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Remeber this fun multiplayer game? I used to enjoy destroying my friends at bomber man! Recently I had a fun experience playing it with my sisters and little bro who thought I sucked at video games.

The story is, my sisters haven't seen me play video games that often since i've been busy the past few years and they decided to have a "bomberman party." They were going to invite all their friends over and play the game and so on, but jokingly I asked if i was invited and I got a sharp NO. WHAT i'm not invited? why because I can beat you all? My sisters AND my little brother laughed at me while thinking in their minds they can never be beaten.

A couple of days later my sisters asked me to show them what I was made of so we played 6 games. 4 (my sisters, lil bro, and other) against 1 (me).... I won 5 times out of 6....the reason I lost once you ask? I took a skull and accidentally blew myself up. After that i was challenged to every game we own and after humiliating them in each one, they learned the meaning of "RESPECT."

The End

Want to see my coasters up close? check them out at www.sew4me.etsy.com

One of my newest creations! Link and his sword they make a good couple don't you think? These are coasters that are in my etsy shop. I was playing zelda the other day and I started thinking about how the old school link looked. He was short and fat, but still a cute elf. Now he is tall and slender and has long flowy hair (whats up with that?). Anyway even though he seems to change shape, height, and hair length in each game the old school zelda is where it all started. The one I created is not the oldest version I know, but in the oldest version (atari) he was sort of just a green square....so...ya. I was debating whether to make the sword or the boomerang by his side since I like that little boomerang its easy to hit the far targets. But the sword is an awesome weapon regardless if link is using it or not so I decided to make the sword.

 

 

 

 

1 up mushroom

  

What a strange name for a mushroom that brings you back to life, “1up.” Was it a bad translation or did the Japanese people just want to keep things simple? I guess it was a “1up” because when you died you sort of just fell all the way down to no where.  BUT if you had eaten (more like absorbed) this green mushroom you had a second chance to….. die. Anyway, how come you couldn’t eat the evil brown mushrooms with fangs. It would have been cool if you ate them and they gave you like a special power. What’s up with an Italian plumber eating mushrooms anyway was there no other food supply? You and I both know there is no way someone can get that fat by just eating mushrooms. I bet Luigi would come by and trade him the mushrooms for like a large pizza or something. Luigi seemed to have a thing for the color green anyway so green mushrooms must have been his favorite.

 

Well, all of that said you have the opportunity to own this really cool 1up mushroom cell phone holder. Remember I can custom make it to fit a lot of devices just contact me or visit my etsy shop (the link is on the left hand side) for more info on it.

 

*click on the "i" above the product for more information on it*    *click on options to view refund policy and shipping*

 

 

 

         

 

  i was with cougar, luke and brandon and we were in this grassy area and everything was vivid, color wise. and there was some force that was coming to kill us, like a meteor or something and cougar said, "good thing i believe in God and i'm going to heaven." and we all just kind of agreed, but as the moment of impact was about to occur, i had a thought in my head, "too bad i don't believe in God... i'd really like to go to heaven." then the force or whatever hit us.  next thing i knew i was in space with black and white speckled stars all around, thinking "stars don't twinkle out here, only on earth did they twinkle." and everything was in Mode7 which is a graphics engine for the old SNES and Sega Genesis where everything was 2D, but they spread it out as if it was 3D, like the old Mario Kart, Road Rash, Space Harrier and many other racing games because it gave the illusion of 3d even though it was just pixels and 2d things.
    
    well, the things i would see would be these 2d Mode7 things, so i coulud only see the front of them. if i were to circle around them to see the sides or back, the flat front panel of them would just rotate so i would always see the same "face" of them. anyway, the things i saw were images of God. God was always a man and a woman fighting, but not really fighting, but gripped in some sort of activity to show they were equally providing power or w/e.

    a couple of these images were they were both mermaid people, but the male version had the upper body of Zeus and the female was Wonder Woman. the were locked in arms trying to strike one another, but instead of usual weapons they had bows without arrows and were using them as if they were daggers or something. Another image was the male version was like a half owl half bear beast and was wrestling with the woman half who was some other combination of two animals. i'm thinking something reptilian, but i can't really remember. there were a lot more images of God, but i can't remember them, but for the most part the man was depicted as Zeus and the female had the appearance of Wonder Woman.

    i was travelling the universe through 2d Mode7 energy balls, like bullets from the old games where they had to be these massive pulsating energy balls so you could see them on screen and such, and i was shooting through them as if they were this kind of elevator tube thing and each ball was a different connector to a different place. At one point it sent me to this small meteor that had green green grass and there was dirt that didnt smudge and i was just flying through space watching as the stars spiraled around us. and see the 2d pixelated energy balls and images of God always facing me. when i woke up i don't think i had ever felt so accomplished. it was weird, but i liked it.

Mark usually helps me develop half-baked ideas about whatever video game I'm currently playing and we've been talking about Super Mario Galaxy recently. Mostly about how it borrows thematically from Super Mario Bros. 3 but sticks with the dynamics of Super Mario 64. Partially spurred on by the survey from Nintendo I got the other day which asks "How likely are you to buy a sequel to Super Mario Galaxy?", I've gathered some of my thoughts together.

You'll notice that SMG has the second-highest spot on Game Rankings (and previously the top spot) which is misleading, to say the least. There was a rash of perfect ratings right before and right after it came out that are to blame for that and if you've played the game for more than 10 minutes, you'd realize it's imperfections as well. Equally unfortunately, there were a couple ultra-negative reviews as well but that's at least predictable with a well-liked release.

There are some flaws with the game which immediately drive the rating down from a perfect score but I also have a habit of comparing Mario games to their predecessors which isn't unfair, I think - the goal being to have as much fun with a new version of Mario as you had with the old version while allowing for improvements from system-to-system. So, maintaining the concepts that are fun while allowing for a reasonable amount of change. I'm not really concerned with the flaws as much as I am with existing elements of Mario games that could have made the game more fun, ultimately by giving it a much needed bump in replay value.

There are two different types of persistence in Mario games. The first is world persistence, which Mario has only ever used in binary form. That is; in a series of levels this particular one is either complete or incomplete. This stems to create the dynamics of "which path do I take?" and "gather this many stars to move to the next world" but nothing you do in a level (short of getting a star or reaching a flagpole) effects your experience if you go back to that level. The only feature that I can recall that violates that rule is Super Mario World's yellow/green/red/purple blocks which you had to "enable" and take effect in previous levels and that's more action-to-the-past then real level persistence. I wonder if the idea of level persistence is written off when designing Mario games simply based on the argument that "levels aren't fun once you break all the blocks" which really only addresses full-persistence when you can very successfully implement partial persistence (the blocks come back!).

The second type is character persistence which Mario has classically been well aware of and only dropped with M64 and newer games (with the exception being New Super Mario Bros. for the DS). This is a tragedy of gaming! A long, long time ago, Mario used to be able to take his fire-power from one level to another. Combined with limited or progressing power-availability this feature single-handedly brings replayability to traditionally single-play levels by hinting at secret locations the first time around and revealing when the player eventually attains the relevant powerup. I'm sure this requires some deep level design thought about how to hint at secret locations but not confuse the player into thinking they should be able to get there without a powerup.

SMG has a modified world persistence which isn't constrained by path but by how many stars you have. Eh. It's different and achieves the same effect so my gut feeling that says that paths are better than stars is simply a nostalgic response. The partial level persistence could be improved, I think the fact that certain stars are only available when comets are in orbit was supposed to achieve the same replayability but complicated itself when the levels started branching into separate maps with timers and whatnot. More secret stars! Extra content based on skill, not luck! SMG manages to just piss me off with this next one though: the only powerup that doesn't go away until you screw up is the bee suit. Even firepower has a timer on it - how is that fun? Not only should they persist until you get hit, they should persist from one level to another. As I mentioned before, it does take a little more effort to design the levels appropriately but there are always creative ways to constrain! For example, if you didn't have enough room to build up some speed in SMW, there was no way you were going to fly anywhere.

Okay, I've gone on enough. SMG is a really fantastic game and I'm having a lot of fun playing it but I probably won't touch it again once I get all the stars. There are ways to fix that problem and make a great game really timeless.

I'd like to believe that somewhere in the world there is always a marching band playing various music from classic Nintendo games.

(haha, you thought this post was about Halo because of the title - it's not, my 360 is still broken)

Ohmygod, this is becoming my video game blog and I'm not completely displeased with that. IF ONLY Vox better supported video game assets. I imagine I'm the only one to blame for that little detail though. As a warning, the occasional Zelda plot spoiler pops up to illustrate my point here.

The Legend of Zelda is a curious sequence of games. More curious than most never-ending game franchises because it's not character-continuous (i.e. most Zelda games aren't a direct sequel; they follow different, although highly similar characters) and it's been stylistically reinvented a number of times and most of those survive as non-failures.

Many franchisey (yeah, that's what I said) video games apply the same situations over and over again and we assume that the characters that look the same actually are the same and that they exist somewhere, in some form between their mostly uniform adventures. Zelda often (but not always) reinvents it's similar characters as another generation of hero, princess and lord of evil, completely unaware of their predecessors (initially, at least). To some degree, this leaves the game open to new players who don't necessarily have to pick up all the storyline back to the NES games before feeling like they're included in an adventure. Every Link (rather, every player playing as Link) has to learn his role in the events taking place and figure out how to use each weapon as he finds them, starting from the basic sword and shield. Apparently all these adventures are interlinked (pun completely intended) and Hyrule of The Adventure of Link (as much as I hate to speak of it) is the same Hyrule from Ocarina of Time. This seems unlikely at first glance since Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass are based entirely on small islands where you traverse here and there by boat which contrasts to other Zelda games where making your way from one area to another involves crossing land by foot. You do eventually learn that the Kevin Costner version of Hyrule is one and the same with the Hyrule you're used to but with some extra flooding added in to seal Ganon away. I guess that particular method didn't work very well.

Zelda has also been fairly successful at adapting to each new platform. There was some serious talk about the impact that the transition to 3D had on the player base and I've heard old school Zelda fans turn down new games because they find managing the camera in 3D difficult or nauseating. That seems to be a tradeoff that the franchise was willing to make to not be viewed as ancient when games pushed hard to adapt to three dimensions during the N64 days (Beautiful 2d or 2.5d games are still made! Their comeback is another topic altogether...). Games in the Zelda franchise have also made the stylistic transition to cell-shading in Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass. This is accompanied by a shift in mood - the seriousness in Twilight Princess is rarely found in either of these bordering-on-cartoonish titles. I find this style much more attractive than games that make a poor showing of realism. But that's not meant to knock Twilight Princess and the main point here is that most of these games have been fairly successful regardless of their style or platform transition. It's almost surprising that Phantom Hourglass has had such a good response from video game critics since it incorporates many of these shifts from other Zelda games. It's 2.5D, cell shaded and incorporates a completely new drawing-control scheme (including the forward roll which I still have not been able to master).

Strangely enough, I didn't even hear a lot of bellyaching for Phantom Hourglass about "this control scheme is going to ruin Zelda!" or mumblings about how people dislike the kiddie look cell shading tends to lend. Could it be that Zelda fans are used to change? That they have some faith in Nintendo to switch things up and still give them a game they enjoy? If only all franchises were so lucky!

Super Metroid is on the Wii virtual console as of last week and apparently is enticing enough for me to download it. I recall never actually being able to finish this game as a child even though I had the first couple levels as a walkthrough in some ancient game guide tome.

Somehow, I think this is going to be a very short game. I played a little last night and already finished off the first bad dude (of 4... plus another final guy, maybe?).

The 1994 mechanics are actually interesting to think about while playing because you'll be completely lost in this game unless you understand the concept of shooting and/or bombing every wall, ceiling and floor you see for ways to find other rooms. It's easy if you know this because you've got a constant flow of new places to go, one of which gives you a new item which you use to find other new places... you get the idea. Unfortunately, if you miss a location you have to backtrack and then it gets boring. I think this was my fate as a child playing this game.

Keeping track of the obscure locations in which Anil may or may not post to on any given day finally paid off with a brilliant animated gif mashup of G.W. and SNES-era Zelda.