Well, what do you know... my Wii still works!
Seriously, though... I haven't turned the little guy on in months, aside from a few rounds of multiplayer Boom Blox here and there. There is a gradual stream of Virtual Console titles out there that I'd love to play... but haven't really had the time to devote, or the motivation to decide which to grab first.
Fortunately, World of Goo came out this week, and solved that problem for me. It's fucking brilliant! Many of you may have played, or at least seen, the free game Tower of Goo a while back. ToG has you building a tower as high as you possibly can by sticking little balls of goo together... sort of like building a tower with toothpicks and marshmallows. World of Goo takes the same concept and expands it in every possible direction. New types of gooballs with special properties, various interesting challenges and puzzles to work through, a creepy/hilarious Oddworld-esque story. I'd go so far to say that WiiWare now has something every bit as special as Braid on XBLA. (and there's a PC version too, for you Wii-haters... on Steam as well as other places, I believe. The Wii version is $15, and the PC one is $20.)
Speaking (previously) of Virtual Console... the SNES classic "Secret of Mana" came out this week, as well. I was a Genesis kid, but from everything I've heard, Secret of Mana is the bees' knees, especially with 3-player co-op. So, if anyone wants to come over and try it out, I'd love to 3-man a totally classic Squaresoft action-RPG.
Good things come on discs, too! GameFly seems to have a very creative interpretation of the order of my queue, so what comes in the mail from them is often a surprise from the latter half of my queue. Why would I want to play something within 6 months of when it came out, anyway? ahem
Anyway, this week they graced me with Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection, which is totally flipping all of my childhood switches. It's a collection of ten classic Williams pinball tables, faithfully scanned and recreated in 3D, complete with all the original sound effects, music, even a hi-res scan the original arcade flyer for each one. Each table has its own set of achievements that unlock various bonuses, and each one also has a tutorial to explain how the scoring works, what kind of special bonuses are available, etc. The ball physics are perfect, and the Wii controls are pretty great. You use both the Wiimote and Nunchuck, with the trigger on each of them representing the flipper button on either side. If you want to bump the table (shame!) you can just shake whichever hand is on the side of the table you want to bump. The plunger is pulled with the analog stick on the Nunchuck.
It's video pinball, so you probably know if that kind of thing appeals to you. What I love so much about it is the "real-world" feeling to the tables... since you're playing on recreations of actual tables, after all. As cool as some of the newer pinball machines are on a technical level, I think they really lost something when so much started happening on the digital display above the table. The ten Williams tables represented here are, for the most part (fuck you Gorgar!), totally classic and brilliant feats of engineering for their time.
Do you like the the Wii controls in World of Goo, or do you think it would be better on the PC?
I haven't played virtual Pinball since Sierra's 3D Ultra Pinball, which I loved - might have to check out The Williams Collection...
Posted by: James Ahlschwede | October 15, 2008 at 12:10 PM
The Wii works great with World of Goo... playing with a mouse would probably be very similar, so I'd go with personal preference.
Posted by: Aaron Welsher | October 15, 2008 at 12:13 PM