So Long, My Wii — Now Playing: ?

Huh. I barely remember that chapter.

Hello, Wii U owners. The Wii says "hi".


I've reached the back half of Chapter 7 in Super Paper Mario, and I encourage anyone who tries the game out to stick with it through Chapter 4, which isn't very good, and Chapter 5, which is a bit of a mixed bag. Chapter 6 mixes things up in a really pretty amazing way, and Chapter 7 has been rock solid so far with some of the best jokes in the game.

It's best to hit Chapter 6 without spoilers, but if you're following along vicariously...

Spoiler:

Chapter 6 starts out looking like it's going to be incredibly lame. Mario jumps into a samurai-themed world and is told that he has to defeat 100 different samurai before he can get the Pure Heart he's after. The Thousand-Year Door had something like this, where Mario & Co. were forced to fight in some kind of wrestling tournament, and seemingly unending arena chapters are a staple of RPGs. I was bracing myself for a very, very long chapter, especially since each samurai gave some kind of lengthy introduction for himself.

But after the first 20 opponents, something interesting happens. The Void that's threatening to devour the samurai world starts growing bigger, so the tournament is canceled and Mario is allowed to freely run past the next samurai he would face. You can chat with them, find out who they were, but there's this intense pressure to run past each enemy and collect the Pure Heart before the Void grows larger and devours the world.

You can't make it. The enemy wins, and the samurai world is destroyed.

I was a little surprised when it happened, frankly, because that kind of total loss isn't common in games, especially ones where you're encouraged to revisit old areas to collect power-ups and items you might have missed. It reminded me a bit of the shift in Final Fantasy VI from the World of Order to the World of Ruin. But rather than presenting you with a remixed version of the old world, when Mario returns to the samurai world, there's ... Nothing. Literally, the world is now a vast, empty expanse of white with nothing at all alive in it.

Heightening the impact are a few meta tricks the designers pull. First, when you return to the world, you get the "Chapter 6-1" introduction you got when you went there the first time. Second, although there's an indestructible item in the now-empty world for you to recover, it's at the end of a very long walk through empty space. It drives home in a strong way the desolation.

"Chilling" isn't exactly a word I'd expect to use when talking about a Paper Mario game, but Chapter 6 was genuinely chilling.

I'm enjoying reading through your impressions. It's been enough years and I've played so many games that I've forgotten some of these moments. You're right, that chapter was incredible to experience.

I'm still only on Chapter 3, but glad to hear it gets better after 4 and 5.

ccesarano wrote:

I'm enjoying reading through your impressions. It's been enough years and I've played so many games that I've forgotten some of these moments. You're right, that chapter was incredible to experience.

Ditto, and frankly it is really making me want to buy a copy so I can replay it.

The second chance for my Wii seems to have ended in a sad manner. Today my daughter wanted to play Wii Sports, however the Wii just went to a black screen and turned off the controller whenever we pressed start. I formatted it and still no change.

*double posts: the future of internet voting*

Time to pick up a Wii-U?

I know once in a while my Wii will turn on but not output to the TV. I think it has to do with the HDMI-converter I use. Usually unplugging the power cord and plugging it back in works for me.

Sounds like you have a more serious problem though....

I wrapped up Super Paper Mario over the weekend. It took about seventeen hours just playing the main storyline; there's plenty of side content that I didn't explore. A small amount of it is meatier, like sidequests, but most of it is collection: recipes, cards, items, etc. I barely scratched the surface of most of the side systems.

At the end of the day, I liked the game. I would have liked the difficulty curve tweaked to be a bit steeper, and I would have liked an art style more in keeping with the rest of the Mario games, but I have a hard time finding too much fault with it. The storyline ended up being a lot more engaging than I thought it would be; the mechanics ended up being a lot less involved than I expected. The 3D flipping is used to good effect but doesn't get used nearly enough; likewise, the Pixl powers and special abilities of the other party members feel a little under-utilized.

I doubt I'll dig in and collect all the stuff and find all the secrets, but I enjoyed my time with it.


I promised Blind Evil that I'd start up Monster Hunter 3 after I finished Super Paper Mario, but I ended up starting Epic Mickey instead. I was a bit intimidated by the hundreds of hours people dump into Monster Hunter and wanted some lighter fare. (If you were curious, Donkey Kong Country Returns has been sidelined for a bit. My wife and I have gotten caught up dumping another 1-2 hours a night into Rhythm Heaven Fever. Seriously one of the best Wii games. Period. Full stop. Police state.)

I put about four or five hours into Epic Mickey previously and found it to be a lackluster experience. The reason I'm giving it a second chance is that I think I may have been approaching it in the wrong way.

I'm an exploratory gamer by inclination. I like games that reward poking into all the little nooks and crannies for secret goodies. That's part of the reason Nintendo's first-party games hook me like they do: the Mario, Zelda, and Metroid franchises are all, to one degree or another, all about poking around for secrets. Epic Mickey's large rooms and colorful style made me believe that was the kind of game I was getting, so I approached each new space as one to be exhausted: paint and thin every surface, and solve every puzzle.

But what I found is that the spaces in Epic Mickey are designed less like a Zelda game and more like a stealth game like Thief or Deus Ex (what a bizarre coincidence). There are multiple paths through each space; typically, three: a paint path, a thinner path, and one that's either some mixture of the two or completely neutral. For example, one room might ask you to unlock a door and you can either thin out some gears to break the lock, paint in some platforms to reach a release lever, or pay a gremlin to fix it for you. This isn't all that different from the stealth, combat, and blended routes of most stealth games.

What happened when I played the game previously was that I would enter a new space and explore all the possible paths through it, but only one of those paths is really useful or relevant per playthrough. Once you solve the central puzzle in a room through any route, the only real exploration left is to discover the other solutions, which are now, by definition, puzzles without rewards, which isn't very satisfying at all. I got so frustrated that I'd solve a puzzle or discover a new path only to have it lead me back to where I already was.

My approach this time around has been to find a route through a room, take it, and move on. We'll see if that makes the game more satisfying overall.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

stealth game like Thief or Deus Ex (what a bizarre coincidence)

Not sure if this was stated for ironic effect or not. Warren Spector was a producer or designer on all three. Granted, he probably wasn't doing the level designs.

shoptroll wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

stealth game like Thief or Deus Ex (what a bizarre coincidence)

Not sure if this was stated for ironic effect or not. Warren Spector was a producer or designer on all three. Granted, he probably wasn't doing the level designs.

Yeah, I was aware of the connection. It was actually looking at the level designs in Deus Ex: Human Revolution (which I know Spector wasn't involved with, but it drew strongly from its predecessor) that got me thinking that I might have been approaching Epic Mickey in the wrong way.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
shoptroll wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

stealth game like Thief or Deus Ex (what a bizarre coincidence)

Not sure if this was stated for ironic effect or not. Warren Spector was a producer or designer on all three. Granted, he probably wasn't doing the level designs.

Yeah, I was aware of the connection. It was actually looking at the level designs in Deus Ex: Human Revolution (which I know Spector wasn't involved with, but it drew strongly from its predecessor) that got me thinking that I might have been approaching Epic Mickey in the wrong way.

From the way he speaks about EM2, choice and effect is still very important to his game design.

garion333 wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:
shoptroll wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

stealth game like Thief or Deus Ex (what a bizarre coincidence)

Not sure if this was stated for ironic effect or not. Warren Spector was a producer or designer on all three. Granted, he probably wasn't doing the level designs.

Yeah, I was aware of the connection. It was actually looking at the level designs in Deus Ex: Human Revolution (which I know Spector wasn't involved with, but it drew strongly from its predecessor) that got me thinking that I might have been approaching Epic Mickey in the wrong way.

From the way he speaks about EM2, choice and effect is still very important to his game design.

Except EM2 failed to bring it, based on reviews. Again.

I've got Muramasa: The Demon Blade if you want it. I plan on getting it for the Vita next year and I don't see myself firing up the Wii to play it anytime soon.

My approach this time around has been to find a route through a room, take it, and move on. We'll see if that makes the game more satisfying overall.

It does.

I'm more or less to the point where I gave up on the game previously, but this time, I'm much more satisfied with the experience. I've also come to appreciate the game's design better and what I think Spector and his team were trying to accomplish.

Epic Mickey is a game about making choices. By now, we're used to making choices in games; it seems like every game this generation has featured some kind of choice or morality system. Most of those revolve around static binary choices that determine, at best, the direction of some of the game's storyline and, at worst, which ending cutscene you get to watch. Epic Mickey takes a different approach to choice and continues to explore some of the design space Spector was utilizing in Deus Ex.

First and foremost, Epic Mickey is about expressing the choices you make in a visible, external way with clear mechanical implications. Like I said, choice systems tend to be about story, but Epic Mickey's choice system is about spaces: choosing the paint or thinner path will often block off treasure chests and other rewards that you can see but can no longer access. It's a pretty bold move for the designers to place rewards in your line of sight but make it impossible to access them because of choices you've made previously.

Deus Ex did similar work in reflecting player choices in the spaces you move through, but they were typically multiple paths to the same end. You might have a locked room with three or four different ways to get inside, but you were generally always able to get inside a room regardless of your character's build and choices. Not so, Epic Mickey, which bluntly expects you to face the consequences of your choices and leave that collectible for New Game+.

Epic Mickey also takes an interesting approach to binary choice in that it judges your every move and rarely allows for a "pure" approach. Every time you use paint or thinner, whether it's in combat, in solving a puzzle, or even in navigating the environment, you fill up a little meter that gives you little helper sprites that can give you a bit boost in combat or give you hints for where to go next. But paint and thinner counteract one another in that meter: if you thin a bunch of stuff and then paint a bunch of stuff, they'll cancel each other out, and you'll get no sprites to help you out.

So there's an incentive to lean heavily on one side or the other, but you can't. Even if you take the paint path through a space, you'll be required to use thinner sometimes, and the same holds true for the thinner path. You can build up your meters by painting or thinning out unnecessary bits and bobs in the environment, but you're still going to be draining those reserves by necessity as you use the opposite power to advance.

It's a neat approach, forcing the player to utilize both sides of a binary morality system, because players so often talk about games in terms of which path they took: all good or all evil; all stealth or guns blazing. Epic Mickey side-steps that by making an all paint or all thinner run impossible, and even if you solve every puzzle with the paint or thinner solutions, neither will net you every reward.

It's a shame that the game's technical issues really hamstring it in a lot of ways, because it's marvelously ambitious.

I also bought a copy of Fortune Street this weekend and played a few games. We really liked it.

If you're not familiar with it, Fortune Street is a property management video board game; think of it as being like a deeper version of Monopoly with characters from Super Mario Bros. and the Dragon Quest series. It reminds me in a way of the Culdcept games in that it takes a classic and classically boring board game and layers on some additional systems to make it really interesting.

I haven't played any of the various translations or imports over the years, so this is my first brush with the Fortune Street series. The game has two modes: standard mode, which are the rules dating back to the SNES games; and easy mode, a simplified version meant for beginners and casual players. We've been playing on easy mode while we get the hang of things.

Standard mode apparently has some complex rules involving splitting the board up into districts that you can buy and sell stock in, as well as empty spaces where you can build buildings with very specific effects, but easy mode omits all of that. What's left, however, is plenty of fun with some creative board designs, interesting rules of purchasing and upgrading property, and cards that can really throw a wrench into things. I'm really looking forward to the added complexity of standard mode, but I'd honestly be perfectly content if easy mode were the norm.

Aesthetically, there are a lot of nods to the source series. You play with characters from the Mario and Dragon Quest games, and they all have in-game chatter that's specific to their characters. Musical cues and background music are borrowed from the parent franchises, so when you level up a Dragon Quest character, for example, you'll hear the leveling up fanfare from Dragon Quest IX. Each board design, of which there are twenty or so, is displayed against a backdrop of an iconic location from other games. So far I've spotted Yoshi's Island from Super Mario World 2, the Observatory from Dragon Quest IX, and a few others that I can't recall right now.

The only thing I don't like about the game is that games can be a little long. It's not a problem for us to put our son to bed and kick back for an hour and a half or so for a game, but I know that'll be a problem for some people. I'm curious to see whether the standard rules speed things up (since you have more ways to make money and reach the target amount) or slow them down (because of the added complexity).

All-in-all, I'm really happy with it and definitely recommend it as a fun local multiplayer game.

Looking at that write-up it actually sounds like Epic Mickey has more in common with Dishonored than Deus Ex, as Dishonored has that aspect of being mostly non-lethal and/or mostly stealth, but allowing some wiggle room. So in Epic Mickey you can be mostly "paint", which if I recall is the closest comparison to "good" the game offers, or mostly "thinner", but you cannot be completely one or the other.

Now, Dishonored does allow for that "completely one or the other", but in the case of all-stealth-all-the-time it can be a pain in the ass.

When I was reading your review of Chapters 4 and 5 of Super Paper Mario, I was thinking "I hope she sticks with it to Chapter 6 which is the most memorable part of the game."

Spoiler:

The events of Ch.6 really surprised me too and it's the thing I remember most about the game. It's a pretty stunning thing to happen in a Mario game.

Also, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but once you finish the game the samurai world is restored and you can actually go fight the hundred samurai if you want, and they have increasingly silly Mario-reference names. I thought that was a nice touch.

Anyway, I think your approach to Epic Mickey is a healthy one and it's how I intend to approach Epic Mickey 2. You'll miss out on pins and e-tickets by not exploring every nook and cranny, but generally the rewards really aren't worth the time it takes.

Fortune Street is fantastic. The regular version with stocks is even better than on easy, but the games are even longer, I'm sad to say. I wish there had been a super streamlined version of the game that could be played in an hour. Also, it gets really hard in cheap ways against the AI as you'll start rolling 1's over and over again if you get too far ahead.

garion333 wrote:

Fortune Street is fantastic. The regular version with stocks is even better than on easy, but the games are even longer, I'm sad to say. I wish there had been a super streamlined version of the game that could be played in an hour. Also, it gets really hard in cheap ways against the AI as you'll start rolling 1's over and over again if you get too far ahead.

You were actually the person who brought the game to my attention in the first place, so thanks. My wife and I are both really enjoying it.

I finally played a standard game last night, and it was a little disorienting. The differences between the easy rules and the standard are sometimes very slight (different max capital values, for example) and sometimes very big (you know, the whole "stocks" thing). I like it, but it's almost a completely different game: more of a strategy game than easy mode's more casual fun. I'd say both have their place.

The biggest thing is that I'm having to re-learn my strategies for winning. I was kinda starting to get the hang of easy mode a bit, but almost none of those strategies carry over into standard mode. I'm still trying to figure out when to buy stocks, when to sell of my stocks in a district, and how to make sure that a rising tide doesn't lift all the boats at once. In the game I'm playing right now, one of the opposing characters (Slime) is invested in the same districts I am, so anything I do to raise their value also lines his pockets, so I can't gain any ground on him.

I finished Epic Mickey over the Christmas weekend and ended up loving it. The camera and controls are certainly wonky, but they're not that big of a deal once you get used to them. I've certainly encountered worse.

As to what I love about it, see my last couple of posts.


Looking to switch gears after Epic Mickey, I gave GoldenEye 007 a chance. I'm not sure it's going to get much more than "a chance".

I don't have a lot of experience with modern first-person shooters, but what I played of GoldenEye 007 felt pretty bog standard and uninteresting. I'm not familiar enough with the genre to know what I'm getting here that I wouldn't get from a Call of Duty or Medal of Honor game. The game seems to fall into that post-Half-Life 2, post-Call of Duty mold of a first-person movie where corridor-crawling is broken up by sensory-rich set pieces that happen all around you.

It didn't really work for me, and I don't have enough nostalgia for the N64 original for that alone to carry me. I might give it another chance before shipping it back to Blind_Evil, but for now, it's my first real bust of this project.


Now to figure out what to play next. Currently in my possession are:

  • Art Style: Rotozoa (WiiWare)
  • Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii)
  • The Last Story (Wii)
  • Monster Hunter Tri (Wii)
  • Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii)
  • Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)

I'm looking for something shorter and lighter, so I might go with Donkey Kong Country Returns, although I've heard that The Last Story is not only excellent but relatively short. Anyone have an estimate for how long Muramasa might take to play through?

Since this is a vanity thread, I'll just keep on posting.

After some prompting from Blind_Evil in IRC yesterday, I decided to go ahead and try out Monster Hunter Tri. I'm a bit afraid of it being some epic length game that's going to suck up all my time, but I wanted to give it a shot since it's one of the Wii's biggest releases (if not in the US) and since I've never played a Monster Hunter game before.

I played for half an hour last night, most of which was spent tweaking my character in the character creator. I bought some random armor that seemed like it might be useful and then harvested some raw meat for the Chief's son. I'll admit: I felt really bad hacking some poor dinosaur to death when it was just standing around getting a drink of water.

Heh, I was planning on grabbing that, but I think I'll be waiting to see if the 3DS entry hits stateside.

Still, feel free to leave some thoughts.

The first character arc of Muramasa should take about 14 hours. Once you're used to the combat, the other story arc should take half that - about 7 hours, for approximately 21 hours for a full run to the basic endings. You could probably play another 6 hours to tackle all the lairs, forge the ultimate blade and get the true ending.

ccesarano wrote:

Heh, I was planning on grabbing that, but I think I'll be waiting to see if the 3DS entry hits stateside.

It's been announced for March for a simultaneous release with the Wii U version.

LarryC wrote:

The first character arc of Muramasa should take about 14 hours. Once you're used to the combat, the other story arc should take half that - about 7 hours, for approximately 21 hours for a full run to the basic endings. You could probably play another 6 hours to tackle all the lairs, forge the ultimate blade and get the true ending.

Excellent. Thanks!

If you do happen to play Muramasa, here's an important tip. Bronze Mirrors are warp items. They allow you to travel directly to the last Shrine you visited. This is used so that you don't have to backtrack through 9 empty screens after a boss battle.

I don't know how I missed that Fortune Street was actually released in the US.

Well then, time to go troll the local shops after work today!

ccesarano wrote:

Heh, I was planning on grabbing that, but I think I'll be waiting to see if the 3DS entry hits stateside.

Worth noting that the Wii U version will have online play and the 3DS one won't. I don't know if a Wii U is in the cards for you, but regarding the 3DS I might suggest waiting for MH4, which WILL have online play.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I'll admit: I felt really bad hacking some poor dinosaur to death when it was just standing around getting a drink of water. :|

If you don't kill em, the titular monsters will.

Blind_Evil wrote:

If you don't kill em, the titular monsters will.

That's fine. That's natural selection. I'm killing them for sport, which is a little weird.

And yes, I had the same problem with killing sheep in Nier. Apparently, I need my opponents to attack me first.

Sport? How so? You eat the meat!