Room 34

There's some stuff about the update in the instruction manual. The update is for the new menu system, which I noticed downloaded with the last system update I ran a couple weeks ago... the Wii menu looks slightly different now. I'm pretty sure the update is actually on the disc, and is not downloaded from the Internet, because it ran REALLY fast on my system, and also the manual says that the update MUST run before you can play the game. I can't imagine that they'd REQUIRE an update that has to be downloaded from the Internet for the game to work. *EDIT* OK, I see you said pretty much the same thing. I should read more than one sentence before I hit Reply!

I played Geometry Wars on the 360 at a friend's house a couple months back and it was great fun. I am definitely going to be buying BOTH the Wii and DS versions of this when it's available!

I haven't noticed the jaggies yet. Are you playing on an HDTV? I DID notice the system update. Weird. It just forced that when you tried to run the game first time around. What happens to Wii users who don't have an Internet connection?

Just logged about a half hour or so (still on the command ship, but all hell has broken loose, and I've just made my way to a save point to stop for dinner), and so far I like it! I was worried that the voice acting and such would make it feel less Metroid-ish, and although there have been a few moments that have felt like rehashes of the early stages of the original Halo (which I've only played through the early stages, sadly enough, on my languishing XBOX), it feels very much like it belongs in the series and it will offer much satisfaction in the coming months! It also already feels like it's going to be a big improvement over Echoes, even though I really liked Echoes.

GOT IT! I had already planned to take today off to go to the State Fair with my wife and kids, and we stopped off at Best Buy on the way there. (OK, it wasn't really on the way, but I MADE it be on the way. ) Good deal though... I grabbed MP3, and at the same time I spotted the sixth Harry Potter book in paperback, which we've been looking for for several weeks, so my wife and I both got something.

I see BestBuy.com is showing a release date of tomorrow. What's funny is that Brunswick Pro Bowling also has an official release date of tomorrow, but I saw it at a Best Buy store yesterday! (Not that I care...) My suspicion is that stores are actually going to horde it until SUNDAY and feature it in the Sunday circular, along with the Wii consoles they've probably also been hording for weeks!

OK, what's going on? First the release date was August 20. Then it got pushed back to August 27. So today I went out, hell-bent on getting myself a copy. Target's already had a space on the shelf for it since last week. I looked on Amazon.com this morning and it said "In stock soon." What? I've never seen that before. I went to EB Games at lunch today and the cashier said "It SHIPS today; it'll be available tomorrow." Blah blah. Back to Target, still not on the shelf. Then I went to Target AGAIN at 3:45. Still not on the shelf, but the demo was playing on the Wii station. So I asked the guy at the counter, and he said it's coming out on WEDNESDAY. I said, "But it was announced for today." A mindless shrug in return. So then I came back and checked Amazon again, and now it says "Available September 2." OK, so what's the deal???

The places here usually have the games on the shelves by late afternoon of the release date. I'm planning to check Target after work on Monday, and if it's not there then, I'll go back on Tuesday.

I just finished Super Paper Mario tonight. Just in time for Metroid Prime 3 on Monday! (I'll be playing Super Metroid on the VC in the meantime...)

My gut feeling is that, if you didn't grow up with an Intellivision, you will not be impressed with it. The only thing it really had going for it was -- arguably -- its graphics, but honestly once we got to see more of what the 2600 was capable of in the later years, it didn't even have that! I think just about every Intellivision game suffers greatly from one thing -- unbearably sluggish gameplay. Take Night Stalker for instance... that would be a GREAT game if it didn't take 10 rounds for it to get up to a marginally challenging (or, for that matter, even ENGAGING) speed.

Holy crap, is that what the PS3 looks like? God that's ugly!

This is good to hear. I've been tempted to pick this up for a while but for some reason just never brought myself to do it. Of course, I'm prepared to drop $58 on games in short order (Super Metroid on the VC and Metroid Prime 3) so I probably won't be buying any DS games for a while!

The only PC games I know are OLD PC games, and I mean OLD... CGA era. One of my all-time favorites was one called Starquake. I managed to find a copy of it somewhere and play it in an emulator recently. Sweet! I bought tons of shareware games at Shopko back in the late '80s. I'm not even sure the stuff was legal. But they sold a lot of floppy disks stuffed to the gills with games that were supposedly shareware, with poorly photocopied instructions, for under $10. Castle Wolfenstein Beyond Castle Wolfenstein Round 42 Pharaoh's Tomb etc. As far as commercial stuff goes, my favorites back then were all made by Accolade: Test Drive, Mean 18 Golf, Hard Ball, etc. Those were the days! Oh yeah, I also had an early version of Wheel of Fortune for the PC. Vanna White looked nasty in green, pink, and yellow. And when you won, it played "The Stars and Stripes Forever"!!! WTF?!!?

I was at Target this afternoon, and I noticed they already have an empty space in the game case, with price labels and everything, reserved for Metroid Prime 3 and a couple of other Wii games that are coming out next week. I don't get that. A whole row of the case was just empty. (Of course, that made me want the game right NOW even more!) I am thinking about DLing Super Metroid on the Virtual Console. It came out yesterday, right? I've only ever played that game in emulation before; I'd LOVE to try it on a real console!

Sorry, off topic, but I have to be the grammar police for a second. It's "could have" (or "could've"), not "could of."

I guess I'm biased against it because I never had it back in the day. (The red label games never really made it to my neck of the woods except for Solaris... which I played to death as all of my friends moved on to NES.) Frankly, encountering this game for the first time in 2002, I found it appalling. An extremely weak effort at recreating the 7800 version, which was weak anyway, and way too slow to bother playing for more than 30 seconds. So, I guess I never really gave it a chance. But I hate it anyway!

Are you speaking strictly of games produced in-house in the early years (i.e. pre-crash)? Because I think Solaris is about the best there is, and that was an original game published by Atari. Yars' Revenge is a great game, but I wouldn't say its graphics are the best. Innovative and somewhat psychedelic, but not that great in terms of detail. Another one with great graphics is Midnight Magic. But you know, I'm just looking through the list of games in my collection made by Atari, and yeah... most of them are either arcade conversions or have terrible graphics... or both.

To each their own. I don't care so much about the arcana of how 2600 games are programmed in relation to the graphics. Outlaw looks like crap, end of story. Basic Math has problems far beyond the graphics. Who cares if numbers are blocky? It's a stupid, pointless "game," no matter what it looks like.

I don't think it's fair to say Pong or Breakout has the worst graphics. Those games are so abstract, little rectangles are just fine graphic-wise. I say the worst is Outlaw.

Just out of curiosity, can I ask how old you are? (Anyone who was around in the '80s would never even think to ask something like this! )

Well the real reason it's so small is that the videos aren't actually downloaded when you download this. It streams the videos over the Internet as you watch them (hence the "connecting..." and "buffering..." delays when you first go to watch them). The videos were cool, but I really WAS hoping for a playable demo! Oh well... just 13 more days and it will be here! I am absolutely 100% positively going to be buying it the day it is released!

The TRU I was at the day I posted this was having a store-wide clearance sale, with everything an additional 15% off the clearance price, so the clearance games, most of which were stickered at $9.98 (except a few real dogs that were $2) were actually going for $8.48. Of course, they're in the middle of remodeling the store, so that 15% deal might only be at that location.

Addams is good, but vastly overrated. A lot of people seem to think it's the best pinball ever, to which I heartily disagree! My two favorites are here, so I'm happy, and I WANT IT!!! Those would be Funhouse and Taxi. (Taxi mainly because I used to own a REAL Taxi machine but it crapped out!)

Hmm, so I take it that Aztec game was a Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff, eh?

Nah, it's all older stuff. They had about 30 copies of Namco Museum.