Is it Monday already? He asked, when it was almost Tuesday. Guess I need to blog things up around here.
I bought a Wii U during the Christmas break. It was an impulse buy actually. I saw it on special and bought it. I’m not ready to make the jump to the Playstation 4 and I’ve managed to avoid the X-Box’s other iterations so it doesn’t figure in my plans either. The reason I’m bringing this up at all is because I went on a Wii U game buying spree over the weekend. I got Super Mario Bros. U and Super Luigi U with the machine and I picked up Skylanders at the same time because it was 33% off and it assured me of getting the plain versions of Ninja Stealth Elf, Wash Buckler and Blast Zone. This past weekend, I bought THREE games even though when I left the house on Saturday I didn’t think I’d be buying any.
A few weeks ago, I saw that there was a new Pac-Man game (Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures) out but I only saw it for the X-Box 360 and the Wii U (it exists for the PS3 but I didn’t know that until just now when I looked it up). I picked it up for $40 at Toys R Us (since they didn’t have Rayman Legends) only to see it at two other places afterwards for $30. Doh! That was game #1.
I’m a huge DC Comics fan, so when I saw Scribblenauts Unmasked, I was intrigued. Not $60 (the price it was going for at Wal-Mart) intrigued, but perhaps $40 (the price it was going for on amazon.ca) intrigued. Well, at Archambault, they had it for $40 so I pulled the trigger. That was game #2.
The good folks at Penny Arcade hyped Rayman Legends as a perfect way to highlight the Wii U’s gamepad. That put the game on my radar. On Saturday I tried the playable demo at Toys R Us and it blew me away. It may be a sign that I don’t play enough games, but I thought it was one of the most gorgeous looking games I’ve ever played and it was fun to boot! Alas, they didn’t have it in stock. I saw it at Archambault but it was going for $60. That was more than I was willing to pay so I figured I’d forgo it. Then we went to Wal-Mart and I saw it for the PS3 for $20. I thought to myself, “Great! It’s $20 for the PS3 but it’s probably $60 for the Wii U and I really want it for the Wii U!” Well wouldn’t you know, the Wii U version cost the same. That’s as good a price as I could ever hope for so I picked it up post haste. That was game #3.
I tried all three games briefly on Saturday night. None of them required an installation or updates (JOY!) so I was able to pop them in and go which I am a big fan of!
When I started Pac-Man it felt like I was missing something. The characters were referring to things I had never heard of before. As I did a quick search to make sure I got the name right (the game is in the other room and I’m lazy) I saw that there’s a TV series that came out last year. Mystery solved. The game froze when I died and thus ended the quick experiment.I’ll try it again later of course, because I liked what little I had seen of the gameplay before the freeze.
I was just as impressed with Rayman Legends at home as I was when I tried the demo in the store. It really is a great game. But because I wanted to give all three games a try, I didn’t play it for very long.
I’d only briefly played the first Scribblenauts Nintendo DS game before and didn’t remember much. Somehow I had gotten into my head that it involved drawing things. I’m not crazy about the interface to type things in. I guess it goes better with the pen than with my finger. I’ll have to give that a try. It’s the game I played the most (mostly because it was the last one I tried and therefore just left the game in the machine). I love the look of Scribblenauts and they REALLY went deep in incorporating elements of the DC universe. There are a LOT of characters and bios available.
It’s a testament to my resolve that I was able to forgo playing on Sunday until I had drawn both strips for the weekend. I had a mental block when I tried writing strips on Saturday and it wasn’t until Sunday that I was able to figure out how I wanted things to go. We get back to the story of what happened in the wild with Zoë, Red Rich and the others starting on January 28th. I’ll write more about the process in next week’s blog. For now though, I’m done. Have a good week everybody!