Ninjas On A Beach?!

So I got all my boxes out of storage today and heaped ‘em in a pile on my floor to figure out just how much I crap I’ve got to take back to Wisco with me. The good news: not a whole lot.  The very good news: I found my Sega Dreamcast.  (This is the great kinda day where there’s only good and better news!)  So for the last hour I’ve been playing Streets of Rage 2 on the Sega SmashPack disc. I used to play Streets of Rage with Big Show all the time back in middle school, cuz he was just the sort of non-conformist that had a Sega Genesis instead of the Super Nintendo. He even bought the SegaCD add on (Night Trap! Yes!)  Anyways, I used all my continues and got halfway through Stage 6 before being brought low by a simultaneous attack from a man on a jetpack and a guy that looked like a mechanized Blanka from Street Fighter 2.  Streets of Rage 2 is 95% easy and 5% fucking impossible, and it’s that 5% that eats all your Continues.  Next up: Golden Axe and maybe later on some Phantasy Star II.

I got back in the gym today and then was all, “What was I procrastinating for, this is great!” Hopefully tomorrow will also work out nicely.

The cold run of cards on pokerroom continues.  I took a 2nd in a $10 Turbo SNG today, but that’s about it.  Perchance PR is punishing me for doing a $500 cash out. I’ll beat you someday pokerroom.com.

For a while today my house was clean as a fiddle, but now I done gone and messed it up again tearing through boxes while I look for shit to throw away.

!

Man, I totally forgot to talk about going to the city on Friday night.  Jordan and  Adam (coworkers), and sundry friends-of-friends made it a very exciting night at the karaoke bar. A very exciting night at the karaoke bar– indeed.  Afterwards I stayed at Cal’s house and then got up in the morning to have breakfast/lunch (wish there was a word for that) with Cal, his girlfriend Emily, and Emily’s sister.  Along the way we got to see the public park where gay men flop their genitals out for passing trains, Noe Valley’s penchant for families with children (Only 11,000 in all of San Francisco according to Cal’s Made-Up Numbers Reference), and Cal’s Favoritest German Knick-Knack Store in all of San Francisco.  A good day indeed, sir.

Back to the grindstone. Two weeks until San Diego (nee Tijuana).

Donkey Konga 2

Early returns on Donkey Konga 2 indicate a solid Meh Rating. They strayed from the formula that ensured that I liked the first one. Before I give my impressions, I’ll quote one of The Masters:

I’ll tell you that I’m tired of hearing every person who reviews the fucking game tell me what kinds of music they don’t like. I don’t give a flying fuck what kind of music you listen to. What I want to know is if these new songs provide interesting, original rhythms I can play solo or with my friends when they come over. Will it extend the amusement I get from the peripherals I purchased? I don’t want to know what’s on your fucking iPod, and I don’t care if this music does not create in you a state of elevated consciousness. I’ve played through every song, and half again on the punishing difficult mode, and I vouch for the gameplay provided in this expansion. The tunes provided by Donkey Konga 2 include many popular “radio” songs which supposedly amount to a kind of despicable mainstream outreach program – as opposed to that solid gold line-up in the first Donkey Konga. I suppose these new “tracks” simply lack the ironic kick of the first game’s “Bingo Was His Name-O” or the haunting, recursive nautical shanty “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

It’s not that I hate pop music and am therefore deeply offended at the temerity of Nintendo to include some music fresh off Z104. It’s more along the lines that a lot of the music just isn’t great to bongo to. Example: whoever had the idea to include TLC’s seminal work on ugly chicks: Unpretty, should be taken out and beaten with a copy of the first game until he learns that fun songs make a fun game. Donkey Konga is about getting drunko and banging on bongos with your friends; I didn’t buy the game to hear TLC’s treatise on the the plight of low women’s self-esteem in our country. Donkey Konga 1 implored me to Dance in the Street, or possibly even Oye Coma Va if indeed that translates to a verb. I suspect that by the time Donkey Konga 3 comes out we’ll be bongoing to Jason Song’s dissertation on economics.

I haven’t unlocked most of the Gorilla mode songs yet, so maybe some of the wankerish selections are all-of-a-sudden going to be awesome in Tough Mode, but without the ability to bop my head to the music I’m a bit pessimistic. I’ll check back in once Erin and I have digested the game a bit further.

RAJ OUT.

Tony Hawk Underground

I don’t buy video games that often, and the ones I do buy are typically never beaten. I usually get stuck at some point, play the same stage 5 or 6 or 12 times and then give up. It happened with Resident Evil 4, it happened with Metroid Prime, and it happened with Viewtiful Joe. Also with Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Also Tiger Woods 2004. Let’s just say it happens a lot. In fact, the only game I HAVE beaten since I was in college is The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. That was a sweet ass game. I mostly like playing games that I can play with someone else (like Doney Konga or Mario Kart Double Dash.) Anyways, the one game that I never minded not beating was Tony Hawk 4. It was a great game to play just to play it. I never wanted to see the ending — I don’t know if the damn thing had an ending. It was just a joy to go out and try to bust a 300,000 point combo or something. It was more like an arcade game, where only points not mattered.

So I was walking around Best Buy with a spare gift card and had already picked up Donkey Konga. I happened to see that Nintendo had released Tony Hawk Underground as a Greatest Hits game so it was only $19.99. That was the perfect price for me.

The problem became clear immediately upon starting the game. This game is hugely storyline intensive. The Story Mode that you use to unlock new levels and increase the stats on your character is pretty good from a plot point of view, but it is a story mode. I liked Tony Hawk 4 because if I got stuck on one of the goals there were 15 others to choose from on that level. In THUG there are only 3 to 4 goals available at a time. Several times I had beaten two goals and got stuck when the other two were pretty tough. Then I got frustrated because I couldn’t take a break from the tough shit and coast along with some other, easier goals.

In Tony Hawk 4, the controls took some getting used to, and to bust some of the harder moves involved a lot of button mashing. Somehow, THUG makes it even more complicated by adding in a ton more possible moves (including jumping of your board and just running.) While it makes for more interesting combos, it also makes the game quite tough for a casual gamer. Those tardchildren that sit around and play it every day so they can make 100,000,000 point combos probably think it’s the bee’s knees, though. I hate kids like that.

The game is pretty cool, but I just couldn’t get into it enough. I think it’s a sign of my age when all I want those damn video game companies to do is make a game that’s playable. I’m starting to hate games that require more than four buttons to play. Yeah, Microsoft, you could make a game where, if you hit A+B+Z+white button the guy on screen masturbates into his own cupped palm (and then licks it if you waggle the directional stick while pressing the right trigger,) but why in name of god would you?

Donkey Konga

My family’s love affair with Donkey Konga got off to an inauspicious start when I got home from Best Buy to find that the instruction book was printed entirely in Spanish. There simply wasn’t an english translation to be found in the packaging. At first I was concerned, but we got the hang of it after an hour or so, and that’s when the magic began.

In a movie review first, here are some actual screenshots of Erin playing Donkey Konga. The level she is playing is called ‘Oye Como Va’.

Donkey Konga comes with the game and the set of bongos you see in the picture. For those who remember Parappa the Rappa for PsOne, Konga is very similar. There are only four actions in the whole game:

1. Hit the left bongo.
2. Hit the right bongo.
3. Hit both bongos together.
4. Clap your hands.

The bongo set a has a little mocrophone in between the drums where it hears the claps. Really a cool little setup.

Nintendo also did an impressive job in paying licensing fees for various head-boppingly-good songs. The weird thing is that upon first glance you’ll see a lot of songs with names you’ve never heard of. Then you’ll actually play the level and you’ll say, “whoa, it’s THIS song.” That happened four or five times when we initially played. There’s also a good mix between Nintendo game soundtracks (Mario Bros. theme, Zelda theme, Pokemon theme), pop music (All The Small Things ‘…she left me wormballs by the stairs, the wormballs let me know she cares…’), classic songs (Oye Como Va, Louie Louie, Shining Star, Wild Thing), and, for some reason, kid’s songs (campfire medley, lullabys). Just a great collection of music to bongo to.

You can actually plug in up to four sets of bongos and have a bunch of people jam. I think I’m going to just buy a second set so me and Erin can Bongo Battle.

Speaking of which, Erin has taken to this game like none since Zuma and Doctor Mario. She was playing for about 3 hours straight yesterday morning, trying to get Gold on all of the intermediate difficulty levels. Each song has three difficulty levels (Monkey, Chimp, and Gorilla). The difference is in the number of total drum hits and claps. Monkey has very few, while Gorilla is like a waking nightmare of left,right,right,left,both,clap,clap,clap,etc.

This game gets the highest reccomendation from me. It is the quintessential Fun Nintendo game. They know how to make shit you want to play with your friends, kids, or wife.

Mario Kart Double Dash

Look, I’m not going to tell you some long, drawn-out story about why this game

is awesome. I’m jut going to state right here that this game is awesome. Also,

this game cheats like hell. But it cheats in such a way that somehow makes it AWESOME.
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Neverwinter Nights

OK, I’ll admit it: when I was a kid I played hella Dungeons & Dragons. I loved that shit. I’d be like, “I’m gonna
wale on that orc with my sword until I see his brain start squirting out.” It was great to just have this little
piece of paper with all these stats on it and the more I beat the shit out of people the more the numbers went up. My equation
for waling on something in D&D? “If I turned my back on this thing, would it wale on me?” If yes, then start waling.
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Def Jam Vendetta

Me and Judd had been waiting for this game to drop for a while now. I first heard about the game when
I saw a preview in Vibe, which focused on how brilliant Def Jam Records was to bring rap and wrestling
together. What really got me interested is that AKI was the company doing the wrestling engine. AKI
is the company that did WWF No Mercy for the Nintendo 64, which is one of the best wrestling games ever.
Whatever. All I have to say is that whoever thought of this idea is a fucking genius.
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