So Long, My Wii — Now Playing: ?

Stele wrote:

See that's what I hate. Samus is the best bounty hunter in the galaxy. She's not supposed to be helpless.

What's the point in playing an action game if you're not going to have those "oh, sh*t!" moments when you're beat down and vulnerable and scrabbling to survive? Whether it makes sense within the established context of the fiction or not, those moments create the tension that action games thrive on. The least dissonant gameplay for playing the Best Bounty Hunter in the Galaxy would be for combat to be a cakewalk, but does that sound like fun?

Well that's generally what low % runs are for in the rest of the games of the series. If you want a challenge, don't collect all the E tanks and missiles.

Stele wrote:

Well that's generally what low % runs are for in the rest of the games of the series. If you want a challenge, don't collect all the E tanks and missiles. ;)

How can Samus be the best bounty hunter in the galaxy if she has to collect all these power-ups in order to succeed? That's every bit as dissonant as her running out of ammo in a tough battle.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Stele wrote:

See that's what I hate. Samus is the best bounty hunter in the galaxy. She's not supposed to be helpless.

What's the point in playing an action game if you're not going to have those "oh, sh*t!" moments when you're beat down and vulnerable and scrabbling to survive? Whether it makes sense within the established context of the fiction or not, those moments create the tension that action games thrive on. The least dissonant gameplay for playing the Best Bounty Hunter in the Galaxy would be for combat to be a cakewalk, but does that sound like fun?

I view things like this as situations where anyone would else would die immediately. Only Samus is is powerful and smart enough to manage her ammo correctly (for example) and make all the right decisions to survive. It's not a statement about Samus, it's a statement about the situation.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

The least dissonant gameplay for playing the Best Bounty Hunter in the Galaxy would be for combat to be a cakewalk, but does that sound like fun?

I'm not sure it's true that that would be the least dissonant in the first place.

SixteenBlue wrote:

I view things like this as situations where anyone would else would die immediately.

Honestly, that's how badassery works in general. Being impervious to harm would be useful, but doesn't make you a badass. You have to be vulnerable, and come out of dangerous situation alive anyway to be a badass.

Garden Ninja wrote:

You have to be vulnerable, and come out of dangerous situation alive anyway to be a badass.

Exactly. You're not courageous if you're never scared.

SixteenBlue wrote:

You're not courageous if you're never scared.

Made me think of this:
Mufasa: Simba, I'm only brave when I have to be. Being brave doesn't mean you go looking for trouble.
Simba: But you're not scared of anything.
Mufasa: I was today.

I'm trying, sadly, to figure out what to play after The Last Story. Clocky playing Metroid Prime 2 inspir"*ed me to pop my Trilogy disc in as well, as I'd never completed it and feel like now would be a good time.

But then I saw that I had 8 hours into the MP1. "8 hours? That's far enough that I should maybe finish that off. But why would I stop?"

I loaded it up and I'm at the save station before the Omega Pirate. >_<

Also, this game still looks friggin' great, by any standards. I guess the frame rate being locked at 60 really helps a lot, as it does with the CoD games,

Omega Pirate. I think I remember that one. He was a Female Doggo the first time, requiring like two or three tries.

Then he became a cake walk.

Blind_Evil wrote:

I'm trying, sadly, to figure out what to play after The Last Story. Clocky playing Metroid Prime 2 inspir"*ed me to pop my Trilogy disc in as well, as I'd never completed it and feel like now would be a good time.

But then I saw that I had 8 hours into the MP1. "8 hours? That's far enough that I should maybe finish that off. But why would I stop?"

I loaded it up and I'm at the save station before the Omega Pirate. >_<

Also, this game still looks friggin' great, by any standards. I guess the frame rate being locked at 60 really helps a lot, as it does with the CoD games,

You should definitely try to finish MP1 if you haven't before. I feel like that game should hold up quite well. Also, finish Dark Souls!

Dyni wrote:

You should definitely try to finish MP1 if you haven't before. I feel like that game should hold up quite well. Also, finish Dark Souls!

Oh, I've finished MP1 twice. I believe I'd planned to get through all three after Trilogy came out but lost a couple times to the Omega Pirate and then got distracted. Of course I beat him on the second try tonight.

Dark Souls is a pretty likely next target, actually. I'm actually a bit drained from liking the Last Story so much, if that makes any sense. I don't want to move on from the mechanics or world just yet. I did play a bit of the multiplayer today and the deathmatch is actually pretty cool. Dust: AET and Darksiders 2, I'm just not up for wholly new games yet.

You know what thrills me? I got the Dark Suit in Prime 2 tonight, and it doesn't make Samus immune to the miasma of Dark Aether, it just makes it hurt less. That upgrades her to nominal safety without letting you relax as though there's no threat.

Grim, diabolical, and brilliant.

With Fluidity done, my wife and I have moved on to co-oping Rayman Origins. I bought it back on page 1 after some enabling by LeapingGnome. I should say up front that I played demos for the game on both the 360 and the 3DS and didn't really warm to either one. However, I've really, really enjoyed the four or so hours that we've been able to play so far.

This might be one of the best platformers I've played in the last few years. Rather than emphasizing exploration like a Mario-style platformer, Rayman Origins puts a Sonic-like emphasis on flow. The levels and controls are designed to keep you moving forward and really get you in a rhythm of jumping, floating, and wall running. Maybe a better comparison than Sonic would be the 2008 Prince of Persia reboot, but in 2D and with wacky characters.

Co-op has been a blast. I was concerned with the difficulty level, but co-op has actually helped mitigate the difficulty quite a bit. When you die, you turn into a controllable bubble. If your co-op partner hits your bubble, you respawn right where they are, so as long as one of you is alive you have a chance to make it through the level.

Highly recommended. Definitely a candidate for a and a if it remains as good throughout.


A somewhat related question for you guys: When and how to the gameplay records in the Nintendo Channel update? I like to mark on my Backloggery how long I've been playing something, but despite having played it a few different times now, there's no entry in the Nintendo Channel at all. What gives?

Hey Clocky, I'm not sure if I ever added you, but what's your Wii Console code over there in Waggleland?

I have no idea. I'll look it up when I get home and post it here.

Hooked up the Wii to my PC monitor. Works well enough but I don't know where I should put the sensor bar on my desk. The monitor I'm playing on doesn't have the surface to place it on. I should clean the desk more or play Xenoblade instead of Legend of Zelda.

You can put the sensor bar below the monitor. Just change the position in the system menu.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

You can put the sensor bar below the monitor. Just change the position in the system menu.

I'll try that. Thanks.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

It's funny: the two big reasons I bought the Metroid Trilogy collection were to play Metroid Prime 2 and to replay Metroid Prime with the Wii controls. The second of those was actually the bigger selling point for me, but I just haven't been able to replay Prime after a couple of attempts. I get about four or five hours in and flame out.

Digging back a ways here, but - hooray! I'm not the only person who loves Echoes!

I earnestly prefer it to Prime, largely because of the difficulty balance and the cohesiveness of the world. Yeah, base combat was a bit harder, but there was more that you could do with it, but it felt like it had greater purpose overall - I was better able to deal with bosses in two, presumably because the stock combat served to train me in employing Samus' abilities as a badarse, whereas in Prime it just felt like filler to give you something to do while moving between rooms. Then the bosses would insist on kicking my arse while I tried to get my head around what I really needed to be doing.

And then there's the worlds. Echoes' may lack the vibrancy and obvious diversity of Prime's, but it felt much more like a place I could believe in. Considering that there's no real indicator of how far Samus is traveling - or perhaps I'm supposed to believe she's just teleporting all over the damn place, which is entirely likely - I couldn't shake the feeling that I was moving between dislocated zones. This wasn't a planet with any kind of organic consistency, this was forest zone, desert zone, ice zone and lava zone. The contrast between areas in Echoes was less striking, but each did have its own stylisation and feel, and this was achieved while still making it feel that you were exploring the same overall landmass. A few extra polygons likely helped, too - I couldn't help but notice a few too many angular edges in Prime.

That said, the intro to Echoes was certainly less spectacular.

Seeing as I may be sold a Wii-u partly for a lot of missed Wii games, the thought of also revisiting these games has me somewhat distracted from the more ideal goal of catching up on games that I actually missed...

I'm about half-way through Prime 2 now, and I'm starting to think it might be my favorite of the trilogy for a lot of the reasons PretendBeard mentioned. It's harder overall than Prime but the bosses seem easier; the difficulty certainly doesn't feel like it spikes as much as Prime's did.

My wife and I are also making good progress in Rayman Origins. We're into the part of the game where there are actually boss battles, and the first boss battle was ... not so great. It's a long chase sequence, which was fun because the game flows so well, followed by a boss battle inside a little room. The problem was in that boss battle at the end because it was just so poorly designed.

It really came down to rote memorization of his movements, which were largely unpredictable, and some heavy leaning on our ability to respawn each other after death. The biggest frustration for me was that if you so much as brushed the boss, you'd bounce into him and not be able to get away until you were dead, making essentially every contact a one-hit kill. Considering that he was the size of the room itself, that made for some really frustrating moments.

I've been told the other boss fights aren't as bad, so here's hoping.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

It's harder overall than Prime but the bosses seem easier; the difficulty certainly doesn't feel like it spikes as much as Prime's did.

That sounds awesome.

Yeah, I didn't hang up on the Omega Pirate like a lot of people, but Meta Ridley nearly made me abandon the game entirely.

Uproxx seems has a post today on The Top 10 Best Wii Games (Not Published By Nintendo) which seems relevant to this thread. Although, all of them except for Klonoa are on your list already actually.

Garden Ninja wrote:

Uproxx seems has a post today on The Top 10 Best Wii Games (Not Published By Nintendo) which seems relevant to this thread. Although, all of them except for Klonoa are on your list already actually.

Interesting list. Maybe I should add Klonoa.

Of the games in there that I've played, I agree wholeheartedly. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Dead Space Extraction are amazing games, and I love Trauma Team even if some of the activities are less fun than others.

Of the games on there I haven't played, I'm most looking forward to Fragile Dreams and Muramasa.

From the games on their list, I've only played Zak & Wiki and Little King Story, neither of which I liked. I've already groaned about LKS upthread.

Uproxx Article wrote:

With the possible exception of Skyward Sword (which came out four years after Zack and Wiki) no Wii game made better use of the Wiimote. Even without the Wiimote stuff, this was a fun, super difficult, aggressively wacky Japanese adventure game. Sadly today the title's mainly known as "the game that flopped so hard 3rd parties were scared off for the rest of the Wii's lifespan".

It was charming initially, but, yeah, it gets way hard pretty quick, and not in a good way. Too many puzzles where you either didn't have much time to figure out what you had to do, or you know what to do, but there is not room for error. I gave up on it about half way through, I think.

I also played Trauma Center: Second Opinion, and thought it was alright. Nothing that made me want to play another game in the series though.

Of the rest of the list, I hadn't even heard of Opoona or Fragile Dreams. I'm probably most interested in Klonoa (which I've heard is amazing, but I keep not getting around to buying it) and Muramasa.

Garden Ninja wrote:

From the games on their list, I've only played Zak & Wiki and Little King Story, neither of which I liked.

It [Z&W] was charming initially, but, yeah, it gets way hard pretty quick, and not in a good way. Too many puzzles where you either didn't have much time to figure out what you had to do, or you know what to do, but there is not room for error. I gave up on it about half way through, I think.

Your Wii experience was just about opposite mine. The further I got into Zack and Wiki, the more I liked it and when I beat it I really wanted to jump back in, but due to the pile, I got distracted.

Klonoa was fantastic. I forgot that it was also released for the Wii.

Dyni wrote:

Klonoa was fantastic. I forgot that it was also released for the Wii.

Me too. I'll Nth Klonoa with big floppy ears on!

Garden Ninja wrote:

I also played Trauma Center: Second Opinion, and thought it was alright. Nothing that made me want to play another game in the series though.

Trauma Team is a bit of a different beast from Trauma Center. Trauma Team has six different game modes, each featuring a different character, and only one of those is the same surgery stuff you were doing in Trauma Center. There are two faster-paced modes (surgery, EMT); two slower, more deliberate modes (orthopedics, endoscopy); and two adventure game modes (diagnosis, forensic investigation).

The neat thing is that each mode is self-paced, so that you can play through all the forensic stuff without touching the surgery stuff, or vice versa, or alternate between them. There's a storyline that weaves between the different characters that you can follow, but each character arc is also fairly self-contained. It's a neat structure that lets players follow what they enjoy without forcing them to wade through content they don't.

The co-op is also pretty neat in that it's been tailored to each activity, so you're not just two players doing the same stuff at the same time but acting in cooperation.

momgamer wrote:
Dyni wrote:

Klonoa was fantastic. I forgot that it was also released for the Wii.

Me too. I'll Nth Klonoa with big floppy ears on!

Added!

Played the original Trauma Center on DS and while I really liked it, the last main story operation was so crazy-hard that it soured me on the entire series. Apparently there are several more challenge operations after it that are supposedly harder.

Sorry, but my hands don't move as fast as they need to to beat it.

I played a bit of Zack & Wiki, but the voices were extREMELY grating.

I find it a bit sad that House of the Dead: Overkill wasn't on the Uproxx list - one of my favorite games on the system, and the only one I've played through multiple times.