In Third Person

Before I invested in an XBOX 360, I was starved for core games as a Wii-only owner. I was going through a drought in games to play, and the Wii version of The Godfather was starting to pick up buzz. I had never watched a Godfather movie or played a Grand Theft Auto game before, the promise of being able to point my Wii remote as a gun or beat thugs down with swinging fist motions seemed really cool. Also, when you don't have that many options to choose from, you're more willing to step outside your comfort zone for some satisfaction.

I picked this up on day one, not quite knowing what to expect really. I had read the reviews and seen this trailer, but not having played this style of game before didn't give me any real context to base my own opinions from.

If you haven't played this, or have played the non-Wii versions of the game, you're probably wondering how the controls perform. While they are not perfect, I thought they were very satisfying, especially in combat. I loved the ability to aim the gun with my hand and beating guys down by actually throwing punches did add to the experience. In particular, I liked all the things you could do when you grabbed a guy. Most famously among my high school friends, I grabbed a prostitute in the game and threw her off a balcony. Yeah, that wasn't the most gentlemanly thing of me to do.

At the time, I thought the game was really fun. I can't really speak on how closely the story followed the movie, but there weren't any missions that stood out to me as annoying, boring or bad. I liked the side stuff where you could shake down local store owners to take control away from rival gangs. This process was kind of repetitive, but I enjoyed it enough to shake down every store and bar owner in New York. Having played a number of GTA games since then, I thought The Godfather: Blackhand Edition stacks up fairly well. It's ultimately not as good, but if you're looking for more open-world goodness, it was a good game to check out.

The only glaring flaw I remember clearly about the game were its visuals. Unfortunately, the graphics aren't the greatest, especially when playing on an LCD or plasma TV. One weird thing though is that I found the game to look just fine on a CRTV. Regardless of what TV you have, the art style does not cover up the technical deficiencies put on the system due to the large open-world.

If you're still looking for core games to play on the Wii, I recommend you check out The Godfather: Blackhand Edition. I'm sure you can pick this one up for dirt cheap used.

Due to the varying interests and skill levels, finding games for my girlfriend and I to enjoy on the same level is difficult. Every now and then she'll play one of "my" games and I'll play "her" games, but I can only really think of one video game series that we can really call "ours". That series, is Boom Blox for the Wii.

If you're not familiar with the critically acclaimed and lukewarm selling Boom Blox series of games, I'll give you a very quick rundown of what it's about. Boom Blox has a number of different game types, all of which revolve around interacting with blocks. This includes throwing baseballs at a stack of blocks, skillfully removing blocks Jenga style, hitting blocks into multipliers and more. Sure, that description sounds really lame and even watching videos of the game doesn't sell the game that well. But when you get that Wii remote in your hand and you knock down a giant stack of blocks to the chagrin of your opponent(s), you'll get it.

Your girlfriend will too. Well, at least mine did. And a few other girls I know with boyfriends got it as well. Heck, pretty much everyone I've put Boom Blox in front of has loved it. It's a shame that Boom Blox has not caught on with the masses, because it's awesome for everyone. But I'm not here to talk about everyone. This post is just about Steff and I.


What makes this game universally appealing is the gameplay. It is extremely easy for anybody to figure out almost instantly, but tricky to master. Most of the game modes also do not require twitch reflexes, which takes out another layer of difficulty. Where it lacks in twitch gameplay it makes up for in strategy. During that moment when you've figured out the absolute best way to handle your situation and the reward is watching a hundred blocks fly off into oblivion, it just feels good.

As a competitive multiplayer game, both Boom Blox games are a blast to play. They're almost as easy as Wii Sports in terms of universal pick-up-and-play appeal with a steeper learning curve for anyone looking to take it to the next level. My girlfriend and I often duel in Boom Blox and the competition is always heated. Unfortunately for me, she wins more than I do. Even as a single player game though, it can be fun to work out levels together. One person can be in charge with the Wii remote and together you can form a plan of action.

Whether we're battling to the death for Boom Blox champion supremacy or working together to solve crazy block puzzles, the Boom Blox series of games are awesome to play together.

I can't go anywhere without my iPod Touch. As my all-in-one mini computer, I use it for everything from media consumption, note-taking and games. While I was swept up in Peggle fever a few months back, one game has remained a staple in my iPod Touch game library. That game is Drop 7. It's by no measure a new game. I bought the game months before I started this blog, and even then it wasn't new. However, I have consistently gone back to this game and play it almost daily. It's a great and simple game that is perfect to play on the go.

If you haven't tried it yet (you have no reason not to, because there's a free demo available), the game is sort of like a mix between Tetris and Sudoku, though that's not entirely accurate either. I have a very hard time articulating how to actually play this game, but within two plays, it just clicked for me. From then on, I was hooked on dropping my numbered tiles into the well to make other blocks disappear. It has a very similar appeal to Tetris in a way. The big difference, besides the matching of numbers and column/row lengths, is that you have complete control over when you drop your pieces. This makes the game much easier to jump into or jump out of, because you can play it at your own pace.

There are three modes of play: Normal, Hardcore and Sequence. I played normal for a while, but got good to the point where a game would last me 45 minutes to an hour. Now, I play almost exclusively Hardcore, which can be over and done with in five-minutes or less. Sequence is a mode I never really got into, because it's been the same puzzle for me every time.

Not much else to say other than that. Drop 7 is a great puzzle game that has such a solid gameplay concept around it that it could last you forever. There is a free demo on iTunes for you to try out as well.

In November of 2007, Super Mario Galaxy was released to great fanfare. It received eye-popping reviews and a number of awards. I bought the game on day 1, but for a number of reasons, didn't actually play it until a few months after the fact.

When I finally did play it though, I found myself in the midst of Nintendo magic. Even without the benefit of HD, Mario Galaxy is pretty to look at. The orchestrated soundtrack is excellent. For the most part, it controls really well. Most importantly, the game's unique take on 3D platforming was highly refreshing and creative.

However, I got about 40 stars before I just stopped playing the game. Up until recently, I hadn't played the game in years and forgot why I stopped playing it in the first place. After about an hour of playing the game again, I remembered why.


For everything that this game does right (which is just about everything), this game just didn't hook me in. I never felt the urge to keep playing or the inability to put the controller down. When I really like a game, it becomes like cocaine to me to the point where I will spend every minute possible with it till I beat it. I liked what Nintendo did with this game, and wouldn't really ask them to change anything about it, but I'm having a hard time finding the motivation in me to keep playing this game.

I don't think it's necessarily a fault in the game. I think it might have something to do with me at this point in my gaming life, though I'm not so sure about that, either. Sure, I spend most of my time playing more mature content, such as Modern Warfare 2, Street Fighter IV and the Mass Effect series, but I still managed to finish New Super Mario Bros. Wii in a matter of months rather than a matter of years. And it's not necessarily a 3D bias either, because Super Mario 64 holds a very special place in my nerd heart.

Regardless of what it might be, I don't know where Super Mario Galaxy went "wrong" with me. I'm still aiming on beating it before Super Mario Galaxy 2 comes out later this month, but I won't make any promises.

I'm still playing (and for the most part) enjoying Skate, which I'm playing at a very leisurely pace. While it's a lot of fun to just cruise around the world and bust tricks, there are some very awkward design choices that can annoy the heck out of you when you play Skate. The inability to walk can be infuriating due to the way the world is designed. Bystanders always seem to get in the way of your objectives, which leaves you skating into them more than you would like. But I wanted to talk about one very specific case of poor game design that drove me nuts.

Three things I need to tell you to set the scenario up for you:

1) Skate exists in one persistent open world. You can skate anywhere in the city seamlessly. However, should you want to warp to different parts of town, you can go to a subway station and use the train. When you do this, you're faced with a loading time while the game loads in the new area.

2) Much of the Skate experience is trial and error. It gives you a challenge, and you try and try again until you get it. To make the process faster, the game allows you to mark your own starting points that you can instantly warp back to the point should you need to.

3) There is a challenge in the game called "Gap It Up". In it, you have to skate over a bridge, hop onto a ramp, then jump over a huge gap. If you need to visualize it, I'll put a video in below.



This is where the game design weirdness takes place. The game starts you off pretty far away from the actual jump. You can set your own marker closer to the jump, but you then won't have enough speed to get past the first bump, which you can see in 0:04 of the video. At 0:06 of the video, you have to make and land that jump while scoring a certain number of points to complete the objective.

In the video, the player nailed it just fine. If you screw it up though, and you want to snap back to your starting position, the game actually takes you out of the game and drops you into a 15-second load time before you can retry the challenge. I don't know if this is happening because I'm too far away from the starting marker, or because the starting point and the ending point are between seams of the world that need to be reloaded in when jumping from one place to the next.

In every other scenario that I have encountered in Skate so far, I can hold the left bumper and press up on the D-pad and instantly warp back to where I started. However, in this one instance, the game completely breaks its flow by forcing you to sit through load times every time you screw up that trick. The loading is actually longer than the time it would take for you to even attempt the trick and if you screw up a lot (like I did), then you'll be watching a lot of seemingly pointless loading.

This is not a game-breaking flaw in Skate, but I think it was a poor design choice to let this happen. If you're going to give the player the ability to snap back to their starting position from the beginning of the game, it should work that way always. Making me then sit through 15 seconds of loading to retry an 8-second trick is nothing short of infuriating, especially when I have to see this load screen 4-5 times in less than two minutes.