Hoax or not?

So today I was randomly trawling through the net for pictures of Colin of Twilight Princess Fame and I stumbled across this. Apparently designs from a planned but aborted portable GameCube. Personnally i think its a lie and think how horrible this thing would be to play, you would need giant hands, but I thought it was cool.

Super Paper Mario

It has been released on at least pert of the world. God damn you Nintendo. Also recently released is the list of games for Q2 and what games are missing from this list Super Paper Mario and Pokemon. This means one of two things, Nintendo fans will be the palest people on earth as a list of fantastic titles get released in the U.K. during Q3 or there are going to be ALOT of angry Nintendo fans that will join the occult to curse Nintendo in a thousand ways as these titles slowly get pushed further and further back into the christmas time.

Things Confirmed in The Last Day or Two

So its all oout in the open resident evil 4 is on its way to the wii. Whoop Whoop to a non mini game being wii bound and something with darker themes can only be good, making more people play wii and stop the scoffers who continually call wii a childs console. But as mentioned befor it makes me sad that porting from last generation to wii seems to be to cheep and easy. But on the plus side of this announcement is this. The officail Umbrella Chronicles site with brand new video. Sadly it does not make it any more clear if this will be a free roaming style game or on rails but any news on this game makes me wee myself a little.

The other bit of news i wanted to talk about is again the PS3. I feel as though all I do is say abd things about it and ignore the Xbox but i cant help but comment on the constant slagging Sony is getting. First of all There is the news that Woolworths has dropped the price of the PS3 by 25%, no reason has been given but shal we just assume that poor sales is the key? This also comes with the news that play are offering a whole goody bag of treats with every PS3, poor poor Sony, lets hope all of this is part of the 10 year plan for the PS3.

Finally I want to talk about the 'cheap' PS3 being dropped from Sony shops and becoming like gold dust to find. This has caused a whoo ha on various sites saying that Sony is taking choice away from consumers, personally i think its only a good thing. I think that your average joe when looking for a new games console they are going to be confused when they see the same games console in a variety of sizes and bits and peices missing and added depending on what model you get, less choice is better. Which by this news you would think that Sony would have maybe noticed but nope instead they have filed to release a PS3 in the style of the recently announced Xbox Elite which involves more memory and gadgets designed to confuse consumers and piss off people who forked out hundreds of pounds for what they thought was the best model of that particular console. How I love the simplicity of wiianto.

Whats Wrong With Wii

This is going to be a brief musing on what i think would improv the wii. I knowi just ranted about sony presuming that the 'hard core gamer' wants a media hub and i dont think that is the case and I may have used the words "How many people use their ps2 as a DVD player?" How ever I do think that the Wii could have done with having a DVD player in it. My thinking behind this is that the Wii is so compact and it looks so much prettier than my DVD player, it would be nice. It would also give the Wii another chance in the day to glow blue.

My second thought for this week on how to improve the Wii is to change the virtual console a little bit. I think its a really cool idea having all these old games ready to downlaod and I have dowloaded a few but I think that Nintendo are putting too much faith in people wanting to experoence retro joy, which for me is not the case. For example I know i loved Ocarina Of Time but I never want to spend 40hours of my life playing it again. What they should be using the virtual console for is new content. The Wii continualy shows that it can make mini games fun again so why not stick some on the virtual console. Its working for Microsoft so why cant Nintendo do it? Also I think that the virtual console or at least a channel should be available that allows players to demo games, for old style gamers that are used to button pushin, getting their heads around the fact that movement is the new way to play can be hard to get their head around. To solve this all Nintendo need to do is stick a demo on each week for that games release so people can test out the wiimote with that particular game and se if they like it and if it works. This has been working for the PS3 its various demos are getting a stupid amount of downloads.

Also this week it finally filtered down to me the n ews of Resident Evil 4 on the Wii, this seems to say cash in to me. Who are Capcom trying to sell this game too, any Nintendo fan who has a Wii probably had a Gamecube and who had a Gamecube with out Resident Evil 4? (I know that was a whole lot of presumption but stay with me here.) I love this game but it makes me a little sad that developers are already porting games from the Gamecube onto the Wii and its this young, it adds to the thoughts that I have been having that developers dont believe that the Wii is going to be a success and are tossing out lazy ports and lazy versions of games. This thinking started when I started playing Sonic and the Secret Ring and I realised that instea of FMV sequences to tell the story they had gone for a comic strip look (which is also being used in Eledees) and then they rub salt in the wound by letting you unlock gorgeous CGI sequences which make you think I wonder how i would feel about this game if this is what was telling me the story.

These are my thoughts for this week.

Thoughts on Playstation 3

I have no shame in being a Nintendo fanboy and thi is possibly going to turn into a rant about Nintendo superiority but i will try and kep it even. As some people may have noticed,the playstation 3 was released in the U.K. a week or two ago much to a bit of dissapointment I think on Sony's part. Although it was splashed across the wed that the Playstation 3 was the biggest selling console ever in the U.K. there are a number of things to take into consideration such as where did this number come from the answer to this is that Sony unlike Microsoft and Nintendo lie in their sales figures. What they say they have sold is actually what they have shipped, this is interesting ( in an oh my gos i am so nerdy way) when we consider that last week Sony reported that only 60% of consoles shipped to Europe were sold. This left me pondering what has gone wrong for Sony?

I dont exaclty hate Playstation and Im not a fan boy that thinks that Sony has brought about the end of gaming I do own a PSone and im looking to get a Playstation 2 for the joy that kingdom hearts and Okami (to name a few) for the joy and smiles they will bring me. The playstation 3 however has nothing to spark my interest the way that the latter ones did. The main reason for this (on my part at least) is the arrogance of Sony. For any one following the release of the Playstation 3 in Europe will have got gentley more and more annoyed at every press release or conference in which it was mentioned. Sony basically said that they didnt care about Europe and that they would release the PS3 in Europe whenever it wanted and that they didnt care because people will buy it any way. We can see that his arrogance has continued with the massive price tag attached to the console here, when it turns out you can get a brand new console 100pounds or so cheaper on ebay from far away lands you know there is something wrong.

Then there is the assumption of what people want in a console. Why did sony insisit on putting a blu-ray player inside the machine? Deciding that people want to have a blu-ray player at this early stage in the players development is a clear attempt to win this round of the Betamax/vhs war. But really how many people use the DVD player in the ps2? This also goes with the buzz word of the new generation of games consoles, and that is 'hardcore gamer' the hard core gamer wants their machine to do al the multimedia tasks around the house. And they want hi-def realistic games. But as hard as i try, with many hours spent googling, wikipedia and even a toodle down to the library I can not find a deffinition of what seems to be an imaginary games player. This has led me to assume that a hard core games player is a man who plays computer games 30+ hours a week and is in their late 20's - early 30's. But how many people will actually fit into this demographic and how much disposable income does some one in this demographic actualy have? I suppose we will see in the next year who comes out on top, Nintendo with the fun for all the fmaily or Sony and their media hub.

I also want to comment on how much I hate the advertising for the PS3. I have no idea what market they are trying to reach with it. And the type font of "this is living" annoys the crap out of me becasue it makes no sense and does not fit in with the spider man style sleek look the rest of the console is trying to show. Maybe the fat writing is meant to represent the size of the machine which still surprises me every time i see it.

Yoshis Island DS

Although Yoshi is the title of this blog I didn't intend for this to be a fansite for Yoshi but it seems that I am writing alot about him. This blog is for the little green dinosaur becasue I have finally finished Yoshi's latest DS outing, Yoshis Island. And I am sad to say it is a big pile of poo, I am so dissapointed in this game. I was hoping for more platforming magic ala "New Super Mario Bros" but sadly got this tedious mess. It looks like Yoshi, it sounds like Yoshi and im sure that if there was some way of smelling in game action, it would even smell like Yoshi but infact it is a poor tramp cousin who has put on their best clothes to go out cause some mischeif and soil the name of his wonderful family.

The art work is fine and dandy and has the cute Yoshi feel and hand drawn yummyness which did make me play through and want to see more. There are touches of geniouse in this game, piloting a space ship and skiing are two that come instantly to mind. But this is let down with how generic it is in places, there is even a level where you have to jump your way up a tower while lava fills up said tower.

The one thing that I cant stand in a game is when it is unfair. This game is beyond any type of fair and clearly the developers knew this when they were making it because I know not of any other where gaining over a hundered lives in the first four levels is as easy, and I wasnt even trying to get more lives. As there are so many I thought that I would list the ways in which Yoshi's Island DS becasue writing sentances about it would bore me;

• Doing a series of flutter jumps in nigh on impossible and numerous sections need you to do them.
• These sections normally have no way of getting to the higher level again so if you fall you have to die and re start the level all over again after the 50th time its no that much fun.
• The space ship section the first time was fun, the second time feels as though I have been here done that and this time i keep dying and its not fun and then the same problem mentioned above happens again.
• The game likes to trap you in small places with bad guys with sheilds that are impossible to get out of
• Leaving the player with out eggs in sections that clearly needs eggs is a common occurrance
• Finaly when you get hit and the baby falls off your back on the levels where the screen is scrolling, the baby bubbles like to float straight towards overhanging ledges that you could not even get to too if you were Knuckles.

On the plus side it is nice to see a whole array of the Nintendo cast in baby form in this game and their added abilitys do add a little bit of interest. There are also many levels to see and they are large which gives a sense of exploration that was missing from New Super Mario Bros. And when you complete the game you do recieve a few more levels to play. But I have no interest in the slightest in playing them and infact I think it is cruel of Artoon to give me even more levels after I had frustratingly played my way thorugh the main game. I do not reccomend this game. If your looking for a new Yoshi fix, there is still a while to go peeps.

Or did he?

I love Yoshi he is one of my favourite things on earth but sadly his newest game on the DS has become part of the recent trend I am noticing in DS land and that is the stupid random difficulty that seems to happen in a DS game its happened in Yoshis Island and now it seems to be happening in Metroid Prime Hunters. Im not the greatest games player in the world, I could try and list off some achievements but I know there are people who are a million and one times better than me. However Iv been playing games long enough to notice when the developer of a game has clearly though holy good christ the game may be a little too short so to make the game longer I will put a bugger load more enemies on screen that can take away more energy than could be thought and to top it all off make it so the next save point takes over half and hour to get too! This does technically make the game longer but it does not make a good game infact it makes a frustrating mess that will never be completed.
Metroid is the worst for this, especially in the prime series. I do love them all and think they are a game worth playing but have we not reached the point in gaming where hunting around for a save spot are long gone. I think its really random for a Nintendo game to force a player to have to set aside at least an hour each time they need to actually complete something of importance in Metroid. With the Gamecube Nintendo promised more frequent in house releases that were shorter and designed so they could be picked up and played with ease, meaning that Nintendo fans could play more Nintendo games. Even Twilight Princess the ultimate epic sit alone and play game managed to let the player save at any point why oh why can you not Metroid? I really hope for Corruption they change this make the conclusion to this wonderful series absolutely perfect.