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Nintendo Land: Donkey Kong Crash Course: Completed!

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While I was away, I finally managed to complete Donkey Kong Crash Course.  Unfortunately, this was on my brother's Wii U, and I completed it by accident, falling onto the finishing line.  The game then implied that there are further stages to go ...

But I completed this stage, at least!

Nintendo Land: being a pikmin

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I've been on holiday for the past week with my extended family, and as part of that my brother took along his Wii U.  We played Mario Chase a lot, which (as you'd expect) works best with five players.  We also played Animal Crossing: Sweet Day a fair bit, as everyone finds it hilarious when people are waddling around with massive heads.

On the last day, I played through many levels of Pikmin Adventure with my brother, switching roles every couple of checkpoints.  It works really well as a co-operative game, though at the end of each level you're shown who played better throughout.


Look at my contribution!

The game is very pretty, with an interesting aesthetic of robotic versions of the typical Pikmin enemies.  They have obvious hit points, which you can then throw pikmin onto, including any player-controlled pikmin.


The game predates the flying pikmin of Pikmin 3, but that doesn't mean you don't get airborne.  One annoyance is that even if Olimar and all player pikmin are on a launch pad, Olimar has to call the pikmin to him before the launch pad will launch.


It's good fun throwing player pikmin into random areas.


Pikmin.

Pilotwings: smoother in 60Hz

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This is possibly the first time I've found the difference between 50Hz and 60Hz to have a significant impact on a game.  When I tried to play Pilotwings previously, I found that I was constantly fighting with the controls and didn't enjoy it.  Amusingly, I forecast at the time that I'd go back to the game "in a couple of years".


On the Wii U, it's the 60Hz version, and it feels much more responsive.  I still found control of the skydiver quite tricky, as it's difficult to see how to move forwards and keep a good speed, but the rocketpack was much easier to deal with.


My other main complaint previously was the difficulty in judging distances, and in particular how quickly you can descend to land.  I think that this simply requires a lot of practice, but the game doesn't let you repeat just one mission as far as I can see.


It looks like the landing zone is miles away here, but to get there requires a lot of diving and pushing the nose down, which of course then means you're going too fast to land.  I shall have to work out how to do this more consistently.

Super Mario World: the third attempt

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I played Super Mario Advance 2, but never got that far - which is surprising.  I played the Wii VC version of the game for a bit, but stopped for some reason after passing Donut Plains.  Now I've upgraded that to the Wii U VC version, I'm going to try to complete a game which many hail as the best of all time, but I've only scratched the surface of.

Yes, I know.  I'm still halfway through NSMBW and NSMBU.  Shh.


Initial impressions aren't great.  The text is really hard to read - had Nintendo never heard of kerning? - and the controls feel a bit imprecise.  This may be because of the travel on the buttons on the Wii gamepad, and the use of the analogue stick.  In any case, after a while the controls weren't an issue.


In this screen, you can see Mario rescuing Yoshi.  Two things to note here: Mario seems to be able to float in mid air, and Yoshi is singularly useless, getting captured around 100 metres from his home.  It hardly seems worth the effort.


I completed the first set of levels pretty quickly, and then got stuck on the first level where you can collect the feather that turns into a cape.  That cost me three lives, because I kept expecting Yoshi to be able to swallow the baseballs lobbed at him.


I finished at the second level in Donut Plains, annoyed with the red dot indicating that there's a secret exit on the first level.  I know how to get to it - you need the green switch palace - but I hate leaving it blinking there.

My favourite Mega Drive games

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From a request on RLLMUK, my favourite ten games for the Mega Drive.

Virtua Racing
Three tracks, one car, minimum of content, £60. Utterly amazing and worth every penny. Magazines warned that it wasn't as good as the arcade game, but that didn't matter - the freedom it gave in terms of being able to steer any way around the circuit and not be shifted to the edge of the screen - it felt like the future.

Sonic 2
I won this in a competition in Mega. Release day came, and I had no Sonic 2. A week later, no Sonic 2. Another week, and I had a letter from the magazine apologising for the delay. I eventually got the game a month and a half after everyone had completed it - and yet I still love it. My favourite Sonic game, just.

Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition
When combined with the six-button pad (which I still feel is the epitome of digital pad design), this is the perfect fighter. I spent hundreds of hours on this; I even got a new Mega Drive (replacing my original Japanese model, as SC2 was region-locked) just to play it.

Aladdin
Far better than the SNES game. The rug ride level has one of the most memorable tunes in any game, and I can still remember where to go to get the genie's heads.

Micro Machines 96
A toss-up between this and MM2, but the courses on this are just a bit better. Amazing with four players.

Shining Force
I'd never played a strategy RPG before this; I've still not played one as good. An involving story, great characters and well-balanced gameplay.

NHL Hockey '93
I didn't play ice hockey. I'd never watched a match. None of my friends ever had either. Why, then, was this game so routinely played whenever we went to each others' houses? You felt so stylish grabbing the puck and slaloming up the pitch before shooting and scoring - later versions may have added four-player but they felt a bit too clunky and heavy.

Toe Jam and Earl
If you play it now, it feels so slow and awkward. How did I ever have the patience to complete it? I did, though, several times over. Special mention must go to level zero, where TJ&E get to bathe in a hot tub.

Quackshot
The Disney platformers were almost all great. I feel this is the best of the bunch, though Castle of Illusion is very close behind.  I don't think of Aladdin as a Disney platformer for some reason; it's a film licence.

The tenth place goes to Road Rash. And Desert Strike. And Populous. And Mega Lo Mania. And Mega Bomberman. And Thunderforce III.  Too many great games!

Oh, and the two-player mode of Lemmings was genius.