Sunday Roundup: 3/22/15

Just like Need for Speed Nitro before it, Avatar here is the lower end result of winning an auction online. Here’s a fun fact about me: I’ve never seen nor know anything about the Avatar series. A lot of friends of mine say it’s cool and I’ll like it, but I’ve never gotten around to watching it.

More trends continuing with another on-rails shooter added to the collection. Sadly, Chicken Blaster wasn’t well received upon release (if you couldn’t tell by the title, cover art, or concept). But for a few bucks that doesn’t mean I won’t give it a try. I mean, how badly can you mess up the genre? Right? …

After discovering the poorly named Dance Dance Revolution and Dance Dance Revolution II on Wii are actually a continuation of the DDR Hottest Party series exclusive to the Wii, I had to pick these games up. It’s been way easier finding copies of Dance Dance Revolution than the sequel here, but usually those first games are in poor condition. This week I was more than happy to lay a five down and claim this game as my own!

Super happy to have finally tracked a copy of this one down after foolishly passing on it some time ago. Here’s a fun story for about the game too: when the GameStop employees were looking for the game behind the counter, they couldn’t find it. Figuring someone may have listed it as a LEGO game, considering there are two LEGO Indiana Jones games out there, I suggested looking in the “L” section instead of the “I” section. Sure enough, there it was. Go poor employee logic!

Hooray! Another Kirby game! I secretly love this series, but somehow missed out on a lot of the DS games. When I was playing this one to make sure it worked, I noticed the controls were a bit wonky. It felt like jump and attack buttons were mixed up: I was constantly jumping when I wanted to attack and hitting enemies when I wanted to jump. It could take some getting used to and not be a problem, but I just felt like it shouldn’t have been like that to begin with.

The current obsession of the weekend, Mario Party 10 has been slowly taking over my gaming life. Not nearly as memorable or fun as past titles, which is incredibly disappointing, I’m still having a good time with the game (Check out my Twitch channel to see a whole 5 hours of gameplay!). Don’t let the crazy negative reviews fool you: for what it is, Mario Party 10 is a fun multiplayer game that is light on the minigames, but high on productions. Expect a full review soon!

Coincidentally I picked up another game in the Mario Party line, the DS exclusive Mario Party DS. While I’m happy to have it in the collection because it’s a Mario game and all, the real game in the series I want to get my hands on is Mario Party Advance for the Game Boy Advance. It had a fun art style and I think it even incorporated e-Reader cards! A collector’s dream!

Essentially a Tony Hawk game but with Mat Hoffman as lead and BMX bikes instead of skateboards. This just so happens to be one of the first Dreamcast games I ever owned as well. Sadly for Mat though, I always felt this game was far inferior to the game it’s imitating, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Worse yet for the dude, a rival BMX riders game, Dave Mirra’s Freestyle BMX, and the sequel were way better in my gaming mind as well. Man, he just can’t catch a break!

Looking remarkably similar to a game I picked up a few weeks ago called Twin Strike: Operation Thunder, Pacific Liberator is a helicopter game from Zoo (who just so happened to make Twin Strike!). I was going to pass on the game because it looked like it wasn’t really selling for much more than a couple dollars, but after considering how that usually doesn’t pan out well for me, I decided to pick it up. Who knows: maybe I’ll do a review of it someday. It apparently can be beaten in just a few hours.

This has to be one of the most riveting games ever made /sarcasm. Railroad Tycoon II, believe it or not, garnered some great reviews back in its day, but that doesn’t make me want to play it any more than I already don’t. It was published by a young Take-Two Interactive, who currently own the 2K and Rockstar labels. And they used to publish railroad games!

Rampage: Total Destruction has been at pretty much every GameStop I’ve been in, but I always passed on it for one reason or another. Maybe because this week I was in a buying mood I decided to finally pick it up. Fun fact about the Rampage series: In the game Rampage: World Tour, one of the cities you get to destroy is Michigan City, Indiana. My home town! Why it was included was beyond me, but I found it so cool you could destroy my own city. Granted, by home doesn’t have giant skyscrapers, huge neon signs, or that many fire hydrants, but hey, I’ll take it.

There are a lot of these Rabbids games on the Wii, and as a matter of fact the first Rayman Raving Rabbids happens to be one of the first games I ever owned on my Wii. Seeing this third game in the series relatively cheap and in good condition has inspired me to start the journey of tracking down the other titles in the minigame series. Some of them can be pretty expensive, so hopefully I find them soon.

At first glance, this game looks like it’s some kind of Fischer Price or Playmobil tie-in game, but it’s not. It’s an original hero and idea put in game form. Interestingly and the second reason I bought the game aside from it being a PS1 game for $2, the developers are Psygnosis, a then well-known developer of great titles such as the Lemmings and Wipeout series.

A sequel to Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz for Wii, Step & Roll utilizes the Balance Board in traditional Monkey Ball gameplay. The Wii remote can still be used as well, thank god, because while I want to get all I can out of that balance board, being forced to use it for a game that has successfully NOT used it for this long would be upsetting. I remember one of my greatest moments with the series was back on the GameCube with the minigames: I hope the minigames in this version are up to par!

The Tony Hawk series continues to thrive on damn near every console I own thanks to another pickup from Goodwill. While the price wasn’t as low as I’d like, I couldn’t pass it up because it was in great condition! It was around the time of this game’s release (which is the 7th in the series) that I was officially done with the games. It really started with Tony Hakw’s Underground, but by the time of this game I was totally out.

My brother had this game on the PS2 while I had Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 on the GameCube. While I contested that THPS3 was better than THPS4 (emotions aside at the time, I still thought it was better), I still found this fourth game to be a faithful edition of the skating series. I never spent as much time with this one as the previous three games however, most likely because it was my brother’s and I didn’t get to play on his PS2 that much (at the time I didn’t own a PS2 console. Oh how the times have changed). I’d like to give this one another shot though, because I hear it’s great!

Here’s another example of a game I passed on before that I was kicking myself for since. Wacky World of Sports is a multiplayer minigame collection for Wii, which doesn’t really set it apart for the mountains of those exact same games on the system. What does set it apart however is including non-traditional “Sports” as the games. I think what really gets me though is that its by Sega. Possible Sonic hidden reference somewhere inside? Time will tell…

Released during the height of the Tony Hawk craze, and being made by the same company as the skating legend’s franchise, Wakeboarding Unleashed takes the same formula as the THPS games and slaps it on the sport of wakeboarding. What’s wakeboarding you ask? Well, it’s when you get a large surfboard thing, hold onto a tether line from the back of a speed boat, and go about 60 mph on the water doing tricks and trying not to drown! The video game sounds like fun. The real life thing sounds dangerous and likely to induce burns and humiliation.