What I'm Playing

I spent a long time tooling around Azeroth with my Night Elf Druid in World of Warcraft, the online MMORPG. One of my justifications is that I wasn't spending $50 a month on a NEW game for either my PC or Xbox and playing a game that I enjoyed steadily for $14 per month.

Now that I'm almost 8 months "clean" from WoW, I have begun enjoying the diversity of other games. As I said a few entries back, we hit the Wii jackpot at Christmas. Medal of Honor 2 : Heroes is a great shooter which I can only play at night because my four year old is very curious about why I'm shooting people. If any of you have it, and the Wii, let's hook up for some games. The Wii multiplayer lobbies are very slick and best of all, free! If you see "Mkae", that's me.

I've been spending a lot of time on QQ Games, the free online game service from America Online. All you need is a free AIM account and the downloadable client. I literally log about an hour a day playing these very addicting games. Look for "Radioman" in the lobbies, mostly in "Treasure Hunter".

The kids are totally addicted to Mario Party 8 which I have to admit got old very fast for me. It has received glowing reviews and as far as bang for your buck goes, it's king. Over 50 mini-games means that you pay about $1 each. Not too bad. J has become quite the Mario fan so I downloaded Donkey Kong (yes, the original) on the impressive Wii store channel so he could see and play the first iteration of the character. On a side note, I quickly blew through the first three boards only to be completely astounded that there were ONLY THREE BOARDS. Wow, things were different in the 80's.

The biggie though, is Super Mario Galaxy. Oh my God. I've played platformers before but to be honest, I have never been a huge fan. I played the first Super Mario Brothers but not owning a Nintendo for a long time, I missed the rest of the series. My preference was the Sega Genesis' Sonic the Hedgehog, which is now incorporated into the Nintendo camp.

Back on topic, this game is stunning. The storyline revolves around Peach (the Lois Lane of the Nintendo universe) getting kidnapped by floating Pirate ships and taken to another galaxy. Mario then travels to this cosmic observatory and meets the mysterious Rosalina who sets him on the quest to explore galaxy after galaxy to find Peach and collect "star bits" along the way. Each galaxy features it's own set of physics, life forms, and challenges. The visuals are absolutely stunning and the game play is outrageously fun. We've gone through about three galaxies (each has 3 challenges) and have rarely used the same technique against the indigenous life forms and bosses. I think that the Wii has found it's "killer app" with this one folks.

Up next, we're looking at picking up "Mario vs. Sonic at the Olympics" and there's a Star Trek game called "Conquest" that hasn't gotten bad reviews. We'll see. The biggie though comes later this year when Star Wars : Force Unleashed hits the Wii. That'll be a Day One purchase, I think.