phantom_leo said:

travo said:

Borderlands is amazing.

Yeah, yeah. It is a lot of fun and it is addicting --BUT-- if you are playing it on PS3, play it for a few hours before returning the rental. I've had nothing but bugs, glitches and performance issues with it that have kinda killed it for me.

I'm really NOT trying to be a wet blanket, but go HERE before deciding to purchase or not!

Totally UNACCEPTABLE for a console game (or any game for that matter!)

Oh wait! You're a 360 person aren't you...?

...one of THEM...

I think the 360 version has far less problems than the PS3 version.

Look at the ratings Rare's games used to get on say Gamespot....N64 days most of them were mid to high 9's on a regular basis. Today, most of them are 8 range, and most would agree they've gotten some very generous ratings on some of their modern games there. A 9 for Perfect Dark Zero? Its a good game but not even close to the original & takes some patience to get into. So its better than Twilight Princess? Kameo is only 1 point less? Riiiight.

Compile the scores of all reviews from gamerankings and Rare's games have seen a huge dropoff in the past decade. I think most people agree 10 years ago they were a top 10 developer, if not top 5. Hell I regarded them higher than Nintendo at a point!

Today? Probably not even top 50.

• The difficulty level is much harder than NSMB (NDS)! (I'm having a bit of trouble getting through level 1-frickin'-4! ! )
• The game gives you ample opportunities to earn 1Ups. (Toad Houses, Rescuing Toads in Completed Levels.)
• L-O-V-E the mutha-fuckin' Koopalings! L-O-V-E ' E-M ! ! !
• The level design is brilliant! (Vader take note: The levels, for some reason, feel like they have almost a Sonic the Hedgehog feel to them, meaning: jumps, slides, proper suit use, coin placement, platform placement, etc, seem to lend GREATLY to speed runs, and have an incredible sense of "flow" to them.)
• The game makes you use your many skills: wall-jumping, sliding, good use of the power-ups, kicking koopa shells, Yoshi flutter-jumps, mastering the timing of jumping... Then throws a curve at you by doing things like making you carry a Toad through the level!
• Mario has a lot of little extra moves that call to mind ALL of his past-decade games, while still feeling like you're playing a retro-title.
• The suits handle/fit-in juuust fine! (Love the fact we can FINALLY K-I-L-L Dry-Bones!)
  
• I'll never get tired of seeing Koopas and Goombas hop and dance to the "Wah-Wah" music!

• I need to come to the conclusion that Wii games will NEVER look good on an HDTV!
• This wouldn't be a problem as much if this were a sprite-based game.
• The game obviously NEEDS to be a polygon based game to make rotating objects, scaling and rotation easier for the development team. SORELY miss the sprites though!
• Save System is still weird! Thankfully there is a quick-save where you can do a one-time save that is deleted upon restarting --BUT-- it seems the make-it-to-a-certain-checkpoint-on-the-world-map save-system is back. Yuck.

phantom_leo said:

• The level design is brilliant! (Vader take note: The levels, for some reason, feel like they have almost a Sonic the Hedgehog feel to them, meaning: jumps, slides, proper suit use, coin placement, platform placement, etc, seem to lend GREATLY to speed runs, and have an incredible sense of "flow" to them.)
  

All Mario titles are suited for speed runs.

Look at this speedrun from Galaxy

this one puts me to shame!

phantom_leo said:

Quick impressions of NSMB (Wii):

Likes:

• The difficulty level is much harder than NSMB (NDS)! (I'm having a bit of trouble getting through level 1-frickin'-4! ! )
• The game gives you ample opportunities to earn 1Ups. (Toad Houses, Rescuing Toads in Completed Levels.)
• L-O-V-E the mutha-fuckin' Koopalings! L-O-V-E ' E-M ! ! !
• The level design is brilliant! (Vader take note: The levels, for some reason, feel like they have almost a Sonic the Hedgehog feel to them, meaning: jumps, slides, proper suit use, coin placement, platform placement, etc, seem to lend GREATLY to speed runs, and have an incredible sense of "flow" to them.)
• The game makes you use your many skills: wall-jumping, sliding, good use of the power-ups, kicking koopa shells, Yoshi flutter-jumps, mastering the timing of jumping... Then throws a curve at you by doing things like making you carry a Toad through the level!
• Mario has a lot of little extra moves that call to mind ALL of his past-decade games, while still feeling like you're playing a retro-title.
• The suits handle/fit-in juuust fine! (Love the fact we can FINALLY K-I-L-L Dry-Bones!)
  
• I'll never get tired of seeing Koopas and Goombas hop and dance to the "Wah-Wah" music!

Dislikes:

• I need to come to the conclusion that Wii games will NEVER look good on an HDTV!
• This wouldn't be a problem as much if this were a sprite-based game.
• The game obviously NEEDS to be a polygon based game to make rotating objects, scaling and rotation easier for the development team. SORELY miss the sprites though!
• Save System is still weird! Thankfully there is a quick-save where you can do a one-time save that is deleted upon restarting --BUT-- it seems the make-it-to-a-certain-checkpoint-on-the-world-map save-system is back. Yuck.

_________________________________

I'm impressed so far! What I thought started out being just a holiday 2009 cash-in, Wii-port of a NDS game with throw-away multi-player, has turned out to be surprisingly GREAT!

_________________________________

Oh... and finally (for now) ANY game that has the opportunity to do this, has one star added to its review just because:

Addendum:

-Whoa! Apparently, the Fortresses don't count as a "numbered" stage... so I wasn't even UP TO 1-4 yet! !

-Finally got up to (and by) Larry Koopa (using the Propeller Suit made the fortress sooo much easier!)... then I was able to save!

-The REAL 1-4 is an underwater stage and OH. MY. GOD! These stages have NEVER looked/played this good before! Colorful, Dangerous and Lighthearted at the same time, the Music is AWESOME, the currents are more challenging than EVER... and the HUGE schools of Cheep-Cheeps made my jaw-drop for a second!

-The Ice Flower adds a whole new element to this type of stage. The frozen enemies block strong currents allowing passage to normally unreachable areas and make icy steps to walk on when they float to the top of the water. Would Nintendo's developers stoop to placing secrets and items on the land masses above the water, out of view...? Of course they would! Awesome!

Archangel3371 said:

edgecrusher said:

Look at the ratings Rare's games used to get on say Gamespot....N64 days most of them were mid to high 9's on a regular basis. Today, most of them are 8 range, and most would agree they've gotten some very generous ratings on some of their modern games there. A 9 for Perfect Dark Zero? Its a good game but not even close to the original & takes some patience to get into. So its better than Twilight Princess? Kameo is only 1 point less? Riiiight.

Compile the scores of all reviews from gamerankings and Rare's games have seen a huge dropoff in the past decade. I think most people agree 10 years ago they were a top 10 developer, if not top 5. Hell I regarded them higher than Nintendo at a point!

Today? Probably not even top 50.

Well whoop-dee-doo for most people.

Why compare totally different games on a different system? That really doesn't make sense. Yeah I think a 9 for PD0 is a perfectly appropriate number and I found Kameo to be an excellent game that some underrated. I'd give it an 8.5 myself. Anyway it's still of my opinion that Rare is just as good as they've always been and I'm sticking with it.

How does it not make sense? I'm comparing games from the same company on a quality level, not a hardware level.

edgecrusher said:

Hey did Psi-Ops ever come out on PC?

yes, it did!

Iga_Bobovic said:

edgecrusher said:

Hey did Psi-Ops ever come out on PC?

yes, it did!

How come I can't find retail copies?

phantom_leo said:

phantom_leo said:

Quick impressions of NSMB (Wii):

Likes:

• The difficulty level is much harder than NSMB (NDS)! (I'm having a bit of trouble getting through level 1-frickin'-4! ! )
• The game gives you ample opportunities to earn 1Ups. (Toad Houses, Rescuing Toads in Completed Levels.)
• L-O-V-E the mutha-fuckin' Koopalings! L-O-V-E ' E-M ! ! !
• The level design is brilliant! (Vader take note: The levels, for some reason, feel like they have almost a Sonic the Hedgehog feel to them, meaning: jumps, slides, proper suit use, coin placement, platform placement, etc, seem to lend GREATLY to speed runs, and have an incredible sense of "flow" to them.)
• The game makes you use your many skills: wall-jumping, sliding, good use of the power-ups, kicking koopa shells, Yoshi flutter-jumps, mastering the timing of jumping... Then throws a curve at you by doing things like making you carry a Toad through the level!
• Mario has a lot of little extra moves that call to mind ALL of his past-decade games, while still feeling like you're playing a retro-title.
• The suits handle/fit-in juuust fine! (Love the fact we can FINALLY K-I-L-L Dry-Bones!)
  
• I'll never get tired of seeing Koopas and Goombas hop and dance to the "Wah-Wah" music!

Dislikes:

• I need to come to the conclusion that Wii games will NEVER look good on an HDTV!
• This wouldn't be a problem as much if this were a sprite-based game.
• The game obviously NEEDS to be a polygon based game to make rotating objects, scaling and rotation easier for the development team. SORELY miss the sprites though!
• Save System is still weird! Thankfully there is a quick-save where you can do a one-time save that is deleted upon restarting --BUT-- it seems the make-it-to-a-certain-checkpoint-on-the-world-map save-system is back. Yuck.

_________________________________

I'm impressed so far! What I thought started out being just a holiday 2009 cash-in, Wii-port of a NDS game with throw-away multi-player, has turned out to be surprisingly GREAT!

_________________________________

Oh... and finally (for now) ANY game that has the opportunity to do this, has one star added to its review just because:

Addendum:

-Whoa! Apparently, the Fortresses don't count as a "numbered" stage... so I wasn't even UP TO 1-4 yet! !

-Finally got up to (and by) Larry Koopa (using the Propeller Suit made the fortress sooo much easier!)... then I was able to save!

-The REAL 1-4 is an underwater stage and OH. MY. GOD! These stages have NEVER looked/played this good before! Colorful, Dangerous and Lighthearted at the same time, the Music is AWESOME, the currents are more challenging than EVER... and the HUGE schools of Cheep-Cheeps made my jaw-drop for a second!

-The Ice Flower adds a whole new element to this type of stage. The frozen enemies block strong currents allowing passage to normally unreachable areas and make icy steps to walk on when they float to the top of the water. Would Nintendo's developers stoop to placing secrets and items on the land masses above the water, out of view...? Of course they would! Awesome!

Addendum:

-Great selection of music from all different Mario Games! Got Princess' Castle Theme from 64. Got the Forced Movement Theme from Mario (also featured in Galaxy). Got the Wah-Wahs! Airship Theme in there too. Too many to list. Great sense of nostalgia!

-This game is definitely a blending of the look and stages of Mario 3 with lots of ideas taken from World.

-There are multiple paths through the Worlds, but you're gonna wanna go back and complete all the stages you skipped anyway. (1)To get all the Star Coins and (2)Just to see what unique challenge the stage held that you skipped. They ALL seem to have some unique challenge to 'em be it crushing blocks, bouncing mushroom platforms, giant rotating gears, sliding into long jump traditional platforming with perfect enemy placement... You name it!

-PS: I have always been a little freaked out by Thwomps!