Can Wii Be Friends?

I was tempted to do it for a while now, but today, I finally gave in: I bought a Wii.

Blame this game.

Anyway, as you can probably guess, the last thing I want to do right now is to write. There’s a more pressing issue for me at this moment (want to take a guess what it is?), but I have a purpose for this post. Mainly, I’m gonna ask a few Wii-related questions because a few things about it still perplexes me. Much thanks in advance for anyone who can help.

1. What is a Wii Classic Controller for and do I need it?

2. Unlike what I did to my X360, which was kept without downloaded games because I don’t have enough confidence for my unit, I plan to play downloaded Wii games (a.k.a. WiiWare). I’m getting World of Goo (despite already having it on my PC), and Megaman 9. Are there other games that you can recommend?

3. There aren’t much Wii games that can be played online, are there? I don’t really need to bother with that, right?

Places Visited in My Early Days

Having used it for more than 10 years, I have recollections of how the internet was like in the olden days: from the dulcet tones dial-up modems to the cluttered look of dot-com era webpages. It’s no understatement to say that the web is better now than before in the browsing, in the design, in every imaginable way, but that does not mean that I didn’t like to surf the net back then, as there were many sites that I frequented even before Web 2.0 became the standard. There may be many recent sites in my bookmark and my RSS feeds now, but they don’t quite arouse feelings that match my nostalgia to the sites I frequented early in my life in the internet.

This post is where I take the journey to the past. Join me, and see what gems I found before the days of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and blogs, presented in the form that I found them (courtesy of archive.org’s brilliant “Way Back Machine”).

NBA

url: www.nba.com

Many of my interests came and went, but persisting few from since my childhood include videogames, anime, comics, and basketball. Back in the 90’s I would always tune to ESPN and watch the half-hour NBA Action show, seeing the week’s highlights and the brief tribute to any players. It’s where I first heard of NBA.com, which consequently became the first web page I ever visited.

Ccurrent status: active

IGN

url: www.ign.com

Although it’s still a famous news outlet for videogames (and other geek stuffs), I’ve always preferred IGN in its earlier state. The reviews were short and straight to the point and didn’t go longer than a page. It has too much babes and cars talk now, and the flash movies make the navigation very unwieldy.

Current status: active

GameCritics

url: www.gamecritics.com

I hate going into this new age talk about destiny, but nothing else could explain how I found this website. On one quiet night when I had nothing better to do, I typed in random stuff on the address bar of my browser. I tried videocritics.com, but that didn’t have anything that kept me diverted for long. When I typed in GameCritics.com, I read their reviews on Legend of Dragoon, and immediately I was hooked. Prior to coming here, I’ve never read any videogame reviews that goes beyond the technical details of the games. Modeled after Roger Ebert’s movie criticism, GameCritics discusses videogames in a more serious way than the average site, by going lengths to describe even the emotional response the game calls forth. The forums, which I was active in years ago, are full of intelligent members that often make the most thoughtful posts. They’re the only videogame site whose writers I befriended and correspond with since. Unlike the others in this list, GC has become even better through the years, now that it has blogs and podcasts.

Current status: active. Additionally, some of its writers started their blog, like Brad for drinkingcoffeecola.blogspot.com, and Mike Bracken for thehorrorgeek.com. Both of them are entertaining, and very informative if you’re into videogames, horror books, and horror movies.

Games Hermeneutics

url: www.lotusreaver.com

It’s strange, but I always found myself able to relate with Kevin Sung (the author). Maybe it’s because back then, there weren’t too many internet writers who were also Asian-Americans (I think he’s Chinese.) I always thought of Game Hermeneutics as an underappreciated site; it’s just not mentioned enough despite all the great articles about videogames, illustrations of videogames, and Asian movies.

Current status: gone, and the author now resides in kevinsung.org, with blog posts which are quite good if not as detailed as his works from lotusreaver.

Lord Carnage’s Cursed Fanboys!

url: http://sarcasm-hime.net/fanboys/

It’s almost bizarre that during site’s most active times, I was also at the height of my anime fandom, and as the new contents dwindled, so too did my love for anime. And while people can give me links to anime review sites that discusses thing more “analytically”, I’d take the bubbly fanboyish-fervor from sarcasm-hime any day.

Current status: inactive. Last update is on year 2006.

Animetric

url: http://www.animetric.com

I dug Animetric’s former author, Rowena Lim Lei, and I may be even more biased for her than most other anime critics simply because she’s a Filipina. Animetric’s reviews on anime (even the red-light district ones, if you catch my drift) are often well-written, as it rarely falls into pointless fanboy-gushing (which may sound hypocritical given the glowing endorsement I just gave in the another fanboyish site, but the thing is, Sarcasm-hime’s gushing was anything but pointless; brash and loud, maybe, but not pointless).

Current status: active, but Rowena Lim Lei no longer writes for it and handed it to Aaron Murphy, who also writes well, if not anywhere as memorable at it (then again, that may just be my nationality-bias speaking).

Anime Academy

url: http://www.animeacademy.com

Anime Academy exemplifies anime criticism at its most readable. Every review is presented with a short list of pros and cons, plus a longer (but always concise) comment about the anime’s plots, characters, and even music.

Current status: active, but languishing in obscurity. The new reviews take too long to get published and have, for years, been mostly about the latest Lupin III movies.

Archnacho and Tortilla Godzilla’s Quality Roms

url: http://home.no.net/qualrom/

This site had a decent selection of roms and emulators for NES, Genesis and SNES. Games were described in a rather original way – by having the two site owners bicker about hilariously random irrelevant nonsense.

current status: dead

GameFAQS

url: http://www.gamefaqs.com

Who needs official strategy guides when GameFAQS offers free walkthroughs for even the most obscure games?

current status: active

RPGamer

url: http://www.rpgamer.com

Like anime, RPG was one of my biggest obsessions when I was in high school. At that time, I would buy and play any videogame RPG that gets released, and I’d regularly visit RPGamer for news of the upcoming titles. The reason I don’t come back here often these days is that my passion for RPG’s have diminished over the years (and you can also blame RPG’s continual fall to blandness for that). I also think that RPGamer’s recent spate of reviews waste too much time using RPG-jargons, making them nigh unreadable.

current status: active

Super Woofer

Superheroism is rapidly becoming the most overused movie theme of all time. After the massive success of Spider-man, a year hasn’t passed when there isn’t at least one movie that birthed, expanded, deconstructed superheroes’ lives. These movies make it look like people can’t be bothered to see anything involving normal characters anymore: everyone has to be a superhuman or even a super-animal. I don’t know if recent moviegoers do indeed feel that way, and that’s certainly a topic worthy of further discussion.

Bolt, fully animated in 3d, is Disney’s foray into the super-something niche. The titular dog, along with his owner Penny, stars in an action TV series that shows him doing preternatural stunts (he could run faster than any moving vehicles, knock humans unconscious with his paw, and wreak havoc by barking). The studio arranges the show in such a way that Bolt believes what happens in TV is real.  So one day, when Penny leaves him for personal reasons, he mistakes this for her being kidnapped. He goes out to find her, inadvertently stumbling into a delivery truck and getting shut inside a box, which then ships from Hollywood to Manhattan.

Being taken very far hasn’t, however, dissuaded him from searching for Penny. Believing what has happened to him as merely another adventure (that he gets on TV), he wanders around, asking for directions and coercing various other animals to take him back. This leads him to Mittens, a female back-alley cat, and Rhino, a hamster constantly inside a transparent ball. In their travels, Bolt becomes increasingly frustrated with one thing: his superpowers don’t work.

For those of you who’ve been reading my recent updates and cringing from their orneriness, the good news is that I don’t have many bad things to say about Bolt. While it will not set a new standard for CG movies and while it is not free of the problems prevalent in Disney movies (such as the propensity for loquacious sidekicks and sentimental endings), Bolt is, most of the time, a pleasant watch. Visualize the typical Sunday scene of an entire family on a sofa, grinning ear-to-ear in front of a TV. They’re probably watching Bolt, and that’s why they’re happy, but don’t expect the kids to stay happy for long when their parents start inculcating them with its moral lessons. And also when their parents tell them that Miley Cyrus (voice of Penny) is whatever TMZ.com is making her out to be.

Come and think of it, I have always wondered why there are many who find Miley irritating. I don’t know about her besides her being the daughter of the man responsible for achy-breaky destruction of the airwaves back in the 90s, and if you show me her picture (with a smile that is said to arouse feelings of repulsion) I will just forget what she looks like after a minute. I don’t have an eidetic memory for blondes. Like how I am to the color of her hair, I found her performance in Bolt forgettable, mainly due to Penny’s brief appearances.

The real stars of the show are John Travolta and Susie Essman. By any lesser casts, Bolt would be reduced to a boring and predictable movie with occasional hints to greatness, but thanks to Travolta (voice of Bolt) and Essman (voice of Mittens), it reaches. Bolt is believable as a naïve, clueless dog who honest-to-God believes in his superpowers; Mittens is convincing as a bitter, pessimistic cat. Mark Walton is also great as Rhino, even if I’m annoyed at Rhino’s sugar-overdose buoyancy. Their interplays throughout the movie are a funny and often a joy to watch – one of its best scenes is when Mittens proves an incredulous Bolt that Bolt is not the superdog that he thinks he is.

I got the impression that the movie is saying that one doesn’t need to be superpowered to do the right thing. Maybe that’s a message that should resonate with its viewers, but I wonder if it also means to remind movie studios that a compelling story does not always require super characters.

Something to think about.

Wolverine

Am I crazy, or is 2009 turning out to be the year of origin stories? We’re just in May, but already we’ve seen movies introduce more than 5 characters becoming superheroes or costumed vigilantes or street fighters or anime gods or what-have-you’s. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the most recent of the bunch and, as the title indicates, is about how James Howlett—a mutant who can recover from any wounds and can make claws come out of his fists—became the iconic X-men character: Wolverine.

The movie takes liberties to several of its characters from their comic book roots: the most notable change is having Victor Creed (a.k.a. Sabertooth) become the half-brother of Wolverine. Readers of the comic may find that idea absurd and may even start boycotting the movie (by burning the posters, or downloading the alleged leak); personally, I didn’t mind. As long as it can tell a good story, I could give a rat’s ass if it alters the alignment, religion, gender of the characters it’s adapting.

And this now begs the question: did I like it? Well, that’s complicated. I can say that every time I see an X-Men movie, I end up wanting to read the comics (and then I’d read the Wikipedia pages and abandon that plan almost as soon as I started it; seriously, there’s no way I can make sense of the story anymore without earning a Master’s Degree in Marvel-ology). If the goal of the movies were to lure in new readers, then I suppose they did a job well done. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is no different in this regard, but while I enjoyed it, I ultimately felt that movie isn’t the most ideal medium for this kind of story. If it were a pilot episode of a TV series, then it would’ve been great.

What led me to believe in this is in the amount of characters the movie tried to cram in its story. I understand that they were here to pander to the fans of their comic book counterparts—why else was Gambit here?—but should there be so many of them, when they do essentially nothing but move the plot forward? Their brief appearances would’ve been fine as teasers had there been any succeeding episodes following this one, but this isn’t a TV series. It may take years—as opposed to a week—for its Emma Frost, Gambit, Deadpool, and Sabertooth to become well-developed characters, or it may never happen.