kill vehicle

It’s true.

I gave in to temptation and bought a Wii from eBay earlier this week, and the nice FedEx man dropped it off on my porch this morning. My copy of Zelda and the second controller set I ordered haven’t showed up, so I spent a while playing with Wii Sports and the Virtual Console stuff.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I had this much fun with a video game.

The sports games are clearly mini-games, and they don’t have a lot of depth or a ton of graphical polish, but they’re just flat-out fun.

Nintendo claimed that people cared less about shiny HD graphics than about gameplay, and from a morning’s time spent with Wii Sports, I’m pretty sure they’re right.

New addiction: Animal Crossing DS.

My friend code is 1375-0438-5340.

I am a lousy fisherman, but I’m currently choosing to blame Ray for catching all of the fish in my tiny village of Homewood.

So Laura got me a Nintendo DS for Christmas, and my mom got me a couple of games to go with it. This is collusion of the finest kind, and I thoroughly approve.

I’m happy with the DS and would write more about it, but Mario Kart DS has completely eaten my soul, so instead I will simply note that my friend code is 408083-716202 and go back to racing a little pixelated cart against strangers online.

Recently, like almost everybody else I know with an Xbox, I’ve been playing Jade Empire until my eyes bleed.

I lack the patience to write a full review, so if that’s what you need you should read peterb’s review, which is pretty much on the money. The game isn’t especially innovative, but it’s very well executed and has a great story. Sure, it isn’t a daring experiment, but not every game needs to be. Sometimes you want a creative and interesting meal, and sometimes you just want a hamburger. Jade Empire is a very tasty hamburger.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the demo for JE that the April Official Xbox Magazine disc had. I bought the issue just for that demo. I don’t think I so much as cracked the cover of the actual magazine. I’d been waiting for JE for about a year and a half at that point, devouring every little scrap of preview news that Bioware leaked.

(more…)

So, the new Splinter Cell is out.

On a whim I stopped at the hateful EB Games the other day to see if they possibly had it. After the guy behind the counter got off the phone with his friend, it turned out he actually had copies to sell me. Weird. I declined his offer of a super-expensive strategy guide (Thanks, but if I get stuck I’ll use the internet for hints. You may have heard of it.) and game insurance (What? No, seriously, what? Who buys that?) and eventually had my prize.

The reviews gush about how this is the best Xbox game ever. The box even helpfully points this out. I was expecting a lot.

I played through the single player a bit. It’s really really beautiful, prettier than I’d expected, but otherwise it’s still Splinter Cell. That’s not a bad thing, but really I’ve already played that twice. I guess I’m happy to have more, especially now that the stupid save-point system is gone, but still it’s not leaving me overwhelmed with joy. It’s all well-done, but at this point I’m more or less feeling underwhelmed. All that hype, and it’s just pretty good. Bah.

Then I tried the cooperative multiplayer. Anything I said about being disappointed?

I TAKE IT ALL BACK.

More later, assuming I don’t get distracted by coop.