Speedfreak

To be honest I think Donkey Kong has created a large enough seperate universe to be considered seperate from Mario. By your logic, considering the name of Mario's original game, you should be saying that all Mario and Yoshi characters are actually Donkey Kong characters.

*spits coke all over screen* WHAT!? Those dungeons were less like puzzles and more like grand tours! Most of the time they'd give you a key before you had even seen a locked door, other times the key to the locked door you has just seen was either in the same bloody room or in the next one. The Temple of Time totally defined their attitude to dungeons in that game: "why make the player actually have to look around when we're basically leading them in a nice simple line doing simple puzzles?", so they just made you go straight up and then straight down in a totally linear fashion. I mean jeez, OoT might not have had the best dungeon design in the series but it was certainly better than Twilight Princess's. Apart from a few rooms the Water Temple was brilliantly designed, the changing water levels turned the whole dungeon into a puzzle itself, it was jus a bit too frustrating because of time too well-hidden keys. The Forest Temple was also quite non-linear, you had to have a good look around before you figured out where to go, and then had to go back through the dungeon non-linearly to apply the item you got. Do yourself a favour and play Majora's Mask or Link's Awakening for some genuinely decent dungeon design. On the subject of voice acting: if it happens Zelda will suck. Zelda storylines exist purely for gameplay. Nintendo are free to change it up if they realise that the story is creating some especially bad gameplay and do so on a regular basis. But in game development when you include voice acting the dialog must be written early so the voice acting can be done in time. And if you want to change the story to better the gameplay but already have all the voice acting done the you're pretty much screwed.

I don't get all the crap about the support system when the game still has them. There's two kinds of support, buddy supports which can occur between any character and boost stats and bond supports which are only between certain characters and have conversations. What's the problem? That's better, if anything.

You know who's fault this is, really? Rockstars. They had to be immature and make crap games that sell on puclicity because that's all they're good for. If Rockstar never made crap like Manhunt WE WOULDN'T HAVE THIS F**KING PROBLEM.

Playing through Twilight Princess again I do think the game would play better (in terms of swordfighting at least) with the Cube controller. But then I equip the bow and start firing off arrows all over the place and remember there's some advantage to it.

Sit further away from the TV. The closer you are the more likely you are to be not pointing at the sensor bar. About 10 feet away is pretty much the ideal distance. It's not really innaccurate because it's supposed to be like a mouse, not a laser pointer.

QFT. You hit the nail on the head. Link simply isn't a character, he's a vessel. Whoever said the next game needs to be outside Hyrule, I agree. Zelda is about exploring a new world, what's the point if you know about the locations already? Hyrule needs to be dumped or needs a new interpretation like in Wind Waker. I'm rooting for something as fresh as Termina again, with a just as bizarre mythos and culture.

The problem with that is Zelda is all about getting stronger, and items that let you defeat more enemies and access more areas is their way of doing that. I was thinking less items and more environment-based puzzles would be better though. Like how Wind Waker eliminated Deku sticks by just having sticks in the dungeons. They look nothing like eachother. The themes of TP and Echoes is completely different. Hell, Echoes' theme is more like the 2 most popular Zeldas, OoT and LttP.

4 things I think need to be fixed for the next Zelda: 1) The amount of time between the start of the game and the first dungeon. Running around Ordon for 2 hours as Link, then another 2 hours as a wolf sucked ass. It needs to be immediate like in OoT. 2) The amount of time between the start of the game and actually being able to explore Hyrule. In TP You didn't get to explore until after the second bloody dungeon! You were shown Hyrule feild and finally got your horse and you're like "Hell yeah, time to explore", but all the paths are blocked with boulders. Lame. 3) The controls. This is a no-brainer really. TP had fine controls for it's time, but after playing Metroid and Mario they just don't hold up. I have no fear they'll make something truly amazing for the next one so this is sorta redundant. 4) The dungeons. I really didn't like most of the dungeons in TP. THe forest temple was as generic as hell, no one even explained it's existence. Next up was a mine, then a water temple that, again, wasn't even really like a temple. I want the next game to be full of dungeons that are just absolutely insane. I want stuff as cool as the Stone Tower Temple, the Tower of the Gods, Eagle's Tower, Great Bay Temple. They even buggered the Temple of Time up and made it about statues. Why not an item that aged the temple itself like it did outside? That would've been amazing. The City in the Sky was stunning, until they ruined it with those damn chickens. If the're gonna throw generic stuff our way then they should at least make it feel cool. The Forest Temple in OoT is a great example, it felt spooky yet it had that forest emblem all over the place that really made it feel like a place of worship. Okay, okay, 4 and a half. 4.5) Sort out Link's running animation. He looked ridiculous in TP. A lot of the story ideas being put forward are silly. Zelda is a simple fairytale. Fairytales do not have crazy plots, they're simple and have a moral. The moral of Zelda is that all a Hero needs to defeat evil is courage, it's a great story so why mess that up trying to make it as deep Metal Gear Solid?

GOOD JOB FOR NOT PACKING IN YOUR PERIPHERAL WITH SOMEONE ELSE'S GAME.

I hope the next game isn't in Hyrule. Wha's the point in a game about exploration when you already know where everything is? I'd love a whole new world like Termina again, or a re-imagining of Hyrule like in Wind Waker would do. I just don't want the same damn locations.

Better. Anyone who says otherwise is looking at 64 through rose-tinted glasses. Galaxy is supposed to be the successor to Mario 64, but because of the way it plays it's really a successor to the 2D games. It's Mario 64 done properly. Most of the levels are short and sweet like in Super Mario Bros 3. Like the 2D games they're also much more linear, though there are plenty of secret shortcuts. This is great because the variety is kept up and it feels much less like an adventure game than Mario 64 did. You're always looking forward to any new obstacles unlike in 64 where you basically knew the whole level after the 2nd star. Like in Super Mario World you can wander off course and find an alternate ending to the level, so you commonly get stars you weren't even looking for.

Fuck this shit, thread ender right here: WHAT HAS SOLD MORE ON LAUNCH WEEK, NINTENDOGS OR HALO 1 AND 2? HALO. WHAT HAS SOLD MORE SINCE RELEASE, NINTENDOGS OR HALO 1 AND 2 COMBINED? NINTENDOGS. It's physically possible for a game to have legs. Halo will drop off the charts soon, shit for all I know it already has, but Mario has saying power. Mario Sunshine was in the top 10 best selling Gamecube games a good 3 YEARS and sold over 6 million copies, thats just 1 million under Halo 1. Galaxy is selling faster than any Mario game ever. Put 2 and 2 together.

They reviewed the game as if a non-gamer was gonna read it, except the final score isn't consistent with it. If I reviewed the game for a non-gamer I'd give it 0.1. It's for absolutely no one BUT the hardcore gamer. Which brings me to my next point. They're saying you won't stick around to see how the story turns out. Yet to be a Fire Emblem fan you have to have a very long attention span because the series is EXTREMELY difficult and requires a lot of planning. Gamespot ave completely forgotten who actually plays Fire Emblem. We'd play through the game just for the gameplay, so if the story does end up turning out well then what's the fucking problem?

It's called a teaser. The real ads will show up closer to the release date. They're exactly like the 3 second Wii teasers before it's launch.

The series has evolved, just incrementally rather than by leaps and bounds every installment like Mario. They just don't get that when you have an actually decent formula for a strategy game you've hit the jackpot and don't want to ruin that. Any minor nuance they add to the game double the amount of possibilities.

I hope to God there's an option for Japanese voices with subtitles in the pre-rendered cutscenes. The US voices were awful, and American accents just don't fit medievil settings anyway.

Pros know the weakness of all the items and know how to work around them. I charge headlong at hammers all the time.

Yup, after looking on GameFAQs I reckon it might be a ship missile upgrade. There's two places in the game that the Chozo maps don't show you item locations for, so I'm gonna check em out.

Just completed it with 99% (fuck knows what that last item was). It never answered the question: what came first, the metroid or the phazon so plot-wise I'm kinda disappointed. EDIT: Oh wait, yeah it does, nevermind.

Most PS2 owners were casual gamers, that's why it's so popular. Guess that means PS2 wasn't a good market for hardcore games durrrrrrrrr.

Super Mario Bros 3 is about 4 hours long, max. 20 hours for a Mario game is plenty.

Do NOT buy Samsung TVs, especially the kind 360s are commonly displayed on in demo booths. I used to work for EA as a tester and we had only two kinds of HDs, Samsungs and Sharps. Gamecube and Wii always looked like complete shit on the Samsung, but on my Sharp at home it looks brilliant. Get Sharp! I will say that my Sharp doesn't support component cables very well (it has a VGA port and comes with an adapter so you can't have sound). But the TVs de-interlacer more than makes up for it. Just get an RGB cable and set the Wii to 576i, it deinterlaces it and makes it look like 576p which is a pretty big improvement over 480p.

Who cares about Mario Galaxy spoilers, really? What the fuck is there to spoil?