Eight Days a Wiik

Yeah, I've got no shortage of Wii puns for the blog titles. Anyway, it's been about a week that I've had the Wii, and it's only now that I'm finally getting back to my blog to say how obscenely cool it is, beyond initial impressions.

It is obscenely cool, even after a week, which is odd, given that most videogame systems (or, more appropriately, the games themselves) don't really keep my attention for this long. As I've stated before, it took me about twenty-seven hours' worth of gameplay to realize that Final Fantasy XII simply wasn't any fun. If nothing else, it seemed like work. As a counter-point, the four games that I got for the Wii continue to be fun, sometimes absurdly so.

Wii Sports went over exceptionally well at my sister's place on Thanksgiving. Everyone played, and my nephew bitched for over an hour, because everyone else wanted to have a bowling tournament and he doesn't like bowling. He prefers boxing, though he's exceptionally bad at it, as he doesn't listen when I tell him to keep his guard up or try to dodge the incoming punches.

Rayman Raving Rabbids, in particular, fits the bill for "absurdly fun," since half of the selling point on the game is the fact that it doesn't take itself seriously in the least. An entire section of the game is devoted to shooting toilet plungers at lunatic rabbits. Some sections of the game are almost obscenely difficult, and I say that because I tend to mumble obscenities about the enormous amounts of physical pain inflicted by those particular sections of the game, although men who jerk off with their left hands will find that God has granted them a much easier time in the level in which the player shoots carrot juice at incoming rabbits who happen to be wearing snorkels and goggles. Like I said, it's absurd, and it's still very fun to play.

Excite Truck is a very nice change for me, since I long since got tired of racing games like Gran Turismo and Forza, where they claim the physics are terribly realistic and you spend half of your time racing shitty little courses you've done ten times before so you can equip your Volkswagen GTI with a new exhaust system. This is to say nothing of the Pimp My Ride aspect that they've been growing into in recent years. No, instead, Excite Truck is simple, the physics are laughable, and it's actually fun. Playing Forza was a simulation to the point where I thought my accountant was trying to screw me.

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (hereafter referred to simply as Zelda) is a very good game. I think I'm fourteen hours into the game, and I'm still not sure if it deserved the scores it did, and I'm still sure I liked Wind-Waker better, but it's now gotten to the point where it's a good game. I've finally gotten the nifty stuff that comes standard with a Zelda game, like the boomerang and bow and arrows, which is to say that it's finally getting fun. It's just a good time, laying the smack down on countless bad guys, thinking your way through dungeons...

And I have to say this, because it's gotta be said: If you have to consult a FAQ or strategy guide in order to beat a Zelda game, your mind isn't analytical enough to make the minimum wage. We should just outsource you to foreign countries, where you can join their manual labor force for five cents an hour and no bathroom breaks. I feel very strongly about this, because the boss-fights in a Zelda game have never been very difficult; rather you just have to think your way through it. Sure, you might die once or twice, but it's generally very simple, and then you move on. But I hear about these people saying the dungeons are too hard to get through, and I just want to beat these people repeatedly about the head.

But I digress. Fourteen hours in, it's becoming a standard Zelda game, in which we get to see Peahats and Death Mountain, and other familiar aspects of the series, but there's one very freaky sequence in which the game earns its ESRB rating of "T," which is for "Teen." As we all know, "E is for Everyone," just like your mom. Bwa-ha! Anyway, freaky cutscene, the likes of which I wouldn't have expected out of a game in this series, not unlike dead younglings in Episode III, though a dead Jar-Jar among them would have been a nice addition.

I figure I'll probably get Trauma Center somewhere closer to Christmas, as my game money for next week is going to get spent on that Amazing Spider-Man DVD-ROM I was talking about a couple posts ago. I'd really like that big-ass 14-disc Superman box-set, but I have to sock away some dough and buy other people stuff for Christmas, which is no fun. Something else comes out on DVD this week, anyway, and I was going to buy that and watch it on Friday night over Chinese food, but dammit if I can't remember what the hell it was. ... Oh yeah, it was Clerks II.


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