Room 34

I don't really see how you can complain about a 30-hour game. How much more were you expecting?

I've had the Wii since March, and have only accumulated 9 games for it so far (not counting VC). Honestly, I'm pretty disappointed with the selection of games that have come out. There are some really great games but most of them have not been enough to grab my interest. I've bought a bunch more DS games than Wii games this year. Here's the Wii collection: Wii Sports Wii Play Super Paper Mario Mario Party 8 Super Mario Galaxy Wario Ware: Smooth Moves Rayman Raving Rabbids Sonic and the Secret Rings Metroid Prime 3: Corruption I have a slew of VC games too. Without going down and firing up the Wii, these are the ones I can recall off the top of my head... NES: Super Mario Bros. Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels Super Mario Bros. 3 TMNT Castlevania Donkey Kong SNES: Super Mario World Castlevania IV Super Metroid Donkey Kong Country Genesis: Sonic the Hedgehog TurboGrafx 16: Battle Lode Runner N64: Super Mario 64 Mario Kart 64 The VC has actually gotten quite a lot of play in my household, mainly because my son likes to play SMB3, SMW, and DKC with me. But I've logged a few hours on Super Metroid too. (Actually, I've played Super Metroid a lot more than I've played MP3 Corruption!) Oh, one more thing: I WOULD have Twilight Princess, but my mother-in-law got me the GameCube version as a birthday present! I debated putting the Wii version on my Amazon wish list, but in the end I went with the 'Cube version because I had no idea when I'd ever be able to get my hands on a Wii. Little did I realize I'd actually get one just FOUR DAYS LATER!!! It's fine though. I've been playing Twilight Princess on the GameCube a lot lately. It works out well, because I have the 'Cube upstairs, but the Wii is in the living room, right next to my 2-year-old daughter's bedroom, so I can't play the Wii when she's asleep.

Now that my son and I (mostly my son) are several hours into the game, I think I can give it a more credible review. The good news is, I still love it! The bad news is, I realize it's not perfect. My biggest complaint is the controls when you're swimming. I find them INCREDIBLY difficult, in a frustratingly pointless, not satisfyingly challenging, way.

FINALLY got to play it today. As I mentioned earlier it was my 4 1/2-year-old son's Christmas gift. As a matter of fact, he's next to me playing it right now, doing the thing where you ride on the back of the ray. So far we are LOVING it. Great game, and well worth the wait! (Needless to say, it's also very cool that it's a game that a 4 1/2-year-old kid and his 33-year-old dad can enjoy equally!)

I've owned it since the day it was released, and in a couple of days I finally get to play it! (I bought it as a Christmas gift for my kid... not that it's JUST for him... ) He doesn't know it's coming, but I've let him watch the Gamespot gameplay marathon (all 3 hours of it). He's pretty excited about the game but he has no idea he's actually getting it for Christmas. (It was tough to convince him that we shouldn't buy it at Target last week when he spotted it as we walked past the Wii games.)

I haven't been to the site in a while, and I just came back and have discovered that all of the topic pages are displaying in a threaded format, with only the original post actually showing on the page and all of the rest simply listed by username and subject in a tree below. I like reading the topics as just a flat page with one post after another. It's way too late and my brain's disengaged but I can't seem to find a way to restore the "old" way. What's going on?

Jeez, without looking I'm not even sure I can list them all! Let's see... NES Super Mario Bros. SMB: The Lost Levels SMB 3 Donkey Kong SNES Super Mario World Castlevania IV Donkey Kong Country Super Metroid Sega Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog N64 Super Mario 64 Mario Kart I'm pretty sure there are at least 3 or 4 more, but I can't remember them off the top of my head. My 4 1/2-year-old son loves the Mario games, in case you can't tell. Fortunately I like them too! He and I have been playing hours and hours of SMB 3 and SMW lately!

I think that pic is actually a prototype 7800. They refer in the article and table to the 5200, so they obviously knew the name of that console. Look at the cartridge in the "System X" slot. Looks like a 2600/7800 cart to me, which changes the scale of the whole pic. Those controllers look more like 5200 models, of course, but I'd guess the ProLine was still in the early design stages in late 1982. Now the question of course is why they'd show that instead of the 5200 but... well... look at their ratings in the table. They gave the 5200's controllers the same rating as the 2600's, and it looks like the Astrocade is their overall 1st choice (perhaps a tie with the CV). If this magazine covered other technologies besides video games, they were probably also recommending Betamax!

It's not necessarily a matter of simply "ramping up" production. The latest high-tech items always rely on a supply of equally high-tech parts, usually made by other companies. The company that's producing the "end result" product can push their suppliers to give them as much inventory of the parts as possible (apparently Apple horded all available sources of flash ROM chips for months when the first flash-based iPods were in production -- to the extent that no other manufacturers could get any!), but ultimately there may be a point where they just can't get all of the components they need to increase production any further.

Or maybe that's due to the pathetic exchange rate for the U.S. dollar these days. I've never seen GameCube new in the U.S. for less than $99, refurbished for $79. I think the PS2 these days is $129 new.

I doubt that there was ever any real organization to whether or not the pack-in Combat had a text label or picture label, although perhaps they did try to use up the text label stock first. I know that my grandma's 2600 (yes, my grandma had a 2600, and not just for the grandkids) came with a picture label Combat. She got it in the fall of 1982, I believe. I know it was just a few months after I got mine, which was in May 1982. They were both "woody" 4-switch models.

The new Zelda is great, very innovative use of the stylus. There are plenty of great non- or minimal-stylus games though. The Castlevania games are excellent. And if you're into Mario at all, I think New Super Mario Bros. is probably one of the best games ever made. It's a dream come true for anyone who just couldn't get enough of the original SMB back in the '80s.

I can understand "kids these days" not appreciating classic video games. Fortunately my 4 1/2 year old son seems to be platform agnostic. He likes video games in any shape or form. He'll have just as much fun playing the Flashback 2 as he will playing Super Paper Mario on the Wii or whatever else grabs his attention. OK, nothing will give him has much enjoyment as New Super Mario Bros. but he'll play Activision Anthology on the GBA and classic games on the Wii's VC, with no sense of the old games being in any way inferior. The other day, he was even enthusiastically coaching me along as I played freakin' SOKOBAN while booted up into Ubuntu! I realized just how video game obsessed he is, though, last night at a neighborhood pizza place. We were there with our neighbors, and we were playing foosball. After I scored a goal, he said "You got a strike!" (thinking of Wii Sports Bowling), and then... "You beat the final boss!"

We probably don't have exactly the same taste in games (since I don't own most of those and am not too interested in them), but I highly recommend Super Paper Mario. I played through that with my 4-year-old son over the summer and we had a blast.

I don't have an XBOX 360, but I saw this the other day and am very intrigued...

I would be surprised if the person who originally posted that was older than 14. But I do think they have a bit of a point with the graphics; for me, despite technically being "better" graphics, I suppose, when things went to 3D polygon style I think it was a huge step backwards aesthetically. It was somewhat impressive how a 3D landscape could be generated and you could move around freely in it, but jagged, cheesy-looking texture maps were the definition of ugly, and I could not stand the PS1/N64 era for that reason. The PS2/XBOX/GameCube generation finally crossed the line into looking acceptable-to-great. But I think that line was crossed somewhere DURING that era, not immediately upon entering it. PS2, as the earliest and least-capable (graphically) of the 3, tends to look the worst to me, but all 3 systems had brilliant-looking games, AND crappy-looking games. (I'll admit here that the PS2 is the only one out of the 3 that I don't own, and I've played it far less than the others, plus I generally dislike Sony, so I'm biased.) I don't have HDTV, and the only current-gen system I have is the Wii, so my only exposure to the 360 and the PS3 has been on in-store displays. Of course I am awed by the realistic, high-definition rendering of a football field. But it's not ALL about the graphics for me. As long as they aren't painfully ugly, they can be rudimentary, as long as the gameplay is there. Bottom line: for me there are Atari 2600 games that look better than a lot of games from the early polygon era; I think visually the N64/PS1 were a step backwards from the SNES/Genesis era, but I understand now that they were part of a logical progression to where we are now. But a lot (most?) of those games really did not age well. Nor did they seem that great to me to begin with.

I got this yesterday and played for about 30-45 minutes last night. I have been waiting for this game for about a year and a half, and I was not disappointed! I really liked Wind Waker, so being a direct sequel is OK by me. I love the cel-shaded look, and although this is, of course, lower quality in the graphics department than the GameCube game, I think they handled it well. It looks really good! I was a bit worried about the touch control thing, but it turns out to be very natural. As others have mentioned, the only control I'm having trouble with is the somersault/roll thing. I still can only do it about once in every ten times I try it, but everything else feels VERY natural. Completely different from Metroid Prime Hunters -- I was very excited for that game too, and the controls absolutely killed it for me so I never bothered to get more than about a quarter of the way through it. Phantom Hourglass gets an A+ from me. Up to now I've considered New Super Mario Bros. to be the best game for the DS but this one is now on top!

I wouldn't say it's just the graphics (and sound) that have gotten better. Games are able to have more depth now than they could back then. The most complicated version of Adventure still only takes maybe 5-10 minutes to finish (aside from the 1/18 of the time when it's completely impossible), and that's if you're fumbling around. Whereas there are adventure games today that are similar in spirit (Zelda, Castlevania, Metroid, and probably countless games on the non-Nintendo platforms I'm not as familiar with), but that take 15-30 HOURS to complete. But yeah, the spirit's the same. Rob's right that a good game is a good game and a crap game is crap, and the percentage of 2600 games that were shovelware was if anything higher than on modern systems. BTW, I think it's cool to have the input of one of the old school masters on the subject! Thanks, Rob!

Geez, you sure have a lot of crap in your menu bar! I like the fan RPM indicator though... pointless but cool!

As a few others have noted here, but it perhaps needs to be emphasized more... I've come to learn this year in my experiences going after the Wii that stores DO horde stocks for days or sometimes weeks if they have a big promo coming up in the Sunday newspaper insert. And that's when the sales numbers go up, because a store will sell 30 or 40 units before they've even officially opened for the day!

My 2 cents... I had never played Super Mario 64 either. I couldn't stand the look of the first gen polygon-based systems (N64, PS1, etc.) so I never touched those systems. But... now I have Super Mario 64 DS and Super Mario 64 (VC) on the Wii. It's pretty simple: I can't stand playing it on the DS, and I never played it long enough to get ANYWHERE in the game. The controls are terrible (both the "gradually accelerating" effect on the D-pad and the "drag your thumb on the touchscreen" method), and it makes no sense to me that you're forced to play as Yoshi for... well, as long as I bothered to play it. But then, for my 4-year-old, I downloaded it on the VC, and wow, it's actually fun! Playing as Mario makes sense, and the Wii Classic Controller makes SUCH a difference to the gameplay. I've gotten quite a bit farther into the game on the Wii than I ever did on the DS, and although I still think the textures are pretty corny looking (like I said, I thought these games looked bad when they were new, and they did NOT age well), but the worlds are creatively designed and it's fun to play.

Whenever I get used carts the first thing I do is clean the contacts. Regular "rubbing alcohol" is 70% alcohol. Drug stores/Target/etc. usually also carry in the same department "isopropyl alcohol" which is 91% alcohol. I recommend the highest concentration you can find. But I've used rubbing alcohol plenty of times on carts and it hasn't been a problem.

I'm still getting my ass handed to me by Rundas. I haven't played much in the last week though. I think I only have 3 energy tanks at this point... I better track down another one!

Yeah yeah... and you guys know the only reason you haven't been hearing from me for the last few days is that I'm too busy playing! (You also know I'm a total Nintendo fanboy and I'll admit it. ) Actually I HAVEN'T been playing MP3 that much this week, but it has to do with having kids now. My son is 4 and he's all over what's going on with the Wii and the DS, so actually in the past few days I've mostly been playing Mario Party 8 and a bunch of VC games -- Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, Donkey Kong Country, and some Super Metroid too!

I looked for it at Target today and there wasn't even a space for it in the case. Is it a more limited release?