After spending some considerable time with my nephews and their friends, I asked what they thought of the new game consoles. They hate the Wii U because of the Gamepad. “It’s like a handheld,” they say. They are aware of the hardware issues between Sony and Microsoft and prefer the PS4 for the console. For the games coming out at the moment, however, they prefer Microsoft. They are confused about which to get: PS4 or Xbone. They really don’t like the Xbone, but PS4 doesn’t really have the games they want.
And boy, do they love playing Minecraft.
They finally got their Wii working again so I played Wii Sports Resort (boy, I suck at motion control games after not playing them for a while!), Mario Kart Wii, and Super Smash Brothers Brawl.
Wii Sports Resort we did a couple of matches of sword fighting and turned it off. We spent more time connecting, reconnecting and calibrating the controllers instead of playing the game. Sometimes a Wii-mote just disconnects itself. I think it is due to the Motion Plus draining excess energy or something. Wii Sports is so much better because you didn’t have to deal with the constant calibrations.
Mario Kart Wii was fun but got boring really fast. Multiplayer, it is a blast until it is not. A small simple mistake or getting hit by an item (because there are a gazillion items out there) can make you go from 2nd place to 10th place within seconds. There are too many players on the road and too many items. The better items are those that only affect the player and don’t grief especially if they have tactical use. For example, the Golden Mushroom is very good unless you are on Rainbow Road where using the Golden Mushroom can sail you out into deep space if you aren’t careful. Contrast that to the Thunderbolt or POW block or that goddamn blue shell. After playing around 10 or so races, we put it up and had no intention ever to return to it again except maybe years from now.
Super Smash Brothers Brawl we played for a while. At first, the game seemed very great with tons of content. After the first match, we made sure to turn off the Sakurai crap like the ‘Final Smash’ and all this other ‘instant kill’ stuff. It’s not fun. The brawl stages tend to be very gimmicky instead of atmospheric. Strangely, we ended up playing more on Melee stages. After several games of this, we put Brawl away and likely won’t return to it in years. The game has a ton of pop and sizzle, but the fundamentals are shallow.
At the end, a nephew even got out the Donka Konga (that I gave him long ago) and went beating the bongos. It was probably the first time he played the game in like half a decade, haha. After a while, he got tired of the bongos of course.
There was one game we did play more than the others. It attracted all my nephews’ imagination and concentration. Do you know what it is, reader? Would you hazard a guess?
The game was the original Super Mario Brothers. The 1985 classic was challenging to them, and they liked it. “This is more fun than the NSMB games,” they said. “Wow! A game over! I don’t think I’ve seen that in the other Mario games.” “You can run out of lives in this game?”
One day, I’ll have to have a retro gaming party for them where the uncle torments his nephews by having them play 8-bit and 16-bit games. Last time I did that, they LOVED, LOVED, LOVED Contra 3. Just like we did when it came out. Why? There is no other game like it today.
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