Henshin A Go-Go, Baby
After setting it aside since winter break, I finally beat Viewtiful Joe this morning. What an freakin' awesome game. It's got all the elements of an old-school Nintendo cartridge - huge bosses with patterns to figure out, long levels packed with tons of enemies, and controller-throwing difficulty. Slowing down or speeding up time alters the fighting, so you can do things like punch bullets back at massive helicopters. In the last boss battle, you get inside your giant robot Six Majin and fight another giant robot on top of the earth, all while an enormous spaceship in the background scorches the planet with lasers and small spaceships zoom in and out, trying to crash into you. I said "cool" out loud so many times; it reminded me of (literally) hundreds of games that Andrew and I played growing up. And it's all 2D!
In the lucrative video game console wars, Nintendo's Gamecube is trailing behind Sony's Playstation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox. When the next batch of systems comes out in 2005, Nintendo is going to have a tough time getting respectable numbers; many think the next system will be the last, and then Nintendo will make software for all systems (an idea I like). The hardware of these systems is getting to the point where differences are negligible...there are no more "Mode 7" or "Blast Processing" buzzwords like the 16-bit era. Most people won't get a chance to play Viewtiful Joe or other near-perfect Gamecube exclusives like Eternal Darkness and Metroid Prime, even with the recent GC price cuts. Games are typically hitting the shelves at $49.99 now, but if you wait six months to a year, the price always goes down to at least $29.99 (and buying "used and new" from Amazon.com is usually cheaper too). I remember that I HAD to be the first kid on the block to own a game in the Super NES days, but now that I'm unemployed in grad school, I can definitely wait.
It's February! Jeff Chin made the magazine cover an image map, so clicking on a headline should take you right to the story. I'll write on Wednesday about the Superbowl Ad Critique, and a new Shoot from my photography class will be up on Friday. Realistically, I've realized that there's no way I'll be able to get this demo done in time to play a show by the end of the month, so the new goal is to just finish the recording and packaging by my birthday instead.
Sunday, February 1 at 10:38 AM
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