Looks like Nintendo will have a new console in time for this holiday season! While the NX won’t be arriving until March 2017, the House of Mario is trying to remind gamers why so many of us fell in love with them in the first place.READ MORE
In this marathon episode of Co-Op Critics, Brian and Dan are joined by Christina Grenhart and Erik Haltson to talk about the current culture of gaming, from online interactions to how games are covered by the enthusiast press.
You can either listen to the episode here on the enbedded player to the right, or download it here.
You can follow Brian on Twitter @BrianLeTendre and check out his blog at www.seebrianwrite.com.
Dan Evans can be found on Twitter @Sk8j
You can find Christina’s amazing blog “Bioware According to Mom” at biowareaccordingtomom.tumblr.com, and you can follow her on twitter at @clgrenhart
You can find Erik Haltson on Twitter @Erik_Haltson, and he will also be posting on Co-Op Critics blog in the future.
For more gaming discussion, head over to www.co-opcritics.com!
When I was in NY for New York Comic Con this past October, I visited an amazing game store that I’ve been meaning to post about for some time now. Video Games New York is a store in the East Village that is exactly the type of place that every gamer wishes they had in their own neighborhood.
From the Mario statue out front, to the shelves full of cartridges, to the console-filled display cabinets, Video Games New York feels like a shop and a museum at the same time. Not only do they have every console known to man, but they have tons of imports, rare collectibles, old store displays, standups and everything else you could imagine.
Check out the pics below, and if you’re ever in the East Village, you have to stop by Video Games New York.
The Nintendo Entertainment System I received for Christmas in 1985 is, to this day, the single greatest Christmas gift I have ever gotten. I have fond memories of taking the NES to my grandparents’ house that same Christmas day, hooking the console up to the 13-inch color TV in their bedroom, and spending the day playing Super Mario Bros. while the adults engaged in their merriment downstairs.
Mind you, I was already a full-fledged gamer by that time, having spent plenty of time in arcades, as well as having poured hundreds of hours into my Atari 2600. But the NES was different. Maybe it was the fact that it came with Super Mario Bros., arguably the greatest game of all time. Maybe it was that perfect rectangular controller, whose design has never been improved upon. whatever it was, the NES cemented my budding love affair with gaming, and I’ve never looked back.
So it was with absolute joy that I watched my son enjoy his new Nintendo 3DS on Christmas day yesterday. What was even cooler was that unlike me, he did not hide himself away for the day, but rather took every opportunity to show all of his relatives the funny video he recorded of himself, the pictures he took and the music you can listen to on the 3DS. All of the things that I never bothered with on my 3DS are the things he loves most about his. We downloaded and played Photo Dojo, where we took pictures and made him a character in the game. We played Face Raiders, which also uses pics of family and friends to populate the game. We also used StreetPass to share Miis, which he thought was awesome.
Watching my son explore the 3DS gave me a new appreciation for mine, and I loved it already. He borrowed my copy of New Super Mario Bros. 2 this morning, or as he called it “the one with all the coins all over the place.” I wonder if that game will be for him was the original Super Mario Bros. was for me. Maybe not, but I now have a new Nintendo memory to add to my personal collection, and he has a lot of great gaming ahead of him.
This weekend, I relaxed and didn’t play a game at all. I didn’t load up 10000000 on my iPad. I didn’t play Spec Ops: The Line on my 360. I didn’t charge up the DS Lite in order to play yet another game of Civilization Revolution. Instead, I just sat back and watched as some of the best speedrunners in the world plied their craft for the
Kings of Poverty’s speedrun marathon to raise funds for RAINN (the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network).
Last time, I discussed briefly the idea of tedium of play that comes with 100% completion. Watching these players break down games by pixel movements with perfect timing, like some of the jumps in cyghfer‘s run of Bucky O’Hare on Hard mode, where the player loses a life with just one hit, or exploit game glitches like dram55‘s use of ceiling sticking in Super Mario World and cyghfer’s use of a glitch that allowed him to enter walls and teleport up a screen in Mega Man 2 showed that mastery of a game inside and out can come with “tedium of play.”
One of my secret sources of gamer pride is the fact that, once upon a time, I could complete Streets of Rage 2 in less than 50 minutes on hard mode using Axel. Because I only owned 4 games for the Sega Genesis (or the Sega Mega Drive, if you’re so inclined), I would say that I mastered Streets of Rage 2. I knew combos for each character, the timing and placement for weapons dropped by enemies or found in the stage, and most importantly, a certain standard for quickly I could finish the game and how high my score should be.
A quick word about Streets of Rage 2, which I will contend was a better game than any of the Final Fight games. I’d go as far as saying that Streets of Rage 2 is the finest side-scrolling brawler of the 16-bit generation. I’d also go as far as saying that beating Streets of Rage 2 with Axel or Max on Mania mode, the highest difficulty level, is a very different experience than beating it with Blaze or Skate. Finally, while Streets of Rage 2 had no in-game achievements (until the re-releases on Xbox Live Arcade and in Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection), beating Streets of Rage 2 with Blaze and Skate on Mania mode would be as close to 100% completion as one could get. It took months of attempts to grinding the game, finding the optimal timing and strategies to handle enemies before I could beat it with Blaze. It took years of off-and-on play until I could beat it with Skate. So why didn’t I consider this tedious?
The easy answer would be that I didn’t find grinding Streets of Rage 2 until I mastered it because I had no other games to play. Another easy explanation would be that tedium looks very different to an adolescent boy with limited responsibilities than to a man with limited leisure time. But I think that the tedium comes with the artificial structure, that the implementation of achievements, trophies, and Gamer Points and my psychological acceptance lays the foundation for me to find the act of play a chore.
Grinding Streets of Rage 2 and grinding for the “Demolition Man” achievement in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 are very different things, even though the same vocabulary is used to describe both. Grinding Streets of Rage 2 until I could beat it with the toughest characters to use on the hardest difficulty mode meant that I was still playing through the game, progressing through different environments, hearing different tracks, and experiencing different stimulation. Grinding for the “Demolition Man” achievement meant, as I mentioned last time, meant that I was herding other willing players into a building on a multiplayer map and blowing the building up with C4, hoping that the game would recognize those kills as mine. Grinding Streets of Rage 2 meant that I was achieving mastery; grinding for the “Demolition Man” achievement that I was filling up a bar in a game.
Seeing the speedrunners come near world record times for games like Batman (NES) and Bad Street Brawler reminded me of what mastery of a game and pride in your play looked like. Whenever you’re feeling burnt out on gaming, take a look at speedrun archives like Speed Demos Archive, a stream on SpeedRunsLive, or even a playthrough on Let’s Play Archive. Sometimes, seeing someone who really knows what he or she is doing with a game is the cure to gaming burnout.
Also, please check out Team Sp00ky‘s archive of the Kings of Poverty’s speedrun marathon (part 1 and part 2) and donate to RAINN, either through the Kings of Poverty’s collection or directly.
Even though I hadn’t really planned on it, I ended up grabbing a Nintendo 3DS XL when they went on sale yesterday. GameStop was offering $100 toward the XL if you traded in your old 3DS, and combined with some other games I traded in, I got the new XL for a mere $11. Turns out it was worth $11 and then some.
I bought an original 3DS on launch day, and I haven’t played nearly enough to justify my $250 investment. My biggest complaint wasn’t the lack of games after launch, but rather the form factor of the device itself. The 3DS was just too darn small, and playing it for any length of time actually made my hands hurt. Over the past several months, there’s been some great games for the 3DS that I haven’t even bothered to pick up. I have a ton of old NES and GameBoy games on the device from the Ambassador Program and my eShop purchases, but I rarely fired up the handheld to play them. Ironically, the game I spent the most time with was Resident Evil Revelations (an awesome game), partly because the added bulk of the Circle Pad Pro made the device more comfortable to hold.
My first thought in taking my new 3DS XL out of the box was that it was exactly what the original design for the device should have been. Not only is the display substantially larger than the original, but the device feels a lot more comfortable to hold and play. I fired up Super Mario 3D Land and was really impressed with how much better of an experience it was playing on the XL versus the original 3DS. Even the 3D comes across better. Reading web pages on the built in browser (not that you’d actually spend much time doing it) is actually reasonable now. I could actually see myself using Netflix on the device now, something I did one time on the old model.
So, while I haven’t spent too much time with it yet, I am really liking the 3DS XL so far. I don’t know if the GameStop deal was a one-day thing, but if it’s still going on, I think it’s worth trading in your old model for this one. I know I’ll get a lot more playing time out of the 3DS moving forward.