A leap forward... twice!

This last Friday, the 27th, was the release date for the new Nintendo game Super Mario:Odyssey. I was already excited about because it looked like that it had taken some of the best parts of several of the previous 3D Mario games, and then added an ability to hijack the other enemies with a smart control scheme to it to push it forward into the Switch.

Cappy is a a resident of the Cap Kingdom, a strange hat-themed place. At the beginning of the game, Mario is knocked off of Bowser's ship into the Cap Kingdom, and loses his hat at the same time. Luckily, Cappy happened to be nearby and found what was left of Mario's hat and returned it to him, with Cappy inhabiting the hat to give it some abilities that Mario wouldn't normally have. Since Cappy's Cap Kingdom was being attacked by Bowser, it seemed that Cappy and Mario would do well to team up to defeat the common enemy.




 Here's the commercial that they've been playing. Surprisingly, this song is part of an amazing set piece in the middle of the game that I will try not to spoil - but here's a hint: The woman singing is a representation of a character from the Mario universe, and no she's not Princess Peach. My older son, knowing what was coming up, had the good sense to make me quit what I was doing so I could see it for myself. If you're prone to fits of nostalgia about Mario, this will trigger most of them.

If you really liked 64, Sunshine, Galaxy, or 3D world, you're going to love this game. Also, dig around and see if you have some amiibo around, you might need them.

(As of this writing, our play tester has over 200 moons out of 999 and we've seen the regular ending.)


The second leap forward this weekend happened at ChicaGhosts 2017 on Saturday.

After Patrick Ponce took the 3x3x3 single record from Feliks Zemdegs back in September, I figured that it would be a while before we saw a new record, since unlike the improvement from Matts Valk 4.74 since to Feliks' 4.73, Patrick's time was a 4.69. However, on Saturday, we got this.





SeungBeom Cho took the new single record with a 4.59 - even more of an improvement than the last new record, and even sooner. This was somewhat unexpected as his previous fastest solve in competition was a 6.54.

 Reconstruction (posted both on this video and on r/cubers by Stewy_ )
 Scramble: U2 L' D2 L D2 R F2 D2 R' D2 U2 B U L U L' R D L2 F2 U2 R'

 x2 // inspection
D' R' L2' U' F U' F' (D' U') U' R' // xxcross
y' R' U' R // 3rd pair
y' R U' R' U' R U R' // 4th pair
U' R' U' F' U F R // OLL(CP)
U' // AUF

So from looking at this solve, the major things that happened here is that for taking an extra couple of moves in planning out the first four pieces, he picked up two additional corner-edge pairs. Also, the OLL algorithm happened to also correctly permute the pieces. Good planning at the beginning, a lucky skip at the end.

Initial Pokkénalysis

So yesterday, Pokkén Tournament was released for the WiiU. We picked up our copy around dinnertime. My older son and I played a couple of matches before either of us knew what we were doing, and then my older son went through a bunch of the single player material to get an understanding of the battle system. Here's the character roster, with a few comments here and there where applicable.

Blaziken - Blaziken is a tall, powerful fire/fighting type Pokemon. He reminds me of a big furry rooster. He is able to break through an opponent's defenses with normal moves, but he has a few moves that cause recoil damage (damage to your own character) if they miss.

Braixen - Braixen is a fire type who looks like a fox carrying around a flaming cotton swab. Braixen has a lot of projectiles, but not as many as the next character.

Chandelure - Chandelure is a ghost/fire type that looks like a chandelier, and a lot of people's early choice in this game because of its ridiculous ability to churn out projectile after projectile. (My older son says he's "spammy".) Tekken games didn't involve projectiles very often, and some of the ones that did were very slow startup. It should prove confusing at first for most opponents in Pokkén to deal with all of these projectiles until more of the metagame is developed.

Charizard - A lot of people probably know Charizard because of his inclusion in Smash Bros. While he looks like a big orange dragon, so far his strength in Pokken has more to do with shutting down his opponent's attacks than being directly aggressive.

Garchomp - Garchomp is literally a land shark.

Gardevoir - We haven't played as this fairy/psychic character yet, but we can say that the computer is not that good at living up to the name. It wasn't guarding nearly enough of our attacks in the single player mode.

Gengar - Gengar has some creepy attacks. What do you expect? He's a ghost type.

Lucario - Another fan favorite from the Smash games series, Lucario seems well-balanced, but I only used him once.

Machamp - Machamp is a large four-armed fighting type. He only has a few ranged attacks, but is able to power through his opponent's ranged attacks easily to get in close where he can do more damage.

Mewtwo - Mewtwo needs unlocking first.

Pikachu - Pikachu is another popular choice in this game, both because of pure popularity and because he seems to genuinely be a solid character with a balanced moveset.

Pikachu Libre - At first I though this was a pretty silly choice, but my Pokémon knowledge is not quite as deep as my older son's. There are hundreds of Pokémon, and while Pikachu is rather popular, I wasn't sure why they had to build a second character variation, when it seemed like they could just have additional costumes for the characters to pick from. I mean, wasn't there Pikachu cosplay in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire? Then, when you go and look it up, it turns out that Cosplay Pikachu is a different subspecies, and is only female.  The tip of the tail is black and heart-shaped, unlike a male Pikachu's pointy yellow-only tail, and a female Pikachu's yellow heart-shaped tail. My older son also reminded me that if they specifically wanted a luchador, in keeping with Tekken's inclusion of King, they could have picked the somewhat less popular Hawlucha. Pikachu Libre has a very strong (cheap?) "Double Team" move that makes it temporarily unhittable.

Sceptile - Sceptile is a grass type that looks like a tall lizard with a plant for a tail. We haven't quite figured out exactly what he's good at.

Shadow Mewtwo - Shadow Mewtwo is the character that you can unlock early with the amiibo card, but is also unlockable normally if you complete all of the Ferrum League. He's the boss of the game.

Suicune -Suicune, a dog-like creature with two tails, seems to have a lot of ranged moves which may prove difficult to get past.

Weavile - A dark/ice character, Weavile is fast and grumpy looking. Don't get clawed!

We haven't played everybody yet, but a few things seem pretty clear. The Tekken system of the buttons corresponding to limbs does not apply at all here. The only thing that seems to be the same as Tekken is the round fixed size arena and the sidestep and throw commands.

We were worried that two-player was going to be somewhat choppy, because of the system having to render two instances of the game but we didn't really feel it.

There are still a lot of other Pokémon in the game as support characters, but we don't have all of them unlocked yet, so maybe we will have to save that for another time. I'm sure that we will discover even more about the game after playing it for a while.

Also - there's a Splatoon Splatfest today, so if you're not busy playing Pokkén, get out there and ink some stuff! (Don't let my older son catch you standing around at the spawn AFK, either!)

Splatoon Amiibos!

I don't know if it had anything to do with Splatoon for Nintendo's WiiU winning a Golden Joystick award, but finally after months of being impossible to get and never visible on store shelves, Splatoon amiibos are available!

This three-pack is the only way to get the Squid amiibo. The squid amiibo gets you a set of armor that you gradually unlock parts for as you complete specific challenges. It also gets you the Hero Shot replica weapon for your character, and the Squid Beatz mini-game. In case the title isn't self-explanatory, it's a rhythm-based game. You have to hit either the D-pad or buttons in time with the symbols that appear to one of the music tracks from the game.

Here's the girl amiibo.

The girl amiibo gets you the school uniform, again unlocked in parts by completing exclusive challenges, the Hero Charger Replica weapon, and the minigame Squidball.

Last but not least, the boy amiibo unlocks a set of challenges that allow you to earn a super-cool Samurai outfit, the Hero Roller Replica weapon, and the minigame Squid Racer.

The purpose of the mini-games is to give the player something to do while they're waiting for a match to fill up with players. The new challenges that are unlocked are segments of new single player content done with different weapons and battle conditions than the default single player mode. While I'm still not totally cool with the idea of having to collect plastic toys to unlock in-game content, I at least appreciate that Nintendo made an effort to make these amiibo more available after they had a good idea of how many people are actually playing the game. My guess is that the original wave of these figures went directly to collectors and eBay scalpers and not to people playing the game. Based on my older son's opponents, I would say that more people are actually able to get the extra outfits now.

Games without fixed price points.

The band I play in on weekends has just started playing a version of Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, deeply influenced by the version that the Brand New Heavies does. After one of our shows, the guitarist and I started talking about versions of Peter Gabriel songs that we like – like Pink and John Legend’s version of “Don’t Give Up” versus the album version that has Kate Bush singing with Peter Gabriel.  I explained about how I had started listening to Kate Bush just before I really got into Peter Gabriel, so the Kate Bush vocals really got to me at that time – even on things like “Games without Frontiers” where she’s just relegated to a small amount of backup vocals.

“Games without Frontiers” got me thinking again about the current state of the mainstream gaming market, where the biggest games are starting to throw their weight around and see who can create the biggest collection of things. The biggest amount of floor space in the big box stores that isn’t the locked game case. It is the shelves for Nintendo's amiibo, Avalanche's Disney Infinity (now on version 3 that includes Star Wars!), Activision's Skylanders (now including vehicles), and now Traveler's Tales' LEGO Dimensions. It’s no longer enough that a game is an expensive standalone proposition that sells for $60 apiece, because with all of the man-hours of programming that goes into that it can seem a very risky proposition for company shareholders. Thanks to the very fractured nature of the market, having simply the appeal of a game is not nearly enough. After the rise and fall of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series that showed us that a complicated bit of licensing and some not-so-complicated plastic toys could be used to sell more product to customers, we now have games engineered to sell a crap-ton of high margin plastic toys both to collectors and gamers.

Guitar Hero did well from its inception in 2005 until around 2010. As a result of some really lousy looking fourth-quarter projections, Activision decided to put any future development on hold indefinitely which left Warriors of Rock and DJ Hero 2 as the last releases in 2010.  (Except that they couldn't leave well enough alone and "Guitar Hero Live" will be coming out the 20th of this month and longtime competitor Rock Band just released version 4 on the 6th. )

The first Skylanders was in 2011, followed by new games every year, because that's how Activision rolls. Fans had started complaining about how Trap Team wasn't as good as Swap Force, and before that they complained that Swap Force wasn't quite as good as Giants. Before that, the original Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure had been winning awards for being so innovative. The most recent one, SuperChargers, adds vehicles but somehow loses some of the fun out of the game. Of course, some of that is probably fan fatigue - if you put out a new game in the series every year, you will get a lot of scrutiny between versions and people will wonder if it's worth it to get the new one if they were still playing the old one.

The same sort of year-to-year scrutiny seems to be happening with the Disney Infinity games, but it really seems like Infinity is getting better and just expanding their universe. At first it was just Disney, and then they added Marvel characters in, and then they added the Star Wars universe to it. As long as the new characters are getting compelling in-game content, they don't have to change up how the game plays that much. It's an advantage over Skylanders in that they don't have to introduce characters to you from scratch - kids (and a lot of their parents) already know who Spiderman and Obi-Wan Kenobi are without playing the game. You can't say that about Eyebrawl, or Ninjini, or Hootloop.

With Nintendo's amiibos, there are a few things you need specific amiibos for. Toad wasn't super-difficult to get, but his amiibo unlocks extra content in Toad's Treasure Tracker. The Splatoon 3-pack, which I have never seen in any store, goes for $60 to $80 when it's supposed to retail for $35, and gets you some new single player training missions, minigames, and costumes. There may be other ways to get the costumes, but there's not a way that I can see to get the other content. There's also a weapon in Hyrule Warriors that you can only get with the Link amiibo - that extra $13 may seem a little excessive if you already paid $60 for the game and $20 for the season pass to get all of the DLC. Sure, the Chibi-Robo amiibo unlocks some things in the game, but it's easy enough to get the game bundled with the Chibi amiibo. (Achiibo?)

I avoided Skylanders intentionally because it seemed like a rather expensive proposition. Infinity seems a little bit better, especially with the addition of the expanded Star Wars universe, but the prospect of toy collecting to get levels still seemed  problematic for me.

But, given LEGO Dimensions' amazing combination of LEGO, Batman, Portal, Scooby-Doo, and Doctor Who, I hardly see how I will be able to avoid this.

I mean my kids won't be able to avoid this. Yeah, that's what I meant.

Leaked SFV character is now official, plus bonus robot content.

So let's start with a riddle. Who's a Street Fighter that's green, from Brazil, and is absolutely electric?
No, it's not Blanka, but nobody would blame you for thinking that. The new Street Fighter V character that was previously leaked, Laura, is now official. Here's her trailer.


Based around Brazilian Jujitsu but with the added Street Fighter touches of a very slow fireball and devastating electrified attacks, she seems to have so many options available to her in terms of what her attacks are that she will quickly dispatch any opponent caught admiring her style. What I didn't really see yet is what her defenses are, and it may be hard to figure that out this early. I don't think that she was supposed to be the next character revealed, but I presume that the fact that a few images had been leaked prompted Capcom to officially announce her and end the speculation.

In other news, we picked up the newly released Chibi Robo game ZipLash for Nintendo 3DS last night. We opted for the copy with the amiibo (which we had to reserve), since it seemed like it could be difficult to get it otherwise.

Who is Chibi Robo, you might ask? Well, the first Chibi Robo game was on Gamecube in 2005. (Holy pasta! That was ten years ago!) You got to explore a house from the perspective of a small robot, walking under furniture and climbing up cabinets. You picked up pieces of trash and cleaned spots in an effort to make the humans in the house happy, but there were also other things going on in the house. Evil spider robots called Spydorz were thwarting Chibi's efforts to revive his predecessor, the much larger Giga-robo left in the basement without one of his legs or any battery power. The man and wife of the house were at odds with each other, leaving their daughter to feel withdrawn and non-communicative. If you get all the way through the game, you restore balance and happiness to the house. Part of the mechanic of getting around involved having a limited amount of power, and finding power outlets along the way as a way to recharge. Chibi has a cord and plug attached to him, and he just plugs himself in for a few seconds to recharge his battery.

The new game, instead of being a 3-d platformer is a 2-d side scrolling platformer, with the promise of using his cord and plug as a way to traverse environments. Although there are still outlets in the levels in some places, defeated enemies drop small batteries that allow him to recharge his energy. Chibi-Robo also finds snacks along the way, which is an interesting bit of advertising in itself - all of the snacks he finds are real branded snacks. The game makes it seem that collecting all the snacks is the main objective so it will be interesting to see how many different brands end up being incorporated into the game.

So far the whip mechanic is good, and there is more than one type of level so far, but we're not that far in the game yet. The music is cute, and isn't just the same stuff we've heard in other Chibi games. A lot of the familiar menu and selection music returns along with Chibi's basic sounds so that you have some things that remind you what you're doing, but the level background music is all new.  It's nice to see that Nintendo is still dedicated to a pleasant family-friendly gaming experience.

Don't get me wrong - I still like shooting zombies as much as the next guy, but there's more to games than terror and panic. There's puzzle solving, cute robots, slow fireballs, and hot Brazilian chicks!

The more you know...

Is it normal that gamer parents have to have "the talk" with their kids as early as 8? No, I don't mean the birds and the bees. I mean spawncamping, client side cheats, how lag affects multiplayer games, and how to pronounce a word that only has the letters "p", "w", and "n" in it? (And if you're wondering, it sounds like "pone", rhymes with "cone".)

I played first person shooters on PC a long time ago. (Hey - I'm not kidding - 1993 was more than 20 years ago!) My father showed me the demo of id software's "Doom" on his Gateway, and I had played through parts of it at his house. It was so long ago that it was before people customarily used the mouse to aim with. I played through most Doom and Doom II and still hadn't played any multiplayer. I even had the scary blood red Doom cartridge for SNES. When Quake came out, we played the heck out of that demo as well before getting the actual game, and then someone in my office where I worked at the time bought the full version. Not only was the original Trent Reznor soundtrack amazingly spooky, but we realized that you could look around at will (what we now call "freelook") but it was still hard to do. At some point the realization was made that the mouse was essential, because nobody could turn around fast enough with just the keyboard. If you take enough rockets to the back, you'll switch to using a mouse. This was also the same time that we learned how to set up multiplayer. At first, we connected using IPX/SPX because our office wasn't using TCP/IP yet, and once we did start using TCP/IP I would often use Quake's robust command line to help with network troubleshooting after hours. I got a better computer at home, and a better 3D video card. (I want to say that it was a Voodoo card, but that might not have been until Quake 2.) I was still playing over dialup. It was a big deal to go somewhere on the weekend that had ISDN to play against people online. My biggest annoyance in the game was people using a character skin that was painted completely black, as many of the maps in the original quake were rather shadowy. Once I figured out that those files lived on my computer, I could fix them so that they were at least regular, but some players made me mad enough that I changed the player skin to something like this:

I had to convert this from .pcx to even be able to post it.

Spawncamping - the practice of waiting at a spot near where players spawn so you can shoot them before they can get any armor or weapons - was prevalent on certain maps, just because of the geometry of the board. The other odd tactic that arose was luring a group of other players into the water, only to discharge the lightning gun and kill everyone. Sure, you died, but if you did it right you would get more kills than it cost you.

Quake 2 came out in 1997. I was not a fan of the railgun which allowed for instant long-distance sniping, and I was disappointed that they had really nerfed the grenade launcher. I liked the single player game better since the enemies were smarter and there was a tiny bit more story to it, but I didn't really like the multiplayer maps or the weapon selection for the most part. I ended up spending more time playing 4-player local Goldeneye 64 multiplayer instead. I found it more fun to play against people who were actually in the room.

I waited for Quake 3 to come out, and I liked that a lot better even though the railgun was still there, but by then it was rather apparent that my skills had waned - or everyone else had just gotten better. While I still come back to Quake 3 once in a while since I can play it against my kids and still have fun, for the most part I have that "been there, done that" attitude about FPS games.

It took a long time for a game to even get my attention at all - I briefly toyed with Bulletstorm once the price plummeted to nothing only because I hear that it had an interesting whip mechanic. As it turns out it was a weapon that allows you to grab things from a distance, and while it did make for interesting "grab the bad guy from behind cover and shoot him" mechanics, I found myself getting headaches while playing the game.

Considering all of this history, I was really surprised that my older son wanted to pick up the new team shooter "Splatoon" - until I realized that this was a lot different from the standard issue shooter games. One, it's a third person shooter - the camera is behind you like in the Ratchet and Clank games or Resident Evil 4/5/6. Even though it's really only a multiplayer game where two teams of four battle it out, the game is about capturing territory instead of just racking up kills. Since you only spawn at your own team's base, there isn't a lot of spawncamping - and even if there was it wouldn't be very productive.



The game came out Friday May 29. There was an update that weekend that added a map (Port Mackerel), a Ranked mode, and a Zapper weapon. After that they added the Ink Brush, and then more weapons and maps have followed after that.  These were free updates, and it seemed like a good use of the internet on a game like this - it gave them a chance to get game data back from players on the weapons already being used, and they could slowly add in weapons as players got better at the game. This game also makes use of the amiibo characters, but at this point it's just the three specifically for this game - a girl player, a boy player, and a squid. They unlock specific single player challenges, which seems like a little bit mean for amiibos that aren't ever going to make it to the store and are already fetching quite a premium just on rareness.  Nintendo, can't we just play the game without buying more plastic toys?

That reminds me of two more things - today is the first Splatfest day, and I'm going to have to have the other "talk" with my kids.  No, not that - I need to explain to them about scalping on eBay.

Infinitely lost in the toy aisle...

On the way back from doing a little bit of computer tech work this morning, I thought I would peek my head in the local ToysRUs. I thought that it might not be a total madhouse, since even though it was getting closer to Christmas I still had the advantage of it being both Sunday and lunchtime.

While they had a good special on games (buy one game $19.99 or under get the second 40% off), the majority of the games available on special were games that I had already purchased. The one game that stood out as something I might play (Midnight Club Los Angeles - Complete Edition) is tainted by the fact that I only got to the end one of the three versions of Midnight Club that were on the PS2, and I don't really think that I unlocked everything even in that one. As I might have mentioned before, I already have plenty of things to play.

ToysRUs has made most of their stores work in a loop fashion, similar to the layouts of Harmon Face Value Stores and Bed Bath & Beyond. At the beginning of the loop are usually seasonal and promotional items, so while you might have found Halloween costumes there two months ago, the front area is now filled with Christmas candy and new offerings from their featured vendors including LEGO, Skylanders, and a large (15' high by about 18' wide)  Disney Infinity 2.0 display.

I had previously mentioned to my children that the reason we didn't play Skylanders is that at the time (2011) was that it was the most expensive game at retail. ("Steel Battalion" by CAPCOM used to have that distinction because of the ridiculously expensive custom controller.) The basic game was similar to the Gauntlet series, where you got a bunch of characters together and tried to fight your way through a series of levels, using the power of the skills of the different characters. The reason I discouraged my kids from this game was that to be able to play every thing that was already on the game disk, it would cost over $300 (and this was just for the first Skylanders game), and you could buy five or six other new release games that didn't do that to you for that amount of money, and maybe ten or fifteen games if you picked them up used or waited for the price drop. Why so expensive? It's expensive because they sell you in-game characters a la carte as plastic toys with computer chips that stored your data in them that range in price from $8 to $15 each, and only certain characters types can unlock and play certain missions.

Now, Disney/Marvel has jumped on this bandwagon and created Disney Infinity, now on version 2.0. Taking elements from both their own and other "sandbox" style games, they have combined it with the same RFID/toy technology used in the Skylanders games and their own gigantic stable of Disney and Marvel characters. (The first Infinity game was only Disney/Pixar characters.) While it may be cool for an eight year old boy to play as a giant spore-shooting mushroom, or a big muscular brawler that looks like an eyeball, it's going to be really hard to compete with a game where you can play as Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor, Elsa,  Anna, Merida, Sully, Mike Wazowski, Buzz Lightyear, or Malificent (and dozens more). The same rule as Skylanders applies - if you want to play as a character, you need to buy the corresponding plastic toy for $14.

Maybe this would be easier if you could see it in action. This is from Disney Infinity's own Youtube channel.



Perhaps this is a hard concept to convey, because since you can do all sorts of things in the Toybox mode of Disney Infinity, it's almost easier to say what the game isn't than what it is.

So, back to the loop thing. The way the ToysRUs is set up puts the expensive "R" Zone items (electronics, most of the video games, tablets, headphones) at the end of your loop so you can't second-guess yourself as you go around the store, and also so the employee that has to take things out of a locked case for you can then just ring up your purchases at that point. The video displays that they have in the store include a setup for Infinity 2.0 and a setup for Skylanders so that parents and kids can get an idea of what the game is about. But, if you ran into Disney Infinity at the beginning of the loop and didn't know what it was, do you supposed that you could find out what that game is about? Probably not. Even though it should sell enough copies this year to make an amount of money for Disney/Marvel that would make Scrooge McDuck a little envious, most of the ToysRUs employees aren't in the right demographic to get any firsthand exposure to these games. I saw a couple over by the big display out front that were struggling with understanding even the most basic thing about the game. They were a little exasperated that the employees didn't know that much. I was happy to help them pick out the PS4 version today along with Anna and Elsa figures, and answer a few easy questions for them. Since the questions are relevant, perhaps they are worth including.

What is Disney Infinity 2.0? It's an open-world/sandbox game where you can explore, race, shoot stuff, build buildings, and all kinds of things. Some specific missions go with some spefic characters, and that unlocks more things that you can use in the Toybox mode.

What's the difference between the Marvel Super Heroes version of Disney Infinity 2.0 and the Toy Box Version? The biggest difference is the starting characters. The Marvel Super Heroes version comes with three of the Avengers (Iron Man, Black Widow, and Thor), and the Toybox version comes with Merida from "Brave" and Stitch from "Lilo and Stitch". The game disk is the same, the Infinity base is the same, and what happens from there depends entirely on what characters you have. The reason for the two versions is just that it makes more sense to start you with a few Disney characters or a few Marvel characters, and the things available to do in the game vary based on what you start with.

What platform should I get it for? Get it for the newest platform that you still intend to be playing a year from now or are comfortable with your kids hogging all the time. The PS4 is going to run a lot smoother than the PS3 version and be able to do a lot more visual effects at once even though the basic style of the graphics will be the same.

I learned later that the PS4 version will be capable of building much larger Toybox areas, since the machine has more RAM available to do that. The same is true of the XBox One version over the 360 version. Sadly, the WiiU version is more on par with the PS3/XBox360 versions in that regard.


If you want to learn even more about the game, you should probably check out more of the videos on the Disney Infinity Youtube channel. I don't think we'll be picking up the game here since I don't want to fall in the Skylanders trap, and I will have my own problems with amiibos on the WiiU by the time Christmas rolls around.

As part of my usual schtick, since I do identify myself as SuperMonkeyCube to people when I meet them in person in a situation like this, I did do a quick(ish) Rubik's cube demo for the couple that I helped. (Three unseen mistakes, still finished in 37 seconds.)

Things to be thankful for...

So, it's Black Friday weekend, and all of us have been trying as hard as we can to get screen time. Everybody was on their DS on Thursday since we spent a lot of it in the car. My older son is working on Pokemon Alpha Sapphire on his Nintendo 3DS, and my younger son was playing more Scribblenauts and some Desktop Tower Defense on his 2DS. About the only thing that I bring to play on DS is my Korg DS cartridge, and I had fun figuring out how to make some drum noises that don't really sound like drums.

My older son and I are still trying to unlock all of the characters on Hyrule Warriors, and it seems like we've had to do a lot of repeated boards to get our characters leveled up enough to face the later challenges. I still have a long way to go on the WiiU version of Bayonetta and the new Bayonetta 2. I was in Gamestop the other day and my regular cashier asked me if I had started the new Smash Bros. game for WiiU, and my exasperated answer was that I still had a long way to go on the last two games that I got! We haven't even talked about the new LEGO Batman 3 game, since my older son and I are casually pretending that the game's not out yet so we're not inundated for requests from my younger son to pick up the game some weekend with Christmas on the way.

The first add-on pack for Mario Kart 8 came out a couple of weeks ago, and the playable Link character and the Hyrule Castle board are both nice additions to the game. I haven't played with the Tanooki Mario or Cat Peach characters yet, but I did see that some of the other courses make for some multiplayer insanity.  The Excitebike course has super-long straightaways leading to lots of shell-flinging shenanigans. Ice Ice Outpost is full of multiple paths most of which require rather precision driving or you will easily find yourself taking an ice bath.

So, even though I haven't picked up either of the newest systems, the PS4 or the XBox One, it still seems like there are plenty of games to play. There are still games coming out for the PS3, and the WiiU seems to have a steady stream of new releases coming out soon to be bolstered by the presence of the newest addition to the WiiU system, the amiibo.  Similar to their Skylanders and Disney Infinity counterparts, an amiibo is a plastic representation of one of the Nintendo characters with some electronics inside that will identify it to the WiiU. Unlike the Skylanders and Disney Infinity characters which each require their own portal, the Amiibo can talk directly to the WiiU gamepad. There is a newer model of the 3DS that has not been released yet that will also be able to read the amiibo information. For the 3DS and 2DS units that are already out, there will be an external  peripheral that will be released next year. Even more curiously, the amiibos do different things in different games. In Smash Bros., they become a specific character that you work on leveling up, in a very similar fashion to how they work in Skylanders and Disney Infinity. In Hyrule Warriors, different amiibos interact with the game in different ways. Some amiibos of the Zelda series characters give you weapons, and from the in-game description it sounds like some of the other ones give you random gifts (which I can only presume are materials to craft upgrades from). In Mario Kart 8, you can customize your Mii racer with an outfit based on the character that your amiibo is based on. I hope that they find other interesting ways to utilize these.

I am also looking forward to Street Fighter IV's upcoming Omega Mode patch, which will add a different version of each of the World Warriors to the line up, with different special moves and inputs. While the existing version of Ultra allows you to play as any previous Street Fighter IV version of any of the characters, the differences between those four versions are rather subtle and are just adjustments to the nuances of the game's balance. The Omega Mode versions are rather different, as you can see here.

So, what am I thankful for (as a gamer) this holiday season? I am thankful for the fact that there are more games out than I have time to play. That reminds me. I need to get ready for band practice.