http://wii.ign.com/articles/987/987312p1.html

Pretty exciting stuff. Looks like enough people bought Retro Game Challenge to convince them to bring this neat game stateside as well, which is just splendid. Here's hoping the response for this game is just as strong.

Gonna leave the screencap as a URL, so no one can complain about how I ruined this awesome nugget of win.

(link)

Holy shit.

UPDATE: someone made a short youtube with two more photos, one showing the exhibition requirements, and another showing our adversary getting ready to charge at Mac.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9ecgV4tPsY&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fgonintendo.com%2F%3Fp%3D82870&feature=player_embedded

Yes!




My buddy emailed me these with the subject "OMGOMGOMGOMG", so I can't really comment on these, but it looks legit.

Kudos to Capcom for bringing this over. Wii might not get MvC2, but at least it's getting something. I'll still play Marvel way more, but I'm totally down for this.

Feel free to jump to the last paragraph if you want to skip my "my gamer dad is so amazing" story.
-PG

I visited my parents again this weekend, and like all visits, my dad's been actively talking to me about how far he got in a game or a new title he's looking forward to. A few weeks ago, my dad finished his first PS3 game, Assassin's Creed. When he asked what other games were out, I blurted out "Street Fighter IV".

My dad and I used to visit my grandmother every weekend. For the last few years of her life, she was bedridden, watched over by my aunt and uncle. When they came back to America to watch my dear Vovo, my cousin gave my uncle a gift; a box of his old games, along with a PS1 and Dreamcast. My dad, sister, and uncle would all sit around and play fighting games like Soul Calibur or Street Fighter Alpha 3. And while none of us were very good (yay button mashing!) it was a lot of fun. I think that was the last time my dad and I ever sat down and played games together, which would mean we haven't played together for roughly 6 years.

It's not that we grew apart or anything; my tastes were starting to broaden as I sat down with a wide variety of games, while my dad stuck to safe bets like the James Bond games, Zelda games, and the Prince of Persia trilogy.

So jump back to this weekend; my dad gives me $60 and tells me to pick up Street Fighter IV for him, since I have a discount at work. I was secretly reluctant; when my dad is bad at a game, he complains. When he loses too much, he quits. He's quite the sore sport. And I've been playing SF4 all week at my buddy's place; the skill gap is pretty wide.

"But you only have one controller" I reply, hoping to dissuade him. He insists I buy it anyways.

I was going to flat out lie and say we were sold out, thinking I'd protect him from being frustrated with something he spent $55 on. I know, I know; it sounds horrible. But then my dad ordered pizza. And when he picked it up, he returned home with another PS3 controller.

Ever love someone so much that you hate them? Goddammit, Dad. Stop being so perfect.

I think this is his way of reaching out to me by getting back into videogames, the same way we'd read Nintendo Power together when I was six. So I pretty much had to buy the game today.

Anyways, TL;DR: My dad doesn't even know what a Hadouken is, much less how to execute any sort of combo. And he's also in his 50's. So training him is going to be quite the challenge. Anyone have experience coaching new players? I want to be supportive so that we can start playing games again, and I don't want him to feel like he wasted money, but I don't know where to even begin.

I'd made a few posts in the past about how awesome it is to have a family that actively plays games. I trained my sister on Goldeneye before she could properly speak, my mom's openly admitted that she loves the Wii (though she took it back when we started chanting "ONE OF US..."), and my dad's the man that started me on the NES before I was even in Preschool.

Coming out of Retirement

Over the years, I've been playing a lot more games; different genres, different systems, the whole nine yards. My dad, on the other hand, is in his mid-50's; he works, he actively exercises, and his eyes are going, meaning he can really only play console games, and can only play sparingly. He never really stopped playing; Zelda is still an old standby, and he's picked up a taste for shooters as well as the Prince of Persia trilogy, but for a few years, he just wasn't playing that much.

When my mom caught WiiFit fever over the summer, she was sad to hear that I'd be taking the Wii to school with me like every other year, and decided to buy her own in order to keep working out (which is going really well, mind you. She owns two exercising games that she plays regularly, and she's lost a good amount of weight). My dad saw this as an opportunity to start gaming more, and promptly bought Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, which he only got because "IGN gave it a good score, and it was only 25 bucks".

RE4, as we all know, is a quality game, and once he sat down and played it, he was totally hooked. I've never seen him this obsessed with a game since the SNES. Since then, I've been actively engaging him in game-related conversation, trying to relight that old spark he used to have. He'd talk about how awesome some of the bosses are, or how brutal the game was on Hard.

I'm a Bad, Bad Son

He was disappointed, then, to hear that the next RE would not come out for the shiny white box.

Flash forward to mid-January; my dad's had his brand new LCD TV for over a year, and it's time to upgrade from DVD to Blu-Ray. With Christmas over, prices for Blu-Ray players went back up to their standard price. At the same time, Mr. Dale North made a post about Dell's sale on PS3s; $60 off. I showed it to him, and he laughed.

Then I planted a seed into his brain. A carefully crafted sentence that would burrow deep into his cerebrum, haunting him every day for weeks.

"But you know, if you're going to spend $300 on a Blu-Ray player, why not spend the extra $40 and get a PS3?"

You see, I'm an awfully manipulative person, and hey, if he bought a PS3, then I wouldn't have to buy one. And then I'd have a reason to visit them during the school semester. So everybody wins, right?

Of course I'm right.

Eventually, the PS3s were backordered, to which my dad simply said "too bad". But he kept talking about that PS3, even without me instigating a conversation. Skip to late January, when I went home to visit. The rat bastard ordered a PS3 from Dell before they ran out, but kept it a secret from me. I guess that's what you get for trying to manipulate your own father.

Dad, Me, and PS3

With his new toy hooked up, he went out and bought Assassin's Creed because, like RE4, "IGN gave it a good review, and it was only $25". I was hoping he'd get the new PoP game, but I was fine with it. I played a little myself, and it was kinda neat for awhile. Eventually, I decided to get Valkyria Chronicles, because copies of that game will go extinct soon. My mission was to try and get him to play, but he's sworn off RPGs ever since we rented Final Fantasy III years ago. Renting Chrono Trigger just pushed him further away, much to my dismay.

But now that Assassin's Creed has been beaten, our house has wifi, and my dad has a PSN account, it's time to convince him to get a new PS3 game. He really wants to play multiplayer games online with his newfangled wi-fi, and he wants to bond with me over some multiplayer games, so I'm pushing hard for him to get Street Fighter IV, though I fear he'll never grasp the simple Hadoken.

A shooting game, maybe? He loves shooting people in the face.

Regardless of what I trick him into buying for me next, I'm happy to see us finally talking about videogames as much as we used to during the SNES era, watching my dad claw through the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, or writing down endless codes for Mega Man X together. I still remember the night my dad beat Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, whooping and hollering, declaring himself "The Champ". Those were great times.

I guess the moral of the story is that anyone can get into gaming, but I think a lot of gamers just aren't communicating with others well enough. I've trained my girlfriend to finally use the dash button in Super Mario World, and I've been coaching a coworker in Super Smash Bros. Hell, I've managed to convert my best friend and his fiancee to the Pokemon metagaming community, and they're serious competitors now; something I never predicted.

But when you can learn to share what you love with other people (in this case, games), and learn to bring them into your world, you'll be surprised by how they respond. I know that sounds really obvious and preachy, but sometimes it's nice to be reminded of these things.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to figure out how to convince my mom that shooting your head in Persona 3 isn't suicide.

I recently sat down with "Can I be the Hero?" (or "Can I Really Be the Hero?". Or "Can I Really be Assed to Type the Entire Fucking Title Jesus Christ") and I'm not sure how I feel about it..

"It is a game."

That is my response to my roommates, fellow Disgaea fans, who asked what I thought of the spin-off. I want to say I love it; the music is solid, the graphics aren't terribly bad (but seriously, would it kill them to up the resolution some time this decade?) and the characters still have some charm, even after being overmilked a tad (can you blame them? It's not like NIS's other games sell). The different concepts introduced also make it a unique experience; the set pool of 1000 lives at the start are all you have to beat a game. The stages that change depending on the time of day, along with the bosses you face. You can even end the game early and restart with all of your achievements, just incase you want to try a different path.

But for some reason, this game offends me. Could it be the rat bastard controls? Probably. Nearly every aspect of the controls has some flaw, like how dashing requires you to dance for one whole agonizing mississippi-second. The jumping controls still frustrate me, even as I approach the end of the game, and stuff like ducking or climbing up ledges has unnecessary lag that prevents Prinny from being as nimble as a good platformer.

Or maybe it's the bullshit level design, the kind of dastardly layout that forces you two fight three unstunnable, teleporting ninjas whilst dodging random oncoming fireballs, a hail of arrows, and enemies that simply cannot die at all.

I beat Mega Man 9 without dieing. This shouldn't be hard.

I keep playing this game, and I can't tell you why. I think it might have to do with this kind of gamer cred; a "put up or shut up" mentality that I have, despite the fact that none of my acquaintances are challenging my skillz. But there's a nagging voice in my head that keeps calling that same name over and over again...

"...p...y"
"...p..sy"
"pussyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy"

And so, every day, I sit down and stare at my PSP, and I think to myself "It's not that hard. Watch. I'll beat it". I beat the stage eventually, and the game informs me that I died 138 times, giving me an F, crossing its arms, and telling me to suck less.

Great game.

I beat the alternate story first, which turned out to be far easier than the main story. This is disappointing, because I'm stuck on a boss in the main story. A boss I must beat in 3 minutes for reason other than "because the programmers said so." But I have to keep playing, because the Ultra Dessert is always a stage away.

Maybe I'm just a masochist, but this game is addictive, despite the fact that I speak so ill of it.