I got to play the Wii today!!

Posted 13.11.2006 7 2052

GameStop has finally put the Wii kiosks in!! I actually called in to my favorite locale and the Nintendo Rep was there already setting up the remote. A few minutes later I frantically showed up at the store to find out that I was the only one there besides some other clueless guy!! I got to play before the employees even had a chance!! I love exclamation marks!!

The game of choice was Excite Truck, which i'm very happy about because I was looking forward to playing that to see how the steering would be. Well ladies and gentlemen, its just like the other people have said; its VERY natural and it only took a few seconds for me to discard my habit of steering with a joystick/d-pad and just let my natural reaction do the steering. Its soooo great to be able to just slightly turn without having to put forth much effort. On an analog stick you still have to focus a little more restraint just to be able to pull of a "slight" turn; with the Wii its easy!

ANYway, i'll just say that, while the graphics aren't gonna blow you away, the overall game seems to be very fun and it still looks very good. Better than the gamecube could pull off, for sure! I really had a blast racing with the computer opponents and my friend once he arrived to do some Versus racing. Very cool experience. I'll be going back again hopefully before I get a Wii this Sunday.

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Children of Mana (Updated)

Posted 13.11.2006 0 2047

Now Playing: Children of Mana & Half Life 2
Now Watching: Lost & Bleach

Ok, just a quick update on my impressions...

I'm lvl 29 now and seem to have seen most of the "types" of dungeons. Of course, depending on your active quest, the dungeon maps will be different once you're in one. I've just kinda been casually playing along and haven't done too bad so far. You get 3 different rewards for completing a dungeon, Bronze, Silver and Gold. I had been getting Silver on all the previous quests so far and the rewards are fitting.

The rewards are a variety of choices like Armor, rings, weapons, gems, status items and a random choice. I usually ended up choosing either the armor or a weapon. I did, however get my first Gold ranking on the most recent quest I did and the choices take a different turn! The types are all the same but as you could imagine they get way better. I chose a Muramasa sword (equippable at lvl 28) as my reward hoping that it was pretty neat, and it was! I have a lvl 31 sword that I was ready to equip when I got that high but now I can sell it; even though the Muramasa is equippable at lvl 28, the stats are even better than the lvl 31 sword I have!!!

So learning from that, it pays to get those Gold Rewards! Other than the rewards system the game can get a little repetative, but if you really do some experimenting on the Gem-fusing then things can change. I like the fusing system because it lets you play around with different strategies of battle. For instance, one quest I was having a hard time with had TONS of poisonous plants around, and if you hit them you'd regret it. It was harder to avoid them than you might think too! Well I ended up just spending some time messing around with some Gem combinations to see if I could fuse a helpful gem. I did!! I made a gem that renders me immune to poison! Because of that gem I ended up breezing through the quest and getting gold-rank!

Ok, I got a little more winded than I'd hoped but oh well. I may write more impressions down later. Hopefully I can include a multiplayer experience! (if any of my friends ever buy the game!)

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Children of Mana!!

Posted 03.11.2006 5 2034

Now Playing: Children of Mana
Now Listening to: Soundtracks/Film Scores, Techno
Now Watching: Lost

Ok this is my first blog.

I got Children of Mana from EBgames on Wednsday when it was first released. I was lucky to get one of the last ones so i'm happy!

I wanted to briefly share some of my experience with it and some thoughts. I was impressed right away when I got to select my character/class. There are only 4 to choose from and from what I can tell, your choice can really effect how you'll play. I chose Ferrik's type which is mainly balanced between fighting and magic-use. I'm glad I chose him because I wanted to get some good use out of magic while still being tough enough to fight mano e mano.

I was impressed again immediately after when the "intro" was done and you see your starting village. The graphics presentation is very well done; not Gameboy-esqe like I thought it was gonna be.

I wont give any story info out so i'm not going to get into detail. I just really enjoyed the first dungeon-crawl. It was a little short but I think it was intended to be, so you could just get the feel for it. You dont start out with any weapon choices, just the sword, but it is still very fun just with the one weapon. They definately focused on the fighting more than the magic-use though.

Its not terrible but I honestly was a little dissappointed when I realized that you dont have magic spells at your disposal but rather you choose a Spirit (1 of 8) to come along with you. Each of the 8 spirits, wich you can change before going out to a dungeon, has 2 magic skills. One is always offensive and the 2nd is support-like, weather its offensive support or healing, or even going invisible

I really look forward to play the multiplayer side too! They seamlessly incorporated multiplayer into the game too. As long as you're in the village you can just activate MP-mode and either join up with a friend or host friends! Its not even different from the regular game except you cannot save just before a boss like you can in SP-mode. I'm amazed at the opportunities that MP will present. It just seems so fun!

Anyway, thats all I'll write for now. I'm not even very far into the game yet; i'm only lvl 15 right now and I don't know how high you can get.

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