This is the first week of a new year. Every time the calendar changes from one year to another it’s a perfect opportunity to not only look back, but it’s also the perfect opportunity to look ahead. 2011 was a great year for games and for Nintendo Okie. I played a lot of great games. Met a lot of great people and lost way more Mario Kart games than I should have. We had our best year ever at Nintendo Okie and there are definitely quite a few people to thank for that.
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I don’t think anyone is going to argue that 2011 was a great year for video games. It started off strong in the early year with games like Portal 2 and was capped off by a huge lineup of games including the latest game in the Legend of Zelda franchise. Overall I played 98 games this year, most of them to completion, but not all. I think pared that down to a list that actually only included 13 games that I considered to be the best of the best for this year. Then I removed three of those games and were left with my top 10 games of 2011.
It actually ended up being very difficult to rank the games this year, because I think all 10 of these games are solid experiences that I enjoyed immensely. I debated long and hard about the top two games on my list and which one I thought deserved the top billing. It wasn’t easy at all, but here are my 10 favorite games of 2011.
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I’m just going to come right out and say it. “My name is Tony and I like the Wii Zapper.” There, I said it. It’s off my chest. Really, though. I know the Zapper is just a piece of plastic that you place the Wii Remote in to pretend like you’re holding a gun, but I like the way it feels. I like the way it adds just a touch of immersiveness to games and I’m going to tell you why.
This past weekend I took my church’s youth group on a trip to a local bowling alley. After we finished our hour of bowling we spent some time in the arcade there since we couldn’t drive the go-karts in the building. This arcade is one of the better ones in town. It’s fairly sizeable and it’s got a good selection of stuff to play. Most of it ticket based games that you use to buy stupid prizes and Tootsie Rolls, but some of their arcade games are pretty good. The one I want to talk about, and got me realizing why I like peripherals like the Zapper and the Top Shot Elite, was Terminator Salvation.
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The Nintendo 3DS brought the advent of QR Codes to my attention. Before I had a 3DS I had not really noticed those little black and white pictures that are used in Sunday circulars, pizza advertisements and many other things. Now that I’ve had some experience with them I’m noticing them everywhere. I can’t do anything with them, most of the time, because I don’t have a smart phone that can read them. I do, however, have a 3DS that can read QR codes and that’s what we’re here to talk about today.
For those of you that don’t know, QR codes (aka Quick Response Codes) are little images, similar to bar codes, which contain data that can be read by devices with a camera and appropriate software. They were created back in the mid 90’s by a subsidiary of the Toyota company as a way to track the position of cars on the assembly line. They can store more than 7,000 characters worth of data in a small space that can be used to link to websites that give you more information about a product, or in the case of the 3DS download new content to your system in a very short period of time.
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I’ve noticed a disturbing trend over the last week that I wanted to talk about. If you’ve seen the same situation then you know who I’m talking about. It’s disturbing to me, and this is only my opinion remember, because they use uneducated opinions to tell their readers whether they should spend their hard earned money to purchase a game.
It involves a regular feature where they have editors tell you whether you should buy a game or not. A feature like that, in and of itself is not that big a problem as that is essentially what game reviews are. They’re one persons opinion of a game, based on a total play through of the game, to give you an idea of what you can expect should you purchase the game in question. My problem with this particular feature is that it very clearly uses the opinions of people who have limited time with the game in a demo setting as well as the opinion of someone who hasn’t even played the game to tell you whether you should buy it or not. I have a serious problem with this because I think it lacks any sort of credibility.
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This week I got to try out some technology not necessarily intended by Nintendo, but is available none the less. It’s something that is also currently available for the Playstation 3 and the PSP. I’m talking about remote play. Now, before you say it, I know there isn’t any form of that technology currently available on a Nintendo system. I can’t download a game on the Wii and transfer to any of my current DS systems. Even though, it’s not officially available, it’s still possible with one game, and that game is Metroid.
I began playing through Metroid just before we recorded our most recent podcast on Saturday night. I made enough progress that I felt I was actually accomplishing something in the game. I continued after the show with Shelby guiding me, from memory, to the places that I needed to go to get some upgrades. (The simple fact that Shelby can tell me where to go from memory is a scary thought.) I decided I was going to complete a play through of Metroid for the first time because of this.
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Holidays mean that there’s not a lot that’s going on that’s going to be news worthy. PR companies are closed and new screenshots aren’t being sent out. We’re going to get you everything we can today, but it’s been pretty slow. I spent the morning out with the family playing at the park and wading in the creek. It’s the first time it hasn’t been 100+ degrees in a long time so we took advantage of the mid 70 degree weather.
Obviously the biggest news of the day is the official announcement of Dragon Quest X: Awakening of the Five Tribes. This was a game that was announced by in 2008 and was only briefly talked about. Since then there has been little to no word on the game. This is going to be an online enabled Japanese style RPG that appears to be very similar to the previous two entries in the series.
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A few weeks ago Shelby sat down and compiled the list of his favorite 10 games of all time so I only thought it fair that I do the same. I’m actually doing very much the same thing that he did. It’s close to bed time and I’ve been at work all day. I’ve got cats meowing in the background and a police helicopter flying overhead. Despite all that I’m going to give you the list of my favorite games of all time.
My criteria for selecting the games will be a little different from Shelby. Rather than looking at my collection I went through every console I’ve owned and listed the games I remember most fondly from every system. I figure if I can’t even remember the name of the game it probably didn’t have that great an impact on me. That gave me a list of 15 games to choose from so I’ve got a little bit of paring down to do. The games range across nearly every Nintendo system (with the exception of the Nintendo 64 as there aren’t really any games that I can remember enjoying very fondly).
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I don’t think that anyone can argue that the release schedule for the Wii for the remainder of the year looks a bit barren and bleak for North America. We only know of a handful of titles that are coming out between now and January 1st. Those titles include Rhythm Heaven, Kirby Returns to Dreamland and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. There are some high profile titles coming out for areas outside of North America, but there’s one title that I haven’t heard anything about in quite a long time that I’m very worried about the future of; Dragon Quest X.
This game was originally announced way back in 2008 around the time we also began to see a lot of information for Dragon Quest IX for the DS. It was announced by Yuji Horii that the game would be coming to the Wii at some point in the future. Square Enix and Nintendo were both concerned that the franchise doesn’t do as well here in North America so they were going to work closely together, possibly even going so far as to have Nintendo publish the title. This was seen as a way to bolster the profile of the game in this region. They tried the same thing with Dragon Quest IX on the DS and it worked.
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During our run up to E3 I had mentioned numerous times that I thought it was time for Nintendo to really take the opportunity to create something new. The last time we’ve really seen Nintendo take a chance on a new franchise was with the release of Pikmin for the GameCube. That game hit stores way back in 2001. That means it’s been more than 10 years since Nintendo created a new, high-profile franchise.
I’ve also had they don’t necessarily have to go out on that limb and create a brand new character, but they could go back into their archives. Nintendo has a huge catalog of characters dating all the way back to the mid 80’s. Characters like Mario, Link and Samus have huge libraries of titles that they’ve starred in. Many more of them could have been considered stars for the company at one time or another, but have fallen off of the radar. Some of them have played bit parts in other character’s games. I’m here today to focus on the characters that I think deserve to have the starring role for the first time. These are characters that have been around for years, but have never starred in their own games.
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The Great Friend Code Exchange
