Does anyone else start games, go through huge amounts of time when you cannot play said games, and then, when you finally have time to play games, you want to play something else? I am pretty sure I am not alone here, and combined with my need to complete 100% in any game that I play (not that it happens all that often), this extensive list is something that nags at my mind quite often.
Here's a bit from My Collection of Unfinished Games:
Pikmin 2
Approximate % Complete: Probably 95%
Willingness to Return to It: Low
Trials and Tribulations: The game is a solid one, a definite upgrade over the original in terms of the amount of content. I still think the first one is the more solid game - the structure and pacing is amazing, as well as the replay factor - but this one offers a deeper experience (pun intended).
The deeper, of course, refers to the caves. The caves, man. Those things take so damn long to complete, particularly later in the game, and if you miss something near the bottom, you need to do the whole thing over again. Lucky for me, I am obsessive and over-prepared, so I always go in ready for the worst. I am a very conservative Pikmin player, doing everything in my power to avoid losing any of those little guys. Seriously, the noises they make are so sad and pathetic - I feel a twinge of sadness every time I lose one. As a result, the caves aren't usually difficult so much as they are just kind of annoying.
Thankfully, the main story is one part of the game I did complete. I got everything in it, rescuing Louie from the crazy cave monster and finding every single possible treasure out there, as well as filling up my entire creature log. "Huzzah!" I thought, when I gathered everything. "Whaaaa?" I thought, when I explored the menus and found the challenges.
Do you remember me referencing that one guy at Nintendo who has cruel and unusual ideas? That guy that simply must exist, given the existence of the final level of Super Mario 3D World and the Grandmaster Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy 2? Yeah, some of these challenges are certainly this person's creation. Most of the challenges are innocent enough, simply giving you a bunch of Pikmin and asking you to collect everything. When you get deep into these challenges, though, you run into levels full of water in which you have no blue Pikmin, or fiery levels with no red Pikmin. Moreover, you only get the best rank if you don't let a single Pikmin die. Yes, you read that correctly - they all must live if you want 100%. It should be clear, therefore, why I do not yet have 100% in this game. It is, quite simply, stupid.
Will I ever revisit it? I find it unlikely. The game, while solid, simply gets to the point where I find myself more frustrated than appropriately challenged. If I ever find myself with endless amounts of time (oh man, that's a funny idea), I might consider it, if only because I really don't have many missions left (something like 7 or so).
Fun fact: some guy on Twitch once tried to tell me he beat the whole game, and then I asked about the challenges, and he brushed them off, saying he didn't do them and then moving on to another topic quickly. That guy has not beaten Pikmin 2. Not by a long shot.
Super Mario Sunshine
Approximate % Complete: Maybe 70%?
Willingness to Return to It: High
Trials and Tribulations: I think I've probably restarted this game about 4 times, each time with the intention of finally getting all 120 Shine Sprites. Well, that has not happened. Not yet, at least.
I like the game enough - it's a solid Mario adventure (even if my brother thinks it is a good game, but not a good Mario game) and has its fair number of challenges. It is more difficult than the previous entry in the Mario series (Super Mario 64) but not so tough that I want to throw my controller at the TV. There's variety to the challenges presented, a remarkable amount of depth, and just when you think you've discovered almost everything, it throws a bit more at you (like making you go through those FLUDD-less stages with FLUDD and collect red coins).
It's that final piece that has, perhaps, made me stop playing for large amounts of time. There is so much to discover in this game, including 30 blue coins in every level. I refuse to look up how to do things, or where things are located - I want to find it all myself. So, that makes the blue coin adventure kind of tedious. I desperately want to find them all, and on a good day, I might have the patience to find them. After I haven't had the time to revisit the game for long periods of time, though, I often find myself saying, "Hey, it's time to play something else for a while."
I'll probably get back to this game at some point in the future, when I finish something else (that's funny - me finishing something), but until then, I'll simply keep telling myself that I'l get back to it someday and finally get all of those damn blue coins. It's really a great game, so it would be worth it to get through it all just for some sort of ending screen that is different from the original ending screen.
Okay, so yes, sometimes I look things up.
Fun fact: I watch this game on Twitch fairly regularly, only to be grumpy throughout it because speed runners skip all of the fun things. I just can't be happy.
Mario Kart Wii
Approximate % Complete: Maybe 80%? Maybe 90%? Tough to call
Willingness to Return to It: Very Low
Trials and Tribulations: It seems silly to put a Mario Kart game on this list given how relatively easy it is to achieve everything in most of them. Back in the day of Mario Kart 64, it was simply enough to get gold trophies in each cup on each cc (and unlock those ghosts from the time trials, I suppose) to get 100%. Mario Kart Wii, however, has some additional criteria.
Instead of simply saying, "Hey, you won, here's a gold trophy, it doesn't really matter how you got here," Mario Kart Wii decides to give you a rank as well. Yes, I know - this is not the first Mario Kart game to do that, but it's the first Mario Kart game where I actually thought, "Hey, let's try to do this." I tried in vain for quite some time before throwing in the towel, and oddly enough, it took quite some time before I gave up on this one, even though successfully getting a rank of three stars on each grand prix is closer to impossible than completing either of the other games on this list. You see, in order to get three stars, you need to use virtually no items, avoid nearly every wall, and come in first on every race. This might work if the other racers didn't use items, but to win without using any items, particularly when you work through the higher cc's, is a nearly impossible feat. Screw Nintendo for making it essentially impossible for me to get 100% in this game.
Thankfully, in Mario Kart 8, the star system, while still annoyingly present, works out much more fairly. If you get first on all four races, you get three stars, so maybe I can get 100% on that game. Unfortunately, in games with an online portion, I don't really know what I ought to consider as 100% complete. That's for a later blog post.
Fun fact: I still do battle mode on Mario Kart Wii as opposed to Mario Kart 8 because Nintendo dropped the ball big-time and didn't create battle maps for this game. For those that haven't had the pleasure, you battle on regular racing courses in Mario Kart 8, making it impossible for me to truly put Mario Kart Wii away, despite my annoyance with it.
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That's it for today's piece of My Collection of Unfinished Video Games. In the future, we'll move into some older consoles, like the Game Boy!
Showing posts with label Mario Kart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mario Kart. Show all posts
Saturday, August 8, 2015
Saturday, August 1, 2015
Nerdy Month in Review: July 2015
On the first of every month, I will recap my nerdy endeavors over the course of the previous month.
July was a hectic month from a non-nerdy standpoint, helping our little lady get through having her tonsils out and adjusting to another foster child in the house. We've also had some pesky visitors in the form of lice and mice, so I have been busy and will continue to be busy. Here is what I did manage to get in, though:
TV
The Little Lady and I have been working through Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. As of today, we have gotten about 10 episodes into season 2. We've witnessed the Avengers tackle Loki and his invasion of Asgard, the Kree, and right now, the Skrull invasion. The cartoon is epic, far more than the movies ever will be, so for anyone that wants to get into the Marvel universe, this is an excellent place to start (others might suggest the comics, naturally, but if you are like me and comics aren't your thing, then check out the cartoon). I wish they worked harder to get more female superheroes into the mix - we've recently been introduced to Ms. Marvel, a strong female superhero, and Wasp has been there since the beginning, but she fits too many ditzy female stereotypes to really count as a solid female superhero. The comic relief is consistently good, and the series does a good job of recalling intertwining storylines that began at the beginning of the series. Despite the complexity of the storylines, The Little Lady has had no problems getting what's going on until recently, when she got thoroughly confused on who was a Skrull and who was not.
In other TV nerdiness, Umberto MacJay and I are attempting to watch every season of Dexter and rank each and every episode. We spent one glorious afternoon discussing our rating mechanisms and how we are going to rank each episode and present it to all of you wonderful readers. The entire list will probably be available on this blog sometime in the Fall, but don't hold us too closely to that - this is a significant undertaking, and I myself am only about halfway through season 2. I have seen every season except for the final season, which fans were not crazy about, but I am going to withhold judgement until I see it for myself.
Video Games
Where to begin here? I have been playing a wide variety of games over the course of the month, mainly because whenever I finally get time to sit down and play one, it's been so long since I have actually played anything. As a result, I've done mostly gaming without any semblance of a story - Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. I already wrote at length about Super Mario 3D World and will spare you anymore details here (no, I have not yet beaten that STUPID OBNOXIOUS RIDICULOUS final level). Mario Kart 8 continues to be a challenge with the addition of 200cc, a ridiculously fast romp through the levels that forces you to change your entire racing strategy. It's like playing a brand new game after being so accustomed to 150cc and the Mirror tracks. I am still missing a 3-star, gold trophy on one of the Mirror tracks, and got 2 stars on one of them (I HATE not getting 3 stars - I usually quit as soon as I don't get first in a race as a result). But, I have enjoyed trying 200cc and silently cursing Nintendo for forcing me to change the strategy that I used over the course of an entire 8-game series.
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is out and about again in my house because I purchased all of the DLC. Ryu has been a fun addition, and I have enjoyed whipping out all of my old Street Fighter moves when I use him (although really, I usually fall back on using the B button to use all of the special moves to ensure my victory). I wish they had added more locations in the new DLC - I miss the stages in Brawl and Melee so much, the newer versions haven't quite lived up to those - but overall, the game is still a blast to play in a living room full of people.
I spent a lot of the beginning of the month playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. It's easily one of the strongest entries in the Zelda franchise, and perhaps, at the moment at least, is my favorite of the overhead, 2D Zelda titles (not that it is really 2D, with its gorgeous 3D visuals). I am super glad they ditched the requirement of using the touch screen to control Link. I never finished Phantom Hourglass as a result - my hand would get cramped up eventually, and I always ended up doing things I didn't want to do eventually, because of the odd controls. A Link Between Worlds, while I am not even halfway through, has proven to be a phenomenally deep game. I just hope I have more time over the next month to play it.
The Little Lady has taken over LEGO Marvel Superheroes, although I got pretty far before she decided she was going to play it all of the time. Again, I wrote at length about this earlier, so I will spare the details now, but the depth of the game continues to amaze me. I could wander around LEGO New York City for HOURS and still not find everything, and that's a good thing. The Little Lady has also taken over Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and thankfully, she is no longer leaving all of her stuff lying around town. As the mayor of Koholint, my town in Animal Crossing, I want my village looking immaculately clean. She probably wouldn't have cleaned up the town except I pointed out that, if you go to the Mayor's Office, my secretary points out how absolutely annoyed all of the villagers are about it. Thanks, Nintendo, for making a game that encourages me to obsessively organize things - that almost makes up for changing my Mario Kart strategy.
Movies
Nothing much going on here. We have been having The Little Lady watch the original Star Wars trilogy, and yes, we'll probably show her the prequel trilogy because it is, after all, canon. Then we can take her to see the new one, whether she's still living with us or not. I continue to love how interested she is in virtually everything - it was so easy to get her into Star Wars and keep her interested. She still asks me sometimes why Obi-Wan didn't tell Luke the truth about Darth Vader. She seems very annoyed about that.
We went and saw Inside-Out and both my wife and I bawled while the girls were simply non-plussed by (spoiler alert) the realization that yes, some important memories can be sad and our emotions get more complicated as we enter our teenage years. Pixar's slogan should be "let us entertain your kids while you bawl your eyes out." That damn Lava short-movie didn't help - I honestly thought they would give us a sad ending to that volcano's tale for a few seconds, and thought, "Geez, Pixar, I thought you wouldn't stoop this low after the first ten minutes of Up." Don't worry, guys - it's Pixar, it ends happily, although you still might cry.
Books
After finishing Stephen King's It, I read the not-so-nerdy Faithful, the story about the 2004 Boston Red Sox in which Stephen King was a co-writer. The Red Sox are my one truly non-nerdy interest, although I needed to read Faithful to remind myself that I am still a Red Sox fan after such a horrible season up until now.
It is a good book if you think about it like a short story collection, but overall, it's a mess of missed opportunities and silly storytelling shortcuts, all in an effort to force out some sort of epic story even though there really isn't any need for it. Characters like Henry Bowers (a truly amazing King villain) and Beverly's father (King knows exactly how to take abusive, horrible people and make them somehow more disgusting) are far more terrifying than It, and the backstories and the little vignettes King tells are often far more fascinating than the main story. I want to like this book, but it's such a mess that I have to consider it one of the worst King outings I've read, probably the first one I have read that disappointed me (I haven't even come close to reading them all, and if it matters, my favorites so far are The Stand, The Shining and The Dead Zone).
I am now reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, something I am told I should have read long ago. As a nerd, it's probably criminal that I haven't read it yet, and so far, I am pretty impressed. Some of the comedy within it feels twinged with arrogance on the part of the author, a sort of "oh wow, look at how clever I am" sort of feeling, but enough of it is quite entertaining that I am continuing to read it each night before going to sleep. It's part of an anthology with three other books by Adams, so I'll probably read those too.
Coming Up in August...
My wife and I will see Ant-Man at some point, and I am sure I will just throw all of my wonderful feelings about the Marvel cinematic universe down in a blog entry at some point afterwards. I will continue to read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well, hopefully getting through it by the end of the month, and I want desperately to work harder on The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, in the hopes that I can write a Game Profile about it. More Dexter is on tap as well, perhaps allowing me to write an entry about how well it humanizes such a dark character, and adds darkness to characters that are otherwise good. I have also been thinking a lot about online gaming and what it has done to the social aspect of gaming. I have an opinion that is probably in the minority of opinions on online gaming, but hey, I'm going to throw it out there anyway.
July was a hectic month from a non-nerdy standpoint, helping our little lady get through having her tonsils out and adjusting to another foster child in the house. We've also had some pesky visitors in the form of lice and mice, so I have been busy and will continue to be busy. Here is what I did manage to get in, though:
TV
The Little Lady and I have been working through Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. As of today, we have gotten about 10 episodes into season 2. We've witnessed the Avengers tackle Loki and his invasion of Asgard, the Kree, and right now, the Skrull invasion. The cartoon is epic, far more than the movies ever will be, so for anyone that wants to get into the Marvel universe, this is an excellent place to start (others might suggest the comics, naturally, but if you are like me and comics aren't your thing, then check out the cartoon). I wish they worked harder to get more female superheroes into the mix - we've recently been introduced to Ms. Marvel, a strong female superhero, and Wasp has been there since the beginning, but she fits too many ditzy female stereotypes to really count as a solid female superhero. The comic relief is consistently good, and the series does a good job of recalling intertwining storylines that began at the beginning of the series. Despite the complexity of the storylines, The Little Lady has had no problems getting what's going on until recently, when she got thoroughly confused on who was a Skrull and who was not.
In other TV nerdiness, Umberto MacJay and I are attempting to watch every season of Dexter and rank each and every episode. We spent one glorious afternoon discussing our rating mechanisms and how we are going to rank each episode and present it to all of you wonderful readers. The entire list will probably be available on this blog sometime in the Fall, but don't hold us too closely to that - this is a significant undertaking, and I myself am only about halfway through season 2. I have seen every season except for the final season, which fans were not crazy about, but I am going to withhold judgement until I see it for myself.
Video Games
Where to begin here? I have been playing a wide variety of games over the course of the month, mainly because whenever I finally get time to sit down and play one, it's been so long since I have actually played anything. As a result, I've done mostly gaming without any semblance of a story - Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. I already wrote at length about Super Mario 3D World and will spare you anymore details here (no, I have not yet beaten that STUPID OBNOXIOUS RIDICULOUS final level). Mario Kart 8 continues to be a challenge with the addition of 200cc, a ridiculously fast romp through the levels that forces you to change your entire racing strategy. It's like playing a brand new game after being so accustomed to 150cc and the Mirror tracks. I am still missing a 3-star, gold trophy on one of the Mirror tracks, and got 2 stars on one of them (I HATE not getting 3 stars - I usually quit as soon as I don't get first in a race as a result). But, I have enjoyed trying 200cc and silently cursing Nintendo for forcing me to change the strategy that I used over the course of an entire 8-game series.
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is out and about again in my house because I purchased all of the DLC. Ryu has been a fun addition, and I have enjoyed whipping out all of my old Street Fighter moves when I use him (although really, I usually fall back on using the B button to use all of the special moves to ensure my victory). I wish they had added more locations in the new DLC - I miss the stages in Brawl and Melee so much, the newer versions haven't quite lived up to those - but overall, the game is still a blast to play in a living room full of people.
I spent a lot of the beginning of the month playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. It's easily one of the strongest entries in the Zelda franchise, and perhaps, at the moment at least, is my favorite of the overhead, 2D Zelda titles (not that it is really 2D, with its gorgeous 3D visuals). I am super glad they ditched the requirement of using the touch screen to control Link. I never finished Phantom Hourglass as a result - my hand would get cramped up eventually, and I always ended up doing things I didn't want to do eventually, because of the odd controls. A Link Between Worlds, while I am not even halfway through, has proven to be a phenomenally deep game. I just hope I have more time over the next month to play it.
The Little Lady has taken over LEGO Marvel Superheroes, although I got pretty far before she decided she was going to play it all of the time. Again, I wrote at length about this earlier, so I will spare the details now, but the depth of the game continues to amaze me. I could wander around LEGO New York City for HOURS and still not find everything, and that's a good thing. The Little Lady has also taken over Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and thankfully, she is no longer leaving all of her stuff lying around town. As the mayor of Koholint, my town in Animal Crossing, I want my village looking immaculately clean. She probably wouldn't have cleaned up the town except I pointed out that, if you go to the Mayor's Office, my secretary points out how absolutely annoyed all of the villagers are about it. Thanks, Nintendo, for making a game that encourages me to obsessively organize things - that almost makes up for changing my Mario Kart strategy.
Movies
Nothing much going on here. We have been having The Little Lady watch the original Star Wars trilogy, and yes, we'll probably show her the prequel trilogy because it is, after all, canon. Then we can take her to see the new one, whether she's still living with us or not. I continue to love how interested she is in virtually everything - it was so easy to get her into Star Wars and keep her interested. She still asks me sometimes why Obi-Wan didn't tell Luke the truth about Darth Vader. She seems very annoyed about that.
We went and saw Inside-Out and both my wife and I bawled while the girls were simply non-plussed by (spoiler alert) the realization that yes, some important memories can be sad and our emotions get more complicated as we enter our teenage years. Pixar's slogan should be "let us entertain your kids while you bawl your eyes out." That damn Lava short-movie didn't help - I honestly thought they would give us a sad ending to that volcano's tale for a few seconds, and thought, "Geez, Pixar, I thought you wouldn't stoop this low after the first ten minutes of Up." Don't worry, guys - it's Pixar, it ends happily, although you still might cry.
Books
After finishing Stephen King's It, I read the not-so-nerdy Faithful, the story about the 2004 Boston Red Sox in which Stephen King was a co-writer. The Red Sox are my one truly non-nerdy interest, although I needed to read Faithful to remind myself that I am still a Red Sox fan after such a horrible season up until now.
It is a good book if you think about it like a short story collection, but overall, it's a mess of missed opportunities and silly storytelling shortcuts, all in an effort to force out some sort of epic story even though there really isn't any need for it. Characters like Henry Bowers (a truly amazing King villain) and Beverly's father (King knows exactly how to take abusive, horrible people and make them somehow more disgusting) are far more terrifying than It, and the backstories and the little vignettes King tells are often far more fascinating than the main story. I want to like this book, but it's such a mess that I have to consider it one of the worst King outings I've read, probably the first one I have read that disappointed me (I haven't even come close to reading them all, and if it matters, my favorites so far are The Stand, The Shining and The Dead Zone).
I am now reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, something I am told I should have read long ago. As a nerd, it's probably criminal that I haven't read it yet, and so far, I am pretty impressed. Some of the comedy within it feels twinged with arrogance on the part of the author, a sort of "oh wow, look at how clever I am" sort of feeling, but enough of it is quite entertaining that I am continuing to read it each night before going to sleep. It's part of an anthology with three other books by Adams, so I'll probably read those too.
Coming Up in August...
My wife and I will see Ant-Man at some point, and I am sure I will just throw all of my wonderful feelings about the Marvel cinematic universe down in a blog entry at some point afterwards. I will continue to read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well, hopefully getting through it by the end of the month, and I want desperately to work harder on The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, in the hopes that I can write a Game Profile about it. More Dexter is on tap as well, perhaps allowing me to write an entry about how well it humanizes such a dark character, and adds darkness to characters that are otherwise good. I have also been thinking a lot about online gaming and what it has done to the social aspect of gaming. I have an opinion that is probably in the minority of opinions on online gaming, but hey, I'm going to throw it out there anyway.
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