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Tag: nintendo spd

  • Wario Ware D.I.Y. (Nintendo, 2009)

    Wario Ware D.I.Y. (Nintendo, 2009)

    Developed/Published by: Intelligent Systems, Nintendo SPD / Nintendo
    Released: 29th April, 2009
    Completed: 10th February, 2015
    Completion: Finished all the Nintendo-developed Wario Ware games and read all the 4-koma!
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Aye, so… I actually started this in, like… March 2014, because that was around when Nintendo had announced it was closing the servers for a whole raft of Nintendo DS and Wii games, and this was one of them. I was all “oh no! I’ll need to download all of those good levels people made and save them to my cart!”

    However, turns out that while my Nintendo DSi will connect to my router, a lot of these (all?) of the Nintendo DS games don’t actually use the on-system wi-fi connection (or something?) and so couldn’t actually connect to my modern router. I could have faffed about with my router settings, but I wasn’t actually bothered, so I forgot all about it after finishing Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (which I finished, ok, shut up.)

    Without the ability to upload levels I’ll be honest I didn’t actually bother my arse trying out the level creation stuff, and anyway that’s my actual job so fuck that for a game of soldiers. And without the ability to download levels, I was stuck with the pre-installed ones, which, much like Wario Ware: Touched! all use the touch screen, so they’re crap compared to the brilliant ones on the GBA. Totally forgettable and dull.

    But at least there aren’t too many of them! The best thing about Wario Ware D.I.Y. is, however, the weird inclusion of loads of 4-koma. If you’re not familiar, 4-koma are a very Japanese style of four panel comic strip, usually super absurdist and often quite wordy compared to your usual, western style of three panel comic strip. These are great. They’re all super funny and you have to unlock them by playing Wario Ware D.I.Y. every day, which sucks, but it’s something to return to, which I did every time I remembered, which, apparently, was rarely, because it nearly took me a full year.

    However, the 150-odd 4-koma were worth every penny, even if nothing else about this is particularly good post server shut down.

    Will I ever play it again? Nope.

    Final Thought: A brand-new game idea!

  • Tomodachi Life (Nintendo, 2013)

    Tomodachi Life (Nintendo, 2013)

    Developed/Published by: Nintendo SPD / Nintendo
    Released: 18th April, 2013
    Completed: 3rd February, 2015
    Completion: Unlocked all the places on the island, I guess?
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    I went home for Christmas this year—as I am wont to do—and before I went a read a funny tweet by my, yours and everybody’s beardy pal Brandon “tha B-dogg” Boyer, where he said “I’ve been playing Tomodachi Life for 7 months & no one has ever even expressed vague interest in dating my Mii and it’s incomprehensibly sad.”

    Now, I’m sure most of you took from that “ha ha, his Mii is such a sad bastard” and went on with your life, but I went “Christ, he’s played it for seven months? I should really give this a go after all.”

    It’s weird, because I was so, so, so excited for Tomodachi Life when it was announced. If you watch the early trailers, it seems so incredibly full of potential. Like it’s just going to be super, super hilarious and fun to play.

    But then people I knew got it, and they were all like “no, this is quite boring, actually” and put it down after a few hours, maybe a few days. So I just didn’t bother to try it.

    And now I have! Trading it off with Fantasy Life in the ol’ 3DS slot. I dutifully checked in on my wee Mii society, every day… except I realised a couple of days ago that I haven’t even looked at it in nearly a month. I didn’t even notice that I wasn’t playing it. It was so uncompelling that my brain just, more or less, erased Tomodachi Life from my memory.

    So I guess I have to say I’m done with it.

    “But wait!” you ask. “What is Tomodachi Life?”

    Well, my confused friend, it’s a video game where you put all your wee pals on an island, with personalities that sorta correspond to the Myers-Brigg types (I think) that you sort out yourself, and wait for the magic to happen.

    What this means is that you click on the apartment they live in, and they say something like “I’m hungry” so you give them a crème brûlée. Or they tell you someone they want to be friends with, or they’re asleep, or they give you something like a bath set so you can watch them bathe (uhh…) You can also decorate their apartments and dress them up, that sort of thing. But mostly, the game is “click on apartment, resolve need, click on other apartment.”

    Occasionally they do stuff! like have funny dreams, or interact with other Miis in a silly way. It’s cute, but in that way where you go “heh.”

    The problem with Tomodachi Life is that the interaction with the game is so stupefyingly repetitive and uninteresting. It led me into this long thought on why EA had never just straight up done a Sims game with Miis, which then reminded me they’d actually done a game called “MySims” which was Mii-like but not actually Miis. What’s up with that? I’m going to say it’s corporate hubris, because when I think of Tomodachi Life but instead it’s, you know, a basic “The Sims” with Miis, and it’s got a lot of the wackiness of this, it seems like a real winner. Like something that would actually be good. Stupid corporate hubris!

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m actually glad that they went out of their way to localise this game. But it seems like there’s something cultural about this game that doesn’t translate, and it’s the (likely stereotypical) idea that Japanese people aren’t very open in public, so seeing friends and loved ones acting crazy is really, really wild. I feel like I remember someone describing the game as analogous to a Japanese variety show, and that sounds spot on. It doesn’t translate because seeing people do strange things just isn’t enough—as in The Sims series, we need context to make it really hit home, as being openly silly isn’t transgressive or shocking in the same way.

    Anyway, Tomodachi Life is bad, and I don’t know why tha B-dogg has played it for seven months. It’s joining that ignoble list of games where I’m straight up deleting my saves. Sorry, wee dopplegangers of my pals.

    Will I ever play it again? No, but I still hope they make (and localise) sequels.

    Final Thought: tha B-dogg, in my game, successfully dated Nikki, the wee lassie who used to be the mascot for Swapnote. So he can have some success… with fictional characters, in someone else’s copy of the game.