Sorry about the long wait between entries, I’ve been really busy redesigning StarWarsMMO.net and its forum in anticipation of the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic. But enough of that, it’s time for The Legend of Zelda!

I am a huge fan of The Legend of Zelda, so at first I was going to write a really huge entry about every little detail present in the game, but it’s pretty obvious that I’m going to have a lot of good things to say about practically all aspects of Skyward Sword in the first place. So, with that in mind, this Game Spotlight will be a lot more condensed and I’ll try not to ramble on as much as I usually do…

This is one of those few moments when Australia actually gets something before the rest of the world, so I’m going to take full advantage of it and bring you this game spotlight so I can try and be one of the first out of the gate among the big game site reviews.

Disney games haven’t been awesome for a very long time, at least not since the days of the SNES with The Lion King and Aladdin… and in turn, Disney itself has changed much and has lost a lot of its awesomeness over the years. The kind of awesomeness I’m talking about is the type that gave birth to the original design of Mickey Mouse which is far superior to his current form, and also the type that spawned things like Fantasia (which is being released on Blu-ray soon!).

Epic Mickey takes us all back to those days before Mickey Mouse was corrupted and also takes you through Disney’s lost history in what is a very interesting game for so many reasons.

I’m not going to bother trying to hide any spoilers for this Game Spotlight for a couple of reasons… the first is that Majora’s Mask is a pretty old game now and if you haven’t played and loved it by now then you’re probably never going to. The second reason is because I’m going to be gushing about some of the awesome moments of this game. So anyway, here goes… I think this one’s going to be another long entry too…

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is one of my most loved games of all time and also one of my absolute favourites. It’s a game that dares to be different, especially when Ocarina of Time was just a reworked version of A Link to the Past. Of course, like many other games, Majora’s Mask has a niche following… a lot of people tend to ignore it for whatever reason… which is a shame.

“I… I shall consume. Consume…Consume everything…”
— The Moon

But don’t worry, I’ll be spilling just about everything in this blog entry, so if you’re awesome enough to read it all, it’s probably going to feel like you’ve played the game yourself… or hopefully makes you want to play it yourself.

The wait is finally over and I’ve gotten my hands on the next instalment of my favourite video game series… but is this new Metroid going to stand up against the likes of Super Metroid and Metroid Prime? If you’ve been catching up on the news surrounding this game in the last few days, you’d have seen that there is a great divide of opinion… some love it while others are very disappointed.

Metroid: Other M is a huge leap in a new direction for the Metroid series… in comparison, the first-person perspective and slightly more action orientated tone that the Metroid Prime trilogy took was only a small step. Prime still carried a lot of the very traditional elements that make Metroid what it is and most people found this to be a pretty decent balance of new and old working together. Other M is likely to scare a lot of people with its new additions and gameplay changes… this is NOT your traditional Metroid and that’s basically the whole point of its existence.

Here’s another dual Game Spotlight for the two recent Legend of Zelda games for the Nintendo DS. Expect a couple of more dual reviews in the coming months since No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle and Super Mario Galaxy 2 are on their way down to Australia.

The Wind Waker was a shock to Zelda fans when it was first revealed. Its cartoonish art style didn’t seem to go down very well initially, however after the ranting was silenced and people actually played the game, they realised it was one hell of a game and that the art style itself had a lot to do with why it was so great. I’m personally glad that Nintendo didn’t take what people had to say initially to heart, because the art style of The Wind Waker has lived on and is present in The Minish Cap, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks.

This month has been pretty slow. I’ve been spending too much time in the real world away from the Internet with a job and all but also playing a lot of video games too. I guess I’m spending way too much time PLAYING video games, not enough time writing about them lol.

There’s nothing much going on under the sea, just a whole lot of salt water and a whole lot of sea life… and then there’s that underwater utopian society of Rapture, a haven for the working man to make his living, the artist to express himself and the Big Daddies to protect their Little Sisters. Too bad things went oh so terribly wrong…

Okay, now I know I’ve already had a bit of a look at this game already, and I know at least one of you (Jeff) will point out that this game sucks and it’s no point talking about it. However, I have played through this game in its entirety and have discovered that it’s so bad that it’s actually good. Therefore I have to share it with everyone in some way…

This entire entry will be extremely spoilerific because I really HAVE to share with you just how ridiculous this game really is. It’s so bad that the President of Nintendo of America, Reginald “Reggie” Fils-Aimé, stated that this game would NEVER make it to North America… lucky for me, the wacky folks of Nintendo of Europe and Nintendo of Australia decided that “If the American’s don’t want it, we certainly must have it!”… So here it is… read about it, because you’re not going to want to play it.

Isn’t it great when a game is released that has a great imaginative and interesting story that is made even better with very well handled gameplay? When it happens, the game will either become very popular due to the right kind of exposure given to it, or it will end up becoming what some people like to call a “cult hit.”

Ubisoft knew that they had something special brewing with Assassin’s Creed, and anyone who has played the game will know first hand that they have set it up to be a trilogy or possibly a long running series. But not even Ubisoft themselves were prepared for the high sales that the first game saw. Their efforts had struck an extremely good nerve with gamers, and their surprise is very understandable too since the first game of a new IP never does anywhere near as well as Assassin’s Creed did.

Even better than that, Assassin’s Creed II blew everyone away, from reviewers to the gamers themselves. I know I was blown away by the improvements they made and… some other things…

I’ll admit right upfront that I don’t actually own Metroid Prime Trilogy for Wii yet (it comes out on October 15 down here, minus the awesome metal case… damn you Nintendo of Australia!!), plus I’ve already played the hell out of the three games individually for GameCube and Wii. But forget about that and imagine the eerie, whistley theme of Metroid Prime is now playing in your head… MANUALLY.

As a long time Metroid fan, my first impressions of Metroid Prime being a first person game weren’t very positive at all. How could anyone turn a game series like Metroid into something that is so alien to the series? It’s impossible, it will never work and these developers I’ve never heard of are way over their heads… All of us who had doubts are very glad that we were dead WRONG about Retro Studios and their excellent work on Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. They had the balls and the support they needed to take a very old and loved series and showing us that it can be more than just a 2D action platformer.

I was going to write three separate Game Spotlights for these games, but then I realised that it’d be a waste of time considering that people really don’t care about these games to begin with… of course, these games aren’t that great anyway.

The three games I’ll be talking about are The Conduit, Deadly Creatures and Disaster: Day of Crisis. All three games seemed to have had high expectations by Wii enthusiasts but ultimately received very low sales.