u r mr. gay PART 2

So, for the first Wii game purchase since June, I picked up Super Mario Galaxy.

What's that? No games I wanted to play? Not quite. There are plenty of games I wanted to play, I just didn't want to pay $50 a pop for them. I would have liked to FINALLY sit down with Twilight Princess and make it happen, see if it can make up for Ocarina without having so much open expanse of nothingness like Windwaker. Metroid Prime 3 really appealed to me for a conventional game taken to the controls (instead of a Gamecube conversion). Mario Party, Super Paper Mario, Cooking Mama, My Sims, NiGHTS, My Little Pony (ha ha, little joke there). I'm just not going to pony up $50 each for what , frankly, I'd be pressed to spend $40 for. PARTICULARLY the older stuff like Zelda (still $50) and Super Paper Mario (still half a Benjamin).

If you ask me, some DS games are pretty pricey, too. I know I don't have to pinch pennies but maybe I've seen too many games find themselves in the bargain bin at a 90% price cut. I mean, I can't even CONSIDER buying PC games most of the time. There are very very very few exceptions. And, yeah, there's always used but I try not to buy used if I can avoid it. Used games aren't exactly great for the industry and I like my games virgin, not ones with potential flaws and problems. I remember picking up a used copy of Klonoa and the 2nd to last level of the game has music that's got pops and cracks from a scratched disk that was filled in to not look scratched but was still damaged. By the time I got to the end I couldn't return it due to story policy, but even if I sweet talked the guy there I'd only be able to get store credit since they didn't have a billion copies of it around.

But I digress.

Always.

Anyway, SMG. I didn't like how it required me to upgrade the Wii. Once a system is compromised, in the past, there might have been protections in the game to detect the hacked hardware and refuse to run, but with live flashing, now it has the ability to brick itself. Live-flash systems are here to stay so I guess we'd better get used to it. Hence my "don't hack until you can get two if you run into problems" policy. I didn't do anything wrong to my system, but those forced upgrades just make me feel uncomfortable, like I need to pass inspection or something. And it would get carried on the flagship game of the past holiday season.

Of course, maybe the game uses some undocumented features that would crash without a shim in place on the system's OS? Still too cynical? Ok, maybe it uses some documented features in a strange way that could cause glitches if not patched. Ok, a little better.

But this is about the game, now, isn't it? Not the techno-politics behind it.

First, the graphics. Why do I start here? Well, because the graphics... ehhhh, I don't think they're that great. Starlit backgrounds and distant astronomical phenomena looked pretty bad, IMHO. Shading and coloring looks technically poor. In the opening sequence I saw filter aliasing almost as bad as the macro-blocking during Sunshine's opening video making me almost wish for video. The resolution isn't there (only 480p) so the next thing would be anti-aliasing and there just isn't any going on. It's not the first Wii game I saw that made me wish it was more of a graphical powerhouse, but, the high contrast really shows up poorly. Meanwhile, Sunshine didn't have a whole lot of high-contrast spots to show off the graphical limitations of the system.

Now, technical limitations aside, I love the art direction. Colors and effects are vibrant and fluid. I guess if you want to tie it in to the aforementioned problems, the framerate is almost always smooth as butter. I think I had maybe 10 seconds of slowdown within 2.5 hours of game play, not bad. The newer more organic look is tremendous while still doing artificial stuff really well. Halos, pseudo-fur, true reflections instead of just cube mapping, all really show off the attention to the shaders for a balance of look and performance. One of the first levels on a little bump-mapped cratered microplanet with holes in the surface leading to certain doom just impressed me tremendously with the look and the framerate.

Remember when cel shading was novel and new? And the kind of air it imparted to what might have been ordinary looking 3d games? It feels like that new spirit without the overly obvious gimmick of cel shading.

The sound is pretty good. With Galaxy, the potential exists for many different types of worlds and the music selected is perfect. Always. It doesn't stick out like a sore thumb, but, it's also not totally noteworthy. I pay super attention to the old-school fanservice tunes, as they were intended to do, but the rest of the tracks so far don't hold out that far. Which is the problem with audio fanservice to begin with. It doesn't irritate me, but I don't exactly see myself lusting for the OST.

Now, the controls. Muddy. The camera angles and art direction look to disorient the player quite a bit. And I LOVE the feeling. I haven't played a game that gave me the same kind of feelings that I get at the top of a roller coaster looking down anticipating the gravitational forces of which I would soon enjoy. Mario is upside down, he's left, he's right, it's like a camera control needs to be a full 360x360 control style, like the Novint Falcon. But they don't give it to you and, frankly, you don't need it. It's kind of annoying you don't always have camera correction ability, but I never really found myself using the C button to right myself.

It does a great job of portraying the feeling that things aren't right in the universe. It's a legitimate film-making technique, too, so it's no wonder it works. So what am I complaining about if I like the disorienting awkward camera angles and it suits the game perfectly (and they turn it off when inappropriate)? The directional stick. If you need 360x360 for a camera, you need it for motion. There are at least a few jumps and movements I needed to try a few times until I got the direction I wanted. I'm not sure if it's that I'm new at the game and need to learn at it or if it just really is that motion turns out to be based on your guestimate of direction, but, either way, it's not the tight little apple of a control scheme that I learned to appreciate in Sunshine, which I found tighter than 64. When you fuck up a jump in Sunshine, you know it's YOUR FAULT. Here? Uhhh, depends. It really feels like they robbed from Paul (classic control) to pay Peter (motion control).

For the record, I didn't hate Sunshine. I thought it was a fine Mario game and among the top Gamecube games. Easy. Personally, I think it's become "cool" to shit on Sunshine just like it's "cool" to gush over any polished turd named Zelda.

And I can't help but go back to the disorienting camera stuff. You're so close to the action sometimes it's not always obvious you can just walk off the edge and stick on the surface instead of plummeting to certain death. In general, Mario games tend to start with the camera close in so you can get the "ooh ahh" factor and then scale out slowly so that by the end of the game you can just see more of what's going on around you... which helps because there is just so much more that is out to kill you. Actually, now that I think about it, lots of games follow that camera-closeness pattern. So hopefully it'll correct itself as I get farther. For the time being, I've got plenty of lives and losing one or two there doesn't seem to punish too badly at least at this stage in the game.

That's about it. I'm enjoying it and I'll give the rest when I'm done with it.

What else is going on? Not much. Not at all.

*cough*
1) had a date with a stripper (yes another one) but she stood me up
2) phonesex with a 16 year old
3) swearing off of waffles for the rest of time.
*cough*

Like I said. Not much.