Zelda: Wind Waker

This won't be a full review because I doubt I'll make it through the full game before my next GameFly game shows up (Sleeping Dogs is on the way). I've had a vague craving to play this game again for a while now and things lined up to allow me to play it in the last few days. It's still incredibly charming, and I'm over my "what is the cartoon bullshit that they've done to Zelda!?" phase. Or maybe it helped that I played two more fairly good Zelda games with this art style on the DS so I've had time to get used to it.
It holds up surprisingly well for coming out over 8 years ago. I'm playing it on the Wii and it decided to turn on progressive scan (480p?) on the 1080p TV I've got it hooked up to. The only thing that looks bad is when things that aren't in the foreground are a bit blurry. The only frustrating thing has been the controls. I've played a ton of first and third person games in a 3D space since this game came out. Let's just say there's been a lot of standardization and improvement. I keep wanting to use the right "analog stick" to move the camera in a way that would feel at home in a Gears of War or Mass Effect game. Nope. And there's a surprising amount of making sure Link is lined up _just right_ to make a jump or something. Even in the beginning levels.
So maybe I'll keep going back to this game when I have the chance. We'll see. I did like that it's been long enough since I've played it that I really felt myself getting into the role of a young kid on a tiny island. I could almost smell the sea salt in the air when I climbed up a cliff and looked out at the ocean.

Paper Mario Sticker Star

My latest GameFly game was Paper Mario Sticker Star. http://www.giantbomb.com/paper-mario-sticker-star/3030-31755/ (Sorry for the lack of hyperlink, I'm trying out the Blogger iPad app with a bluetooth keyboard and I can't figure out how to, ya know, hyperlink.)

When I first started it up, the cartridge still had a previous renter's data in there. The saved game seemed to be near the end, and was at 18 hours of playtime. 18 hours!? There's no way I can put that much time into a silly Mario 3DS game. But after an hour or so I was really looking forward to spending that much time in the funny little world it creates.

Most of the games in the Paper Mario series can be described as RPG-lite and this one is no exception. You use items on enemies in a turn-based battle that deal some amount of damage. If you press the A button at just the right times you can deal more damage or avoid taking some damage. Pretty simple. There's a little bit of strategy with pairing the right items or type of attack with the right enemy, but there's not much to that. The boss fights can get a bit more complicated since you'll usually want to save your more powerful, rarer stickers (attacks) for them. Picking the right one in the right order is the key there.

Other than that you just have to make your way around in the world and find things that will let you progress to the next section, adventure game-style. This is where the game sometimes falls flat. I spent a lot of time looking at a walkthrough to tell me where to go next since the game didn't always make it very clear. Several times, I had been to the place I needed to go and tried the thing I needed to do, but not in _exactly_ the right way. That can be pretty frustrating.

I got most of the way through the game (about 16 hours in) before I got tired of the tedium of "go here, do this, come back." I think level 4-3, the haunted mansion level was what finally broke me. Don't get me wrong, it was well done and pretty funny, but there was a _lot_ of walkthrough looking on that one.

While I wait for the next game I started up Zelda, Wind Waker. I'm playing the Gamecube disc on the Wii, using the trusty old Wavebird wireless Gamecube controller. I knew I kept those around for a reason.

Bioshock Infinite and the return of Gamefly

I started back up on Gamefly and managed to get Bioshock Infinite about the time it came out a couple weeks ago. It took me about a week to blaze through the (roughly 12 hour campaign) on Easy difficulty. I played it quickly for one, because I'm back on the "time is money" when it comes to games idea. But also because I was enjoying it so dang much.

The world they create is beautiful. The sounds of the world and UI are familiar but consistently great. The visuals are like that too. It's really a great job of creating something that's at the same time believable and unbelievable. A lot of the sounds and cues will be familiar to players of the first two games. Which is a good thing. In fact, and I can safely say this without spoiling anything, there's a few pretty excellent callbacks to the first game in the ending sequences of Infinite.

As for GameFly, lets just say it was targeted e-mail marketing at it's best. They still have my e-mail address, of course, and they've been pretty good about not sending me too much annoying crap. So when I got a note that said there's a new shipping facility in Kansas City I thought pretty hard about signing up again. That the first month would only cost me a dollar was just gravy. If you'll remember from before, one of my biggest complaints about them was the terrible shipping times. I would typically go for a week of dropping a game in the mail before getting another one. I knew that Netflix had a KC shipping facility and knew how much of a difference that could make. As for queue management, I still don't think they're nearly up to par with Netflix, since the second game I got was down near the 9 or 10 position since all the other, more popular games were unavailable. Both the PS3 and 360 versions of Tomb Raider were in there, and that game's been out for a month or two. What gives, Gamefly? But maybe it's not an entirely fair comparison since games cost so much more than movies. We'll see how it goes.

So my next game up is Paper Mario Sticker Star. Something that looked sort of interesting, but mainly just gives me a reason to use my 3DS. I've had trouble finding a lot of reasons to do that. I played through most of the first party Nintendo stuff that they've put out, but the new Castlevania: Lords of Shadow game is the first 3rd party game that I've enjoyed. I liked most all of the 10 hours it took me to finish the story in that one. Aside from me wanting to scream "Dammit, Dracula!" (spoilers! Well, sort of) a few times towards the end, I had a lot of fun with it.