I went overto my friends house tonight for some gaming. First night in a long time. We played some N64, and then some Saturn bomberman (he sucks at bomberman). On the 64 we played Mario Kart and Dr Mario. Our 64 controllers no longer play like new.

He has a X-box, but I still have not learned to play the new two joystick style shooting games. I have played once or twice against experienced players, and I was too unskilled for it to be fun for either of us. So we didnt touch the x-box.

I was feeling sort of spacy, more in the mood for an easy, casual, cooperative game such as SNES Turtles in Time, rather than the competitive and serious games we were playing.

My SNES is back at my parents house, and I do not even have a tv at the moment. And my controllers are falling apart, like every one elses. I am not really a serous gamer at all anymore.

This got thinking about maybe getting a TV and a wii. I have minimal experience with the wii. I tried a bowling game once, and my cousin once showed me how it plays old SNES and NES games. Seems like the NES ability would be perfect, as the new controllers are fairly classic with D-pad and two buttons. And controllers that worked consistently would be such a pleasure.

Also, I am really excited about the Bomberman Live: Battlefest game with capture the flag, as I posted in the other thread. Years ago, I ebayed a Sega Saturn, two mutlitaps, and a bunch of controllers just for Saturn Bomberman. So a new system just for Bomberman Live: Battlefest is not out of the question. And the wii D-pad sure looks so nice and clearn compared to the Playstation and xbox D-pads.

Anyway, I thought I should ask about the wii now that I have it in my mind. I know very little about modern gaming.

I am not really intested in the motion sensing controller games. Bowling game I tried was stupid. So how many wii games just use the D pad and buttons? I see there is a new 2D Mario for wii. I love 2d gaming. Are there lots of new good 2d games?

And maybe it is time for me to learn the two joystick thing so I can play Halo with the guys, although I am still relectant. I feel that it is hopeless at this point now that they have thousands of hours and me zero. And I am gettting old and dont have much time to waste playing games. How long would it take me to catch up? Are there wii games that would be appropriate for learning the two joystick thing? I assume that once you learn one two joystick shooter, you can play them all, correct?

You'll probably like mario galaxy and mario galaxy 2 which is coming out, they're very mario64-esque except for a tad more linear and directed twords your goal. The 2d mario is also very good (my favorite new game of the last quite a few years actually, as Mario 3 is certainly in my top 5 and it has a great deal of throwbacks to that and world.), and there are alot of other 2d retro remakes which have varying levels of quality (megaman 9, and soon megaman 10, a castlevania remake, a blaster master remake (which i found highly disappointing), a contra remake, among others, especially konami games. Other then those fairly key offerings in my opinion the system isn't all that great, I've played a great deal of the games and few of them hold my interest. The Mario Kart is somewhat better in my opinion then MK64 for racing, but well worse for battle. The smash brothers I have trouble deciding which i prefer. The new worms game (not released yet) looks somewhat promising as it doesn't seem to require waggle controls, but you could find that (and a lot of 2d games) on other systems as well. It probably wouldn't take that long to learn a joystick shooter in reality, I don't play them as I neither like dual analog input for shooters or for that reason shooters in general, but once you get a feel for them it's not that bad. Other games I could recommend for the system is Zack and Wiki which is a pretty hard little throwback to oldschool adventure games (speaking of which there are also ports of the new Monkey Island games, and the new Sam and Max games, if you were ever into that genre), but that's more mentally challenging then physically challenging, it has a bit of waggle for interacting with objects. If you like turn based strategy games the fire emblem game is good though extraordinarily time consuming and ridiculously difficult. There is a pretty good 2d hack and slash game with nice large metroid-ish maps called Muramasa the demon blade, though that can be a tad hardcore at times, only good if you like arcade fighters or brawlers. There is a good Rune Factory game on wii, which is basically a Harvest Moon with dungeons, which may be interesting if you ever played old harvest moon, I'd say it's the best since HM64. The Punchout game is good if you like Punchout. If you liked marvel vs capcom there is a new vs game which is very similar, though with a japanese company most people in the us have never heard of. That is all the games I can think of as possibly notable really.

If you're entire goal is bomberman with random online people you're probably better off with another console due to friendcodes really killing your ability to play with random people and then add them to a list to play later (360 is probably the best for that but with a fee, ps3 is probably the second best). If you want local play the wii will probably be fine, and less expensive. If you want online play with only a few friends it should be tolerable too.

As for this whole return to the old gameplay, while I'm somewhat happy about it there aren't many notable games that bring new ideas to the table, so alot of the time playing new games I have a hard time justifying not just playing the old ones again which are often superior (blastermaster over blastermaster reloaded for instance). Also makes it really hard for me to like the wii as a system nearly as much as i liked any of the systems before it, as the next gen ideas aren't often things i like, and the past gen ideas were done better before when the ideas were pushing some bounds and not just trying to direct nostalgia. I went from not playing wii games in months to playing over 30 hours of dreamcast which i had just plugged in a week, something that i don't theorize will happen on the wii for another decent period of time. I find it alot easier to say old systems like that are amazing systems then any current or last gen systems, as they all tend to have a lot more games that even now I can recommend over anything current. The only current wii games I'll likely replay completley are New Super Mario Wii and Mario Galaxy, both which i've beat several times already.

And yeah, the new mario games really are that awesome :P

Let's see... All I've got on the Wii is that game disc that came with it, and Bomberman '93 and '94 (why didn't they translate it anyway? Not like there's a whole lot of text there... oh well) from the online shop. I've heard good things about New Super Mario Brothers, and I've played Super Smash Brothers Brawl and it's pretty good. I haven't tried that Bomberman Blast because I haven't downloaded it yet, but I didn't hear a whole lot of good things about it in the topic about it on this forum. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have its good points, though.

I'm going to have to concede as well that there aren't a lot of really good games on the Wii... But then, if you're okay with buying a system just for a couple of games, it's got some good games on it.

My brother has an Xbox 360 with online support, and I think he has enjoyed it... But I don't know a whole lot about Xboxes so I can't tell you anything more than that.

I have a Wii. It's alright I guess. I haven't gotten anything new for it in a while, seeing as there isn't really any games I'd want for it that serves some practically. But here's a brief list of games that I played for it that are pretty fun (in no particular order).

WarioWare Inc. Smooth Moves - If you don't mind looking like a moron with your friends, this game is probably one of the funnest games on the console. It's only really fun with friends though and can get really boring by yourself, unfortunately (the sole reason why I haven't bought it).

Super Smash Bros. Brawl - I don't think I need to explain why it's awesome. I bought my Wii for this game alone.

Super Mario Galaxy - Mario 64 in space, pretty much.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella/Darkside Chronicles - Fun arcade style shooter games based on the Resident Evil games. You don't really need to play any of other games to get what goes on in these games, although it's more enjoyable if you have.

House of the Dead 2 & 3 - Another arcade style shooter featuring zombies and such. Essentially exact ports of the original games.

Metroid Prime 3/Trilogy - Although motion senor heavy, I found these games to be completely enjoyable. It's basically first person Metroid. If you plan on getting this, you're probably better off getting Trilogy, as you get all three games (with Wii controls) for the price of one.

Super Paper Mario - Plays like old school Mario games, but features some RPG elements like HP and experience points. It also has some goofy characters and plot, like the other Mario RPG games.

Another cool thing about the Wii is that you can purchase and play all sorts of old school games, including NES, Super NES, Nintendo 64, and even other consoles like the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, Master System, PC Engine/TurboGrafx, and Neo Geo. They also have some neat original games for download as well, like Mega Man 9 and the newly released 10, Gradius and CastleVania Rebirth and others.

Another plus with the Wii is that it plays GameCube games too, so you can get some of the good games you missed for it as well.

Also, I actually find the D-pad for the PlayStation consoles to be rather comfortable. :/

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The Local Video Gaming Lunatic

Recent stuff I'm into:

Watching: A Certain Scientific Railgun (ep.14, stalled), Hoshi no Kirby (ep. 71, stalled), Nazo No Kanojo X (ep. 8), Acchi Kocchi (ep. 8)
Reading: nothing