The last few weeks have seen us playing a lot of fun video games (if I haven't posted any personal articles recently, this is why!), so I thought I'd weigh in with my thoughts on them a few weeks on.
The Wii has been a lot of fun, and I'll get to that next. But one of the more surprising developments to me has been that Emilie hasn't been playing much, continuing to play mostly with the Nintendo DS. In 2007, she has played through and won New Super Mario Bros.
, and collected 50 stars in Mario 64 DS. We'll probably pick up Mario Sunshine to play on the Wii once she's done with that.
Her long-time favourite game, Animal Crossing, has also been getting a second wave of play. One of her co-workers bought a DS and Animal Crossing, and they brought them to work to trade items. This sold the system to another co-worker, then a third, and now a fourth! Talk about word-of-mouth at work! I also bought Emilie the DS version of the Sims 2 for March 8th (women's day), but I've ended up playing it more often than she does!
I have a big backlog of DS games to play myself, as well. Over Christmas I stocked up on RPGs, Magical Starsign, Final Fantasy V Advance, Golden Sun, and Final Fantasy I & II:Dawn of Souls . In my enthusiasm, however, I failed to take into account how huge these games are! I'm still not done with FFV, despite playing it heavily for three months, and so I haven't even got to the others yet. I've also enjoyed NSMB and Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, where I'm nearly done but currently stuck at Dracula.
But the real centre of my gaming attention has been the Wii. While a surprising number of my coworkers have bought the Wii only for Wii Sports, I actually haven't been playing it that much. Tennis and bowling are both a lot of fun (I concur with the observation of many others that bowling on the Wii is actually more fun than real bowling). We both like boxing a lot, tiring though it is, as a stress reliever. Golf is okay but the putting is very frustrating, due to the mechanics of the game (which require a well-defined backstroke).
Wii baseball deserves special mention, for being the most realistic simulation of the real thing. When you're standing in front of your TV watching those balls come in over the plate and taking a swing, it really feels indistinguishable from actually playing baseball; it's pretty neat.
The sports game I've been playing the most, however, isn't made by Nintendo—it's EA's Madden NFL 2007, which is awesome. I think most fans of sports games are more likely to own an XBox than a Wii, so this game doesn't get nearly the credit it deserves. The controls are really well thought out and immersive, especially the passing game, and power running. Some people have complained online about the kicking game; these people are whiners, I find it works excellently. Emilie always finds it funny when I call for a fair catch, though :-) The game lacks an online mode, but that doesn't matter to me living in France, since no one in my entourage even knows the rules to American football, let alone would want to play online.
Besides Madden, the game that I've been playing the most has been (of course) The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It is an incredible game, and things like being able to fight on horseback are particularly cool. The coolest thing about it, though, is how much it feels like Zelda. I mean, I only played the original NES Zelda, and the SNES A Link to the Past. (Now that I have the Wii I'll be able to go back and play Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker later though.) But things like enemies, the way bombs work, the bow and arrow, the boomerang—it's all stuff that goes back to the original Zelda, and despite being in 3D it all feels just right. The addition of a great story, though, is something that the original Zelda didn't have that this one does. I'm 19 hours into the game so far and haven't scratched the surface.
I got one other game this week, even though with the backlog I have going I'm not planning on getting anything else until I've finished some of the others (Sonic will have to wait). That's because the game is Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, a 2002 GameCube exclusive that is very hard to track down. I found out about it from the podcast GeeksOn, who in their December "a geek's Christmas list" episode had a list called "GameCube games for the new Wii owner". This is a horror-themed game with a Cthulhu-like mythos, and a huge amount of depth. There are in-depth descriptions of anything you care to examine, and you play characters in Ancient Rome, 18th century Europe, the Khmer empire in ancient Cambodia, etc. in the course of the story, as the main, present-day character reads their chapters from the Necronomicon. There's so much attention to detail in this game that in the cut scene that took me back to the Roman empire, the Centurion and his soldiers are actually speaking in Latin!
So, a lot of fun games. Although the original reason I was so sold on the Wii and DS is because I don't have a ton of time to play video games, and their games are made to be good in small doses, with Zelda and Eternal Darkness I've got a couple epic games to work through anyway.
