Goodbye, Mushroom Kingdom

I finished Paper Mario.

I can't believe that this game, which is two generations old, and which I'd already beaten years ago, captivated me so much that it led me to totally blow off Resident Evil 4 for so long! Paper Mario is a wonderful, brilliant, addictive game, and well worth the $10 I spent on it. If you never played this game, and you have a Wii, download it IMMEDIATELY.

It's always a sign of an excellent game when you feel sort of melancholy upon finishing it, sad to bid the game world farewell. This is especially the case with RPGs, where you spend so much time in certain locations and get to know them so well. I remember that beating Earthbound (aka, the greatest game ever made) for the first time, years ago, actually left me depressed for a couple of days. I'm gonna miss Toad Town, just like I miss Onett.

So, now it's time to get back in to Resident Evil 4, which I will hopefully do in the next couple days. I am so close to finishing the game, but it's probably still gonna be a while until I do so. This game is so intense, that I've found I can't play it for too long at a time, so progress has been slow. I was hoping to finish this game before the release of Metroid Prime 3, but it looks like that's not gonna happen (especially if you take into account all the bonus content on this version of RE4). Perhaps I'll hold off on getting Metroid and just let Super Mario Galaxy be my next game, and save Metroid for the next time there's a long stretch between game releases. Anyway, the next post here will hopefully be about Resident Evil 4 again. Stay tuned.

I <3 Toad Town

Ugh. So yeah, I've been completely neglecting Resident Evil 4 to play Paper Mario on the Virtual Console. If you're going to follow this blog, you had better get used to me flip-flopping like this, because that's kind of what I do when it comes to video games. I assure you, I am not giving up on Resident Evil 4 (although, honestly, my ammo situation is a major problem, and I have no clue how I am going to overcome it), but I've sort of been hypnotized by the Mario game.

The crazy thing about Paper Mario is that it almost feels like it shouldn't be a VC game. It's so (relatively) recent! I still remember a LOT of the game's nooks and crannies, as if I played it for the first time yesterday!

I am currently in the middle of the Shy Guy's Toybox chapter, which is really fun. This level almost has an adventure game vibe to it, due to the fact that I have to constantly run around searching for items, and then giving those items to people in different locations to get more items, which in turn give me passage to new areas where I find even more items. I enjoy that sort of thing, for some strange reason. This episode has me running around in Toad Town a lot, and while I'm doing that, I'm also taking care of a lot of unrelated side missions. Toad Town is awesome in this game! I totally love towns in RPG games. They are so relaxed and full of activities and plot advancements that are fun, but not dangerous. When I die and go to heaven, it had damn well better resemble the first town in Chrono Trigger or I'm going to sue Jesus. Anyway, Toad Town is great, and pretty damn big and chock full of stuff to do.

I'm guessing that in a few days I'll beat this game, and then return to Resident Evil 4.

Speaking of Resident Evil, have you read this article from the Village Voice? This is the kind of shit that enfuriates me, and all I can do is hope for Bonnie Ruberg to live an unfulfilling life and then die painfully, violently, and with the knowlege that her presence made the earth a slightly shittier place. But as a side note, it makes me wonder why Resident Evil 4, in which every single enemy is Spanish, didn't receive similar criticism?

Paper

I haven't played much RE4 since the last entry. Basically, I finished off that chapter, which was accomplished as soon as I backtracked my way back to Ashley's cell. On the way, I found a bit of ammo but evened it out by wasting a bunch of ammo on some ganados.

Here's what I was up to today, video game wise: Being a hopeless slave to my addiction to the Virtual Console. I downloaded a ton of new games today, including an old favorite: Paper Mario. My Nintendo 64 was my constant companion during my college years and this was one of the very last games I played for it back then (third last, in fact, right behind used copies of Pokemon Puzzle League and the surprisingly fun side-scroller Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers). Since then, I've played the two Paper Mario sequels (including the absolutely brilliant Super Paper Mario for the Wii). So it's nice to revisit the game that started the franchise, and it's a nice way to offset the grim nature of Resident Evil 4. I played Paper Mario for about an hour today, and stopped just after I added Kooper to my party.

Oh, another game I got on the VC today was Devil's Crush, the sequel to Alien Crush. This shit is even better than the alien one. Why do I love pinball video games so much?