Hello, and sorry.

I’m not missing, I’m just in hiding. I’ve been doing a bit of writing and a bit of work on the magazine (yes, it’s over a month late now, I apologise for that). I haven’t been doing much else lately except playing Lost Planet, Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, and watching West Wing.

Lost Planet was a very excellent game. It plays exactly how I would have wanted a 3rd person Contra or Metal Slug style game to play. Capcom really nailed this game on the head, and it can be seen with some of the complaints I have read about it. As my friend summed it up “It’s too good, which just makes everything that is normally a non-issue stand out even worse. Like invisible walls and invincibility durring recovery. These aren’t things that belong in a game that looks like it comes out next year visually.” I paraphrased of course, but that’s the jist of it. For me, that is the perfect kind of game, especially looking as good as it does.

The game does, unfortunatly, suffer from a few problems. The worst is a completly bloated and poorly written story. The game wants to make the story fairly important and doles out cutscenes quite frequently. Unfortunatly it’s not good, so that gives you too much time to pay attention to it in a game that is much more action oriented. From start to finish the game was about 14 hours with a good third of that being cut-scenes.

The game also feels a little too short, or perhaps too long. In the instance of a game for many repeat playthoughs I can see it getting trimmed down to about 6 hours skipping the cutscenes and getting better at some of the segments. That’s too long for a Contra-esque game, and a little two short for a single playthrough. There are also some balance issues, but nothing that’s unforgivable.

The online game is good too, because unlike Gears of War I don’t need to work heavily with team member therefor only being able to play when enough people I know are online. I can just open a game an mess around for a while without needing to work out team tactics with idiots. Speaking of which I had a run in with some random jerk-offs and they have put me off of playing games online for a while.

Wario Ware is something I was going to hold off on after getting Lost Planet, but decided to get anyways. It was really worth it although a few things were changed that I had come to greatly enjoy in the series.

First, medaling of all the micro games are gone. Secondly, the extream randomness of it all is gone because they tell you what type of micro game controller technique you need to use before it starts (though there is a mode where you can play without those). These are really small complaints though. Honestly the second one is a stretch. Smooth Moves ended both better and worse than I expected.

It was shorter than both GBA games it seemed, but that’s ok because the ending isn’t the “end” as much as it is just letting you know when the other stuff starts. You get two more characters after the end which just don’t use the standard rules, so it made sense where they put the credits.

I think there are only six games to unlock, which is quite disappointing because some of them I don’t want to play for very long, if at all. Two of them are very great though and will get a lot of time out of me.

Then the game both shines and mocks itself with the thrilling (Green Elephant) tower because it removes the intro instruction of how to hold the “form baton” and works so much better for it. I wasn’t on board with the complaints about showing the forms until the game showed me that the whole game could be done w/o them.

The worst offense of the game is that they removed medals. After unlocking all the towers (easier than I thought it would be) I went in to start medaling and, I can’t seem to see how to do it.

The game is a step up from Touched! for sure, but no where near the original two GBA games. This game feels like a brief touch with something that could have been good/better. Arm wrestling your Mii friends is fantastic (I beat tablesaw last night), but the pseudo-real graphics at points really stand out as the opposite of what the series is aiming at. The removal of the form positions would have made this game really good, and the inclusion of medals would have extended the game beyond a two evening affair, but as it stands the game isn’t all that great.

What I got most out of it s that I need to get Rhythm Tengoku.

The biggest thing I’ve done recently is complete The West Wing. In case you don’t know, West Wing is a TV show that has aired on NBC for the last 7 years or so. It stars Martin Sheen as the President, and he’s one of those actors I like. Honestly, I kind of despise TV shows. I can’t stand most of them. I had constantly told a long standing friend of mine to shove off when presented with the series which he tried to force me to watch.

Well one day about three years back he managed to convince me to watch the first couple episodes on DVD. I enjoyed it, so I borrowed the first season, and to my shock and amazement it was damn good. The second season was just as good too! Who knew? Anyways, from season three through season five it waned a bit in quality, but so far I hadn’t bought any of the seasons: I’d managed to borrow every single one of them. After that I didn’t know anyone who was getting the most recent seasons (six and seven) so I didn’t watch almost any for about a year.

Then I found out that my father-in-law had the last couple seasons. So a few months back my wife and I started to watch them, and they actually started to get good again. Hell, the sixth and seventh season are almost as good as the first two (but not really). My main gripe is that some jerk made the decision to ruin any suspense that the seventh season would have had by showing who the new president would be at the beginning of the very first episode of the season.

That said, I’m a little sad it’s gone, but at the same time I’m glad its wrapped up and actually ended in a high note in terms of quality. If you ever a good 90 hours to spend watching a TV show and can enjoy some political drama I highly recommend it. I don’t know what the hype surrounding the show is, but it’s probably best to ignore all that and just enjoy it. I know I did.