This is a weird, weird week in gaming. Besides the WarioWare D.I.Y. two-fer on DS and WiiWare, and perhaps some DLC if you're so inclined, there's nothing worth playing. OK, so you've got Sakura Wars: So Long My Love on the Wii, which is the very definition of a niche game – it's a mech fighting game crossed with a dating simulator, and if that's not the most Japanese thing you've ever heard of, I don't know what is. I'm curious to check it out, but not $50 curious.
The other "big" release is… sigh… Dead or Alive Paradise, which allows you to take pictures of (read: stalk) the digital ladies of the Dead or Alive series. We talked about this subject at length (no pun intended) on our first podcast. If you want some auditory titillation before you, uh, go out and get this creepy, creepy game, check it out.
On the other hand…
A week like this should be seen as a boon for gamers. On every system, we've seen massive release after massive release, owing to all of these games getting out of the way of Modern Warfare 2 and New Super Mario Bros. Wii's epic struggle back in November. I've got a pile of 30 – 50 hour games to slog through, including Mass Effect 2, Final Fantasy XIII, and (less pressingly) Bioshock, Half-Life 2, Oblivion, Ogre Battle 64, and Metroid Prime 3. It's tough out here for a videogame reviewer. So I'd just like to say thank you to the industry for releasing literally nothing that I care about this week… it's actually helped out quite a bit.
I just found out how Twitter works
and so I'd like to respond to messages that were sent to me in January.
First, our good friend Cameron Campos linked us to this interesting video on the importance of storytelling in gaming as it relates to the teaching of videogame concepts. Check it here.
And to Rachel Molnar, I'm impressed at your ability to get to world 7 with four friends in NSMBWii. I barely made it to the end on my own. It's a hard-ass game!
And from Mason Pitzel, well, it's not exactly videogame related, but it IS Crispin Glover singing about clowns:
So keep sending your messages in! We're @vigigames. Maybe we'll make a post about whatever you send in months later!