10. Sandstorm - Mario Paint Composer

The song isn’t quite as full bodied as others, but still a good recreation of a classic electronica song we ALL know.

9. Don’t Stop Believin’ By Journey on Mario Paint Composer

Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world. Took the midnight train going anywhere. . . . I think I just cried a bit.

8. Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone (Top Gun) on Mario Paint Composer

We all loved the movie and at the time no one really realized how homoerotic it is. HEY GOOSE YA BIG STUD!  TAKE ME TO BED OR LOSE ME FOREVER!

7. Take On Me by A-Ha on Mario Paint Composer

I went through a big A-Ha stage a couple years ago (we would listen to 80’s pop interent radio stations at work because it was the only genre of music that we all equally disagreed on) that this one had me dancing in my chair again.

6. Thriller by Michael Jackson in Mario Paint Composer

I don’t care how freakish he is now, at one point we all loved him and we will keep it at that.

5. Beach Boys - I Get Around ( Mario Paint )

Lying in bed, just like Brian Wilson did?

4. What is Love? on Mario Paint Composer]

This recreation is absolutely full bodies. The only thing it doesn’t have (and I honestly think Mario Paint Composer is unable to recreate) is the high pitched singer in the back yelling “WHOOAAAAAAAoooOOOOOOOooooooOOOOOHHHHeeeeEEEEEEooooOOOOEEEEOOOOOOO” or something like that.

3. Still Alive (from Portal) 2.0 in Mario Paint Composer

The cake is a lie! This song is great because of excellent use of background vocals (or should they be background marios?).

2. Through the Fire and the Flames - Dragonforce

Everyone knows this song for it’s legendary status in Guitar Hero 3, well a Mario Paint fan decided to tackle it himself and did an EXCELLENT job making this recreation that is rediculously faithful to the original.

1. The BEST MARIO PAINT SONG EVER!!!!!

Made you click.

What did I find? MY BRAIN IS LIKE 50 YEARS OLD!!! After having a it for a week or so my progress on most tasks has stayed about the same. Does this game really help your squishy bit of grey matter? I hope so because I need to get sharp! I’ll try to give you updates as they happen!

My thoughts: VERSUS MODE IS FUN AS HELL. Nothing beats being an infected setting up an ambush on the survivors. I personally like being a Boomer and vomiting all over the survivors (calling in the always fun horde), but it’s also very satisfying to be a hunter and pin someone down tearing at their flesh!!

I do feel, though, that people’s worry about L4D’s lack of content and multiplayer staying power is warrented, but hopefully Valve will keep us in downloadable content so that this game will be fresh and fun for quite some time.

If I can get a crew of people together I’ll be sure to play as much of the game as possible and give the entire game a full feldged review soon.

Go buy this now and support people in the industry who actually make quality products and don’t shovel out shit games *coughEAcough*.

First off….

Dead Space (PC)

This game pretty much takes survival horror and re blends it.  It feels like it takes pieces from Resident Evil 4 and Bioshock and mixes it with some RPG elements.  This game uses the over the shoulder 3rd person view which seem to work better for immersion and the scary factor then the First person view.  This game kinda reminded me of what Doom 3 would have been if it was more than a flashlight simulator game.  Its dark in space but its overall dim lit and not completely black.  Doom seemed to get this wrong.  Immersion in a Horror game is all about the aura and the vibe that the maps give you.  And when you just plain old can’t see the map it kind of kills it and turns it into, “I’m scared because there is just shit jumping on me and I can’t see”  Don’t get me wrong Dead Space is full of cliche horror scenes like the typical monster comes out of the wall and attacks you.

The game rides on the pretty common theme of Alone in the Unknown.  The story line is pretty lame though, I’m not going to spoil it but its a bit predicable.  I did however like the weapons.  When I play a game i like to see some originality with the weapons.  Typically in many games there is the pistol, machine gun, and heavy weapon shtick.  Though this is how the weapon cast system is in Dead Space they seem to change it up with the Power node upgrades.  Its a system that allows you to modify and unlock attributes to your weapon with a series of branched out upgrades.   Another thing about this game that I haven’t seen in any other game is that you DON’T want to head shot, you want to take out the limbs.  This adds a fun element to the game.  And craftily flows over to some of the weapons.

As you may have seen from screen shots or videos, some of the weapons shoot out ammo in a line.   These are denoted by the 3 laser sights.  The fun thing is, is that you can choose on the fly how your gun is positioned  to shoot i.e. vertically or horizontally.  So if you want to shoot off an arm the best position is to have your gun shooting top to bottom.  And if you prefer to slow down the enemy you can adjust the weapon to shoot a line of ammo from left to right and take off a leg pretty easily.

The game had a good length to it as well.  It was just long enough to keep you from getting bored of the scenarios that it could throw at you.

Moving on..

Farcry 2

At first I thought I really liked this game.  I had the mind set that it would run just as shitty as Crysis which actually takes away from the overall game play experience.  When I launched this puppy, I found a gorgeous world that actually ran like butter.  Which was surprising, and a total bonus.  A few hours in I was even content with the story.  But after being let out on your own to do whatever (sandbox), it just got old.  My train of thought was lets get some good weapons going immediately.  Well to upgrade your weapons you have to talk to a dealer and he will give you a mission to unlock said cool weapons.  The missions given to you by the dealer are fucking identical every time.  Go to (X) on the map and take out convoy.  The convoy consists of a Truck and 2 Turret mounted hummers.  No difference, every single time.  Which leads me to my next grievance.  The roads are pretty repetitive too, it goes something like this.  1) take out map, 2) find location and drive, 3) drive past check point 4) get out and kill everyone, 5) continue till next check point and repeat.  Its kinda like GTA but the roads have nothing cool on them, its not like your driving down a street and have someone to run over or something to look at.

So at this point I am bored and go to get back on the main story line, which turns out there really isn’t a main story line.  Its pretty much run around and help out whatever faction or what ever friend you make.  I was pretty disappointed.  I tried to go back to the butcher to continue my quest but he wasn’t there.  I walked in and was getting shot at from all around.  And on my objectives all it said was get a mission from random person i.e. gun guy or faction, which I was bored out of my mind with. I need some drive to keep me from continuing.  Some story line to keep me involved.

I’ve had some time on my hands as of late so I have played an beaten most of the game I play.  I will have to talk about Fallout 3 and Call of Duty: WoW and even my aspect on Left 4 Dead.

Because of this problem I haven’t been able to play some of the best games out there. Good examples are Bioshock, Doom 3, and any survival horror game out there (the Resident Evils, Elmo’s World). If I play a scary game for any length I am absolutely exhausted! I will inch through the levels peeking around every corner the whole time having my body extremely tense. I get done playing and I’m not even relaxed (which is why I play video games). Luckily some companies are coming out with solutions to this problem, such as cooperative play in Left4Dead. If i have one of my hard chargin’ buddies with me it’s just not as scary!

How about you guys, you like scary games?

Graphics

The graphics in this game are great. Stylistically he game is a giant cartoon with small video enhanced bits and it fits the game perfectly. I honestly think this is where the Wii is headed. It can’t compete wiht the PS3 or the Xbox 360 in video power, so they will work with things that are would look good on any system but many of the beefier systems have abandoned (such as a 2D platformer done in cartoons).

Controls

The controls in a Wii game make or break the game. Because it is the system’s big selling point, many developers focused on using the Wii’s motion controllers in as many ways as possible, which in many games is  complete overkill. Wario Land: Shake It! has the perfect control usage for the type of game it is. First, it uses the Wiimote in a horizontal fashion which for a simple 2d platformer is retro-heaven. Horizontally the Wiimote is nothing more than a slightly akward, wireless NES controller. The Wii’s 4 direction d-pad means that I never had trouble telling what direcion i was going in *coughBionicCommandoReArmedcough*.

The only time you use the motion in the game  is in fun little bits that remind you that you are on the Wii and are used in ways that make the game much more dynamic and fun. The basic motions are shaking the controller to spit out the treasure in a bag of gold (and with a title like “Shake It!” trust me, you will do a ridiculous amount of shaking) or moving the Wiimote down to do a ground slam, but they added some motion depth by using the tilt component in VERY fun little ways. My personal favorite was one world boss where you tilted to move a rolling cart back and forth which also changed the angle in which you used a giant punching glove on the front of your cart to shoot objects at the boss.

Sound

The music in this game is HORRIBLE. It sounds like Dentist Office/Elevator rejects. Maybe the developers were trying to make an inside joke here, but I just found it annoying. The other sounds in the game are great and very funny. Hearing Wario grunt while he climbs a ladder or a little bad guy scream like R2-D2 on fire is just priceless.

Overall

I loved this game, but then again I’m a huge sucker for a 2D scroller. It was cute while offering a challenge and not taking itself too seriously. I actually had a reason to fire up my Wii and not be completely disappointed and decide to sell it.

Bullet-Tooth Tony and I have a habit of sitting around my apartment, drinking, playing classic Nintendo games on my Wii while we proceed to get drunk (fun, eh?). So last weekend we thought this would be a great throw-back game for our classic gaming ritual but after playing for something like 2 hours we had only beaten two robots (I also again must confess, both of the defeated foes were the work of Tony).

I’ll confess I bought this off of WiiWare. While I usually evangelize the Xbox360 as the console to beat, I hate hate hate hate the D-pad on the 360 controller. A d-pad needs up, down, left and right and when you are playing classic games on a d-pad with diagnals (like Bionic Commando: Rearmed) it just screws things up.

So pick this game up from your favorite game dispenser and give Capcom the money they deserve for giving us new content in a familiar format!!!

*Now, disclaimer time, I routinely was behind the times as a child. While I did have a Nintendo Entertainment System, I rarely got new games and when I did they were gifts from family members who had no clue what the “hip” and “happening” games were, so I played Mega Man first in my late teens via an emulator.

Check out version 1.0 (there are are often people playing on that) but not all of the features are there (no disguise for spy, or sentry for the engineer), but if you have enough interested friends start up a server in 2.9 beta. You can get more information or download it here.

As the game came to fruit, though, I lost quite a bit of interest. Now that it’s released, I’ve heard many mixed reviews from both professional reviewers and casual gamers. So I want the opinion of the people who matter: What do YOU think of Spore?