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Uuuh ... thanks j03.
I do enjoy the adventures of Mario and family ... and also the Zelda franchise.
I was a BIG nintendo fan, and still enjoy playing my N64. (My sister currently has custody of the SNES, so that she at least has something to play with. I ought to check with her one of these days to see if she's actually using it, or if she wants to perhaps move up to the PS world ...) However, their corporate decision to drop the old systems like a hot rock and promote the hell out of the new one does not give me warm fuzzy feelings. At least Sony continues to support the PSone, and made their new system backward compatible with the old and did not alienate their fan base.
Most of the other games available for the GameCube are not the kind of things I find interesting. Pikmin? Oh man, I would NOT touch that with a ten foot pole. Bossing around seeds? Not for me. Gimme a good sniper rifle and let me pick off targets, thank you very much.
Anyway, there is an astonishing amount of cuteness involved in Mario Sunshine, which includes any number of places where you just HAVE to say, "Oh Gee that's clever indeed!" When there is some little game feature that gives you a reminder of the old NES Mario days ... like the "underground" music every time mario hops into a manhole cover, or the scary rendering of the Pirhana plants in the new version of the game. The graphics were awesomely crisp. But maybe I'm just reacting to the fact that a lot of the games I tend to play are of the dark, brooding, grainy, atmospheric variety.
I am starting to adjust to the new controller configuration, but there are more buttons than I have fingers. Luckily my friend has an 8 year old son who is able to help me through the more difficult parts. I'm actually doing fairly well at his point, and I think in just a couple hours of play I got 5 or 6 sunsprites. The stuff I tend to get stuck on are the "test of skill, agility, and eye hand coordination" stuff ... like those damn races. I'm assuming that in the first race (on those surfin' blooper things) I have to get my course time down to under 40 seconds, which is a hassle and a half. I hated the Slide Races in Super Mario World 64 and STILL haven't beaten the damn aztec turtle in DK64 despite numerous tries and careful reading of the hint book.
I don't see myself getting a 'cube in the next month or two, but now that the bug has bit, It is likely that sometime this summer I'll hit a sale or get a coupon or just say "oh what the heck" and head over to the EB World in the shopping center in East Norriton.
In the meantime, I'm still more than entranced with the many games available for the PS2, so finding time for ANOTHER game system will not be easy. Does anybody know where the damn train has to be in Max Payne when I start my running jump so I can actually land on top of it rather than *splatting* onto the tracks? Is this actually a "bullet time" kind of moment or am I just lame?
I'm likely to set that aside for a bit though, since I got "Fatal Frame" for Christmas ... I played the X-Box version one night and thought it was even spookier than Silent Hill 2.
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