Having been out of work for a month hasn’t done much to lift my spirits, so I’ve dropped off the daily schedule that I had set for myself. I think I’m going to go back to my old three-posts-per-week schedule. It’ll give me some time to rest while I think of some more substantial things to write about.

Bioshock 2 is supposed to be released tomorrow, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get it right away. It looks like more snow is going to be on the way. After digging out of two feet of the white stuff over the weekend, I don’t think I could take it. I just hope the next blast isn’t as severe as the last one. (From the recent reports by ABC and the Weather Channel, it appears I won’t get my wish.)

Last night was the night of the big Super Bowl. The New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts played down in Miami this year, and the Saints came from behind to win by a score of 31-17. I was hoping for the Saints to win this one solely on the basis of them “needing” a ring (it’s their first Super Bowl appearance ever, and Peyton Manning and the Colts have won the big game in the past). This would put me in good company with the folks at Electronic Arts, who, for at least this past decade, have played simulations of Madden NFL to “predict” the winner. The game picked the Saints, too.

Category: Blog, Life, Sports, Video Games
Author: WillyFourEyes
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Tags: bioshock 2, indianapolis colts, madden nfl, new orleans saints, super bowl

For the second week in a row, I get invited to a party, and “outside forces” conspire to keep me inside (those so-called “outside forces” being snow). Today, we got a little over two feet of snow. Action News says that it’s one of the snowiest winters the Philadelphia area’s ever had, but I won’t know for sure for another month or two. It does make for a good workout, though.

Category: Life
Author: WillyFourEyes
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Tags: parties, snow, weather

And thus ends my journey through the world LittleBigPlanet. A shame that I had to cough up $10 to play a game I already owned in order to play it for three days and beat it.  At least now, I can worry about sampling all of the user-created levels once I get my own copy back.

Category: Video Games
Author: WillyFourEyes
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Tags: finished, littlebigplanet, playstation 3

After beating the original Street Fighter arcade game as part of my Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 package, I’m fortunate to have played Street Fighter II first (and I’m sure a lot of people have). Say what you will about the toughness of the bosses in SFII, but they’re a cakewalk compared to many of the enemies that you have to fight in the original game. Besides Retsu and Geki, all of the opponents after them are grossly unbalanced, who can hit harder than you and move faster than you (why is Mike able to knock me down with just three punches?). Your special attacks can deal lots of damage to them, but the stiff controls make it hard to execute them with any degree of regularity. Even then, only the Hadoken seems to work at all. It’s not a good thing when copious abuse of save states is a requirement to get past even one round of any given battle. The original Street Fighter definitely shows its age here, and even back then, it wasn’t all that good. It’s best left as a reminder of how far the series has come since then. This one’s only worth 1 star out of 5. Skip it.

Pros: one of the first one-on-one fighting games with special moves
Cons: unbalanced game difficulty, controls that don’t work as they’re supposed to

Category: Video Games
Author: WillyFourEyes
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Tags: 1-star reviews, arcade, capcom, partial reviews, street fighter

So I bought No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle a few days ago, fully knowing that I had yet to finish the first game. A lot of reviewers have said that the second game is a big improvement over the first, so I feel somewhat justified in picking this one up. I may play the sequel concurrently with the original game, just to see how things have turned out between the two games. Most gamers don’t seem to like to do that now.

Back in the NES days, I’d usually wind up renting a sequel to a game before playing the original one. It happened with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and with Mega Man 2 and 3. This was at a time when I didn’t have access to the Internet, and didn’t care so much for things as “spoilers”, “plot”, or “continuity”, as long as I got to pick up a controller and make my character hit things with his sword or shoot things with his gun. I probably wouldn’t have been afforded that luxury if No More Heroes had been released in the late ’80s. Given Nintendo’s strict policies on “acceptable content”, chances are it wouldn’t have seen the light of day back then anyway.

Category: Video Games
Author: WillyFourEyes
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Tags: no more heroes