New Super Mario Bros. Wii Play Together

by Tom Kerkhof (and Geert van Ostaden)

New Super Mario Bros. Wii (NSMB from now on) is basically the sequel to the original New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS. The catch is, as we are all constantly made aware of by any form of advertisement Nintendo throws at us, that we can play this game with up to four players simultaneously. I know you could play four player games on the DS version, but you were never able to traverse through the levels of the main game with more than a single player. On this Wii sequel, you can.

And it is this feature, and possible this feature alone that can possibly make NSMB stand out from other platform games, or even Mario games.
I think it should be noted that NSMB is by no means a bad game – in fact, the single player is of that trademark, familiar high quality you’d expect from a Nintendo title – it’s just that it’s not what it was made out to be. For me, playing the game with four players isn’t as fun as I thought it could be – not by a long shot.
The main reasons for this are some minor annoyances that don’t do the game any justice and should really be fixed to make a better game. For instance, it is very easy to kill off your fellow players. I can honestly say it’s easier to kill them off then it is to truly help them. Now I would be the first person to admit that annoying your fellow players a bit is good fun, but it can really spoil the game in the long run. As such, I don’t understand why Nintendo made these settings both the default and without alternative. Were it possible to switch off some of the more hindering features, like how your character treats your fellow players as obstacles, or how the ‘death’ of your partners hinders your movement for a second due to its animation.

Then there is the bubble. I would love the bubble, were it not for the fact that it is sometimes too easy to accidentally activate it. Also, being able to save yourself as long as your partner is fine, perhaps makes the game a tad too easy, a feat its predecessor suffered from. As it stands, I merely like the idea of the bubble.

Of course, most of these problems are mostly absent in the versus (or ‘Coin’) mode, where the only objective is to collect as many coins as possible to win. In this mode, it’s a free-for-all and each player is allowed to hinder the other players as much as they can. However, the goal in this game is perhaps unsuited for this kind of game play. There is no way to ‘steal’ other players’ coins; you just have to collect as many coins as you possibly can. In some levels, it is thus very hard to stop players who already managed to collect enough – or many – coins. A shame, really, since I would bet some good money on this mode being an absolute hit, had it been refined a bit more.

In the end, this mostly means I think NSMB disappointed me a little. I though the concept of playing a classic Mario game would be a unbelievably good one, but it turns out it is merely a mildly entertaining one (or possibly an annoyingly frustrating one). Had Nintendo fixed some of the problems I listed before, then perhaps the game would have been great. In that case, I would even forgive the game its complete lack of any online support, a feature I think is sorely missed in a game of this day and age, especially when it tries to profile itself as a multiplayer game.

What remains is the excellent single player that takes elements from many classic Mario games and, like its predecessor, is an excellent addition to the library of Mario games. Admitted, it lacks the ‘fresh’ feel of its cousin on the DS, but it still has everything you loved about Mario. I just really miss the Multiplayer mode that could be so awesome, but even that mode is at least enjoyable, so in the end NSMB turned out to be a fine addition to the Wii library.

The Life of a Game Development Student

Since I’ve started studying game development my life has been much more hectic and stressful and my free time has been reduced to roughly non-existent.  Now, I can’t tell you what life is like for every student studying game development because obviously I have no idea how other people live, but what I can illustrate for you is what daily life is like for me and my fellow classmates, from what I observe around the school building.

Well, I assume (from many encounters with many different ignorant people) that many imagine studying game Read more

Getting too old for gaming.

I have to admit it, I am getting too old for videogames. In my never ending quest to find and review the decent games out there, I struggle.

Growing up during the Nintendo 8-bit era, games were challenging then, the first Sonic game on the Megadrive was insanely fast for it’s time, but insanely slow when played now. Games are larger, busier and have more functionality. Heck, look at the first controllers that only had a cross shaped D-pad and 2 action buttons. Compare it to a PS3/X-Box 360 controller. Bit of a difference eh?

During my latest adventure with Prototype, I was subjected to over 30 different kinds of combinations available with the player’s avatar. Not only did you posses 4 different versions of your power (claws, bulked up arms and hands, tentacles and your own plain fists), you can also wield a vast assortment of weapons. Even ignoring the regular weapons you are still left with your 4 different styles of attacking. Each style has it’s own defensive and offensive capabilities, and there are several button combinations that perform different kind of combo’s or unleash a specific kind of attack. Read more

NES gaming review: Gun.Smoke

Gun.smoke is a nice vertical scrolling, shooter arcade game, which was released in 1985 in Europe by Capcom, also known from games today like the Resident Evil and the Megaman series.

In each level you have to shoot your way through a horde of criminals which all try to kill you, because you are always trying to kill their boss. Every boss has a bounty on his head, because they are wanted criminals and you are the nameless bounty hunter that has to kill them.

The more levels you finish, the more criminals will try to kill you at the same time and eventually, like in most games, it will get harder and faster.
I recommend when you play this game, to play it with a NES Advantage and not with a regular controller, because your left thumb will get a pretty good beating after several levels.

As you shoot your way through a level, different power-up’s pop up from either killing the criminals or shooting down barrels.

Some will give you more fire power, 1up or just some random pickups that are worth money.

With the money you can buy better weapons which will need ammo that you can get from the same merchants.

Some of the weapons are: a Magnum, a Shotgun, a Machinegun and Smart bombs.

Also, there is a horse you can buy which will let your character take two hits until you die instead of just one.

Oh, and if you pay close enough attention, you can see ‘’CAPCOM’’ on every wanted poster, nice little gimmick.

First look: Toshiba Qosmio X300 gaming notebook

On April 16th, we were invited to attend a games workshop and get some hands-on experience with Toshiba’s new gaming notebook line, the Qosmio x300. Unlike the usual marketing talk, we actually got some interesting information this time around. After a short introduction by Inno Frencken with a short talk about the machine itself, and the Toshiba gaming notebook lineup, Bruno Beusch from TNC Network took over. Part of the organization of Game Hotel, Bruno presented the audience with some interesting information regarding recent developments in the gaming industry, ranging from the influence of user generated content, to the development shift from large corporations such as EA and Sony, to smaller indie developers for new and exciting ideas. FlOw being one of his examples, accompanied by the drawing game Crayon Physics Deluxe. The social aspect of gaming is also expected to become increasingly larger, taking Facebook games, but also World of Warcraft as examples. He also elaborated a bit on Game Hotel itself, which is a series of international events that are aiming to highlight the most innovative game creators, but with a fun, social take on the usually serious gaming world, or as they put it themselves; “GAMEHOTEL’s acclaimed international events, broadcast and cross-media programs, spotlight the world’s most innovative game creators”.

After the industry talk was over we got the chance to put the X300 to the test. We were also able to talk to some people from Toshiba who developed the laptop, and there were even some nice people from THQ. All-in-all it was a really nice opportunity to get some extra info on the laptop. One of the guys from THQ was also present, and brought some copies of the game Company of Heroes: “Tales of Valor”, for us to play on the X300, and give us some playing advice for the game.

It looks fancy, it sounds fancy; its the ultimate gaming laptop! The outside looks just as awesome as it does from the inside. I wont bore you with a summary of computer specs, if you are interested though: Spec Sheet. So, what we have here is one of the best performance laptops available at the moment. The Qosmio X300 has some features that you wont see in other laptops, it got a NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTX inside which means 1 gig of dedicated video memory. A “Unique” “Quad” core2duo extreme processor specially designed for this notebook. Which of course is awesome when playing games. And with nice images nice sound is a must, thats why they put in a speaker system and a subwoofer made by Harman Kardon. So for gaming you got your own mobile piece of love, however, it would help if you’ve been doing some body building, because this baby weighs about 6 kilo’s, so standing at your bus station with it becomes just that little bit less attractive. The X300 comes equipped with a 17 inch screen (thats big for a laptop). And even though its big and produces a lot of “power”. But with a lot of power comes a lot of heat, but it’s nothing it can’t handle, since the cooling is managed pretty well by 3 fans and a big-ass exhaust the back side, which also has the nice bonus feature of blowing hot air under girls’ skirts in the summer . The down side is, it does produce a lot of heat, so we wouldn’t recommend using it on your lap if you’re planning to have babies at some point.

It has some nice functions for the lazy gamers amongst us. There’s a lot of space on the two internal hard disks, so you wont need a external one for storage. It also comes with a media remote, which can be stored in the expresscard slot on the side of the machine, which comes in handy when you hook it up to an HDTV using the HDMI video out. This makes watching movies really easy, no need to crawl off the couch!

This laptop is made from hard plastic and even though we only had a short amount of time to play with it, it did feel pretty sturdy. I would not suggest dropping it, though, but the X300 should survive some bumps. Of course this all Sounds nice and good, but there are some downsides to this gaming monster, hey nothing is perfect!

So yeah, if having a top-notch graphics card, processor, fast memory, and lots of disk space is what you’re looking for, and you have a big wallet, then by all means at least consider this laptop! If you’re on a tight budget, however, then It’d be a safe bet to say you wont be able to afford a laptop like this one, with it’s rather hefty price tag.

Truth be told, other brands in the gaming laptop market have similar laptops for similar prices, so we can’t really say it’s a bad thing per-se. There were a number of things that did stand out though. The big one is that there is no DVI video out, something that has been on most laptops for a few years now, and has become standard. The X300 only offers HDMI and VGA out, which is something you should definitely take not of if you’re looking at purchasing this kind of laptop.

Another thing that we couldn’t really grasp was that while other computer companies offer some form of customization, like Dell, Alienware, and even Apple, the Toshiba gaming laptop lineup don’t seem to offer this flexibility, which disappointed us a little bit.

Another thing that struck us as a little odd, was that everything seems to be a bit over-the-top, from the exterior design, to the hardware, Harman Kardon sound system, to the hard-drive sizes. Where other laptop makers put time and effort into removing at least some of the hassle by not installing too much “bloatware”, the X300 was packed with extra software, some of which duplicated windows functionality, and some of which seemed downright pointless (most computer makers have this ‘issue’, it’s not just toshiba).

The dual-hard drives are nice to have, but once you start filling those 2x 320GB drives up, it’s only going to slow the system down, and we think it would have been better to have put in 2 smaller, but very fast drives instead. Speed is what we’re aiming for on this kind of laptop, right? Speaking of hard drives, maybe an SSD option would have been nice, since they are known for their fast reading speeds, so an SSD should reduce loading times in games significantly.

Finally there were some things that we weren’t sure of if we liked them, or hated them. For one, you can’t install windows xp on it, since toshiba offers no drivers for it what-so-ever. And while some companies chose to put fast, but pricey DDR3 memory in their systems, others are still sticking with DDR2, for it’s lower prices, allowing gamers to upgrade their memory for a small amount of money, instead of having to shell out the big bucks for those 4GB DDR3 memory strips. And there was one more thing which we couldn’t quite figure out.. Why anyone would put a trackpad way off to the left side of the laptop is beyond us, but toshiba did!

Overall, it’s a very nice, and powerful system, that feels sturdy, and has the whole led, hardcore gamer look going on, but we are afraid that the X300 is targeted at an extremely narrow audience, and are left to wonder if they will manage to sell these in some decent numbers.

Because we where only able to play with the X300 for a short time we didn’t get to test the full potential of it. Currently we are waiting for the review unit to arrive for our final conclusion which you can expect right here in a short while.

Co-author: Jelle van Lohuizen, Photo’s by Maikel de Bakker

To live without “that”

Who could ever think of it? Who could ever suggest that it would happen? Who could ever think that I, the one and only dech2410 could do it? But even worse, who could ever know that I haven’t done it for over 3 months? And no, I’m not talking about THAT, you dirty-minded person. What I am talking about is the thing that a lot of people worship the most.

All happened after the summer vacation. After 10 weeks of non-stop working and gaming, working and gaming, and repeating that a lot of times, my new study called “bachelor of organic synthesis and microbiology” kicked off. Finally, no more frustrating teachers, no more history, geography and all that crap. Just the things I like. And of course, a study costs money, so I maintained my job as vegetable-salesman in a supermarket to fund everything. My hobbies like music and sports fill the evening, and Sunday is of course the time to spend with my beloved family. So, and of course in that time one of my biggest hobbies kind of got lost in time. Being a busier person, gaming dropped from hobby #4 to hobby #76. At this point, my Wii stands dusty and non-attached next to my even dustier television in my dusty mess which we call a bedroom. The only two things that I use in that room are my computer and my bed. And why? Because there is absolutely no time for anything else. But Dennis, can’t you do the other things in your holidays? Uhm, unfortunately, then I have to work, since I can’t pay all the other things just by my study funds. A decent student from Leiden needs money for clothing, food, Saturday nights off, presents for birthdays, my website, vacations, music, drinks, family, school supplies, study communities and so on. All with all, that kind of leaves me with 20 euro a month, not even enough to buy a MMORPG-subscription for a month. Still wanting to buy a game that gives my bank account a nice red color. Which proves that time is money. Unfortunately…

is money, money is time, that’s the way life is, that’s the way the cookie crumbles and that’s the way my spare time is gone. So I’m not gaming anymore at all. I’m not even having time to write this column, but hey, I’m in the train to home, coming back from school anyway. Notebooks, what an invention. From one point of view, it saddens me not to hear the great music from the games, not to play the most addictive games alive, and not to satisfy my need to grab a controller and having to play. On the other hand, it isn’t a problem at all. In return, I got so much nice hobbies that I don’t even think about gaming anymore. But every time I’m in my room, looking at that poor console, I miss it too. But hey, what’s the point; I don’t have money for that stupid thing. But still, I miss it. What to do?

At this point, there is nothing to do about it at all. We’ll just wait for that moment, that my spare time will come back to me again. Embrace your spare time while you have it, enjoy it, and use it wisely. And if you don’t have money, why spending it? Gaming isn’t fitting in my life at this moment. We’ll just wait, wait really long for it.

To live without it… I never thought it would be this hard…