minna ni naisho dayo

Virtual Christmas

I brought my Japanese Wii home for the holidays, mainly to show off Hajimete no Wii (good family fun) and to indulge in a little holiday Mii making, but I wound up spending most of my time playing Virtual Console games. Yesterday we had the family over for Christmas Eve, and my brother and I decided to download Ice Hockey for a quick Old Timers match (we used to play this game religiously back in 1988). I was surprised to find the Japanese version's music is different from the US one (it's not nearly as good), but the game itself is every bit as fun as it used to be. In the end, CAN (me) took down USA (him) 4-3 in an OT shootout. It's a shame you can't play VC games online, because if you could, I'm sure we'd be spending a lot more time with this one in the future.

I also downloaded my favorite NES game of all--the original Legend of Zelda. According to the Wii, it took me approximately four hours and 30 minutes to clear the first quest from start to finish. Even after all these years, it's still a fantastic, magical game. If you've never played it for some reason, you owe it to yourself to download it and play it ASAP. But don't cheat! It's much more rewarding if you figure out all its secrets on your own.

Finally, we nabbed Gradius earlier today, as Hiroko was feeling nostalgic for an old-school Famicom shooter that we could take turns playing together. I spent countless hours with Gradius back in the day, and just hearing the music again brought back tons of great memories. I'd kill for a VC release of Life Force or some of the other co-op Konami classics (Jackal anyone?).

In short, Virtual Console rocks and I can tell I'm gonna have lots and lots of fun with this thing in the coming months. :) Merry Christmas everyone!

Blue Dragon

In honor of Mistwalker's first major RPG release, Hiroko and I decided to make the game's creator, Mr. Hironobu Sakaguchi, to keep the Wii warm while we're off playing his game on Xbox 360:

Not a whole lot to say yet on Blue Dragon, except that it got me hooked enough to take the Japanese 360 home for the weekend so I can keep playing. At about 6 hours in, I would say it's a very solid RPG; it's not Final Fantasy and it's not Dragon Quest, but it still shows a lot of promise. Great battle system, good character customization, beautiful visuals (especially if you're a fan of Akira Toriyama), and solid music. I'll try to chime in with more thoughts after I've played some more, but for the time being, I'm digging it. And the BD faceplate they packed in with the limited edition Premium Pack in Japan is possibly the hottest freebie I've ever seen:

I couldn't bring myself to buy another Xbox 360 just to get this faceplate, but I've got other plans in the works, and hopefully one of them will lead to that thing being on my 360 very soon...

The Secret to Happiness

This:

Plus this:

Equals this:

I finally got my hands on some Wii component cables yesterday. How sad is it that I had to wait for Japanese launch before I could experience Zelda the way it was meant to be played? Nintendo's done a -lot- of things right as of late, but the component cable debacle is definitely not one of them.

Anyway, I'm off to Hyrule. See you in a few.