Things I've Bought: March 2008 Archives

My Tessa MiniCards from MOO.com are here, hooray!  Pictures forthcoming, but a good number of the cards seem to have a faint white line through them due to a printing defect.  Considering the price and general quality of the card (stock is very nice, print is a bit lacking, price is fine for a novelty item), I won't bother making a fuss.  Fun to have, and I'll probably use them as gift cards for the foreseeable future but I don't really see myself recommending their service to anyone right now.

I would assume that their other (read: larger) offerings are printed at a higher quality though - they threw in a sample sticker book with the purchase and the gloss does make the colours pop.  I think lineart and simple pictures do lend themselves better to printing though - the cards that came out nicer are of the pictures that feel (to me) over-saturated on-screen.

Having always been a Nintendo fanboy (being an 80's video game fan pretty much requires you to love Nintendo, after all), I've always been worried that a time will come where they will be rendered entirely irrelevant by its competitors.  Its third-party support is non-existent by this point, its console games have long since reinvented the console into a mini-game/party-game system save for Zelda, which feels increasingly dated and rehashed with each successive version, and Mario, which somehow manages to reinvent its entire genre with each release (though, to be entirely honest, platforming is basically a dead genre altogether).  Yet, Nintendo stays ever successful reinventing its hardware much like its Mario franchise, by releasing the same old technology with different ways to play it.  Touch the DS!  Waggle your Wii!  Buy our product and we'll re-release the same old games you've always enjoyed!

Fortunately/unfortunately, Brawl proves to be the same old SSB game with barely a new coat of paint over its decade-old fighting system.  It now provides more characters, bonuses and useless single-player content than ever before but at heart, it's the same fighter that feels sluggish compared to the many other games that have spent shorter generations reinventing its combat system (take, for example, Team Ninja, which does nothing but perfect the 3d-fighter and lock-on system and builds multiple games around it).  Brawl does none of this, and just gives you what it's always promised.

With 35 playable characters across the Ninty universe (and more), a fanboy can't help but love this game.  I just wish I enjoyed it a little bit more.

(Friend Code: 0387-8489-2872)