PixlBit

Cowabunga!

This news is a little old but it's too good to pass up, so please bear with me if you already heard about it. Square Enix has been surprised by the success of Bravely Default both in Japan and abroad and apparently is rethinking its mass appeal development strategy, which means we might be getting more JRPGs from them that are focused on being great JRPGs. What a novel concept! Check out this USgamer article for more details about an interview with Square Enix's president. This sounds good and I hope they carry through with it.

When Nintendo released Mario Party in 1998, it further solidified the N64 as the system you played with your friends. That first entry established the formula the series would follow for years to come: Moving around a nonlinear board to collect coins and buy stars while going head-to-head with the other players in minigames. Mario Party was a hit, of course, and was followed in 1999 and 2000 with Mario Party 2 and Mario Party 3, respectively, both for the N64. After a year off in 2001, the party moved to the GameCube with Mario Party 4 in 2002 and didn’t stop until the release of MP7 in 2005.

March was an exhausting month. Not that it was so full of stuff but everything was just...exhausting. I was mostly absent around here, I know, but I've got some things planned for April and even have a blog already written! But we're talking about March right now. I did get one game finished and made progress on several more. Take a look!

One of Mario's strangest adventures is Super Mario Land for the Game Boy. It takes him far afield from the Mushroom Kingdom into Sarasaland as he tries to stop an alien, of all things, who kidnapped Princess Daisy. I suppose Luigi ought to have been the one to save her but he must have been busy. Maybe they hadn't met yet? Oh well. Mario's first stop is the Birabuto Kingdom and it has a very upbeat, gamey sound to it.

When Ben asked the community here if anyone wanted to write some music for his RPG, Gutterdelve, I was tied up finishing the last song for Pirate Code. But I sent him a message once I was done with that, asking if he still needed music. He said it'd be great to have some boss music. It took me a couple weeks to work on it (life was busy), but then he didn't answer his messages because he was so consumed with finishing the game...and never got the song.

Drifting off...

Games Beaten

News broke this week that Nintendo will shut down its Wi-Fi Connection for the Wii and DS on May 20. That means no more online Animal Crossing or Mario Kart or Smash Bros. There's a full list here of affected games. It's not the lack of online play that bothers me. I didn't play online much anyway. No, it's the disappearance of the additional downloadable content that bothers me. Take the Professor Layton series, for instance. I haven't played any of those games—heck, I don't even own any of them—but I want to, and while I'm sure the main games offer more than enough puzzles to keep anyone busy, all those games offer downloadable puzzles. Gobs of them, I hear. They'll all be gone. Same thing with the two Picross games for DS, another couple I've always wanted but never gotten around to buying. What about all the extra content for Dragon Quest IX? I actually own that game, thanks to my wife getting it a couple years ago. Should I drop everything and try to play through that? I can't decide.

Everybody always talked up Tiny Wings so much that I jumped at the chance to get it when it went free for a brief time. But then it sat on my phone for months and months and that, my friends, was a sad mistake on my part. Tiny Wings is indeed awesome.