Just like a child on show-and-tell day, I packed up my Nintendo 3DS and showed it off to my coworkers as soon as I could. As someone who works in the tech sector, I’m surrounded by like-minded individuals that love checking out the latest in technology. While I wasn’t trying to sell people on the device in particular, I definitely wanted to see their first impressions of glasses-free 3D.
What did they think?
My girlfriend Steff is really good at Bop It. I should further qualify that statement by saying that Steff is not 8 years old. All kidding aside, it was one of her favourite toys growing up and she’s still good at it today. Having used a Bop It in the last few months, I’m lucky if I can score 40, while she can hit 100 in her sleep.
Being the loving boyfriend that I am, I gifted her Bop It on the iPhone shortly after it came out. Did it meet my Bop It champion’s standards?
The next generation of hand-held gaming has arrived. I picked up my Nintendo 3DS first thing this morning at my local Wal-Mart, which was rather uneventful. Maybe it was the fact that my brother and I were the first two people to buy Nintendo 3DS consoles at our store at 7am, and maybe it was because we were at Wal-Mart, but there were only a total of four people when the store opened looking to buy one. My brother and I both picked up the blue 3DS as well as our own copies of Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition.
We’ll talk about the game later. For now, let’s focus on the package and the hardware itself.
With the Nintendo 3DS set to hit North America in a matter of days, it’s time to close the books on the Nintendo system that could. Who knew that the ugly and under-powered Nintendo DS would end up becoming one of the best-selling systems of all-time? Who knew the device would actually usher in a new era of casual gaming?
Though I’ll confess to not having played my DS in a very long time, I bought a ton of games for it during its hey day and had a lot of great memories with it. Before moving into the next era of handheld gaming, I thought I’d close things out by listing off my top 5 favourite Nintendo DS games.
I like the Fight Night series. I thought Round 3 was great and Round 4 was even better. Well, it was better, until I ran into a game-breaking glitch that caused me to lose 20 hours of progress. When this happened to me, I returned the game with no remorse. I’ve had opportunities to buy it back for as low as $5 brand new, but I still couldn’t bring myself to do it. I loved that game, but I hate what it did to me.
With Fight Night Champion in stores now though, I’m torn.
Over the past few weeks, I have grown rather fond of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. While I still play Super Street Fighter IV with my coworkers when they are online, Marvel has (for now) taken over as my go-to fighting game of choice.
What I’m enjoying most about the game is the team element of the experience. In other vs. games, I would choose my team simply based on who I liked and/or who I was good with. Once in battle, I wouldn’t pay any mind in regards to who my opponent’s team was, either. I was just looking to beat people up for the win. But now that I’ve actually taken some time to learn this game, I’m realizing that there’s so much more to the team-based gameplay than that if you want to go far with the game.
Has it really been 20 years? Apparently so. Street Fighter II is officially 20 years old this month, which is definitely something worth noting for gamers of all tastes and walks of life. Street Fighter II is one of those revolutionary games that changed the course of the entire medium. It birthed the fighting game genre as we still know it today. It’s control conventions and design choices originally set by Street Fighter are still used in fighting games and other genres. It revived the arcade scene. It defined a whole era of gaming. Most importantly, it’s legacy still carries on in the hearts of many a gamer that have thrown a hadoken in their lifetime.
Yours truly is one of those gamers that will forever have a soft spot for that game. Outside of owning three copies of this game (not including any updates like Champion Edition or Super), this game changed my life.
I hope your month of love was a good one. Despite me having to dial down the daily content (and the time I spend gaming) due to real life, it’s still awesome to see so many people hit this site on a monthly basis. I’ll still keep writing as often as possible.
This month’s top 5 posts are an interesting mix of evergreen posts that never seem to go away and older posts finding new life due to current events. Click through to see what was the hotness in February.
Being good at fighting games is hard. Due to my recent success at Super Street Fighter IV, I’ve sort of taken that fact for granted. However, I got better at Street Fighter through hundreds of hours of practice, tournament experience and absorbing anything and everything I could online in regards to making myself a better player. Before I went through all of that, I spent dozens of hours playing the game online; losing almost every single one of those matches.
Though I was able to coast through the bottom tier of ranked Marvel vs. Capcom 3 matches, my winning percentage has taken a serious dip. I know enough about the game to recognize that I’m losing to people who suck at the game, but I don’t have the skills and know-how myself to beat them. Am I willing to put in the time and effort to not suck?
Over the last few weeks, the traffic to my arcade fighstick posts have skyrocketed. With Marvel vs. Capcom 3 hitting store shelves, it appears as though you’re all looking for as much fightstick information as possible before you spend your hard-earned cash on a new fighting game weapon of choice.
As a public service to you (and as something I would find fun to write), I’ve put together a newbie buyer’s guide that covers my knowledge of arcade fightsticks. This post features some general things you should know, mini-reviews to a few of the major fightsticks on the market and links to my older posts where I go into more detail on each product. I’m by no means a fightstick connoisseur, but I do own a bunch of them and spend a ton of time using them.
If you’d like to learn more, click through to the rest of this post!
In Third Person 