbols and got to work just plowing through it, because hey, who cares? I'd be surprised if anyone I knew could get through this game without a walk-through, not because the puzzles are particularly tough or require a lot of thought, but because you hardly even realize when they're there in front of you. There are dozens of red herrings strewn about the hotel that seem to only be there for frustration's sake; at one point you pick up some kind of electrometer which goes off when you're near the scene of some ghostly activity- important clue? Hell no! It's just some diversion from the puzzle at hand that provides no hints whatsoever. A good adventure game rewards you upon solving one puzzle with a hint or tool used for the next; Dark Fall: The Journal makes no attempt to do this. I think the developers spent a little too much time trying to fill the game with spooky atmosphere and backstory rather than make it an enjoyable gaming experience. Oh well! At least it was short!

Resident Evil: Revelations

It's been a long time since my last Resident Evil game, so here's a brief recap of the series so far for anyone who doesn't know- it's a survival horror series whose first 3 games came out on the original PlayStation and just got cranked out one per year; they were critically acclaimed at the time but revisiting them all 15 years later it's tough to forgive the awful 'tank' controls- your character controls more like a car than an actual person. The next two games (Code: Veronica and Zero) came out on the next generation consoles and were pretty good too but the formula for the games was quickly growing stale and fans of the series were getting tired of more of the same. Things got radically changed for the sixth game in the series, Resident Evil 4, one of my favorite games of all time. Resident Evil 4 was much lighter on puzzles and had a heavier focus on action, and its much-improved controls gave it unanimous critical acclaim. Then came Resident Evil 5 which shifted the setting to Africa, and it was mostly good, but in my opinion it suffered from taking itself way too seriously and generated a whole racism controversy that was an ugly point for the series. I had played and logged all of these games (except 4 and 5, which I played pre-Back-Blog), and since then two more installments have come out- the criticially panned Resident Evil 6, and the more acclaimed 3DS-exclusive Resident Evil Revelations. I'll begrudgingly play the former at some point, but here are my opinions on the latter.

 

Honestly, it was great. Revelations is a return to the slower-paced origins of the series in which exploring, puzzle-solving and backtracking are the name of the game rather than the more linear action of Resident Evil 4 and 5 (and probably 6). But it's also probably the best game in the series in that style, with much better controls than the old games and obviously the graphics and sound and all that are just light-years ahead of the old games, even on a portable system. The abandoned cruise-liner was a great choice of setting for the game as it uses the claustrophobia of a ship to its advantage, constantly pitting you against big enemies in small, cramped spaces. And of course now and then you get a huge set-piece that looks like it's pushing the limits of what the 3DS is capable of, with the penultimate boss being my personal favorite. There are a couple small gripes- one, you're given a scanner that supposedly makes you stronger as you scan more and more enemies but it seemed poorly implemented, and second there's not too much variety in non-boss enemies- I guess Capcom had to skimp somewhere. Still though overall I really enjoyed my time with Resident Evil Revelations and I'll probably play through it again someday.

Assassin's Creed

And so ends a wildly successful Memorial Day weekend of logress for me. Before you judge me for spending a beautiful weekend inside watching movies and playing video games… shut up! I did like eight hours of yardwork, too, and went out for a couple of nice dinners. Now, next weekend, with Mario Kart 8 coming out on Friday, sure, you can bet your ass I'll blow the weekend on video games regardless of the weather. This weekend? Some opportunities arose, I guess. Nothing more!

Assassin's Creed is, of course, a wildly successful action-adventure video game series. There've been something like six or seven releases in the last seven or eight years. It was high time I checked one of these games out, so when I found the first one for six dollars I jumped right in. The verdict? Eh, I'm not really sure I have one. All of the elements were in place here for a great modern day open world sandbox. It had the same parkour and wall-climbing elements that so many recent classics do, and it tacked on a stealth element as well, allowing you to sneak right up to enemies, for the most part. But there were a few warts here I just couldn't get over. For one thing, the controls were needlessly complicated and a little unwieldy. For another, despite a rich plot and lots of characters, I just never found myself sucked into the story at all. A distant third issue was the combat mechanics; fortunately, the game doesn't rely much on combat, as it's generally a "Plan B" for when a nice stealthy assassination goes wrong.

I dunno. I'm not sure what didn't click for me here. The elements were in place, but this didn't resonate with me nearly as much as something like Uncharted or Infamous or even the slightly older Prince of Persia. I've been told that the series really gets good with the next release, Assassin's Creed II, along with its two follow-ups, Brotherhood and Revelations. I could buy all three right now for twenty bucks or so, but for now I'm going to hold off. There are just too many older games in my backlog for me to justify lumping another three in there when I didn't love their predecessor. I'm sure I will someday, but not yet. Not yet.

New Super Mario Bros. U

The running complaint with Nintendo, hardware oddities aside, is that they've almost completely stopped releasing new games in so many of their beloved franchises, particularly on consoles. We've seen one Metroid game in the last seven years, and no future release from that franchise has even been confirmed. We've seen one console-based Zelda game in the last eight years, and again, there's no news of an upcoming release. Star Fox hasn't put out a console game since 2005; Pikmin was absent for nine years before 2013's Pikmin 3. I bring all this up only to serve as a contrast to Nintendo's bread and butter franchise, as there have been five new console-based Super Mario titles since 2007. That's nearly one a year, and I'm ignoring two original handheld games and a Super Luigi spin-off in the same timeframe. Bottom line, Nintendo loves itself a lot of Mario games. And Pokémon, too, I guess.

But how many is too many? New Super Mario Bros. U is the fourth installment in the New Super Mario Bros. offshoot series already, and that series was born on the DS in 2006. The gimmick, back then, was an honest-to-goodness return to basic 2D side-scrolling Super Mario games, which was nice; the series had been exclusively rendered in 3D environments for more than ten years at that point. But then the Wii tried its hand at the same exact concept. And then so did the 3DS and then ultimately the Wii U. And then the Wii U spun it off into the aforementioned Luigi-centric game. At this point there have been more 2D Super Mario releases since 2006 than there were from 1990 to 2005. Not to mention Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel, and most recently two games with the suffixes 3D Land and 3D World.

I'm not complaining, even if it may sound like it; the games are all impeccably polished and completely enjoyable to play. This one right here is probably my favorite Super Mario game since 2007's Galaxy, although I don't think I'll bother to go for 100% completion the way I did in New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I can't even keep track, for the most part, of which fun levels and quirky gameplay elements belong to which games anymore. It's crazy!

I guess all I'm saying is that I wouldn't put it past Nintendo to sneak in another two or three Super Mario games before we see a new Metroid or Zelda. I'm a sucker and a nearly lifelong Nintendo fanboy, so I will buy and play every single one - am I part of the problem? Dang, I am, aren't I? Whatever - Nintendo's release schedule notwithstanding, this was a great, fun game.

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed

I've been a PS Plus member since November and I've been initiating downloads for all the Vita games since then in order to obtain a large backlog of Vita games when I eventually got one. With Mario Kart looming, I decided this would be the first game I play. I didn't expect much, but I was pleasantly surprised. The big gimmick here is that each car can change into a plane and a boat. I played as BD Joe, the crazy driver from Crazy Taxi. The most impressive thing I found about this game was just how vibrant the colors were, particularly on the Vita screen. It's just a beautiful game. But more importantly, it really conveys a sense of speed without sacrificing the player's ability to control the racer. My biggest complaint is that if you play it on easy you then have to go back and play every single race again on medium to unlock the credits. So I literally beat the entire game and then had to beat the entire game again just so I could unlock the credits and consider this game beaten. However, I didn't mind having to revisit it because it was a pretty damn fun game. I recommend it. On a side note, I have no idea why this isn't just called Sonic (or Sega for that matter) All-Star Racing Transformed.

Don Jon

I didn't expect much from this. I love Joseph Godon-Levitt, but I haven't heard very good things. Essentially, we watch JGL do his best "The Situation" impression with a little heart infused in there. There are some good performances and there's a decently realistic portrayal of selfies, but there isn't much to love. Not much too hate, but nothing that really grabbed me. I think my favorite part was Tony Danza. Anyway, it runs less than 90 mins. Could have been worse.