Zelda WiiU Delay

So Zelda for WiiU has been delayed indefinitely. According to this video, the development is going so well that the dev team is discovering all kinds of things they want to add to the game. This fleshing out and completing the game to perfection is the current goal. As such we will not be seeing Zelda WiiU until not 2015.


I am not surprised but I am disappointed. With the maintained lack of third party support Nintendo really needs to bring their A game to any in-house games they release. And with the luke-warm reception of Mario Party 10, they've already used their one "Ok, that one wasn't good, but all their other stuff is, so I'll keep buying" for the year.

As for the Club Nintendo closure, I'm sill frustrated that they didn't roll memberships of Club Nintendo into whatever the new loyalty program is going to be, but I am excited to see what kinds of mobile games are in the works.

I play a lot of mobile mini-games when I'm in between things, and don't necessarily want the extra weight of my 3DS with me. So I can easily see situations where I would want an iPhone/Android game that gives me my Pokemon/Zelda/Mario fix while still wanting and having the full or bigger versions on the 3DS. I know some people think that phone-based mobile games will be the death of handheld consoles, but I still like the separation.

Club Nintendo Closing

Nintendo is closing Club Nintendo. This makes me suuuper sad. I mean, I've been a member since before it was even called Club Nintendo.

I registered my GameBoy Advance SP alll the way back in 2004. It became Club Nintendo in 2009.

This was a great way for them to get feedback on Nintendo-published games. Plus, we got awesome loot for being their feedback/survey monkeys.

I still wear my 8-bit Mario t-shirt, I use my Pikmin tote as my lunchbag, the Platinum award several years ago was a sweet statue of most of the main characters from Super Mario.

As a consumer, I'm failing to see the downside to this program.

Further, it's clear they weren't planning on closing it until recently as fairly new games, like Pokemon AlphaSapphire/OmegaRuby have Club Nintendo codes that the expiration date isn't until 2018.

We have until March 31 (also the last day to register both 3DS and WiiU SSB to get Mewtwo) to get all our games registered, and then all codes expire. We have until June 30th to redeem our Coins. 

Why, Nintendo, why?

RetroN5 Unboxing

So our black RetroN5 finally showed up from Amazon on Tuesday night.

For those of you who don't follow the retro gaming scene, the RetroN is manufactured by a small company called Hyperkin.


The last year has been one fiasco after another. Pre-orders went live September 12, 2013 with an expected October release date. Which got pushed to December. Which got pushed to January. Which came and went with no information. Which got pushed to March, April, May, and the console finally released on June 9, 2014. Not that they gave hardly any to Amazon preorders, which is why we only just got ours.

So anyway. Here it is, the big reveal.

The packaging was nice and sturdy. It did work out of the box, and we were able to run the updates from our iMac without any issues.

I do not like the controller. It is too thick, bulky, and response for the right arrow key is kinda shit.
The analog stick isn't a true analog, they went with microswitches, so if you pay close attention, you can feel each direction of the d-pad it sits on top of move.

I would have preferred a real d-pad. The faux-analog just isn't accurate enough.

Husband just gave up on it, and is using our original controllers, which we luckily have for every system the Retron supports.

Screenshots of games will be coming later, as we work through our collection and see if we own anything that is not compatible.

Ni No Kuni

Just finished the PS3 version of Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch.

First half the game, totally worth the $15 I payed for it, third quarter felt off, and frankly the last quarter was unbelivebly anti-climactic.

That said, gameplay and controls are tight, and the Studio Ghibli animation is a joy to watch the whole way through. Husband even watched me play!

If you like Pokemon/Zelda dungeon runners you will probably greatly enjoy this game.

Each familiar (read "monster") you collect has a secondary form and two tertiary forms you must select between. Add fantastic pacing and side-questing, and I completed it in about two weeks, when I am notorious for not finishing games (looks at Bravely Default guiltily).

Part of what made the pacing so grand was side quests have dedicated portions of your quest log, so you know when you have a new one, you know where to look for it and you get some nice gameplay perks for completing them, like a chance for better item drops or more XP awarded at the end of a battle.

The story has many high points, but the side characters are a touch underdeveloped compared to say, Tales of Vesperia. But since Husband just finished Vesperia, that might well be a biased perception.

Overall, good game, good value and definitely a must play if JRPGs are a genre you enjoy even if just on occasion.

2014 Most Anticipated Games

So Husband and I put our heads together and came up with the games we're most excited to see this year.

In no particular order they are:

•  the Evil Within--looks to be Shinji Mikami taking survival horror back to its roots. Dark, freaky, and fucked to hell.

• SuperSmash Bros. WiiU/3DS--it's SSB. Of course we're excited. The introduction of MgeaMan to the franchise is just icing on the cake.

• Destiny--as big fans of Diablo and Borderlands, we're hoping Destiny gives us a way geek out over loot piles, while bringing a fresh perspective to the genre.
  

• Bayonetta 2--Crazy-ass action from Platinum. The first one was a lot of fun, here's to hoping this one lives up to the original.
  

• The Order: 1886--Because who doesn't want a steampunk shooter?
  

• Mariokart 8--Dear god, are we at the 8th installment already?
  

• PhantasyStar Online 2--We'll be excited if and when this one actually happens. I went through the effort of downloading and playing the Japanese edition last year, so I already know it's fun, I just want to be able to read the damn menus.
  

• Dreamfall Chapters--I am sure you, dear readers, are plenty smart enough to guess my excitement levels, considering this is the (probably) final installment of the series I named this blog after. 
  

• World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor--We're WoW nerds. Don't judge. 
  

• Pokémon Alpha and Omega--Remakes of the third gen Sapphire and Ruby. Hope they update it to include all the lovely things like the mystery trade from X and Y. 
  

*sigh* and Husband says laundry needs to go get done, so while I'm off doing chores, feel free to post the games ya'll are looking forward to. Did we miss any?

BravelyDefault, First Impressions

So I picked up Bravely Default a few weeks back, and it has taken me until now to get far enough into the game to feel like I have a good grasp of all the mechanics.

Overall, it is a pretty straightforward J-RPG. If you don't like that genre, you probably won't like this game. Personally, I love me some J-RPGs.

The intro was gorgeous. Oddly, you trigger it with an AR-card that is printed on the back of the info booklet provided with the game. You can also download the initial one and some others from the Bravely Default website. I opted to watch the intro with the 3D on. This is the Right Way to start a tale. The narrator fairy (*cough*Navi clone*cough*) jumps out of the AR-card and starts begging you to rescue her friend and partner the Vestal of the Wind. The animation was extremely well done, smooth, and when you moved the 3DS around, you could see different portions of the character who was talking. It really gave the feeling of looking through a window into a different world where faries can just come hurtling at you, begging for help.

The overworld map and overall gameplay feel like an updated Golden Sun, which is enough to endear this game to me, as GS is one of my all time favorite games.


Core gameplay consists of selecting if you are going to attack or defend each turn.

Defending is called "Default." This builds up BP (Brave Points) which will allow you to attack up to 4 times in a single turn. When you select Default, you also take less damage from enemy attacks.

When you attack you have two options, "Brave" or normal attack. An attack uses one BP. You can go into "debt" by up to 4 BP. This is the opposite of storing BP with Default, although the effect of waiting 4 turns before your next move is the same.

So battles are a balance of do you think you can beat the baddie quickly or do you need to be cautious? I've found that I tend toward aggressive (going into BP debt) with my DPS characters, and conservative (storing BP with Default) with my healers.

Add to all of this an astoundingly complex class system called "Jobs" that allows any character to be any class, and you have a recipe for a game that is guaranteed to suck you in for hours at a time.

The last battle mechanic is called SP (Sleep Points) that are earned one of two ways:
You leave the game running for 8 hours in sleep mode (game launched but 3DS is closed)
Pay SquareEnix real money

Yes. You read that right. A full-price full-length 3DS game with goddamned micro-transactions. Not with PlayCoins, not in-game currency, real money.

You can only have 3 SP at any given time, so if you are like me, and leave the game you are currently playing running all the time in your GameBoy, it's easy to not pay. However, what I have not yet figured out is how to turn off the option to buy SP in-game. I hope it's just buried in one of the menus somewhere, where I haven't seen it yet. So any of you with childrens running around, turning off the micro-transactions is a feature you are going to need to dig for.

And what, you may be asking, makes SP so special that it costs real money? Well, it lets you attack with a single member of your party out of turn, even if they are in BP debt. That's it. That is the feature that is so special that they added micro-transactions to this game. Like so many micro-transaction options before it, if you use the SP, the game becomes several degrees easier. It's not quite pay-to-win, since all the SP in the world won't let you beat a boss if you are too low level, but it's close.


The final aspect that makes this game stand out from its peers is the use of StreetPass to help rebuild a city that was destroyed in the intro. People with StreetPass turn into members of the city, which you can then task to help rebuild different shops. This appears  to be the way to access many of the more powerful weapons and armor in the game. Again, we have a downside. Not all StreetPass tags count. Only those from people who are also playing BravelyDefault. So give the game a year or two, and new players who don't pick games up when they are still expensive will have a very hard time rebuilding their town, which kind of sucks, given how integral to the game this mechanic seems to be.

As of this writing, I have just completed the Wind temple so I reckon I'm somewhere around the quarter way mark.

I'm not going to brief on story, as I'm not yet far enough in to be able to give a good synopsis without risk of spoilers. Suffice to say, I'm very curious how everything will turn out.

To sum up: if you enjoy games like Golden Sun or the Tales series, you should probably pick this one up sooner rather than later to get the full experience. If turn-based games annoy you, or if you don't make use of features like StreetPass, I would recommend skipping this one.

Lego Marvel Heroes Review

So my super sweet husband gave into my begging and got me Lego Marvel Super Heroes for WiiU. Yes, I could have gotten it cheaper on DS, and yes, he could have gotten it for his Xbox 360 and actually gotten the achievement points for it, but dammit, I wanted a WiiU game. The poor console had been barely used since I finished Pikmin 3 earlier this fall. And this makes me sad because I like my WiiU.

I should also note that I played primarily on the GamePad. The switching between the TV and the gamepad wasn't as smooth as it is for Nintendo titles, but it was still easy. I didn't have any lag. The gamepad's battery survived being played almost constantly Saturday and Sunday.

I'll admit, I've been a fan of the X-men comics and cartoons since the early '90's but didn't know much Marvel lore overall until the Marvel Universe movie series started. So, I'm a little bit late to the game.

As such, I can't really speak to how true the game is to the comic-version of the Marvel world, but I do have to say there was something unbelievably awesome swinging around Manhattan as Spider-man, or starting at street level and flying up to the helicarrier as Ironman or Thor.

The story was good if a bit predictable, [spoilers]Loki is the bad guy again, and it used the same MacGuffin as the Avengers movie, the Tesseract., which having seen Thor, The Avengers, and Thor: The Dark World felt overused.[/spoilers]  The plot did manage to move forward well, though I wish we would have had more options for which characters to use during the initial play through of each level. The first time you play a level, the game assigns which characters will be needed to complete that level successfully, and so there is little exploration initially. This causes the linearity of the levels to stand out and start feeling old by the end of the game. This was, however, offset by the free play mode that is unlocked for any just-completed level. The free play mode allows for on-the-fly switching between characters during the level, allowing for maximum exploration based on needed abilities and skills.

Second admission. I've never played a Lego game before. This was my introduction to the franchise. As such I found the mechanics easy to learn, although some areas gave far too many hints (Agent Coulson I'm looking at you) and others were trial and error until you found the right piece of the background to break apart and turn into a useful item. I liked the mechanics of building a shield for Captain America to stand on to aim lasers, and a 4 for Mr. Fantastic to use to turn into a special item/action.

I found the controls to be a bit fidgety. It felt like each button did too many tasks, too few of which were context-dependant. For example, if you were Ironman, a double tap of b was fly. Then holding B was go up, and holding A was go down, with a double tap for land. But if you held the left thumbstick in the "up" position, this would "lock" you into accelerating in that direction. Nice if you are trying to get to the helicarrier, annoying if you were just trying to get to the top of a building.  Or in fights, Y was your main attack, but a to-long press and you would go into aiming mode. Further, there was no way to select between near or ranged attacks for the characters who had both. You are stuck rapidly pressing Y and hoping you hit the enemy who was attacking you. This leads to visually neat (the characters to multiple different combinations, and there are variations between all the characters I've played with), but tactilely disappointing battles. I would have liked to have some use of either the bumpers or the triggers to perform different kinds of attacks.

Overall I had a lot of fun playing it, I beat it in 15 hours, including some but not all of Deadpool's side missions, and none of the special unlockable characters. The result was it felt a lot shorter than it really was, due to my beating it over one weekend of play. I am usually extremely slow at completing games, even short ones. This feeling of shortness would lead me to recommend waiting to purchase it until the price drops below $50, especially if you are fast or have played Lego games before and know exactly what to look for to solve the puzzles.

OSX Mavericks and new iMac Review

Well, we are finally settled into the new apartment. The movers where awful, everything is scratched at minimum and flat out ruined at worst.

So while we are fighting the movers to replace or fix our stuff, we decided to retire the 2009 Dell that was our desktop, and upgrade to an Intel Haswell/Mavericks iMac.

I opted for the 27-in with a 2560X1400 display. 3.2GHz quad-core Haswell processor, 8 gig of RAM, and a 1 Tera HDD. This set up also includes a NVIDIA  GeForce GT 755M.

So first impressions of Mavericks is that it really doesn't feel much different from several of the older versions of OSX that I've used over the years. However, we did decide to invest in an AppleTV to take advantage of the wireless desktop extension to the TV in the living room.
This. Is. Awesome. I prefer using a wired mechanical keyboard and a Logitech mouse for my serious typing or gaming, so I'm not much of a fan of the bluetooth keyboard and mouse that come with the iMac. But when these are combined with the extended desktop onto the TV and the fact that Mavericks considers both screens to be primary, it's brilliant. I have my good keyboard hooked up to the actual iMac, and the bluetooth one out in the living room with the TV. This is probably about 15 feet away from the actual computer, and I have had zero connectivity issues so far. 

I've been on Windows computers primarily the last several years, so I'm re-getting used to the maximize/minimize/close buttons being reversed, and having the toolbars for all programs up top. 

The dock still works well, and this is something I've worked hard to imitate on any of my Windows computers that I use on a daily basis. 

I've already downloaded and tested Steam, and it works exactly the way I'm used to. I am disappointed at how few games are actually Mac compatible, 9 out of my 30-odd games. As ubiquitous as Mac/Linux has become the last several years, I was expecting a much higher compatibility ratio. This makes me wonder just how effective the Steam Machines are going to be at playing all games, considering that SteamOS is a Linux platform. 

I'm having fun with the App store, Launchpad, and Mission Control. 

Having free access to the full versions of Numbers, Pages, and Keynote is going to be really nice. 

Pokemon X & Y First Impressions

So my wonderful husband read my mind this morning and went to the local big box shop to pick us both up a copy of Pokemon X and Y. He is  playing version Y while I am playing X.

This is a first impressions from my first 2 hours of fiddling with the game.

I love the mini games, Pokemon Amie and SuperTrainer. These are available from the start and really bring the interaction of the Pokemon and Trainer to life. Pokemon Amie further has 3 more mini games in it that are basic puzzles to let you 'befriend' your Pokemon more.

The mix of new and old Pokemon so far has been perfect. Enough old faces to trigger Red and Blue nostalgia while having enough new that you are always wondering what will pop out of the tall grass next.

The 3D models and form of the game, as far as the standard graphics go, are nice. It feels like the series has finally matured into current generation gameplay.

I am disappointed that some of the "general" trainers you battle are still in 2-D drawings, which is only stark in contrast to the fact that your character is fully animated.

This is the most fun I've had playing a Pokemon game in several years.

Once I've gotten further in the game, I will post a more comprehensive review.

Post the Second

Now that we've gotten the serious bit of commenting policy out of the way, Welcome to Dreamfall.

For those of you out there who aren't complete and utter nerds/geeks/etc. Dreamfall is a reference to the video game "Dreamfall: The Longest Journey." If you haven't played either Dreamfall, or The Longest Journey and can handle a decade-old point-and-click adventure game, I highly recommend both. They revolve around a world and its mirror. Stark, the world of science based technology and hard facts, and Arcadia, the world of magic and fantasy. They balance each other, two halves to the whole. Reality and imagination. For me this balance of fact and fiction and the blending and blurring of the two is what makes these games so lovely.

As to why I chose this for the name of my blog, well, it's not too far from how I view life. Life is a journey, and it is the longest one we get. Imagination and creativity go so far into creating so much beauty to enjoy, yet so does technology, for all that technology is generally viewed as cold and impersonal. What's awesome is that modern technology is working to break that mold by creating more aesthetically pleasing devices, and combining and varying what materials are used to create different effects.