Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Nintendo Switch) Review

Even though the Nintendo Switch is a very popular new console, ironically the first two big games could also be found on the WiiU. While Breath of the Wild was co-launched Mario Kart 8 was certainly out for years. Now granted Mario Kart 8 was one of my biggest disappointments in the series, and if they needed to re-tune any of them, it would be this one. Since I no longer have a WiiU or my old copy of Mario Kart 8 I figured I'd get this mainly because of multiplayer. Now granted it never feels right spending the dough to get the same game twice, so are the new upgrades worth it in the long-run?

Photo: Tanukis in Atlanta

Tanukis (also known as the raccoon dog) is a species native to Asia that inspired the Tanooki suit in the Super Mario games by Nintendo. They were a little hard to see at Zoo Atlanta but I got a decent look. They're more related to dogs than raccoons. They weren't very active though. 

The Lost Legend of Zelda Games

 The Legend of Zelda series is one of Nintendo's biggest juggernauts but the series has changed a lot over the years. They also tried things that changed drastically by the time the final product came out. Here are the lost Zelda games to the world.

Photo: Nintendo Switch Pro-Controller

While the Joy-con controller tha comes with the system is pretty good, I needed a spare controller for multiplayer anyways. I'm a little skeptical of how comfortable this controller is but it's pretty darn good. The d-pad is much better and the joysticks seem better for a FPS. 

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch) Review

 The Legend of Zelda is a favorite video game series of mine, so much so that I had named my dog Zelda (who sadly passed away last October) when I got her in the early 2000's. My first love in the series was Ocarina of Time, as before 1999-2000 all I ever played was the first game on NES and I found it too difficult for my mental power as a little kid. I later replayed that and loved it along with most of the games in the series. Breath of the Wild took so long to develop that it actually came out after the "death" of the WiiU and arrived as a launch title for the Nintendo Switch. They did make a WiiU version to appease fans, but the Switch version is suppose to be the best as the system is more powerful.

My Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Impressions

 I waited a LONG time for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I originally thought it was going to be out of the WiiU, it really became a Nintendo Switch game. Granted there is a WiiU version, but like Twilight Princess, I got the better version on the more powerful system. It's been almost six years since we've had a real 3D Zelda adventure, and I will say that my hype was pretty much met. It does a lot changes you'd never thought you'd see in a Zelda game. It's even got some voice acting (though many lines are text-only) where you can obviously hear a woman (probably Princess Zelda) in a very lovely British accent. 

I heard the world map is huge, and even the initial Great Plateau area (which I'm not even done with) is larger in size than most Zelda games and sometimes put together. Now granted a lot of this is land with nothing going on. You have to stumble upon secrets and enemies before they stumble upon you that is.  

You also have an apparent lack of traditional dungeons. Kind of like Pokemon Sun/Moon for 3DS, you go through "trials" with shrines instead. All the shrines I've through go by very fast. I hear the game has about as many as there are stars in Super Mario 64. 

This Zelda actually feels a lot like the Fable series on the Xbox consoles. Except it's really good, I disliked Fable 2 and hated Fable 3. It's also a lot more realistic as your weapons and shields break and you have to replace them. Armor and shields mean much more here than any other game in the series. And you can't blindly charge into enemies either. You have think of how you're going to win every battle. And dying a lot is going to be very common place.  

My Top 5 Nintendo WiiU Games

 Nintendo has had good and bad years, but I will say with confidence that the WiiU was its weakest system. Without a true 3D Mario adventure or an exclusive 3D Zelda game, the library wasn't the greatest. Even though I had one for years, I played an awfully small amount of WiiU games. Even Mario Kart 8 wasn't nearly as good as the series usually was. So what five games were the best for me?

Photo: Got a Nintendo Switch

 With the years flying by, it didn't seem that long ago since the WiiU was new. It didn't work out so well for Nintendo, but the new Nintendo Switch is doing so good that you can't really find them anywhere. Yesterday my wife and I went into Walmart and found a few. I almost couldn't believe it. The original Wii was a lot like this (even worse as it was a holiday release) and I remember finding a box at a Walmart. They clerk at the time (mid-2000's) claimed it was a display box and I was almost so angry I could have easily kicked the glass. He was joking, but now a decade later I had an old woman get it for me out of the case. Luckily she wasn't a jokester and she didn't even realize that they had some.

My Favorite Photos: Pink Pokemon Shirt

On a recent stop to JCPenney my wife found this pink Pokemon shirt for her. It was on clearance so I suppose it was made for the craze of Pokemon Go on mobile phones last year. While Pokemon as a video game series has survived after people thought it would end up being a "fad", Pokemon Go sure did turn out to be a fad. But to be honest, almost all smartphone games are fads since touch screen controls only work for a limited number of games, and mobile developers find ways to ruin game-play. I never played Pokemon Go but it seems they made some pokemon almost impossible to find which would be only a matter of time before people got tired of that. 

Super Monkey Ball 3D (3DS) Review

One of my favorite times in video game history was in the early 2000's because I was a big fan of the Nintendo Gamecube. Sega's literal first game on the Nintendo console was Super Monkey Ball. It debuted in arcades, and was probably going to be a title for the Sega Dreamcast. However the Dreamcast had failed by the time so Sega decided to make it a launch title for the Gamecube. I enjoyed both the original game and Super Monkey Ball 2 which was also on Gamecube. The only other one I played was Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz on the Nintendo Wii. The problem with that game was that the motion controls (there was no option for an analog stick) made the game even more difficult than usual. It's been quite a few years since I had some time with a Super Monkey Ball game and even though this 3DS game is rather old now it's about time I gave it a chance.

Pokemon Sun/Moon (3DS) Review

 Pokemon Sun and Moon are the newest Pokemon games in the main series. So far the 3DS has gotten 3 sets of main Pokemon games. There was X and Y, and then Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. I never played the original Ruby and Sapphire on Gameboy Advance so I just skipped it. I had almost skipped Sun and Moon until the craze of Pokemon Go came along. I never really played Pokemon Go but it revived my enthusiasm for the series. Nintendo has fallen on some more difficult times lately so they are pumping out more of their series staples than they usually do. Can Sun and Moon impress being the 3rd pokemon game in a handheld generation?

My Favorite Photos: Super Smash Bros on Thanksgiving

I had brought my WiiU and a little TV over my brother's house during the Thanksgiving event. Mainly because I knew my nephew Mr. C and Mr. K would be there. Mr. C finished his food first and he went to have fun in my niece's room. I told him to come over to the office and to my shock that he never heard of the game Super Smash Bros. before. Both of them were really bad at it, so I had to lose on purpose at times to make sure neither of them threw a tantrum, I make it where I won, then Mr. K, then Mr. C and the circle continued. By the end of the night they got much better, but they were upset that they had to go home. "One more game?" was uttered to their parents by both of them. My brother Steven asked what it was called, seems Santa is going to get them it on Christmas morning. 

Yoshi's Woolly World (WiiU) Review

Yoshi's Woolly World is yet another sequel in the Yoshi Island sub-series of the Mario franchise. While I didn't get to play it, I remember Kirby's Epic Yarn which more than likely inspired the graphical style of Woolly World especailly as the same team is behind the new Yoshi game. Yoshi's Island was one of the best games on the Super Nintendo and easily one of the best of all-time. The original sequel, Yoshi's Story was terrible but the next one Yoshi's Island DS was a lot better. Yoshi's New Island on 3DS was decent but certainly not close to the original. Does Woolly World finally compete with the original or is like the two portable sequels? Or even worse is it like the N64 mistake from the 1990's?

Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (WiiU) Review

 When the Nintendo DS came out in late 2004 it really needed a good game that wasn't just Super Mario 64 with extras. A few months into it, we got Kirby: Canvas Curse which not only gave the DS a much needed awesome game (the handheld console would later become much more popular) but innovated the Kirby series which had been rather stale at the time. The game used the stylus to draw lines as Kirby was now a ball that could no longer absorb powers from his enemies. Now over eleven years later, I finally got my hands on its sequel Kirby and the Rainbow Curse for WiiU. A decade does seem like a long wait for a true sequel and do find it a little odd they didn't put this one on 3DS instead.

Pokemon Origins (TV Series) Review

When I was in elementary school, I remember the original season of the Pokemon anime cartoon. I loved it as a kid, I even remember getting a few issues of the Pokemon manga comic book as well. But the Pokemon anime is and has always been fairly cheesy and very simple. And somewhere in the early 2000's I stopped caring to keep up with it. I noticed Pokemon Origins the other day which is more faithful to the original game. But I thought it was strange to have this one as a TV show as the Pokemon anime with Ash Ketchum still exists. It's not really a TV show, in Japan it was a made-for-TV movie made in 2013 to get people hyped up for Pokemon X/Y for the Nintendo 3DS. The American version separates it into four episodes. I had initially only wanted to see a little of it out of mere curiosity but after such a rush of nostalgia I figured I'd stay for the whole thing. 

The story is pretty much the whole events of Pokemon Red and Blue. Instead of Ash Ketchum, the hero is Red whom Ash Ketchum was originally based on. Just like Ash and Red, Gary Oak is really Blue Oak in this one. And thankfully Jesse and James of Team Rocket are non-existent in this one. Just like the game itself Red gets to pick one Pokemon (not a Pikachu) from Professor Oak and he picks Charmander. Blue picks Squirtle merely because he's a jerk and wants the advantage over Red. Professor Oak tells them to go out and complete the Pokedex and find all 150 Pokemon out there in the world. You later realize how dumb everyone in Kanto is about Pokemon. The extremely nearby Johto has another 150 that nobody ever knew about mere miles away.   

But just like the game Ash Ketchum... I mean Red has to go around all over the Kanto region to find every single Pokemon. And Red also has to visit every gym leader and get all the badges by the time he's done. But first he'll have to learn what it means to be a Pokemon trainer. It doesn't mean they are tools, it's not about glory, but rather about friendship. And Red will have to remind some other trainers along the way about that as well. But he'll have to face the notorious Team Rocket and its leader Giovanni who wish to do very evil things to the world and they don't mind using Pokemon to do so. 

Pokemon Origins was about as I had expected. A decent tale about the adventure millions played in the late 1990's. The game had a lot of plot to cover so a lot of the gym encounters are told like they were just quick flashbacks in this TV show/movie. It was interesting to see a Pokemon anime a lot more faithful to the game than the actual anime series ever was. While it won't wow anyone from the original generation of real-life Pokemon trainers, now that a good chunk of them have their own kids it's a good way to show them the original generation of Pokemon. While I still enjoy the sequels, the original 150 (plus Mew of course) were always the best. 

Score: B-

Fact of the Day: Poke Bugs

The video game series Pokemon was heavily inspired by insect collecting. Its creator Satoshi Tajiri loved insect collecting when he was younger. 

Funny Story: Pokemon Demons

Around 1998 on our school bus there was a girl named Kiki (her name is kind of obvious that her parents did not give her great genes to begin with) and she stated that her church (and she wasn't even in middle school yet) told all the children to stop playing Pokemon because Pokemon were Satan's demons. Since more kids on the bus were Poketrainers than super-religious she was basically booed in a sense to sit down and be quiet. I thought it was something silly she made up but the Christian-right has had a bit of hatred towards Pokemon. Later in life I've heard some weird pastor guy called them "oriental demons" and another case just like it with some church leader saying pretty much the same thing with the super-popularity of Pokemon Go. What did Pokemon ever do to them? 

Story: Finding Pokemon

In the late 90's Pokemon became one of the biggest things ever. I never heard of it until after a baseball game. We went to one of our team-mate's houses and everyone got their Gameboy systems out and played Pokemon Red/Blue...except me. I wasn't actually that late to the Pokemon train as it was well before Gold/Silver but I did feel awfully left out for a few days until I got my own. It brought me some good times as the fun part of the game was trading and battling your friends with the little link cable. Pokemon Go is out on mobile phones now and it's very much doing the same thing that Red/Blue did back in the day. I don't think many parents from the late 1990's actually expected their children to be off on another Pokemon quest when they grew up almost two decades later. 

Question: Sonic Vs. Mario?

 While not truly the first console war, the first big video game debate I think was between the Sega Genesis vs Super Nintendo with the other question being Mario vs. Sonic? Not many kids were fortunate to have both consoles which led many to pick a side and ask the parents for that system alone. Sonic was actually intended by Sega to be Mario's bane and his first few games were good enough to rival Mario. It worked out for Sega and Sonic gave the Sega Genesis enough popularity to make up for their low-par games on the Sega Master System.

Hyrule Warriors (WiiU) Review

 Hyrule Warriors is a game I never quite expected to ever be made. Nintendo has made plenty of spin-off series before, but almost all of them were in the Mario series. The Legend of Zelda games usually are stand-alone classics that aren't dramatically different from each other. The only spin-off game I remember was Link's Crossbow Training for Wii (based on Twilight Princess). and that game was honestly terrible. Hyrule Warriors is based on the Dynasty Warrior games, which makes it part of both franchises. The Legend of Zelda games is one of my favorite series, but did I like this odd spin-off game?