Mario Kart

Record-Setting Win Gone Unnoticed

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I usually don’t like doing this, as it seems a bit selfish of me, but I felt compelled to reveal my dirty little secret to the world. I, Matt, am the owner of the World Record for Mario Kart 64’s Choco Mountain Time Trial, with an amazing time of 1:46:400. This picture is my sole proof of the record in question. I apologize for the blurriness, but I only have a cell-phone camera.

If you search Twin Galaxies’ site, which is THE source for video game records, you’ll see the top record of 1:46:840, which is the Japanese National Record. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news Japan, but it appears that your record has now been broken. In fact, it has been broken for about seven years.

Sad thing is, Twin Galaxy will not approve of the record because I never taped the record-setting run, and it wasn’t done under any referee supervision. I’ve contacted Twin Galaxies numerous times in the past about my record, but they’ve never gotten back to me. →  Destroy All Articles! 2

Is Wii screwed?

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Amidst all the recent articles on how the Wii is creating gamers out of grandmas and still out of stock around the nation, there are murmurs of doubt. Few people doubt the control scheme; it works well and is a lot of fun. But it remains unclear if Nintendo will be able to satisfy either their hardcore fans or their new casual gamer audience. Detractors are already labeling the Wii a repeat of the Gamecube; a platform for Nintendo games but little else.

As expected, the Wii will have a solid lineup of first party games:

Animal Crossing
Battalion Wars 2*
Big Brain Academy
Disaster: Day of Crisis*
DK Bongo Blast*
Fire Emblem
Mario Kart (not officially announced)
Mario Party 8
Mario Strikers Charged*
Metroid Prime 3*
Kirby
Pokemon Battle Revolution
Project HAMMER
Super Mario Galaxy
Super Paper Mario
Super Smash Brother Brawl

* Published but not developed by Nintendo

This move looks unfair.

Even without third party games, the Wii could do very well. →  You may say I’m a gamer, but I’m not the only one

Nintendo Says “Huh?” to N64 Memory Pak on VC

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I think the Big N missed the memo that was sent around the office (or rather, world) on what their fans want. Nintendo apparently forgot to include any code in their emulation software to simulate the N64 Memory Pak peripheral. This means that any game that utilized it will have to forgo it completely. As of now, only Mario Kart 64 uses it for saving time trial ghosts, but there are games out there that use it far more extensively.

Games like WinBack, Shadowman, and Extreme-G all used the memory pak for single-player game saves. The peripheral, which would connect to the expansion bay on the N64 controller, was integral to the enjoyment of these otherwise great games of yesteryear. So what does Nintendo have to say for themselves? Apparently that we shouldn’t have even asked in the first place. In regards to the Mario Kart problem:

“Due to unavoidable technical reasons unfortunately it is not possible to save ghost data from Mario Kart 64’s Time Trials in the Virtual Console version of the game,” reads the statement issued to Pro-G. →  Rule of Read

Series Retrospective: Tekken

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When I left for college three years ago, I made the transition as smoothly as anyone could ask for. No horrible case of homesickness, no glaring social problems. Even made the Dean’s List for the first and only time. There really wasn’t anything to worry about, save for one major adjustment; there were no gamers on campus.

She is bending over with such force that her hair is blowing. Amazing.

Sure, there were people who played, but it was usually the stereotypical group of guys who got drunk and played a lot of Madden, GTA and Halo (I would later come to embrace and sometimes join these fellows, but that is for another day). That, or I found hipsters who continued to play Mario Kart 64, insisting that it was the pinnacle of gaming, even after it received a sequel with a stable framerate. If there were crazy, dyed in the wool gamers like myself on campus, they were doing a fine job of hiding. →  18 Wheeler American Pro Reader

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A multiplayer world

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Raph may want to think about updating his pic on his website.

The other day I was listening to the Penny Arcade podcast, specifically The Zone of Breakfast. First off, a quick shameless fanboy plug: although our glorious cult leader (may he always provide for us Kool-Aid), Jay, dislikes these guys, I’ve always been a huge PA fan. In particular, I enjoy their new podcasts because I get to listen to a lot of video game news I ordinarily would not. Rather than do research and reading, I can just listen to the voices from the computer, which is more comfortable to me, because I am illiterate and hear voices in my head. Anyhow, they were discussing a comment that Raph Koster, a designer for both Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies made at a E3 several years ago.

It seems that Raph decided to be a bit inflammatory, and stated that single player games were an “aberration”: eventually, history will view the times we played games alone as a “growing up” stage before we had total connectivity and the internet. →  Mrs. Article, you’re trying to seduce me.