ugvm

the site of uk.games.video.misc

Paper Mario: endless wandering

Posted on Written by

After beating the Koopa Brothers, there wasn’t an immediate clue where I should be going next. And so I didn’t really go anywhere. I spent half an hour retracing my steps to see what I was missing.

What I was missing, apparently, was that there was a new area opened up to the south of Toad Town. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me since I had been told about the port many days beforehand and I just forgot. I don’t like having to resort to a walkthrough, but unfortunately real life just means I can’t remember offhanded comments from random characters between play sessions.

So, off to the desert now.

Paper Mario: an endless prologue

Posted on Written by

Playing Paper Mario now, the similarities to the Mario & Luigi games are obvious. Not just in terms of the mechanics – attack an enemy in the overworld to get the first hit in battle; turn-based combat with timing enhancements; use items to enable special moves – but also in terms of the humour and interaction with other characters. In this game, Mario’s sidekick is one of a selection of bad-guys-turned-good, subverting the usual assumption that goombas and koopas are only there to be bounced on, and lending specialist skills to open new paths and collect more badges. That’s not to say that all enemies are converted, and the game hasn’t quite yet reconciled the fact that Goombario, for example, has so far seen a hundred of his peers being brutally slaughtered.

The game starts off quite slowly, with a lot of story to cover. Bowser has obtained a star rod, which makes him look like a fairy but more importantly allows him to have any wish granted. He has taken this opportunity, not to make Peach fall in love with him or to have Mario disappeared from existence, but rather to just kidnap Peach and her castle wholesale. Back to a standard plot, then. Mario has to find seven star people sprite things, which are all over the kingdom, and to do that he has to collect new abilities and get stronger to face stronger enemies.

So far I have found one.

The first part of the game took ages to play through due to there being so much conversation, which of course you can’t just skip over because there is the odd line that is important at telling you where to go. I started playing this back on 6 November, and because I have very little time to play and also because of the slow pace, I didn’t reach Chapter 1 until 12 November.

I explored the village and pathways first, finding a number of badges and coins and star pieces, before venturing into the Koopa Brothers’ fortress. The puzzles inside weren’t at the level of Ocarina of Time’s water temple, but it was refreshing to see a bit of clever design which required little backtracking. Halfway through I rescued Bombette, who coincidentally was able to blow up cracked walls, of which I had noticed a couple throughout the dungeon.

Bombette is relatively handy in battle as well, though her special move of Bomb uses a fair amount of FP (flower points?) which means I am more likely to be found with Blue Koopa accompanying me; his special move allows you to attack all the enemies on the ground at once.

I battled up to the Koopa Brothers, and then the fight against them was the most difficult so far; I had to use some items to regain health since I couldn’t work out the timing to mitigate against their attacks. It didn’t help that Goombario’s Tattle skill – which gives information about an enemy and then unlocks a health bar beneath that type forever more – only worked on one of the four brothers at a time. Nevertheless, they eventually fell, and I rescued big moustache star man thing.

Splatoon: still painting

Posted on Written by

After the closure of the eShop and turning off the multiplayer servers, there was no real reason not to hack my Wii U. It’s taken a while for me to get around to it due to time constraints aligning with interest, but I’ve finally done it, using the guide at https://wiiu.hacks.guide/.

The main reason to do it was to get back the functionality that had been lost. I now once again have a populated homescreen, with Miiverse messages flying around a random selection of games. Everything seems much more lively and friendly. I can also hide all the ugly homebrew channels in a folder as well.

I have signed up with Pretendo, which meant I had to create a new primary user on the console and copy all my save games over to it, leaving my NNID adrift associated with a Dora the Explorer Mii. There’s something screwy happening with the usernames there, which I will have to sort out some day – my username on the Wii U is Xexyzxyz (since I had to choose a different name to my original NNID) but on the website it seems to just be Xexyzx. This also means that my existing folders and organisation on the homescreen needs to be redone.

But I didn’t just want to hack the Wii U so I could play with menus. I wanted to play games online again. Specifically, I want to play Splatoon. I have the third game in the series, and do occasionally play that online as well, but the Wii U entry feels a lot purer and smoother, particularly using the map on the gamepad to monitor where people are.

Everything still works, even the waiting minigame.

There aren’t that many people on the server, unfortunately – it takes a while to get a game – but it works really well considering it’s been built by hobbyists. The experience is very similar to how it used to be (with me losing most of the time). I can forsee me losing many more hours to this.

Splatoon and the last day of Wii U online

Posted on Written by

I’ve enjoyed my time with the Wii U. Most of its best games have since migrated to the Switch, although often with cuts made to fit the single screen. Playing Assassin’s Creed III with a detailed map available at a glance was revolutionary; Kirby & the Rainbow Paintbrush felt very natural to control. Nintendo Land remains a go-to party game to this day, with the asymmetric multiplayer of Mario Chase and Animal Crossing Sweet Day causing heart palpitations like nothing else. Its compatibility with Wii games concretes its position as an essential part of my gaming setup.

One of the more radical games on the Wii U was Splatoon. As you will have seen from previous posts, I quite like first person shooters, but I’m not very good at them. Particularly online – I have neither the speed nor accuracy needed to grace even the top half of a final leaderboard. I still play them, but they can be a dispiriting experience.

Not so with Splatoon. It’s not first-person, for a start, and the objective is not to kill other players, but rather to cover the floor with your particular paint colour. You can target others – and if you splat them they do explode in your paint colour, causing a satisfying area of coverage – but you can also spend the time covering up the other team’s painting efforts and undoing their hard work. There are various weapons, ranging from large paintbrushes and rollers to sniper paint rifles, and you form a random team of four each game. This means that different people can play it in different ways, and everyone contributes to the game in the way they feel best able to.

I favour the paint roller, which lets me cover large areas but does leave me exposed to people coming in with paint guns – so I try to avoid confrontation where possible.

I haven’t played the game as much as some, who have sunk hundreds of hours into it, but I have played both the offline and online games a fair bit. I’m up to level 16 now, playing almost exclusively on the unranked mode (I never progressed past C+ in ranked). And 16 is where I will stay.

Last night saw the closure of the Nintendo Network for the Wii U and 3DS. All online games on those consoles no longer function – the errors vary, but errors there be. To mark this I spent an hour playing Splatoon for the last time, and the lobbies were full of others doing the same. I played eight or nine games in total, and I was reminded almost immediately of how the use of the gamepad to allow you to jump around the map led to a fluency that’s missing from Splatoon 2 and 3 on the Switch – being able to jump to help a teammate without having to switch view is amazing.

I think I won the majority of games, but I suspect that’s because many people were online not to compete but to commemorate.

I spent most of my time on Splatoon, but did also visit Mario Kart 8 (I finish with an online score of around 2800), Wii Sports Club, and Super Mario Maker’s 100 Mario mode. I’ve downloaded a bunch of courses for future use on Mario Maker as well.

There is a replacement network being launched called Pretendo, and at some point I will try to configure that – but it’ll require a mod for my Wii and 3DS and I’ve not got around to that yet. I think it’ll also mean a reset to my progress on a number of games, which I’m loathe to do.

Farewell, Nintendo Network. It’s been fun.

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD: completed!

Posted on Written by

At least my thoughts have been consistent.  The top tweet is eleven years after the bottom.

Having bought Twilight Princess alongside my Wii on launch day in December 2006, but then being captivated by other games (and with a general desire to not play the game until Kieron and John were going to do so as well), I didn't get around to actually playing it until 2011, after I finally gave up on my friends' lackadaisical attitude to Zelda gaming.  As I was more active here at the time, you can read several posts about my progress then, where I completed the forest temple, was whisked away to the twilight, had trouble with controlling Wolf Link, met Midna, and scouted for the three parts of the Fused Shadow.  I seemingly got as far as the temple at the bottom of Lake Hylia, including defeating the boss, before giving up.

Giving up? I don't think it was a conscious decision. Instead, Mario Kart 7 was released, I was also playing a Layton game, and other stuff just seemed to grab me instead. I always intended to go back, but I never did.

Skip forward a decade, and I realise that I bought a copy of Twilight Princess HD for the Wii U when it was cheap somewhere, I have no big story game on the go, and I quite fancy crossing this off my list - particularly because I was bought Skyward Sword HD for the Switch for my birthday and I'd like to play that sometime.  So, rather than resurrecting my old save and complaining about being lost, I unwrap the new game and start it.

After a few hours I remember why I lost interest in the early days of my first playthrough. It's just a little dull to start with, meeting people around the village, fishing, running down narrow corridors between areas. There is some interest when children are captured ...

... but the muted (brown, C64-like) colour palette does its best to dissuade this interest. And then you get to the twilight, which (as my tweets above show) I found pretty difficult to progress through.

And yet I did.

I remembered very little about my original playthrough other than chasing monkeys through a forest and the aesthetic.  I suspect that this is largely due to the relatively generic nature of the world; the art direction isn't as recognisable as Breath of the Wild, for example.  It wasn't until I was many hours in that I started to remember my routes through places; but those many hours became more and more exciting as I progressed.  It was clear to me that the story of Midna and the story of Zelda were somehow intertwined, but it wasn't until I met up with the scary-floating-faces crew that things became clear.

Midna is probably the best thing about the game, and having her constant companionship and annoyances throughout the story meant that the end was quite affecting.  Having traversed through Hyrule, back and forth to collect hearts and rupees and equipment and whatnot, there was a definite shift in the endgame once you travel to the skies and then to meet Ganon.  On the way there's a few non-surprises ...



And then once you get to Ganon, it's a pretty standard big boss Zelda game fight, with a few tricks with Midna and Zelda and unexpected but expected changes.  You know you're coming to the final fight when you come across a room full of chests.



Midna doesn't like Ganondorf, by the way.

And then the end of the game.  I think I've mentioned before about the final blow in the Wind Waker, and how no other Zelda game has quite met it - but this came close.  After taunting and attacking and generally making those I cared about suffer, it was nice to make Ganondorf wear a new brooch.

It isn't the best Zelda game.  It's not even the best Zelda game on the Gamecube.  But it is a Zelda game, in the classical form, and the dungeons are well designed, and the characters are (mostly) distinctive and fun, and the puzzles and equipment is intuitive and challenging, and the story is a bit rubbish but you want to see the end of it, and the enemies are enjoyable to fight, and ... it's good.  Overall it went on a little too long, even if the story did take some interesting twists and turns, and the oppressive nature is a huge barrier to enjoyment.  But it's good.