A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

classicaljunkie and I got Wii Fit as an early Xmas prezzie. It's nice! I recommend it if you have a Wii but lack a solid exercise regimen. I'm skeptical about the game's longevity, but it is teaching me some new, worthwhile stuff. If nothing else, it's like a super-interactive exercise video, with feedback.

It's a bit too interactive at times, though. It needs a mode where it leads you through a workout of several linked exercises, rather than letting you choose exercises one-by-one until you feel like stopping. Not only do I not always want to choose, but the break of a minute or two for menu navigation and (unskippable) high-score-list admiration feels artificial.

Sometimes it does suggest a good follow-on exercise after you complete something, but instead of offering you a "Hey great let's do that" button, it leaves it to you to find where in the menu-maze that second exercise is, and start it up yourself. How could they miss this?

It'd also be nice if you could navigate the menus using only the foot device, a la DDR, rather than having to pick up and put down the Wii Remote all the time, often just to press the A button. Really, would puttting an extra A button in toe's reach on the board have been that hard? (It already sports a toe-friendly power buttton.)

And, too bad about the BMI, which everyone (even my doctor) seems to agree isn't a very useful metric, at least in terms of presenting a normal/overweight/obese range that hardly applies to all humans. But we knew about this deal ahead of time, so we're not taking it too seriously. We laugh as the Wii performs its initial judgement on new players, which is invariably HELLO YOU ARE ENORMOUS followed by ploomp ballooning up the player's on-screen Mii, who is like "WTF". whatever

World of Goo is a brilliant game. If you have a Wii, you owe it to yourself to drop $15 on downloading it.

I'd classify it as a cross between Lemmings and a Tinkertoy set. On each level you need to guide cute little critters ("gooballs", in this case) from a starting point, across variously hostile terrain, and then to an exit. But where Lemmings had you assign various worker-roles to some of the critters in order to make a path for the others, Goo has you using them as building material.

The gooballs like to be picked up with the wiimote, and if you drop one near two or three of its buddies, they'll reach out and link up as a lattice. Thus you construct towers, wedges, bridges, and various other structures that non-linked gooballs can walk across to the exit. The game uses a full-bore 2D physics engine, and the things you build act like "real" (in a Flatlandish sense) structures of their shape would, if made out of a rubbery material. A lot of the puzzles involve figuring out how to use up as few gooballs as possible to build stable supports for the up-reaching ones, and it's a real joy to play with.

This is surely the best Wii Ware game published yet, and worth every penny. Go get it. (Thanks to queue for the rec!)

I didn't think I'd like Super Smash Bros Brawl, and I'd surely like it a lot less if classicaljunkie and I didn't live around a lot people who love to play chaotic button-mashy fighty party games, but we do, so I do. CJ might dig it more than me, actually, since she's also into the single-player modes and the trophy-collection hook.

I used to play the previous game (Melee) at mrmorse's occasionally, and usually felt like I had little control over the action, whanging away at the buttons and making my character do random stuff. After a little bit of practice with my own copy of the game, my random-whanging rate's down to maybe 75 percent, and that makes a big difference.

Jmac tip for beginners: The first combo move to learn is the the up-special smash, which is (almost) every character's fall-recovery technique. When you can pull it off without panicking, you can save yourself from falling off the screen more often than not. Mess around in the Solo Training level for a few minutes to get the hang of it. With the standard remote + nunchuk controller setup, you trigger it by tapping up and pressing B.

We unlocked R.O.B. last night, and for whatever reason I'm very good with him. Also his green-metal look is quite attractive. Pikachu was my first good character, but whenever I bust him out among friends they all become venomous with anti-Pikachu hysteria, making me the biggest target. So Mr. P has transformed into my gutsy inviting-everyone-to-bring-it character.

I'd post my SSBB friend-code but my Wii is at CJ's and I don't know. Someday I'll get it together. I wish it were easier, but so does everyone else. This VGCats comic does an excellent job summarizing the three different consoles' approach to online play, with Nintendo's being especially poignant.

It's fun, and I recommend it. It fails to reach the conceptual heights of last decade's Super Mario 64, but the games it plays with gravity and perspective and make it a unique and worthwhile platformer.

Galaxy's levels are surprisingly linear. For the most part, you start at point A, and bounce along a unidirectional graph - the tiny planetoids being nodes, and the fixed flight-routes between them the edges - until you hit the flagpole star at the end.

Several levels feature branchpoints in their routes where you can go grab a "hidden" star instead of the main one, encouraging you to play that level twice. Nice, but adding an extra arm to the graph doesn't make it less graphy.

It is not an exploration game like Mario 64. Your interaction with the environment is more like a tourist than an adventurer: land somewhere, admire the scenery, do whatever's on the itinerary for this location, and then move on to the next destination. There's no need to figure out what to do or where to go next, and almost never any backtracking.

The scenery, however, is beautiful, and those itinerary tasks are all perfectly fun, usually involving nosing around a little planet collecting things and exploiting the various crazy new power-ups this game introduces.

Small gripe: the game continues the Mario-game tradition of keeping track of lives, and awarding you with extra lives for clever exploration, valiant deeds, or just collecting lots of stuff. The trouble is that lives are meaningless to a modern platformer. You start out every Galaxy play session with five lives, and playing almost any level results in a net gain of two or three more. I typically had 15 or so lives every time I was done playing. I seldom bothered to go fetch 1up mushrooms placed in tantalizing locations. It would have been nice to replace these with something more appreciable.

You should still play it (especially if you can borrow a copy like me, ha ha). Wii owners who find themselves enjoying this game owe it to themselves to also check out the orginal Super Mario 64, which can be purchased and downloaded for $10 from the Wii Shop channel.