Buddha Provides

Yo!

Not a lot of updates lately, as I mentioned in the previous post, much because I haven't played a lot of video games lately. Which in turn is because there aren't that many interesting that have been released. However, at times like these one can resort to friendly people like Buddha for example. Buddha provided me with the ability to replay Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country for SNES. Don't ask me how he knew that I wanted to play exactly those games, I suppose if you have reached complete insight and become one with the soul of the cosmos these things kind of come natural?

SMW I borrowed from some kid who lived on our street when I was younger and played it on my SNES (I never actually owned it). I remember finishing it very quickly and I enjoyed it but it never made that much of an impression on me. Playing it again today it really dawns on you how finely tuned a game like New Super Mario Bros for the Wii is. It might seem that NSMB for Wii has very few differences gameplay-wise when compared to the original Super Mario Bros for NES, but they really have come up with the perfect mix. I say this because SMW has not aged that well, it's not a bad game by any means, but today when a lot of features it introduced aren't that impressive it feels a bit lackluster of an experience. The enemies feel a bit off (baseball-throwing football players seem strange both flavor-wise and the way they play out - no wonder they have not returned in another Mario game), and the levels are bland. If I were to recommend a mario game for SNES it would be Super Mario All Stars - especially The Lost Levels (the real SMB2), or Yoshi's Island. The latter has awesome graphics and the only real downside is that you always run as Yoshi which can be troublesome in some parts.

I recently played through Donkey Kong Country Returns again and got all the Kong letters and pussle pieces. Playing Donkey Kong Country again it becomes more clear why I think the latest Wii outing doesn't really match up to its predecessor. DKC just has a more smooth and fast-paced gameplay, where you in DKCR often have to stop and shake the controller which turns it more into a dithery experience. Speaking of the popularily termed "waggle"-function of Wii games, it really is a blight on many games. The only rational explanation for it is that Nintendo forces the developers to put some sort of motion-controlled action into all games, even 2D platformers like NSMB and DKCR where it's completely unneccessary. Waggle would be fine it wasn't for the fact that it can fail, unlike the press of a button. If you press a button the game always responds, but when you waggle there is always a risk that you don't do it enough for the game to register it. This is particularily bad in games like NSMB where you need to waggle to fly with the helicopter hat. Many times in this game when you intend to activate the rotor, it doesn't register and Mario falls down to his untimely death. This is another downgrade to DKCR compared to the original game where you just had to press a button to perform a roll, as opposed to waggling it up in DKCR. I'm not opposed entirely to the motion sensor function of Wii, but there is a right and a wrong way of using it, waggling I think is a horrible idea - at the very least you as a player should be able change the button configuration for each game to get rid of it.

I'm gonna stop here for now but do have another topic ready for another blog post even if I don't play any video games so see you soon!

Peace out!