I accomplished a lot gaming-wise last year. For the first time, I kept track of every game I bought, how much I paid, as well as the date I obtained the game. I did this for my beaten and completed games too. So the stats rundown?

New games: 23 retail, 13 free/gift/borrowed
Beaten games: 29
Completed games: 11
Money spent: $410.60

Now this may not include EVERY game I came across this year. A lot of Steam games I left out until I actually played them. :x (For example, I bought a few indie packs of 5 games on Steam and only intended to play 2-3 of them. If I ever played the other ones, I added them to the list but otherwise they went unchecked.) I’m going to go into detail with lists after this so click more to see that if you’re interested.

New Games
Grey is unbeaten, green is beaten, and yellow is completed. :)

Finished Games
I’ll list everything I beat OR completed, along with a little blurb about it. :)

Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix (Beaten January 4th)
I think of all the KH games, the first one might be my least favourite, but playing the updated FM made it a lot better. Skipping cutscenes when I died was excellent and I liked all the additions. I just wish I’d chosen defence to bolster in the beginning instead of magic. :( I didn’t even get guard until after the second half so I struggled a lot most of the way through.

Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix+ (Completed January 7th)
Following my success in finishing the first KH, I actually managed to do the VERY LAST THINGS I needed for completion in order to see the short for Birth by Sleep. I was right down to the wire when I did this if you check the date I received BBS in the mail. :x

Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (Beaten January 29th)
So much KH in the beginning of the year! This took me a few weeks to wrap up. I never did manage to complete this one. :(

Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth (Completed March 4th)
After KH I might have been video game’d out for a while, hence no major progress, but I did finish up this game in time for Pokémon HeartGold.

Pokémon Trozei (Beaten March 12th)
…I also finished this Pokémon game in time for Pokémon HeartGold.

Pokémon Blue (Beaten March 21st, Completed March 22nd)
Technically it was in the same stint… I think? Regardless, I rushed this on an emulator in 100x speed. It was a lot of fun.

Pokémon HeartGold (Beaten April 6th)
I believe my excuse for taking so long with this Pokémon game was the fact that midterms were in full force during the timeframe it came out. :( I also didn’t like Johto as much as I remembered. I played mainly because of the Cherubi/Cherrim on my team that I traded in from Diamond.

Trauma Center: New Blood (Beaten June 8th)
Another huge gap, this one due to exams and then work. I played through this on co-op with my brother and it was our introduction to the series. I had a blast and we’ve now got all the Wii games (with one we haven’t played yet). It’s ridiculously over-the-top plots with great gameplay.

Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales (Beaten June 9th)
There we go, two games in a row. Excellent. This game was adorable and great for rush hour traffic.

Guitar Hero 5 (Beaten June 25th)
Played this over a few nights with my brother. I’m not a huge fan but it was an easy game to just toss on the beaten list, haha.

Plants VS. Zombies (Beaten July 12th)
A friend had been hounding me to get this game for about a year and I caved when it went on sale on Steam. I loved it so much. I’ve never really played this sort of tower defence game before so it really pulled me in easily.

Left 4 Dead (Beaten July 13th)
Same Steam sale. I got obsessed with this game when a friend finally bought me the sequel on Steam. I had to buy this almost the next day. I beat it sooner.

Picross 3D (Beaten July 17th)
This was not as good as the original Picross. I don’t like this in 3D.

Final Fantasy XIII (Beaten July 21st, Completed August 31)
Started this way back in April and it took me forever to beat, then even longer to complete. I loved the battle system and the fact that all the sidequests were battles is likely the only reason I did them. My main party was Lightning, Fang and Vanille. (I love all-female parties in the more recent FFs.) I had a lot of fun with this.

Tales of Eternia (Beaten July 30th)
I borrowed this from a friend in May. I hated the battle system, the plot was mediocre, but I liked the characters so I stuck to it. I ended up playing the last few hours on auto so that I wouldn’t have to bother controlling anyone. And I’d been using a caster, too, so all I had to do was STAND THERE. Yeah, I hated the battle system that much. Good game otherwise, though.

Wii Music (Beaten August 5th)
A fun toy. My review is one of the few things actually on this blog. :P

Dissidia: Final Fantasy (Beaten August 10th)
I wasn’t very good at this game until I started using Terra, who was the very last person whose story I finished. XD; She’s a bit cheaper than everyone else, with ranged magic attacks so I excelled. :P

Left 4 Dead (Beaten August 17th)
I bought the 360 version because I liked the PC version so much and most of my friends are console gamers. ‘Nough said.

Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (Beaten August 27th)
I loved Phantom Hourglass and everyone told me this game sucked in comparison, but I finally gave it a try. It wasn’t as bad as everyone says but I do agree it’s not great.

Left 4 Dead 2 (Beaten August 29th)
Left 4 Dead 2 (Beaten August 29th)
Dropping them together. Both the PC and 360 ones were beaten in the same day, with the Parish campaign being the last thing I needed. :p

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (Beaten September 1)
This was a long time in the making. x_X I played the beginning like… 5 times. Finally made it past chapter 3 this time and enjoyed the game, though the battle system was awful (Wii controls are horrible, ugh).

Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (Beaten September 10)
And time for the English version! I actually got to the point where I was only one or two Arena matches away from completing this game by the end of the year but alas, didn’t get the chance. :(

Professor Layton & the Unwound Future (Beaten September 19, Completed November 12th)
Yay, Layton! I rushed to finish this before Pokémon came out and did it. I went back after I was done with Pokémon and finished each puzzle I missed.

Penny Arcade: Episode 2 (Beaten September 23rd)
I was so heartbroken to finish this and learn there was no third game! ;_;

Resistance: Fall of Man (Beaten October 11th)
My brother and I wanted something to play together during Thanksgiving and this was the only co-op game we had with us. It turned out to be okay though we had to play on Easy and we still sucked.

Pokémon Black (Beaten Nov 1st)
My first Pokémon game in Japanese! This was interesting, and I won’t be importing another game ever again because I didn’t enjoy it as much, but it was a good learning experience. Got a few new favourites from the game, though thankfully nothing overtook Cherrim.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (Beaten November 24th)
To be honest, I wasn’t really looking forward to this. I still haven’t even touched multiplayer, but I did finish the single player campaign and I really enjoyed it. I just wish there had been a longer gap between this and AC2. If this is an annual series I’m going to get sick of it…

Half-Life (Beaten November 28th)
This took me so long. I’m horrible at the game! I’d barely do anything every time I’d sit down to play for an hour. Eventually, when I was about halfway through, I went “fuck it” and turned on cheats. I tossed on invincibility and never looked back. I started having fun with the game and I still sucked at it so I don’t feel too bad.

Recettear (Beaten December 7th)
This was a surprise. It was in an indie pack on Steam for $5 so I bought it and that was one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. This is a gem of a game and I recommend it to everyone. It’s quite the time sink though.

Puzzle Agent (Completed December 8th)
I beat this in a night. I really hope there will be more installments. This had an amazing ambience and while the puzzles were pretty simple and short, the plot more than made up for it. I’m just glad I didn’t pay a lot for it…

Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (Completed December 12th)
This ending confused me. I don’t remember a lot of parts of it, meaning I started to doubt if I ever actually did beat it way back when… but I also distinctly remember handing over every single mask and obtaining the Fierce Deity’s mask. But I would have had to complete the game before this to get that… right? o_O Oh well.

And Yet It Moves (Completed December 18th)
An interesting game but I probably wouldn’t play it again. I found it pretty frustrating at times and boring at others. I don’t regret playing it though.

VVVVVV (Beaten December 27th)
Again, a friend wanted me to get this and I didn’t want to pay the full price for it so I got it during Steam’s Christmas Sale. It’s fun, even if I suck at it and died over a thousand times while beating it. (Whyyy did it have a death counter??)

Trauma Team (Beaten December 29th)
My brother and I started this back in… November, I think. We made it all the way to the Autopsy part before we couldn’t go on and then had to put it on hold until I was home for Christmas break. I only liked the operation one, the diagnosis one, and my surprising favourite, the emergency response one. Everything else was annoying. Especially endoscopy. GODDAMN YOU ENDOSCOPY.

Ben There, Dan That! (Completed December 30th)
The end of this year made me realize how much I like puzzlers and point-and-clicks. I really, REALLY liked the dialogue in this. It’s just a shame the sequel is more vulgar for no real reason. (This is wittier and I definitely prefer it.)

………..phew! I believe that’s all. This year was really good for my gaming. My resolutions for next year are pretty much to spend less ($400 is almost as much as rent has been most of the year ._.) and to beat/complete way more than I buy. It’d also be nice to beat everything I buy but I’m iffy on that one so far. Regardless, I hope it’s an even better year than this one.

Left 4 Dead 2 (Xbox 360)

Sadly, I think the day after I wrote my last entry, while I was at work, my brother’s friend took back his copy of L4D. (This was very unfortunate as I’d scheduled time with my friends to play it… only to finally get each other together to realize that, oh, I didn’t actually have the game ffffff.) Within a few days, my brother and I were going into withdrawal (well, not really) so we agreed to split the cost of the sequel, since we’d already plowed through all the campaign modes in the original game and wanted something new.

Of course, I’ve played almost all the campaign modes in the PC version–though I believe I’ve only managed to complete one or two. So it wasn’t totally new for me but more of my close friends have this version of the game so I can play with them now. I am slightly regretting this purchase, though, since I definitely prefer the original game over the sequel (I prefer the characters, the campaigns, etc.) and my roommate for the next year already owns this game. orz. :(

Anyway! Been playing a campaign or so every other day. It’s lots of fun, even if splitscreen is a little hard to get used to. I suck at Versus mode, which I tried briefly before giving up and just going to bed the other night. XD Will probably end up buying the original L4D soon enough.

Final Fantasy XIII (Playstation 3)

I’m a bit surprised I actually decided to go back to this–I felt a bit of regret when I set the game aside to concentrate on unfinished titles. I’d been doing a lot of missions before I beat the game and maxed out most of my Crystarium. So that’s mostly what I was doing when I tossed this back in the PS3 the other day.

I finished all missions except the final mission after the Titan’s quests. And the final… 3 or 4 really hard missions. I decided I’d ~max out my crystarium~ for those ones. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m grinding in that fight against the Behemoth King & the Megi…thing. The two beasts fighting before the… I want to say Meggiora Highlands but that’s Tales of the Abyss, lmao. :( Anyway, with the Growth Egg I get about 13,200 CP each time I battle, and using Lightning, Fang & Snow as Commando, the battle takes 5 or 6 seconds each time. So I get quite a bit! But it’s really boring so I tend to watch TV on the TV next to the TV I play it on. (Y-yeah we have a congregation of TVs in the basement…)

It’s dull work but I get so excited each time I finish off a Crystarium! I’m currently working on everyone’s 5th Crystarium. :) I’m about halfway through that and then just the one more and I’m done! And then I will have no excuse for failing repeatedly against the last missions. *wibble*

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (Wii)

I can actually put this on here this time because I finally sat down to play it this afternoon! And I am even more frustrated with the game than I was last week! HOORAY!

So last time I left off in the Temple of Lightning. Which has a ton of backtracking. Now this wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t filled with narrow pathways with basically unavoidable battles (the monsters for which respawn as soon as you’re out of sight, pretty much) that take forever. And to top it all off, the annoying walkways in the dark where if you fall off, you start over at the bottom are still there. UGH. It took me three sittings to do this temple because it was so frustrating.

I manage to make it out of the place, go through a million cutscenes and I’m immediately tossed off to the Earth Temple. Uggggh okay. Okay, I can do this. No more flying enemies, right? Well, that was right. Annoying enemies, sure, but not nearly as bad as the other temple. I make my way through and manage to get to the altar relatively quickly. Success!

Cue an annoying minigame where you have to predict falling tiles and make sure you’re always standing on a safe tile. Took me 3 or 4 tries. Annoying. But I did it! So I walk through the secret pathway that opens up and take maybe 3 steps ahead and… oh. A battle. With those stupid caterpillars that sound like horses that my brother and I have been bitching about the whole time. Whatever, big deal. Except… these are boss caterpillars or something, because one rolled into my brother and K.O.’d him instantly. So I revive him with a Life Bottle only to find I haven’t restocked and I have 4 left. Then Regal dies, so I attempt to revive him with Resurrection to save Life Bottles. In the same second, my brother and I are both steamrolled and we die. And that’s it. Game over.

….and I hadn’t saved until sometime in the Temple of Lightning. FFFFFFFFFUUUUU– To be fair, I think I saved just as I was leaving. But there were NO SAVE POINTS between that and where I died! What the hell! :( In these kinds of games I only ever save when I see a save point… very rarely do I remember to save when on the World Map (especially since this map is just a point-and-click one). Just. uggggh. We both looked at each other with disgust when we saw the location of our previous save and agreed to just turn off the Wii. We’d had enough for the night.

Hopefully I’ll go back to this soon, though it wouldn’t surprise me if I didn’t.

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (Nintendo DS)

Okay remember how I said this game wasn’t so bad? After actually going through the Fire Temple and the last (??) section of the Tower of Spirits (or whatever it is), I’m tempted to take that back. It’s getting pretty tedious and I’m getting pretty tired of it. XD; But I’m near the end so I must persevere! Especially because it’s the only handheld game I’m playing at the moment. :|

I’m currently searching out the Sand Temple and I can’t figure out the clues so I’m just going to FAQ it, I think. It certainly doesn’t help that I really only play this on the way to/from work nowadays and can barely see the screen, so even when I am doing the right thing, I’m usually doing it wrong or missing a minute detail that would be obvious if I were playing it… properly.

Regardless, I will definitely not be going for completion in this game. I will be content to ignore its existence after I’m done with it here. But maybe I’ll pick up Phantom Hourglass and keep grinding for those last Ship Parts to get complete in that. :) Sounds like a plan! So let’s just hurry this up and get the game over with.

Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (Nintendo DS)

I was told ages ago that this game sucked by several people so I never bothered with it. Now that I’m playing it, though, I wish I’d ignored those people because I actually am having fun with it. It does get pretty boring at times (omfg the train) but for the most part it’s just like Phantom Hourglass.

Right now I’ve just entered the Fire Realm and some Goron has sent me to find something to cool down the fire. Riiiight. :( I’m thinking I’ll just ignore him and go back to explore some of the other realms for a bit because I have a ton more items since the last time I did anything. Or maybe I should start my collection of train parts. n_n This game makes me want to pick up Phantom Hourglass and attempt completion again–all I needed were maybe two or three ship parts. D:

But yes, having fun with this! I just wish they hadn’t… managed to make the overworld even more boring than it was in PH. Because really, that was one thing I thought they could not mess up anymore than they did. I hate being proven wrong. D:

Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360)

I beat this on PC but my brother’s friend left his copy of the 360 game at our house the other week so we decided to play through it. I’ve beaten all the campaigns as of last night but will probably keep playing it until his friend picks it up.

Omggg last night’s campaign was ridiculous. XD We played Death Toll on Normal and it was my brother, my online friend Mork, my brother’s RL friend (who joined at random :s), and I. My brother and I had failed at the end of this one a few times the other day so we needed the help. But apparently the Director absolutely hated us.

In the second-to-last chapter, it took us maybe 3 tries to get through it. :| The first time, we died trying to go over the bridge that triggers the horde. The Tank that spawned as you head into the first building in the chapter really did a number on us. So we tried again and made it past the Tank okay! But then there was a Witch right in the way and one of us accidentally startled her at the same time a Hunter appeared and AUGH we nearly died again. Mork died during the bridge horde and the rest of us were all at <20 health, with Daniel (my bro's friend) running only on temporary health. We ran into a laundromat and found some pipe bombs (finally!) and a single health pack, so we gave it to Daniel, shot the Smoker that had wandered inside, and wandered maybe a block when a Tank came barrelling after us. My brother and I got taken down by a Hunter or something (and between the two of us, managed to kill it, but were on the ground) and then Daniel died to the Tank while we lay there. FFFFFFFF.

Third time, we were on a total roll. We managed to off the Tank without anyone taking damage. A witch spawned in the building but behind a closed door to a room we didn't need to enter. There seemed to be a horde inside the building but we made it through okay. We decided to make a run for it with the bridge which worked out for a bit... but my brother got swarmed running across it and told us to go on without him. Mork and Daniel were pretty far ahead of me when I got swarmed by everything they ran past. XD; So my brother died and I somehow managed to fend everything off and limped off toward the others only to get swarmed again, and then pounced by a hunter. They said they ran right past another Tank on the way to the Safe Room. XD; At the end, my brother took like 150 damage that chapter, I took 75, and Daniel somehow took 8. >:|

Last chapter went amazingly, despite everything. xD Daniel ran right into a Witch. (Quite literally–we had to go through a house and she was behind the door leading to the backyard so he pretty much opened the door and tripped over her.) We managed to kill her and got him a med kit. We made it to the house in the woods for the final crescendo and despite facing like 6 boomers and being ridiculously uncoordinated, we survived with no deaths in this chapter. KICK ASS!

So I got my final campaign achievement (discounting DLC since I’m not gonna pay for that). And a few others too, like rescuing someone from a closet, healing someone else when you’re at less than 10 health, and I think one other.

I love this game. :’D

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (Wii)

This probably shouldn’t be on here since I haven’t played it in a week but… hopefully writing about it slightly will make me pick it up again tomorrow or so! *optimist*

I like the characters but the gameplay is pretty horrid (WHY ARE THERE WAGGLE SHORTCUTS) and the story seems so half-assed. :( At this point I’m pretty much playing it for the sake of beating it & for skits. I love skits. They are finally voiced. Mmmm.

I think my brother and I left off in the Lightning Temple. It’s really tedious and I hate it. And I want to get it over with. And I am now realizing that it is not the kind of place I should have saved in because if I don’t hurry up and deal with it, I’m going to end up dropping the game here and that is bad. D: After all, I finally made it past chapter 3 in this playthrough!

—

I think that’s about it. I have some free time coming up in the next few weeks but a lot of that time is going to be spent with Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (in English this time!) and Pokémon Black (in Japanese!). So I do kind of want to finish up some more from my backlog before I embark on all this but I don’t want to start anything, either, haha.

I played it a bit at the beginning of the year and then set it down for quite a while but it’s still a really good game and a must-have for anyone with a PSP. I think it’ll be a game like Smash Bros. that I can pick up and play every so often for some no-strings-attached gaming and not feel bad to set it down again for months at a time.

So here goes my kind-of review, mostly rambling post!

Gameplay

I heard somewhere that the whole point of Dissidia is that someone (Nomura? Probably.) wanted to make a game that mimicked the over-the-top fight scenes you always get to see in cutscenes but never play. And if that was indeed Dissidia’s goal? It achieved it well. It’s actually amazing to sit back and think about the battles because while you’re in them, you’re just so immersed in trying to win and staying on top of the opponent but if I were watching a battle later on (a feature I admit I have not taken advantage of), it would probably play out like an action cutscene.

There are two types of attacks: HP and Bravery. HP, like it suggests, diminishes the opponent’s hit points. Bravery affects your attack power. Each bravery attack you inflict raises your Bravery (and depletes the opponent’s) and you do damage equal to your bravery. Or something like that. Some attacks are long range, some are close range, and some even have a “chase” feature where you hit the opponent away and then “chase” right after them to inflict another attack (which they can then dodge and turn right back on you with good timing).

It’s very action-oriented. You run around and attack in real time, timing your attacks and outright dodging and blocking those turned against you. You can run up the walls, slide across energy on the stage, and even break parts of the stage away as you fight. When you slam an opponent into the ground or a side of the stage, you inflict extra damage so the whole point seems to be as theatrical as you can, going over the top to create an interesting battle.

Each character also has a special attack. When you collect enough EX points (scattered around the field after attacks, or collected in an item that appears at random on the battlefield), you can go into EX Attack mode which is basically your overlimit/overdrive. Regen activates and several exclusive abilities come into play. It culminates in your special skill that you manually activate after an HP attack. The opponent has to tap X repeatedly to raise their defence while you enter a series of commands to raise your attack power for a final blow-type of move.

The playable characters are the main characters from each of the Final Fantasy games from I through X, as well as the main villains. Some, like Cloud, Squall and Tidus (arguably the most popular characters in the FFverse) are pretty easy for a beginner to pick up and use and others require a little more ability and practise. But everyone has their place.

Plot

It wouldn’t be a Final Fantasy game without a convoluted plot and despite being in the fighting genre rather than RPG, Dissidia does not disappoint. The basic plot revolves around an eternal fight between two gods, Cosmos and Chaos. Cosmos summons 10 warriors (our heroes!) and sets them on a quest to obtain their crystals the empower them to overcome Chaos and his 10 warriors (our villains!). That’s pretty much it.

I did play through each character’s story but I still found a lot of it confusing. To be fair, I played it with a huge gap… since I originally started the game as a way to kill time in the days before Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep arrived on my doorstep. I played in order of difficulty and got up to Odyssey IX (Zidane’s story), which was just over halfway. And then I dropped it when BBS came out and didn’t pick it up again until now. So that’s January to August. Oops.

But still, I’m sure the plot ties together fairly nicely but each story on its own is pretty boring and I must admit I never did care about the plot. Mostly just about fighting (because it was fun!) and getting my Beaten status on Backloggery. Once you beat the Odysseys, you get the final chapters and that was pretty bland. There wasn’t much story between the first chapter and the last chapter and having to go through 3-4 stages for each was pretty annoying. I would have preferred they just lessen the level of the final boss and shorten that final set of chapters instead. :/

Graphics & Sound

If there’s one thing they did absolutely right, it’s the graphics. Everything looks great, the stages are great, and despite looking solid, the framerate never suffers like it does in some other PSP games when too much is going on at once. But Square-Enix is always pretty top-notch when it comes ot graphics so that’s no surprise.

I really liked the music in this game too. There’s a selection from each of the games featured. Typically one calming background music, a battle theme, and a final battle theme. So X has “To Zanarkand” as its general BGM, “Normal Battle” as its typical theme, and against Jecht, you hear “Other World”. Music was all fitting, obviously, and the original tracks were good too, if a little generic. I think the themes for Cosmos and Chaos were done by a Canadian band, too. They seemed sliiiightly out of place amongst everything else but are still solid songs imo.

It’s not a very memorable soundtrack, though. I’ve listened to it all the way through a few times and find myself blanking out for 6 tracks at a time before remembering to pay attention. As background music, I suppose this means it’s very fitting but it’s only worth listening to it outside the game, imo, to hear the rearranged versions of some of the tracks. (I really like the Dissidia version of One Winged Angel.)

Rambling!

I didn’t really have any preferences through most of the game. I think I liked using Cloud but he was a January character so I don’t remember much–I only assume I liked him because he was the only one to ping LV15, with the next closest coming in at LV12. Hopefully that means I was good with him and not that I just gave up repeatedly and had to rebattle a lot. Who knows.

I left Terra for last because her plot intrigued me more than Warrior of Light’s. I’m so glad I did because she ended up being my favourite to use. I vastly prefer standing back and pummelling from afar than risking my neck to get in some close hits. As a magic user, she was a perfect fit for me. So upon finishing her Odyssey, it was easy to just continue right on into Shade Impulse to finish up the game. :) I ended with her at LV50. My next highest level is still Cloud at 15, haha.

The final chapters were super easy so long as I avoided the random level 60s or whatever. :/ I hit the final boss at around level 41 and quit and retried a few times until I finally managed to beat him at… level 48? Whatever level I was at, I levelled to exactly 50 afterwards. I was pretty cheap for the fight, using mostly the Tornado attack to deflect his magic and draw him into my attack but oh well. He was cheap too. >:[

I haven’t done any endgame stuff, nor have I played much of the other modes aside from Story. I’ll get around to it eventually but likely not until someone wants to play against me… so I’ll need to either level up or get used to the game again, haha.

Anyway, it’s a great game and, as mentioned, is definitely worth owning for anyone who has a PSP.

Now, back when the game was first announced at E3 2008, I thought it looked ridiculous. It was the lowest note in an otherwise awful keynote for Nintendo, so that’s saying something. I didn’t understand the point. It looked and seemed to play somewhat like Guitar Hero or Rock Band but apparently you didn’t need to hit the notes in proper time. So what’s the point of a game without any sort of challenge or goal? Then Miyamoto came along and clarified that Wii Music was a toy, not a game. So what was it doing on a video games console? The whole idea baffled me and had I not “given up” on the Wii long before, I probably would’ve regained those feelings of betrayal from Nintendo.

Sometime later, my brother and I happened upon a short video. I cannot for the life of me remember where I might have found it but the person speaking in it was praising Wii Music and made it sound appealing. They mentioned the sheer potential it had for teaching about music and for arranging your own songs and understanding the layers of music and whatnot. This piqued both our interests but Nintendo was still trying to sell the damn “game” at $50 which was well out of my price range. So the other week, when Gamestop.ca had the game on sale for a mere $10, I bit. Splitting the cost between my brother and I, it came out to just over $5 each with tax and I don’t mind paying $5 to test something out and maybe have a few laughs.

Introduction

Since my brother went to a friend’s house overnight the other day, I had to put our playthrough of Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World on hold and, having nothing better to do, I switched the disc to Wii Music.

I was greeted with a Mii-esque little man who looked like a cross between Einstein and a conductor. I picked a Mii and was tossed right into a tutorial where you learn to play the different instruments. There are three main ways:

• Piano: Uses Wii Remote and a nunchuk. You basically just waggle up and down like you are a horrible piano player. Because you are. Especially in this game. Used for piano-like instruments and things like bells or the DJ Turntable.
• Guitar: Again, Wii Remote and a nunchuk. You hold the nunchuk out like you’d hold the neck of a guitar and you “strum” with the Wii Remote. Used for guitars, ukeleles, etc. It’s horrible. :( It rarely picks up my strumming unless I am playing wicked air guitar or something and exaggerating every movement.
• Trumpet: I think it’s called something else but trumpets are awesome (I used to play it!) so that’s what it is here. This just uses the Wii Remote and you hold it in front of you, pushing 1 or 2 to make noise. Tilting it up plays louder and tilting it down mutes the instrument somewhat.

There’s also a violin way but I have no idea how it works because I suck at it so much. It’s kind of like guitar, though. I think. You can also use the Balance Board for drums, I think, but I have no clue where mine is and I suspect it is being used as a table somewhere in the house so I haven’t tried it out.

The tutorial then runs you through Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star with you on piano, giving your first real introduction to the game. I must admit, this part was a little fun. You can choose to play it “properly” by hitting the notes when they’re supposed to be hit based on the bar of music on the screen. (So you can basically play rudimentary Guitar Hero, if you so choose.) But if that’s too boring, which it will be, you can hit the notes whenever you damn well please and Wii Music carries the melody through.

So you can add notes where you want or delay them, or cut them entirely, and whatever you choose to do, Wii Music does its best to make it not sound like crap. I sound a lot more cynical saying this than I actually was but honestly, it’s kinda fun to experiment with what sounds good and what doesn’t. Some parts are really built up with the additional notes and melodies and others just sound strange. There’s no pressure to do it “right” because the game emphasizes time and time again that whatever you choose to do. (And likes to call your worst performances “avant-guard” lmao.)

Music Videos

After this tutorial, it forces me to make a music video out of it, which sounds more time consuming than it is. Basically it just records your Mii’s playing and changes the camera angle a lot. All you really have to do for the creation is rate the song and give it an album cover.

You have to rate each song you save out of 100. Mine always sound like crap when I play them, so everything has a rating of “12″ so far, save this one song where I really tried to make it sound bad. That one’s a 100 so that I could easily find it again later. :’) Later, when you’re browsing music videos, you can view the Top 10 or sort by rating. The game stores up to 100 videos and after that will auto-delete them starting with the lowest-rated songs.

After rating, you are presented with a rudimentary photo editor. You get a square canvas with maybe 15 set options for background, another 10 frames/titles, and you can place “clipart” of the Miis that were in the video on the background. There’s a few different poses and you can choose between showing the Mii with its instrument or just the Mii’s head. It’s really basic but I don’t expect much. The only disappointment here is that no matter what song or setting you played in, the title is always just “Wii Music”. I can kind of understand why they won’t let you enter your own but at least show the song title on the cover? It shows up in the listings themselves (along with a pre-made band name based on the Mii(s) you used) but it’d be nice to see it on the cover since you’d think that if you have to go to the trouble of making one every time, you’d want to make it useful. Oh well.

“Expanding Your Style”

Once you save 3 music videos, another level of tutorials opens up. It introduces you to the different genres of music included in the game. It leads you into a rock rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle. Here, it really lets you see how each section (percussion 1, percussion 2, bass, chord, harmony, and melody) really impacts a song. You play each part and it puts it all together in the end. I must admit, I haven’t had much musical training and this really made me see why some teachers wanted to use this game in the classroom. Even listening to other songs now on my iPod, I catch myself going “oh, this part is the harmony” or “okay, I see what they meant by chords being used to accent only some parts of the song”. Haha.

Upon completing 6 videos, yet another level opens up, this time giving you more advanced techniques for each style. So instead of just learning one pattern of beats as percussion, there are two that are used in different parts of the song. This part will be boring to retell so I won’t bother but again, it added at least a little more depth to the game.

The interesting part of all this, is that it opens up “Custom Jams”, where you can choose your song, then choose the genre for it. It’s fun setting up a jazz rendition of Legend of Zelda or a rock version of Do Re Mi. You can record each part with your Mii (or a different Mii) and put it all together in one music video. And that’s where it gets interesting, ’cause you can choose ridiculous instruments for each part and still come out with something good… or, if you’re like me, make it as hilariously bad as possible. It’s fun! :)

Minigames

Okay I am not going to lie, I love minigames. They are a guilty pleasure for me so long as they aren’t tedious parts of a sidequest or required in an RPG (since RPG minigames usually suck D:), I can waste hours on them. So honestly, the minigames were pretty much the only part I really enjoyed in Wii Music.

And that’s using “enjoyed” rather liberally.

There are three. In one, you play as a conductor and I do not understand it at all and am thus very bad at it, so I played it to unlock all the songs from it and left it alone. The second, you use handbells and you basically just have to play your bells at the right time. Pretty simple (but I am bad at it because the Wii never picks up that I’ve rung the bell ffffff). The last one is a series of minigames based on Pitch. It is lots of fun!

In the Pitch one, each level is a quick series of questions. It starts out easy. In level one, the questions are simple like “Match the pitch from the speaker” and you have to select the Mii that’s playing the same note. Or match 2 Miis out of many that are playing the same note. In another, you’re given a feeling (“Oh no, I dropped my phone in my soup!!”) and you have to select which melody depicts it best–the happy-go-lucky tune or the ominous “DUN DUN DUN” one. These get harder and harder each time but it’s just a lot of fun to get it all done before your time runs out. :) Easily the most fun part of Wii Music.

If there had been more minigames, I would’ve been happier. I don’t like playing games with literally no point. These minigames? I might not have liked them all, but at least they had a defined goal, something the rest of the game lacks. So I can see why Miyamoto classified it as a toy.

Songs & Instruments

I guess this is important to talk about. I nearly forgot to, haha.

The song selection in Wii Music, to be perfectly honest, is abysmal. There are maybe… 30? If that? And only about 6 are worth playing (for me). :( They’re mostly basic free melodies or folk songs with about 4 Nintendo themes and then a few pop songs, only like 2 of which are even at all recent. The songs suck, which is unfortunate, because the premise of Wii Music (arranging songs with your own flair in different genres) could be vastly improved if there were more familiar songs, or songs that would really sound different out of their natural genre.

But the instruments are another story. There’s actually a lot to choose from and the problem wasn’t that there weren’t enough, but sometimes too many, haha. There’s no way to sort them when you’re scrolling through them so it’s a bit hard to select them but that’s the only complaint I have with them. Some instruments are really weird (like the cat & dog suits) but most are just fun to experiment with. It’s just a bit too bad that the controls are so bad that some instruments are just rendered unplayable.

The Verdict?

Wii Music was a really good game considering my brother and I got it for $10 but anything more than that and I’d be very disappointed with it. The game itself is good to kill time and I will admit it’s fairly relaxing, but it felt more like WiiWare and that’s probably where it would have fared better. Being marketed and sold as a full-price game was just wrong and it’s disappointing to know just how many people thought it deserved that place. :| It didn’t. And even at $10, had I not gone into the experience expecting utter crap, I probably wouldn’t have been impressed in the least, to be quite honest.

But I knew there was a lack of goal or meaning in this game. So despite what all this would have you believe, that was not my biggest issue with Wii Music. The problem with it was actually the controls.

Now, maybe it’s just my setup or something, but I could not get it to recognize some of my actions most of the time. :/ Especially with the guitar, I’d have major issues with the game only picking up the most exaggerated movements. I’d be strumming with my whole arm just to get it to pick up a strum which made it near impossible to play any faster songs that required multiple notes in a second or two. It also made timing near impossible to get. It was so frustrating! I even grudgingly got off the couch to stand up, hoping it might make a difference, but to no avail.

I have the beginnings of carpal tunnel, so most Wii controls that involve waggle, or really anything similar, will really aggravate my wrists after a time. So playing Wii Music was just absolutely painful. I played for an hour or two yesterday and I’m still feeling the effects. :( Mind you, I know this is my fault for ignoring the “why don’t you set the Wii remote down and take a break!” messages, but I was taking my own breaks after every song anyway because of my short attention span.

I’m still blaming the crappy controls. :(

Aside from controls, the game was okay. Not something you pay full price for (or even half price for), but I can see it being a good way to kill half an hour with friends as you try to either make nice music together (if that’s your thing) or, the more likely situation in my group, create the most ear-splitting song you can.

I rated it a 1 on Backloggery and was happy to set it down and move on to bigger and better things.

I tend to ramble a lot when I start talking about the games I love and play (and love to play!) so I figured starting a gaming blog so my Livejournal friends don’t have to put up with daily gaming-related posts, my Backloggery friends don’t have to see my page notes update frequently with long-winded thoughts, and my poor twitter friends don’t get 5-tweet updates about my latest gaming escapades. Well, okay, that was a lie, my twitter friends will probably still have to put up with that. But basically, I want a place where I can go on about games, their plots, characters, my strategies, reviews… whatever I feel like. This is that place.

The name, “Gamer Cherrim” comes from the fact that my online handle, gamertag, PSN ID, and all that jazz is typically “Cherrim”. The gamer part obviously signifies the point of this blog and is a slight play on “gamer girl”. I’m female, which makes me a gamer girl but hopefully not a girl gamer. Yes, there’s a difference. If I ever act as obnoxious as a girl gamer does, you have full permission to punch me in the face. However, I am still a girl and as such, may have a more girl-friendly view on game fandom. In that yeah, I do sometimes have slash goggles and fangirling tendencies. Apologies in advance for that.

Anyway, a little background info! I’m 21-years-old and I’ve been gaming since roughly age 8. I wish I could say I grew up on games since before I can remember but the first console I owned was a Gameboy Colour (assuming handhelds count) and after that, an N64. My first game was Pokémon Red, which I had to share with my brother. (He used our Master Ball on a Snorlax.) My parents were very against gaming back then, which is a bit weird now since it was my mother who convinced me to spend my very first paycheque ever on an Xbox 360 and it was my dad who bought the family’s PS3 as a Blu-Ray player. But alas, no NES or SNES-era games for me.

As I said, I started gaming “late” but what I didn’t have back then I’ve tried to make up for now. I have every current-gen system and the only thing I lacked last gen was the Xbox. My favourite systems are probably DS and 360, the latter mostly because playing games with my friends is fun and my PS3 stays at my parents’ house when I’m away at school.

My favourite genre is technically still RPG, since my favourite series all hail from it, but lately I’ve been getting a little bored with it and my attention has been captured better by action or adventure games. (Or my guilty pleasure–puzzle games!) My favourite series are Kingdom Hearts, Pokémon, Assassin’s Creed, and Tales of. My favourite game is a toss up between Kingdom Hearts: Re:Chain of Memories, Tales of the Abyss, and Kingdom Hearts 2: Final Mix+ (though if I can count FM+ and Re:COM as the same game since they were packaged together, I will).

Hopefully I’ll put this blog to good use and it won’t be too boring to read. :)