Lynda Monica

This is the last month where the Wii U will allow funds to be added to the eShop, so I picked up a fifty dollar eShop card and started to browse one last time. I figured I should look through the Smash for Wii U DLC and see if there was anything I wanted. Amongst all the stupid guest fighters and K-tier Nintendo characters, there was a single character that actually deserved to be in a Nintendo all-star crossover. The DLC stages all sucked, but the Mii costumes really caught my attention. In the end I only bought three, and I made a special effort to take cool snapshots to show them off! Sword Fighter Brittany in the Takamura outfit. (The Mysterious Murasame Castle) Brawler Cassandra in the Jacky Bryant outfit. (Virtua Fighter) Gunner Helena in the Rockman.EXE outfit. (Mega Man Battle Network) While I don't own Hyrule Warriors yet, I took the chance to buy the DLC that adds Marin from Link's Awakening as a playable character. She's a beautiful and mysterious maiden on the surface, but there's a mischievous side to her that's only showcased in the many Easter eggs hidden in Link's Awakening. She's a wonderfully oddball character with more going on than you'd first think, and I hope Team Ninja was smart enough to incorporate her wild side. Nintendo usually used the Wii U eShop as a dumping ground for software they had no confidence in, but Pushmo World was a rare exception where the game was designed to be affordable and worthwhile. If you're looking through the Wii U eShop this month, make sure to pick this one up. Finally we end on a weird one, with the baseball club pass for Wii Sports Club. In order to play any of the sports in the digital version, you needed to buy a membership pass. Your options were to pay two dollars for a pass that gave you access to everything for twenty-four hours, or you could pay FIFTEEN dollars for a pass that gave you permanent access... to ONE of the sports of your choice. Nintendo released a physical version a year later without any micro-transactions, but nobody cared due to the digital version's reputation. What makes the digital version an interesting prospect these days is that the physical version is really expensive. The digital version offers a twenty-four hour free trial, so I was able to try out each sport and decide which one I should buy. Baseball was the only sport that was actually improved in the remake, as it makes really clever use of the GamePad and Wii Motion Plus. Catching fly balls with the GamePad works flawlessly, is completely intuitive, and is fun and satisfying to do. It simulates the action so well that it gives a tiny glimpse into what the GamePad may have been capable of with a bit more creativity. The other sports didn't fare so well with their new control schemes, so I got the best part of Wii Sports Club for fifteen dollars; and saved ninety dollars by not buying the physical version! The Wii U eShop is honestly an unremarkable platform with little to offer, but I did manage to get some great stuff. I'm really happy with everything I got, and really happy about everything I left behind.

Always hated this game. Gave it a 2. The concept gives this game a free pass more often than it deserves, but it's always been awful.

I played all four as they came out on GBA, and they are pretty rough at points. The first and fourth ones aren't too hot, but I really liked the third one. Much like the old Sonic games, they're pretty rough first playthroughs, but become awesome once you sink a lot of time into getting good at them.

I don't know if it's because I'm shopping for Wii U strategy guides, but I've been pushing my luck with offers and getting them accepted right away. Wii U guides may not be the best point of reference though, since nobody is shopping for them. There's no interest in them due to the system in question, and there's no interest from resellers as they're already too uncommon and expensive to be worth buying up. People seem to be eager to just get rid of them.

I've lined up a copy of Paper Mario Color Splash that I'll be picking up during the week! This month I'm aiming for the Wii U Mario spin-offs. Something I'm bidding on ends in the afternoon today! The last few Wii U guides I want to buy are going to take some time to track down. Designing male Miis has been a lot more difficult than female Miis due to a lack of hairstyles. That's it for now.

That's actually Cynder. She's from the second set of Spyro games called "The Legend of Spyro". I remember when Skylanders were still new, Cynder was a difficult one to get since both Spyro fans AND Skylanders fans wanted her. These days she's just as common as everything else from the first game. Her figure from the second game is a little better, but for Skylanders fans the first figure is just as iconic as any of the others.

Tanooki gave me an eyeroll. I'm sorry. For what it's worth, I actually owned this game at one point during the Wii and DS era, and quite enjoyed it. I still gave the game a 4, as it's true there are way better alternatives. However if you understand the mechanics, it has a simplistic old school charm about it. I quite enjoy when RPGs aren't bloated with an overbearing story, and focus on gameplay. Games like the first two Pokemon games, the first two Dragon Warrior games, and of course Quest 64 where the desire to improve your character takes priority over a hammy story are games I wish there were a lot more of. I know this delves into historical significance territory, but Quest 64 also gets some innovation points for not doing the same style of combat as 2D RPGs. I respect that it attempted to make a combat style using the possibilities a 3D space could offer, and the fact that it works and is entertaining is worth noting too. I don't think it's a fantastic game, but I agree with Tanooki that people hate on it way too much. While it's easy to dismiss, I think it's an N64 game you should play through at least once if you have any interest in the system.

I'll steal a joke from the Games Done Quick playthrough and say it's one of the top 5 RPGs on the N64.

Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures 2 is similar to the first one, but refined and improved in every way. While I don't recommend the first one at all, I can recommend the sequel to Wii U owners who want more games to play. If you're the type of person who can contextualize something high quality made on a low budget, I think you'll be impressed by Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures 2. While it doesn't live up to the standards of the best games out there, the circumstances of its development make it a triumph. Asking a small developer to make a sequel to a tie-in game in under a year with next to no money is a recipe for disaster, but the finished product somehow manages to stand proud as a very decent Pac-Man game. Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams was a sequel to the 2011 reboot of the series, and was made to separate the series entirely from its past as a Super Mario Bros. clone. I've been itching to play this game for a long time now, but never wanted to pay more for a physical copy than what it costs on the eShop. I ended up paying $25.00, which was pretty close. I recently said some unkind things about Guitar Hero on the site, but I found the Guitar Hero Live set at a garage sale for twenty dollars. It was pretty hard to pass up, so cut me some slack if this feels hypocritical. I bought the Resident Evil guide at the same garage sale for fifteen dollars, and it turns out it was kind of a steal. (It's pretty expensive online) The Nintendo Land guide I ordered a while ago, and it finally showed up yesterday. The three amiibo cards round out all eighteen abilities in Desert Island Escape, meaning that I'm FINALLY finished shopping for Animal Crossing amiibo Festival!

Similar to another thread I made, but this may apply to more people. There's so often an exception when it comes to personal preference, and video games genres can be very good at causing a hard stance to waver, if only once or twice. Earlier today I was thinking about the Wii, reminiscing about a game so awesome that it made me set aside my dislike of rhythm games. I didn't grow up listening to band music, and have always had a strong aversion to it. When I hear people endlessly talk about their favourite bands as if they're legendary heroes, it immediately makes me not want to listen to their music. I prefer instrumental music, and get super turned off by band members acting like they're some sort of legend for writing a damn song. Now I'm not trying to annoy people by saying all this, but what I AM saying is that this aversion to band music has led me to really dislike rhythm games. For every rhythm game that comes out, I have to put up with the same hundred or so songs that get replayed all the time no matter where you go, and the last thing I want to do is play along to them with a toy guitar as if I myself am some no talent wannabe rock star. Yet out of nowhere comes DJ Hero, a bizarre rhythm game featuring a genre of music I've never heard before, with original mash ups of SONGS I've never heard before, all while using an extremely weird turntable controller. I took a gamble on it as it was pretty expensive when it first came out, and it turned out to be one of the greatest games I played on the Wii, and one of the absolute best first playthroughs of any game I've played. It was such a breath of fresh air to hear a really cool genre of music not tainted by the image of old men drooling on their rock albums, and the entire experience was so much fun that no rhythm game has ever come close to matching the party that was DJ Hero. I could post the entire soundtrack here since I love almost every mix in the game, but I'll be a good girl and only post my favourite one. DJ Hero 2 unfortunately played it a lot more safe, and I'm not a big fan of it as a result. The first DJ Hero will live on in my memories though as one of the best games of all time. How about you? What games shattered your genre boundaries? It doesn't have to be limited to genres where there's only one exception, so even if there's three or four games you like out of dozens you've tried, it still counts!

This is going to sound crazy, but we didn't own any 3D platformers for the N64 at all! The only platformer we had was Kirby 64, and I constantly rented Yoshi's Story. We didn't get the N64 until Ocarina of Time came out, so we missed a lot of the early years. I've never revisited the system either, so I haven't played much more than what we owned to this day. (Though I did make a point to play Mario 64 much later on) I guess looking back, we had a pretty strange selection of N64 games. Goldeneye (FPS) Perfect Dark (FPS) Pokemon Snap (Photography) Pokemon Stadium (RPG Battle Simulator) Pokemon Stadium 2 (RPG Battle Simulator) Pokemon Puzzle League (Puzzle) Hey You! Pikachu (Virtual Pet/Life Sim) Star Wars Rogue Squadron (Flight Combat) Zelda Ocarina of Time (Adventure) Zelda Majora's Mask (Adventure) Super Smash Bros. (Fighting) Mario Tennis (Sports) Paper Mario (RPG) Dr. Mario 64 (Puzzle) Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (2.5D Platformer)

Even though there wasn't much interest for this thread, I'm still going to keep it updated! I finished all the girls! With the exception of Vanessa, I tried to make some older women for the last set of girls I had to make. I imagine the first bunch of men will happen quickly, so I won't update again until I've made at least ten dudes. Sorry if there's not much interest for this. I just enjoy designing characters.

Ace Attorney is weird for me, because while I love everything about the first game, I only enjoy the filler cases of the others that came out in English. I like the third case of Apollo Justice a LOT, I like the one with the big muscular fake Phoenix Wright, I like the Masque de Mask case, and pretty much every case that has nothing to do with the over arching plot. When the series actually tries to move the story forward though, I dislike all of those cases for some reason.

I actually didn't know. I just assumed they were always spicy.

I'm a huge wuss when it comes to spice, but I really like it at the same time. I'm 32 years old and just discovered buffalo wings, and they're awesome. I've been working on a plate of eight of them for hours now, as I can only take one or two bites of one before having to recover for a bit. It's been a great long term snack since I've been able to munch at it all evening and not need to make anything else. I'll be buying these again in the future.

I started going for 200% in Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze. (Wii U version) It's fun, but I also discovered how awesome Time Attack mode is. I'm falling in love with going for shiny gold times with no damage taken, even though it has no impact on your file's percentage. I think Tropical Freeze is really growing on me.

Mega Man X 1-5 are games I've been meaning to play for a very long time. I would probably just get one of the compilations of them though, as I think there's a digital one for the Switch.

1989 for me. A bunch of popular movies came out that year, but my favourite is easily Al Yankovic's "UHF". It's the ultimate feel good movie where all the good guys get everything they deserve, and all the bad guys get what's coming to them. It's amazing to me Al never made another movie, but at the same time he doesn't really need to.

Wow, that's awesome! I can't see all of Brittany's gorgeous perfection though. I've never been into collecting promotional stuff like standees and demo kiosks, mainly because it takes up so much room. I always love seeing these kinds of things being rescued from being thrown out.

I don't know if this will apply to a lot of people, but I thought I'd go for it. What is a video game series you've experienced a lot of, but you still only enjoy one game in the series? The big one that springs to mind for me is F-Zero. The only one that I really liked and played until I 100% completed it was F-Zero Maximum Velocity. That game was so unbelievably good, but none of the other F-Zero games impressed me. There are MANY series where I feel the first game was the only good one, such as Golden Sun, StarTropics, Touch Detective, Pikmin, Ecco the Dolphin, Professor Layton, and Ace Attorney. I played most of the sequels to these series, and didn't like them. (Though Golden Sun 2 was the least bad) How about you? What's that one stand out game in a series you otherwise wouldn't touch?

I think a lot of the difficult games I learned to love later in life I would have hated as a kid. All throughout the N64's life cycle though, my brothers and I didn't even know about Star Fox 64. We loved the SNES game a lot, so we'd probably have fallen in love with Star Fox 64 had we known about it. We found out about it much later in the 2000s.

I'd say it's my second least favourite, only beating out Mega Man 3. The first one is my favourite, then 2, 4, 6, 5, and 3. I know nobody asked, but for Mega Man 5 GB I'd rank it right in the middle. My favourite is Wily's Revenge, then 3, 5, 4 and 2. I know absolutely nobody on this forum would ask this, but if we're talking Battle Network, the fifth one is the king. Never played the Mega Man X series outside of Mega Man Xtreme, so no comment there.

Yeah, I know it's weird. XD I gave it an 8 because I thought the description fit a little better. It IS one of my all time favourite games, but I'd be in denial to say it has no flaws. I gave it an 8 because "I like to recommend it" seems like the most accurate way I'd talk about it to someone in person. I would hesitate to gush about it to someone offline, as there's a lot that could be argued against it. Favourite and highest rated don't really go hand in hand for me. Some of my favourite games aren't really the best.

There are no touch controls at all. Gyro aiming is what was unique about Zero. A game not being immediately intuitive does not make it bad design by the way. It makes it have a learning curve, but it works flawlessly once you're good at it. I understand some players not wanting to put in the time to learn it, but that doesn't instantly make the game worse. The issue is that Star Fox 64 is a game that's extremely simple to understand, and Star Fox Zero isn't. For a lot of players who just try it out for a few stages and get frustrated, it's easy to understand why they'd prefer Star Fox 64. For those who take the time to learn how to play Star Fox Zero though, it's an unquestionably superior game. Any time a game gets blasted for poor controls, you have to take a step back and think about why there are so many players who can play it flawlessly, and maybe think to yourself that it's not actually the game's fault.

Nice proto, man! Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh