AtariAge Forums: AtariAge Forums -> EricBall's Tech Projects

Have you ever played a game and wondered whether you bought the same game as reviewers? Super Monkey Ball 2 is like that for me.

Another one of my cheap bastard eBay purchases. I don't have Super Monkey Ball 1 yet, so I can't compare the two. But I'm glad I only paid $10 for it.

Maybe it's because I'm playing the single player story mode instead of the multiplayer games. Or maybe the reviewers only played the first ten maps and cribbed the rest from Super Monkey Ball 1. Who knows?

The problem I have with Super Monkey Ball 2 (story mode) is the level of difficulty. We're talking having to play a map dozens of times before catching that lucky bounce. And the way story mode is structured, you have...

Although it's no Zelda OoT, I'm quite enjoying ripping through Star Fox Adventures.

the bads:
#1 Exit doesn't save, or give the option to save! (I lost an entire stage discovering this.)
#2 Very linear. There's one path through the game and very few (and very short) side stories. In most cases it's pretty obvious where to go & what to do.
#3 Although the manual seems to suggest a complex attack system, it really comes down to A-button mashing while wiggling the control stick. (Although it's far easier to freeze the biggest SharpClaws than to find that first hole in their defense.) Plus, there's no combat tutorial.

the goods:
#1 Save anywhere, anytime - although the restore brings you back to an earlier point.
#2 Hints from Slippy & Peppy for when that path isn't obvious. (Although this does make the game even easier.)
#3 Fox's expressions

I was able to pick it up for $10 (including shipping) on eBay. Definitely worth it at that price.

Okay, I'm part way through Wind Waker; the pirate has become Zelda and I need to ride the waterspout to get my fire & ice arrows. Of course, I don't know how many side plots I need to follow up on, so there's probably a bunch of random sailing left.

Which brings up two points. First, a lot of the reviews really focused on how tedious they found the sailing & wind changing. I disagree. Yes, you're going to spend a lot of time sailing around (often criss-crossing the entire map), but the programmers have tried to throw in stuff to keep it interesting. Lots of little islands to visit, treasure chests to winch up (with or without maps), and enemies to battle. My advice is to swing the camera around and do more than speed to the next encounter. As to the wind changing animation, IMHO it's not half as annoying as some of the other repettive dialogs.

However, I wish the game had a built-in "ship's log" to track everything that you're...

One of the things my mother-in-law brought with her was her copy of Wind Waker. Last night I sat down for an hour or so and played through the intro island. I really enjoyed playing both N64 Zeldas (though I prefer Occarina to Majora) and my hands instantly "remembered" the controls; pressing R to shift the camera and still pressing A to jump :-).

The big change from the N64 Zeldas is, of course, the cell-shaded style graphics. My first thoughts were "ick, ugh, how annoying and distracting." But once I got into playing I noticed it less, so there's hope. Also, everything is still 3-D, so it's not like Paper Mario with 2-D characters in a 3-D world. Hmm... I'll have to check out the shadows the next time I play.

The story set-up is also radically different from the N64 Zeldas; although I could see the sister-napping coming from the first "Big Brother". (Although I thought I might have been wrong when the sassy pirate first appeared.) ...

Got both of these cheap when the local video store closed, along with WarioWare.

Just some final thoughs on Pikmin now that I've finished the game; although I ended up restarting from the beginning when I realized I was too far behind to get all of the parts in 30 days. And I guess that's my main complaint with Pikmin: the 30 day time limit is "un-fun". The time limit on each day isn't bad (except for the final boss), but it's disheartening to realize you're at day 20 with 15 parts still to collect. My other complaint is with some of the "boss" enemies it's difficult to determine if you have the right strategy. The final boss was like that - having him eat bombrocks (often including the yellow pikmin carrying them) seemed to be the only way to do any noticable damage. But I found I was running out of bombrocks, Pikmin and time while the boss still had a quarter of it's life remaining. I found myself going to the online strategy...

Another rental. It will be interesting to see how Wii impacts GCN title availability and pricing.

Anyway, Wario Ware is billed as another party game title (like the Mario Party series). Except it's stuffed full of “micro-games” and the multi-player game has no inter-player interaction.

So what about these microgames? Although I had fun at first, they quickly lost their charm. The problem is each microgame lasts less than in a minute. In that minute you have to figure out the objective & controls (based on little more than a one word instruction) and then hit the right button (the A button or the 4 direction) at the right time. Once you've played each microgame a couple of times (or read the instructions in album mode) then almost all of the games become trivial or a test of timing or reaction time.

I also got a little frustrated with the format of the single player mode. It's set up as groups of 20+ games with a common theme, ending with a “Boss” game. The...

Mario Party 4 continues the tried-and-true formula from the N64 board game + minigame series. As usual, there are enough changes to make it unique without straying so far that you will need to read the manual.

One significant change is item spaces have been changed to mushroom spaces. You only buy most items from stores. The mushroom squares randomly give either a mega or a mini mushroom (no traditional mushrooms). Mega mushrooms make you big, you roll two dice, squash opponents (for ten coins), and skip past any special spaces - including stars. Mini mushrooms shrink you, allowing you to access certain short-cuts and special spaces, but your die is only 1-5 instead of 1-10. This modification works well and adds some interesting tactics to the game.

MP4 also adds a "team" feature which falls into the "why didn't they think of this before?" category. At the start of the game you can divide the four players into two teams of two (any combination). At the...

Another rental, this one I picked out. I completed a little over a third of the game so far.

Pikmin is best described as a lite RTS (that's Real Time Strategy) game. You need to divide your time between creating Pikmin (by harvesting pills, plants and defeated animal enemies) and gathering your ship parts (by removing objects and enemies from your path). You have 30 game days (each lasting ~15 minutes) to collect the 30 ship parts (although I'm not sure all are necessary). Each day you pick a landing site to explore; and at the end of the day you have to marshall your Pikmin back to the landing site or they're eaten overnight. The game allows you to optionally save at the end of each turn.

I think the most frustrating part, for me, is the time limit versus the number of parts. Days where I wasn't able to retrieve a part were judged a failure. And although it's a simple matter to restart the day, that feels like cheating to me - like re-loading the Leisure...

My five-year-old son picked this one out from the local video store ($5/7 days each or three for $10), I think mostly based on Mario (and Chomp) being on the cover.

I have mixed feelings about this title. When I first read through the manual, I realized that MG is more of a golf simulation with Nintendo characters than a Mario Cart or Mario Party style golf game. I was really worried that my son (and wife) would have real difficulty playing with the complicated control scheme. Fortunately, I discovered that the Automatic mode is reasonably easy to use (press A to start the swing, press A again to complete the swing) and the auto-aim works well enough (with some notable exceptions). I never tried to use the Manual mode, although I often adjusted my aim point and sometimes the club.

However, putting is, IMHO, much harder than it should be. It's far more difficult to make short putts than it needs to be; even after I realized you could hit A when the power meter...

This was one of the CGN launch titles, and I'm agreeing with some of the comments I recall reading at that time.

My biggest complaint is the linearity of the game. As opposed to SM64 where you had the opportunity to open multiple worlds very quickly, with very few roadblocks other than the Bowser battles, LM plods along - forcing you to visit rooms in a preset order (often requiring you to traverse the same hallways and stairways over and over). An in spite of this, I occasionally found I didn't know where I was supposed to go next. The built-in map is neat, but it really needs to highlight rooms which are open but you haven't visited yet.

The flashlight + vaccuum mechanic works well, for the most part. There were a couple of times I wished I had more control over Luigi's movements once he "hooks" a ghost, rather than being randomly dragged around the room and into dangers. It's also annoying that you can't "reel in" Boos and prevent...