Nintendo does not feel confident in their ability to effortlessly innovate in a way that comes across as natural so they come up with touchscreens and motion control in the hope that they will inspire new ideas as easily as the switch to 3D did. The Wii and the DS are an extension of that issue. But Zelda has been kind of lost since then and we'll have to see if Skyward Sword can get it back on track. In Mario's case, Sunshine comes across as a mistep as the idea in Super Mario Galaxy to use planets worked like a charm and did not feel forced. So they had to make a conscious effort to make them stand out which is a recipe for a forced idea. It's like that's the point where Nintendo could not effortlessly make a respectable sequel to those franchises that provided new experiences. But both of those ideas come across as incredibly forced and don't really add much anyway. Both games try very hard to distinguish themselves from their predecessors with FLUDD and the cel shaded graphics. The thing is is that it seemed that Nintendo KNEW that. The four titles I listed as the best provide experiences that were not available on a previous console. They weren't bad but they didn't stand out the way Super Mario 64 and the N64 Zeldas did. As a result I found those two games somewhat disappointing. The Gamecube did not have this luxury so titles like Super Mario Sunshine and Wind Waker were not doing anything too different from what had been done before. The N64 had the advantage that nearly every sequel it had did something vastly different and original from its predecessor. One thing to note is that the four titles I listed had no real N64 equivalent. Pikmin 1 is also a must-play but Pikmin 2 is the better title. The two games are more or less equals anyway. I personally prefer Metroid Prime 2 but I can't really explain why I prefer it. I would consider the best Gamecube games to be Pikmin 2, Zelda: Four Swords and the Metroid Primes. Conspicuous Dole sponsorship? Double checked. Incessantly bright and optimistic music? Check. In a system launch speckled with sports, ports, and Luigi's Mansion, Super Monkey Ball stood as more than a bit of an outlier. With no small number of bufferless stretches, analog-stick twisting routes, and frequent instances of “ Fall Out,” this selection of courses could soon invert the goofy smile generated by the rest of the game. Skilled players could chew through the Beginner and Advanced modes without significant hair-pulling, but Expert, which ratcheted the number of stages up to a thoroughly scorching 50, leaned more in the direction of sadistically challenging. The distinct leaps in difficulty, which could keep even the most skilled players active for a long time, also accounted for the game’s only true moments of frustration. From twisting courses loaded with power-ups in Monkey Race, to frenzied primate pugilist brawls in Monkey Fight, to precision launching and landing of a gliding monkey, Pilotwings-style, on a far-off platform in Monkey Target, the bevy of extras present rounded the overall experience in a manic way that made sensible use of the system’s multiplayer-friendly controller port count.
#Ski or die nes goofy series
While spin-offs and sequels led the series through a cavalcade of iterations, few were as revelatory or memorable as the original, a fact that speaks volumes to the lasting appeal of a game that favors substance over style, and content over convention.Īlthough they could experience the draw of the arcade version with repeated courses through the extensive main game, players could now also choose to compete with each other in a selection of combative mini-games. Instead, developer Amusement Vision took the arcade curiosity and gave it the depth a good launch game should have. If it hadn't picked up the "Super" or received an array of additions, Monkey Ball probably would've been a fine, if fleeting, console experience. Once that concept, which eliminated any extraneous frustration, was grasped, the game became a more intuitive experience of reading and reacting to the puzzle-like surroundings. The dueling simplicity and complexity of the game was a product of its straightforward mechanics: In the process of guiding a capsule-bound ape through a swath of harrowing platforms to a narrow goal, the only point of input was the analog stick, which in fact controls the tilt of the stage, not the character. Tracking a path not unlike a game it closely resembled-the arcade and NES hit Marble Madness-Super Monkey Ball found a steady home on Nintendo's newest machine in 2001 only after spending the previous year as simply Monkey Ball, an arcade game sporting a unorthodox yet appropriate banana-shaped joystick. NWR Score: 9 (Billy Berghammer) 9.5 (David Trammell)