Formula Zero Grand Xix

Who wants a review of a nine year old game? Who DOESN'T want a review of a nine year old game more like? Yes Wii U is almost upon us and all those retarded journos, the morons who run GAME and those ridiculous early adopters won't stop bloody going on about it. However, much like the 3DS it feels like a series of reruns. There's genuinely nothing original on the platform bar Nintendoland but I can tell you now that 90% of Wii U games won't pick up on the brilliant idea of hiding information on the game pad or asymmetric gameplay. 

It'll be like motion controls all over again. Everyone and their dog will make platformers where poor old player 5 (the mum character in the current TV spots) jabs the screen to create platforms and generally has far less fun than a quick spot of rub the man in the boat. 

 But fuck new games. I'm still catching up with the Gamecube releases. I distrust those pricks online who claim to be 'bored' by a console (normally the Wii, which by the way is permanently gathering dust. Who needs to hoover when you've got a Wii permanently sucking up dust because consumers don't know how to look for and buy good games that aren't shootan games?) there's hundreds of thousands of hours to be played on virtually every console and even if you were dipping, playing just enough to make your mind up about it, I refuse to believe that you've done that for a proportion of the semi-decent games. More often than not, you've been bored by a game that's flayed, dissected, promoed and previewed to death on one of those awful sites so by the time it eventual dribbles out you feel like you know it. But hey, that's how online marketing works. Playing and discarding games before they've come out in your territory so you don't have to. Boy this prelude bit is going on a bit isn't it? Take ZombiU for example. This is where I pretend I played the original because I'm a games waaaaaaaankar. I was only mildly interested in it to start off with because it seemed to me to be abundantly clear that all those 'trailers' and those shorts set in some trendy good looking guy's spacious flat, you know the ones where they have a proper haircut and a nice leather lazyboy, were not reflective of the final game. Thankfully, due to the excessive humping of previews my interest has gone from 'limp twitching' to 'back inside my body cavity'. For me, the distinctly average reviews were akin to a sex change. This metaphor has gone too far. 

 In other news, I will get on to talking about F Zero GX soon I promise, my local GAME. The place that inspired me to write this short play has seem to have forgotten that the Wii exists and that WiiU is backwards compatible and as a consequence has all but gotten rid of its Wii section (you can buy Mario & Sonic and Zumba fitness new, some tea stained Mario Kart Wii games make up the only actually playable games in the preowned section). So right now, today, you can go into GAME and look at the boxes for WiiU games. That's sure to placate the 42000 million Wii owners who still only have Wii Sports and Carnival Games. Way to steer them towards an attach rate higher than 2, guys. Good old GAME. I literally cannot wait until GAME goes under again. I have a 2011 Nintendo calendar I got free from ONM and on every day I've written GAME closed? At the end of the day when GAME hasn't closed down I cross off the day and move closer to God because GAME not closing is a modern day miracle. I could go outside right now, set up a stall out of cardboard boxes and sell my old PlayStation games, just the duplicates which amounts to a copy of Die Hard Trilogy, WWF (Pandas) Smackdown vs Raw 2 and two copies of Speed Freaks, and genuinely enter into competition with GAME. If I tweeted about it, the CEO of GAME might catch wind of the scheme, come over to my stall and try to sue because I had a monopoly on the high street game retail sector. 

Anyway. I'm still caching up with the ol' Gamecube releases I never got around to all those years ago. I've got Baten Kaitos Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean, Skies of Arcadia some fucking subtitle, Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2 and F Zero GX taunting me from the shelves. I've not touched Baten Kaitos. Skies is old skool RPG in that I've played it for about three hours and I think I've made less than ten buttons presses. Metroid Prime is so good I don't want to play it because then I'll play it and beat it and then I'll be sad that it is all gone and done and I know I won't play it again and so the next time it will be touched is when the guy from the council come into my flat to clean up my remains which slumped in the lounge for three years before anyone noticed I'd died and chucks it in a bin bag to give to Oxfam. I can't play Metroid Prime 2 until I finish Metroid Prime obviously. F Zero GX however....

Is soooo hard. It doesn't help that I'm visibly physically deteriorating with early onset middle age but it is ball achingly hard. I'm currently on Chapter 4 of the story which I had to buy from the fucking in-game shop with tickets that I had to earn by coming somewhere respectable in the Grand Prix races. Which, by the way are also fucking hard. I only took a year of on/off trying to beat Chapter 3 and even then I fluked it. I enjoy games being hard. I'm not that prick off the internet though who won't even look at a game's box art if it isn't as hard as those old arcade games that were designed to be hard so you'd pump all you cash into them. But at my time of life spending my precious gaming time doing the same fucking level over and over again and failing miserably isn't the most productive use of my time. I'm reading Reality is Broken at the moment because I'm a book waaaaaaankar and all the cool stuff that Jane McGonigal goes on about is moot because my gaming life for the last year is failing that one fucking mission over and over and over. It isn't even consistent either. Here's how my last series of playthroughs went. I came 8th then I came 20th, then I got retired, which the announcer pronounces retard, then I came 5th, then I came 12th, then retard, then retard, then retard, then I came 2nd (close), then I came 12th, then I came 11th, then I came 6th, then I came 9th, then retard, then 8th, then 5th, then retard, then 4th, then 11th, then retard. And then finally I came first and the tiny little burst of endorphins in no way made up for the tens of hours I'd spent getting it wrong. Then I bough Chapter 4. CHAPTER 4. How many chapters are there? I hope that there's 6 Chapters to be honest. I just want to get it off my Backloggery and move on. 

9/10