Gaming «

Sep 06 2012

Playing Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga or “Why Can’t I Stab The Band!?”

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I decided to break my rule of not playing more than one one game at once and finally play Lego Star Wars for the Wii after unable to access my saved progress of Bioshock (it’s saved on another xbox across the country) . I already broke my rule with Space Channel 5 Part 2 but the Xbox has to be shared and the Wii doesn’t.
Note: It seemed economical to let a housemate get an Xbox to share and I would buy myself a Wii. This plan has proved frustrating.

The game started me out in Moos Icely Cantina. Thanks to the MN 501st I can only think of it as Moos Icee Cantina, every year at CONvergence they have a party that’s Cantina themed and they serve slushies. Slushies are not Icees, but who’s going to argue with the 501st? No one. For the next 30 minutes I tooled around the lego bar ignoring instruction prompts to learn as I went. If you’ve never played a Lego game they take the best part of Mario games, being rewarded with coins for destroying things, and multiply it by 10. Chairs, crates, cups, nothing was safe from my wild wii-mote lightsaber flailing. I’m sure the scene would have have been fairly amusing to anyone watching, until I became self conscious (as one does when playing Wii games) and found out that I could simply press a button instead of flailing the controller.

Besides destroying the Cantina like an unwanted rowdy guest you could also pick fights with other bar patrons. But not the band. You couldn’t fight the band, which is a shame. I was hoping they would pull lightsabers and blasters out of their instruments.

After a while I eventually discovered how to go on with the game, but I reutrn to the cantina often for some profitable destruction.

May 21 2012

How To Play Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

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Friend: “Hey, how you doing with Link’s Awakening?”

Me: “NOT WELL!”

Friend: “What?”

Me: “I can’t get into level 3!”

Friend: “Why?”

Me: “I had to get into the castle! But I didn’t know how, I tried everything until I had to look it up! And you know what it told me?! ‘Just give the bananas to the monkey and it will get its friends to form a monkey bridge to get into to castle’ but I had no bananas!”

Friend: “What bananas?”

Me: “The ones I was apparently supposed to get in level one through an elaborate trade chain that had nothing to do with completing level one! So I didn’t do it!”

Friend: “I didn’t know you could skip that part.”

Me: “IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH LEVEL ONE, so of course I skipped it!”

Friend: “Of course you would!”

Me: “Yeah! Why would I go get a doll, to trade for a bow, to trade for a can of dog food, to trade for bananas if it had nothing to do with getting into the cave!?”

Friend: “Makes sense.”

Me: “So I had to go back and track down all the trades so I could get my monkey bridge.”

Apr 11 2012

Why Stephen Colbert Is Right About Bears, Or How I Played Tomb Raider

esophia 0 0

Shortly after getting myself a Wii, the first non-obsolete console my finances had ever been able to afford, I picked up a copy of Tomb Raider: Anniversary. Despite my tenacity, I had never excelled at previous Tomb Raider games and was convinced that this revisit to an old gaming friend would result in great tomb raiding glory!

I raced through training at Croft Manor to get to actual game play where the levels all blurred together in my excitement. I quickly smashed buttons to get to the next level while ignoring a lot of details. I had no want for details! This was Tomb Raider not Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (which I kicked ass at BTW).

Somewhere in Peru I met my match at the foot of an ancient temple’s staircase.

Paraphrasing my sister’s version of events:
From upstairs she heard a loud crash, followed by terrified screaming and curses. She quickly ran downstairs assuming I had tripped and injured myself in one of my frequent bouts of clumsiness or had encountered a spider. What she found was me on the floor next to a tipped over footrest, screaming at the TV and frantically waving a Wii-mote. When she asked what was wrong I screamed incoherently about bear attacks, the TV then showing I had died and asked if I wanted to reload a save point.

My version of the epic events of epicness:
I navigated the ruins, fought wolves, and swam underwater looking for hidden passages. You know, just a regular day for Lara. Eventually I came to a large chamber and did some stuff, details are unimportant. As I stood and surveyed the site trying to determine how best to open the large door at the end of the chamber I was struck.
Attacked from behind! A bear! THREATDOWN!
I manipulated Lara to attack like a spider monkey. Running, shooting, dive rolls, and other dramatic action sequences followed my button mashing as I fought the bear. Being as this was on a Wii my movements in game were enhanced by intense controller flailing, regardless of whether or not that’s how the controller actually worked. It was all very impressive, until I stood up and tripped over the footrest in front of me. This momentary lapse in my attack allowed the bear to corner me, I had found some area of the level from which there was no way out. As I tried to escape the bear I found the only way to avoid damage was to continuously dive-roll in place, I had found some fluke of the game by chance that as long as I did this the bear’s swipes at me yielded no effect.
At this point my sister had entered the room, this distraction causing me to cease my dive-roll defense and give in to the bear. Bested, I reloaded from the save point.

And that is how Tomb Raider taught me the best defense against bears was a dive-roll.