Hole in the Net

The old Nintendo, I mean…I can’t put my finger on it, but the Nintendo that brought us the Wii seems to be quite a different Nintendo than the one that brought us Super Mario World. Don’t get me wrong, I think the Wii is a great system, but despite what I’ve played on it so far, I’m not heartbroken that I don’t own one. Maybe it’s too early in the system’s life, or maybe my gaming tastes have changed too much over time, but it’s really telling when today’s release of Metroid Prime 3 should have me lamenting the fact that I don’t own a Wii, yet I’m not. This is the first Metroid title I won’t be playing, and oddly enough, I just don’t care. I thought the last two Prime titles were amazing, but why hasn’t that same sense of excitement and anticipation carried over to this new title, I wonder?

Gaming has changed a lot over the last ten years, so much so that even Miyamoto himself seems to think that the games of the ‘old Nintendo’ may be a thing of the past. I suppose I should get used to the fact that things change, but that still won’t take away the nostalgia of Mario flying around in a yellow cape, racing the timer in Super Metroid, or tossing the latest Zelda cartridge out of a second story window.

Oh yeah, I hate the Zelda series. We’ll go into the hows and whys another day.

It seems that the rumored PS3 version Of Bioshock may in fact be nothing more than that; the 360 version of the game now has a slipcover that says ‘Only on Xbox 360 and Windows PC’. I thought for sure that this would be a shoo-in for a PS3 port, but I guess Microsoft knows a good thing when they see it. Smart move, as Bioshock thus far is looking to be a serious Game of the Year contender, and MS needs every feather they can stick in their hat through the end of 2007 if they hope to impede Sony’s marketshare.

So I downloaded the Eternal Sonata demo on LIVE earlier today, and I have to say that after spending a good hour or so with it that it trumps the Blue Dragon demo in pretty much every damned way conceivable. Let me give you a little backstory about my relationship between myself and JRPGs: by and large I consider the vast majority of them to be utter garbage. Play one and you’ve more or less played them all, but even so there are a scant few that stand out in my memory as being phenomenal and well worth experiencing: Phantasy Star, Phantasy Star 2, The Shining in the Darkness, Final Fantasy 2, Final Fantasy 7, Thousand Arms, Skies of Arcadia…if the demo is anything to judge Eternal Sonata by, I have every confidence that I’ll be adding it to my fairly short list.

Skies of Arcadia has long been my favorite JRPG followed closely by FF7…we’ll see if Eternal Sonata ends up rounding out my top three.

Looks so, as these are some of the comments piling up as reviews start creeping in:

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“A Perfect Score: That’s what BioShock deserves as it is one of the most original, haunting and memorable shooters to come along since Half Life.”
-Alternative Press

“This is the really bewildering thing about it: it succeeds so stunningly on three different fronts. Not esoteric ones, either, these are the big challenges developers have been struggling to master for decades: narrative, emergence, a sense of place. If another game did just one of these as well as BioShock, it would immediately qualify as a classic. When a game comes along that does all three, we can only be baffled and thankful.

I spend my career, and my gaming life, waiting for a moment when a game just astonishes me, when I can’t believe what I’m seeing, what I’m doing. BioShock has five.”
-PCG UK

“BioShock is a novel compressed into a first-person shooter. It manages to be both a tricky, exciting action game, a fascinating creation of an enclosed world and a deep enquiry about what it means to be human - a trick most action movies and books fail to achieve. It also plays with you at every stage, confounding your expectations and your control over events repeatedly, from your control over your weapons, Plasmids, plot, self…

And this is where we have to stop ourselves - we don’t want to spoil it. What we can tell you is you’ll be playing this game for months to come, exchanging story elements to build up the bigger picture, and arguing about what it all means. Come, join the argument, play the impossible game.”
-OXM UK

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I have to admit to being a bit skeptical myself over the course of the game’s development…we hear lots of promises but often are left underwhelmed by the final product. Still, comments like these are reassuring, and it seems as though I’ll be taking a second look at BioShock myself when it hits store shelves later this month.