Street Fighter IV - Pre-emptive Dismay

Why aren't we more excited about the prospect of Street Fighter IV?

We are a little bit excited. Street Fighter III was pretty good, but nobody wanted to play as any of the new characters, all the Super Arts and EX moves were terribly complicated, and I personally haven't got the mental capacity to learn all these things. I just wanted 3 or 4 special moves for each character, so it's like a nice easy game to learn, like chess, or Buckaroo.

I bet it's full with as many characters as could fill a small country, and 80% of them are dicks. They'll all have dreary reasons for wanting to win the tournament, none of the heart-warming tales of woe, like Dhalsim just trying to raise some money for disadvantaged blind orphans, or Zangief fighting to show the world how powerful mother Russia is/was.

Beat-em-ups used to be the best things ever, now they're just for twats who know how to pull off 39 hit combos before the round has even started; they'll be the same twats who dress up like characters from their favourite manga. I hate them. They're ruining the things I quite like.

Rejoice! Our Free Wii-mote Jackets Are Now Shipping!!

We got this in our inbox today:

"Dear Customer, Thank you for your request. Your Wii Jacket(s) are in the process of being despatched and will be with you within the next ten working days This e-mail is for information only. Please do not reply. Kind regards, Nintendo Customer Services."

Rejoice! Winter is here and our Wii-motes can wrap up warmly!

We're also extra excited because we only have 3 Wii-motes and we asked Nintendo for 4 jackets! Advantage us.

Now Playing... Paper Mario and Mario Kart

We've been off work for most of the week, so we've had plenty of time to play games that aren't available on the XBox 360. Which we can see thanks to UPS (and not the bastard Microsoft) should be here sometime today. Fixed. We can only hope.

So it's Friday and what have we accomplished this week?

We've finished (for the first time) Paper Mario! Yes the N64 one, we haven't got the Super version for the Wii yet. Thanks to the Virtual Console we've managed to go back in time and play one of the games we always wanted to, but never had the time to. What a fantastic game!! We can understand why the Metacritic score is 93! It is an absolute gem and a lot of fun to play, we just couldn't put it down for a minute. From starting off in the little Goomba Village, to taking down King Bowser way up in the skies atop Peach's Castle, you are presented with some of the funniest and sometimes most difficult adventures with Mario and his friends yet. We didn't even tire of the sections where you play as Peach and end up sneaking round the castle!

face it, never gonna happen

We completely recommend this Virtual Console download if you haven't played it yet. Oh and we will definitely be hunting round the shops and EBay for a reasonably priced Thousand Year Door for the Cube too! We may even find ourselves shelling out some dosh for the Mario & Luigi games too! Or do we just jump right in and go for Super Paper Mario?

With news this week of worrying developers murmuring about the Wii's future and their unwillingness to invest in a platform with an uncharted future, you can only wonder where their problems stem from? We've paid 1,000 points for a game we just couldn't put down. To us that is a small price to pay for such a great game, given that the title has already had it's run on the N64.

Now correct us if we are wrong, but haven't Nintendo implied that the Wii is the cheapest and easiest console to create new titles for? Surely the ball is in the developers court then? They should be more worried about coming up with something fresh, new and equally as addictive as some of the titles we haven't been able to put down yet? We don't require big budget Halo 3 titles because we're happy with the smaller more interesting games like Katamari. Nintendo aren't going to let this one die, maybe the casual gamer did buy it after seeing Wii Sports round their mates house, but they'll probably buy your game too! (Provided you put it in front of them, price it and market it well)

stop that you! just make us some games

Anyway, we digress. We finished yesterday by running through the four cups on Mario Kart 64 at 150cc. As far as we can remember that's all you had to do in the game? We've unlocked the "Extra" mode to get the mirrored tracks and we've been in hoots again pissing about on Toad's Turnpike in a backwards fashion. Its funny to think that we paid fifty quid for this back in the day. When you think of the latest iterations of the frenzied racer you certainly feel like you get more bang for your buck.

See, we can't help but compare the sheer amount of hours we've spent on each title, and it's fair to say that until Mario Kart DS appeared we have spent less time on each new title. Super Mario Kart took a lot of our youth along with Killer Instinct and Super Bomberman. Mario Kart 64 was one of the few titles we could afford and only got sidelined when Rare hit a double-whammy in 1997 with Goldeneye and Diddy Kong Racing appearing along with their addictive challenges.

The Gamecube iteration really didn't hold our attention for too long. We were more interested in this XBox Live thing that was kicking about, and if we played our Gamecube it was probably going to be for the Four Swords or Sega Soccer Slam. Problem is these days that we can't play any of these on our Wii because we had one of those US/JAP Gamecube thingys and all our games don't want to play nice with our PAL Wii. Datel, hurry on up with some sort of new Freeloader thing please!

bikes? karting? here? hmmmm

So with another couple of announcements this week regarding the Wii version of Mario Kart we can only hope that it will follow the wonderful example given in the DS version and once again recapture our hearts, and of course of spare time. So far it all seems positive! We've just noticed something about 12 people online and something else about motorbikes? Maybe we're looking at something more like Project Mario Racing? (Sorry we couldn't think of any other way of merging Gotham with Mario... Project Gotham Karting? Hmmm nope.) Either way we just want to play the damned thing. It certainly isn't the game we are most excited about - that illustrious award belongs to Smash Brothers Brawl. We're subscribed to the Dojo on our Google Reader and we just can't wait for the bloody game to get released! Talk about packing so much in to one game! Nice work!

Hmmmm. Back to the now. So we've had a week of N64 titles and a massive Lost catchup session on series 3. It didn't do much for us when we first started watching it, but we've found ourselves strangely compelled this week! Apart from this we've spent our time not winning an award and pressing refresh on the UPS tracking information website waiting for that shitting 360.

Hope you've had a good week too - what's happened in your gaming week?

P.S. I hope we lose some weight before next year!

SHOCKING NEWS: We Didn't Win An Award

Are we really shocked? Yes we are! We're still shocked that we even got nominated in the first place for a Games Media Award.

Are you responsible for putting us in the "Best non-commercial site / blog"? If so please let us know what inspired you to do so, because we don't understand! While we don't post to this site when we feel like to make money or to get nominated for awards, we really do appreciate the nominations and we hope to keep doing this for as long as blogger is free!!!

We're very happy to hear that the winner is non other than UK:Resistance, one of the sites that inspired us to get out and dump our thoughts into the wide worldy internet thing. Congratulations to Gary and all of the other winners too. The event was awesome and we ate loads.

We just want our bloody 360 back now so we can play Halo 3!!!!

Rarest Playstation Game Ever?

For only the fifth time in 18 months, the inhabitants of GOY towers are on the move, which means another bout of rummaging. Things we had completely forgotten about have made their presence felt. We're pretty sure that 90% of gamers are at least a little bit like us, and hoard entirely unnecessary items of merchandise or ephemera.

Some of it is taking up space that we now need for grown up things like ironing boards and a garlic press, like those 30 odd playstation one demo discs, but some of these are real finds, worthy of note. I speak of course of things like the Super Mario Jigsaw Puzzle, various copies of Mean Machines magazine, and the pile of Street Fighter comics, including the adaptation of the JeanClaudeVanDamme adaptation (which was on the telly the other week - it's so bad it goes past being good again, into being bad and then out into being good).

But there comes a time when we have to do things we'd never do, sell the 'retirement fund' - a special selection of rare games and bits that we know draw the top dollar. This week saw the time draw near.

CASTLEVANIA - SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT with lovely art book and soundtrack CD


So this little beauty found it's way onto a popular internet auction site.
It was a thrilling battle to the finish line, the wonder of consumerism all concentrated into a small 7 day auction. Anyway, it sold for a amount of money in the area of £75. Which will probably be spent on a combination of Phantom Hourglass, Pro Evolution 2008, or that garlic press I've heard so much about.

The point of this bleating on and on about my own successes in the field of international commerce was to ask whether Castlevania, Symphony of the Night, is in fact the RAREST PAL Playstation 1 game OF ALL TIME. We know Kula World was a bit rare for a while, and Tombi, but is this old vampire jaunt the rarest of the lot? Your thoughts please.

While thinking aloud about this post, a local asked me why on earth anything in this age of mass production would be rare, and in particular a game in a popular series, published by a large videogame company? We didn't have any of the answers, and thus pretended that we hadn't heard the questions.

I'm just off to play the fuck out of it before I send it off.
(unless of course, you are the person who won the auction, in which case I'm off to make sure it's safe in the oxygen vacuum chamber I set up to keep if fresh)