GAMES. drop 7

now that i've got one o them fancy iphones, i have been checking out a bunch of free games.  many of them are fun, but most of them wear out their welcome after a day or two of playing.  one game that has kept me playing over and over again is a game called drop 7.  i love the puzzle games, and this is a really clever twist on the whole dropping pieces style that began with tetris.  the concept is a little tricky to get the first time through, but once you've got the hang of it, it is super addictive!  see, there are these grey circles at the bottom and numbers fall from the top.  in order to make a number disappear, you have to put it in a spot that corresponds to its number.  for example: if you have a 1, then you must put it in a line by itself, a line of one.  if you have a 4, when its in a line of four circles, it will disappear.  the clever bit is that the lines can be up and down or side to side. if you make a number disappear next to a grey circle it cracks, do it a second time and it becomes a number.  like i said, its sounds more complex than it actually is.  i've been playing this one a ton and really love it, give it a try some time and you will be hooked too!

GAMES. dice wars

dear dice wars, please give me my life back. one of my buddies showed this to me a few months ago. he sent me a link to a flash game that he had been enjoying. i gave it a try and became instantly hooked! the game is basically the board game 'risk', which is a personal favorite of mine! growing up i always loved playing risk with my big brother, he would always beat me, but i loved playing anyway! dice wars is just like risk except you wont find little plastic figures in the vacuum for the next three weeks! i'm going to share the link, but i'm warning you: only click on it if you have a few hundred hours to kill! it will suck away all your free time, like it has with me. click at your own risk (get it? risk? ha!) here.

GAMES. metroid pinball

i have recently been going through a renaissance with my nintendo ds. i had it put away for about a year or two, never playing it at all. but recently i found it gain and have been enjoying it a lot! ive been going through some of the old games i have for it and playing them all again. some of them are still really fun, but others i just cant get into. one of my favorites at the moment is metroid prime pinball. i really love pinball games, so i got this one a few years ago. i have no real interest in metroid, having never played any of the other games. as someone who is new to the metroid universe, i wasnt exactly sure what was going on most of the time. there were a bunch of characters and levels that i did not recognize, so if they were homages to different things from different games, it was all lost on me... anyway, the more i play it the more i like it! as far as pinball games go, this one is pretty good! i've been having a lot of fun traveling from world to world with the ball and even finding the level boss. after many many nights of playing i was able to actually defeat him and have an absolutely huge amount of points! metroid prime pinball it a blast, but nothing quite compares to my absolute love of the old pokemon pinball game for the original game boy!

GAMES. xbox 360 natal

earlier this week they had the E3 conference. its a video game conference where each of the three video game console makers announce what they have planned for the coming year. first up is microsoft, then nintendo, then sony. i, of course, an a huge nintendo fanboy and felt huge satisfaction when the wii outpaced all the others after most said that nintendo should quit after the gamecube. i am such a nintendo fanboy that i actually still own every system they have ever put out (including the rare virtual boy). i have always swore that i would never own any other gaming system. until now. the mircosoft keynote address about their upcoming products introduced this thing called 'natal'. it is video gaming with out a controller! they showed it off and it totally blew my mind! i am still picking up pieces of my mind off the carpet two days later...

i dont know how real it is, but if it actually comes out- i will buy an xbox 360 for it!

check out a little bit about it here.

GAMES. sequence

i had never played this game growing up, but diana said she really liked it, so we added it to our wedding registry. we ended up getting it. recently we pulled it out and diana taught me how to play- and i've got to admit i really like it!
its a card game and a board game all in one. the cards you have in your hand are on the board and when you lay one down you can put a chip on the spot on the board. once you get 2 five-in-a-rows, then you win! its been fun playing with diana because its pretty different each time you play, and can be enjoyed with just two players, unlike some of the other games we got... oops.

GAMES. broken ds

it is a sad day. my nintendo ds finally gave out on me- its dead. its been on the fritz for about a month or so, but it looks like it finally kicked the bucket. its a bit sad, a video game system has never died on me before. i bought this thing when it first came out in november of 2004. it was the first video game system i had ever bought when it first came out, and i was totally excited to play it! i spent a lot of time playing it those first few months and had a great time. over the years i had gotten quite a few games for it, but i was mostly drawn toward puzzle games. i haven't played it much for the past year or so, pulling it out for a week or two and playing some puzzle games right before bed. i mostly just loved to play the mini games and stuff. i bought 'super mario 64' when i first got my ds, and i hardly ever played the actual mario game! i think i still have yet to collect more than 5 coins... but i spent countless hours playing the card mini games, maxing out the amount of points you could earn in each of the games.

i guess i'll just have to live without it for now. maybe when the new version, the nintendo dsi, comes out the current versions will get real cheap and i can pick one up. if not, the games will go into my video game bin that houses all the old systems i dont play anymore. sad indeed.

GAMES. monopoly party

over the years i have spent a lot of money on video games. i have a bin full and shelves full to prove it. but for some reason that i cant really explain, there is one game in particular that i keep coming back to: monopoly. ive always liked the board game, but it always takes too long and its hard to find people who want to play it. a few years ago i found a version of the game for my gamecube. its a party game and when played against three computer opponents, can be played in under a half hour. with all the great advancements in graphics and the amazingly diverse gameplay that the wii allows, i still regularly return to the simple joys that a game of monopoly brings. go figure.

GAMES. back on the horse

a while ago i was really obsessed with playing mario galaxy, which i had gotten for christmas this past year. i was eager to play it once i got home from christmas break. i had already put almost 30 hours into it, and was loving it greatly. i brought the wii home and then it happened: the wii broke. nooooo!!! well, let me clarify, it didnt actually break, it still ran quite smoothly. the only problem was that it would not eject the disc that was in it, wii sports. i made the foolish mistake of traveling with it while a game was still inside the system. oops.

for the past two months i have been periodically turning on the wii and pushing eject to no avail. but, with the grace of God, it ejected the disc yesterday! hurrah!!! so last night i finally got to play mario galaxy again- the first time since january 2! and it was glorious...

GAMES. super mario galaxy

i forgot. im sorry, but i had forgotten. i forgot just how fun video games can really be. i had spent too many nights playing monopoly party on the gamecube, and too many nights playing wii sports. i forgot that a video game can be so immersive and addictively exciting when you really dig into it and let yourself be taken away. im sorry, i wont let it happen again.

for christmas i got super mario galaxy for the wii and figured 'its gotten such good reviews, maybe its worth a try' and boy is it ever! i wasnt much of a fan of the last couple mario games. 'mario 64' didnt do anything for me, and 'mario sunshine' didnt hold my attention, and i think it best if we all just forgot about 'luigis mansion'.

'super mario galaxy' is everything one would hope for in a game. the story is simple, but it leads to such incredible levels and worlds that its so easy to loose yourself in the game.

now, i dont really consider myself a gamer. i am interested in the video game industry and enjoy picking up a controller every now and then, but my attention span for games is usually limited to a half hour. but this one? well, i think over the past four days ive logged in almost 15 hours of game play! the levels are some of the wackiest ive ever seen, the characters are adorable and a blast to control, the enemies are varied and challenging, and the objectives are exciting and interesting. the controls on the wii are some of the most fun and inventive ive ever seen. after about ten seconds it becomes second nature to control that little guy on the screen and jet around on all the different adventures in store. the only draw back from playing so much is the really messed up dreams!

i would talk about it more, but ive got a craving to go play some more! later!

GAMES. wii zapper

for christmas i got the wii zapper. its a plastic attachment that you pit the remote and nunchuck into to turn it into a gun style device. its only twenty bucks, and comes with a zelda game. so, i figured id try it out. the game is called 'link's crossbow challenge'. its a fairly basic game, mostly designed just to utilize the zapper attachment. its really quite fun, it involves about 8 levels, each level consisting of three stages. the fun thing about each stage is its variety. now, the game itself is basically a glorified light gun exercise, but it finds many interesting and fun ways to use that premise. the first stage of each level is a target shooting game, basically its like a shooting gallery carnival game. the second stage is a third person shooter where you move around and shoot at the bad guys. the final stage in each level is a first person shooter, which can sometimes be like a duck hunt or lethal enforcer style game. each level is challenging and a lot of fun. a fun aspect of the game is the multiplier for successful hits in a row. if you hit your targets consecutively the point value can jump from 50 to 5000 or more.

it was very fun. i figure a good indicator if its fun level is the fact that a half hour after playing it i wanted to play it again!

GAMES. sales figures

its no secret that i am a fan of nintendo. im not just a fan, im one of those people who would be considered a 'fanboy'. what i mean by that is that what ever nintendo puts out, i will buy. the flip side of that fact is that i also care very little for xbox or playstation. now, the life of a nintendo fanboy was a hard path to travel a couple years ago. in the last console race the gamecube did horrible. the playstation 2 blew away all the competition.
when it was time for the companies to begin releasing their next gen consoles, and it was expected that sony would blow away the competition, and actually had many people wondering why nintendo was even in the hardware business anymore.
then something strange happened. nintendo presented its next console to the world: the wii.
as it turned out, they werent out of the race just yet. now, a little over 9 months later, the wii has just surpassed 10 million sales. this is really impressive because the xbox 360 has only racked up about 11 million sales, and it was released a whole year earlier. heres the best part though: the playstation 3, which was heralded as the 'best of the next gen gaming consoles' has only 4.2 million sales. (by the way, the stats come from this site)
all is right in the world for a nintendo fanboy, as it should be.

GAMES. starfox and wii play

in preporation for jeffry lees visit last weekend i went to gamestop and picked up a game for him. hes been mentioning for the past several months that he really wanted to play 'starfox assult', but he doesnt own a gamecube. we figured that this would be a good chance to pick it up and let him play for a while on my 'cube while he was visiting.

we ended up having some free time saturday afternoon, so he decided to pop it in and give it a try. i myself didnt play it at all, but jeffry lee thought it was pretty cool. i guess hes always had a soft spot for starfox since the first one on the super nintendo. aw, how cute.

but once he left i realized something: i had just bought this game for him to play, but i had no interest in playing it myself. so, i decided to do the reasonable thing and return it. but i also figured (or talked myself into) buying a different game would be the right way to deal with this problem. so, i picked up 'wii play'. i figured it was a good investment anyway: it comes with a free wii controller (usually $40), and a disc that has 9 games on it. all for only fifty bucks. my rationalizing mind figured its like buying a new controller and getting 9 more games for only ten bucks. i havent been able to try it yet, so i cant really say if it was worth it or not. i guess ive got my plans for this afternoon figured out!

GAMES. ssx blur

one of my favorite games on the gamecube is the ssx series. i first got into it on the second edition, ssx tricky. i really loved it and then ssx3 came out. still my favorite edition so far. when ssx: on tour came out i was a bit disappointed. the game play had taken a bit of a backslide since the 3rd one.
now, this series makes its triumphal entry onto the wii. i wasnt sure what to expect- i knew the controls were going to be all different due to the motion sensitive remote. i was worried that they might follow the lazy controls of tony hawks downhill jam, which just slightly used the motion capabilites. happily, they came through with a very different and inventive control system. all the turning and speed are handled by the nunchuck, and all the tricks and jumps are done with the remote. it is a totall blast to play. in order to achive bonus power and cooler jumps you have to form shapes, or follow patterns of movement with both parts of the controller. i am not good at physical dexterity, so when i try to perform these huge power jumps i look like a rave dancer having a seizure! after i landed my first jump i had to pause the game: i was laughing so hard because i knew how silly i looked doing these controls! i double checked to make sure my blinds were closed, and then i jumped back into it! through out the rest of the night i hit the slopes, giggling at my self all the way!

GAMES. wii remote straps

there has been a whole lot of talk about he problems with the wii remote straps. i have never experience any problem at all. i think the real problem with all these people breaking stuff and hurting themselves has more to do with their stupidity than it does about a faulty product. i have played my wii a lot and have never had any sort of problem with anything getting broken (expect when aaron swung before looking and sent his drinking cup flying to the floor). i think it just boils down to people getting way too excited and going crazy with their motions. all the games ive played can actually be simplified into wrist actions, there really is no reason to flail ones body about (but it does kind of amp up the silliness and fun factor when in a group).
even with this fact, nintendo has decided to offer free replacement straps to anyone who would like them. being a sucker for anything that says nintendo on it, i decided to take them up on that offer. last week i filled out the form to get new straps for my wii remotes. pictured above is a photo of the original and the new straps side by side. the difference is not huge, but the new ones are quite a bit thicker and stronger (the photo doesnt quite capture the difference). also, the new straps are about a half inch longer as well.
ill use the new straps on the two wii remotes i have, but i think im going to use one of the other straps on my ds, cause i think thats cool!

GAMES. wii!!!

finally!!! the wait is over, i am the proud owner of brand new nintendo wii!!! i would have posted about it earlier, but ive been too busy playing it!!!
first of all, i must start by saying that i am a total nintendo fanboy. secondly, i must tell you the kind of gamer i am: i love to play video games, but on my own i usually play for about a half hour, and then im ready to move onto something else. im not into the games that take a ton of time to play and involve a huge 20 hour long storyline. i want pick it up, play for a bit, then be on my way. and with that, let me tell you about the wii:
wow!!! i totally love it. when i first hooked it up i was greeted with a screen of different 'channels' to choose from. i first selected (by the way, just the fact that you can point the screen with the controller and a little pointy hand shows up that you can move around a rotate, was one of the coolest things ever!) the 'mii' channel where i could go through and create a cartoony little version of me to play around with. jeffry lee and rex helped me pick the features offered that looked most like me. once we had my little guy made, we went back and selected 'wii sports'. this is the game that comes with the system. its five different sport games specifically created to show some of the functions of the motion sensitive controller.
i started out with boxing. yikes! i didnt suspect that i would be building up a sweat and getting a work out while i played video games! after a fight in boxing my shoulders were actually aching! next i tried golf. the controller is held like a golf club and you have to swing it to get a hit. i was really impressed with this one. i swung once, but it was too light, so i tried again but felt like it was too hard- and the swing chart on screen said that it was too hard! wow, who ever developed this did a great job of getting the swings right! as i was playing this i thought 'even my dad would love this game!' tennis, baseball, and bowling were also a blast. each of the five games are very simple, but it seems that this game is more designed to teach us the basics of what the wii can do.
the game i bought it is 'excite truck' and it is really cool too! this one isnt so motion sensitive, rather, its tilt sensitive. the buttons are for gas, brake, and turbo, but the stearing is totally based on tilting the controller the way you want to go. its kind of like the first time you ever picked up a video game controller and with out thinking you would lift up your controller when you wanted to make mario jump, except that you are supossed to in this game! the learning curve on all these games is so easy that it only takes about 30 seconds to get to the point where it feels perfectly natural.
it is a totally awesome system, and a totally awesome next step in gaming. i think i will be playing more than 30 minutes a day for the next few months...

GAMES. wii countdown

only one week left. seven more days. a whole week. dang, i am loosing my patience- i want it now! (im as bad as cartman...)
far too much of my thoughts lately have been taken up with the wii. i even made a special trip to target this week because i heard they had some wii related merch. they did, they had a bunch of wii magnets, so i bought them. (i am such a fanboy...) i am planning on standing in line saturday night to get it, but i didnt preorder it, so we will see how well that goes...
all this past week i have been plotting and planning what exactly im going to get with the system. it comes with wii sports, which has generic versions of tennis, golf, baseball, boxing, and golf. so, i know there will be tons of fun just playing with that, but i would like to get another game right away too. almost everyone will be anticipating the new zelda and picking it up, but i dont really care for those games. the last zelda game i really got into was the first one. almost twenty years ago. i am thinking instead of of getting exite truck. its a racing game, and those usually keep their replay value. and the idea of moving the controller like its a steering wheel sounds totally cool!
something that i just saw today in the newspaper ad for meijers showed that they are going to have a good deal on buying a second controller and getting the nunchuck attachment for free (worth 20 bucks), so i think if we can buy the system there, then i will get that second controller too.
how much time till it comes out now? shoot. still seven days. dang.

GAMES. why do i care?

i cant exactly explain why, but for some reason i have been come completely obsessed about the video game industry. which, really doesnt make sense, because i hardly ever play them. there are very few of them i actually like.
being a nintendo fanboy i am required to love all mario games (which i actually do), but i dont much care for any of the rest. the last zelda came i liked was actually the first zelda game for the nes! the only metroid game i like is metroid pinball for ds. i have no interest in war sim games, i certainly dont like first person shooters, and strategy games and role playing games are just too complicated or boring for me, i have no interest in sports, so i know i wouldnt care for a sports game, and id never even bother with an mmo because i dont have an extra three hundred hours of my life to invest in getting a level 40 whatsit.
i guess that just brings me back to mario games. oh, and i like puzzle games too. give me tetris on a desert island and id be all set. and for some reason i cant really explain i really like the ssx series. and thats about it.
for liking so few games, my new obsession over the game industry doesnt really make a whole lot of sense. i probably play only about 20-30 minutes of video games per week. but for some reason, i am hooked on hearing the latest about the new systems and newest games coming out, even though i know full well that i will never actually be interested in playing about 90% of them.

GAMES. nintendo wii (again)

ok, i think ive had enough time to think it over. ive decided that i love it.

GAMES. nintendo Wii

this is not exactly what i expected. when i heard that nintendo had finally announced the name of their latest console, i quickly hunted down the websites to hear the latest news. and this is what they announce: the nintendo revolution will now be called the nintendo wii.
hmm, really?!? i wasnt quite sure what to think. at first i wondered how one would go about saying 'wii'. is it like 'we', or is it like 'why'? after reading a bit more i saw that its pronounced 'we'.
its still i bit shocking to me. ive been really pumped about this console for a long time now (yes, i am a major nintendo fanboy) and each new surprise they announce has left me very stunned. the ideas they are coming up with are just so different that it takes a while for them to sink in. the first sight of the box itself, the first look at the controller, and now this.
im not really going to make a judgement on the name itself, yet. when i first saw the controller it took me a few days to understand what it could mean and the changes in would allow. i hated it at first and thought nintendo had blown it, but i quickly began to understand and get really excited about it. im thinking i should wait and allow this name to sink in as well.
i need to try it on for a few days and see if it fits.

by the way, here is what Nintendo has to say about the new name:

Introducing ... Wii.As in "we."
While the code-name "Revolution" expressed our direction, Wii represents the answer.
Wii will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else.Wii will put people more in touch with their games ... and each other. But you're probably asking: What does the name mean?Wii sounds like "we," which emphasizes this console is for everyone.Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii.Wii has a distinctive "ii" spelling that symbolizes both the unique controllers and the image of people gathering to play.And Wii, as a name and a console, brings something revolutionary to the world of video games that sets it apart from the crowd.So that's Wii. But now Nintendo needs you.Because, it's really not about you or me.It's about Wii.And together, Wii will change everything.

GAMES. settlers of catan

ive never much liked strategy games. for me, 'risk' is about as complicated as i like to get. some of my friends in high school would always like to play axis and allies but i was never interested. another game they would play was settlers of catan. i figured this one was to complex for me too so i never tried it.
this weekend robb convinced me to give it a shot. i really liked it! i was wrong, this game isnt complex at all, it just looks like it is. in case youve never played, ill give you a quick rundown: you need to try and build towns, roads, and cities by collecting cards with different materials like clay and wood. its very fun and the gameboard changes each game which allows for a totally different game each time you play.