Salon posted a review of Lucky Wander Boy today, and that made me realize it was about time I did the same, since I’ve been done with the book for about a month now.
Lucky Wander Boy‘s premise is interesting, and certainly familiar to some of us – guy spends too much time obsessing about retro gaming. He starts looking for deeper meaning in the games, and begins cataloging his thoughts.
So Sl1p and I decided that this would be a jolly good time to have a little WarioWare competition. It’s on the honor system, and only people with GBAs can compete (read: no emulators), but it should be an enjoyable time that is had by all. So mash that A button!
Also, most of the ridiculously large debate in the comments for the last post was for naught; the consensus seemed to be Fusion, except that when I got to Gamestop, they didn’t actually seem to have any. This narrowed it down to Aria of Sorrow and Pokemon – and I wanted something that wasn’t being described as “extremely short”. So Pokemon Sapphire it is, as well as a GC->GBA link cable. I don’t get to crack open either until my birthday, though – Katie claims I’m “too spoiled”.
Those who want to help me out with this without reading the goofy ruminations, skip to the bottom.
In any case, it’s interesting to see how my portable gaming has gone over the years.
Right before Sophomore year of Cornell, I got a Palm V. The Palm V was good. This was back during the big Palm software boom, so there were tons of games to squeeze in on my 2 megs of ram.
During Junior year, on a complete whim, I picked up a Gameboy Color. I did enough emulation to know there were some quality titles. I grabbed Super Mario Brothers DX, Mario Tennis, and Pokemon Gold. Things were good.
But it wasn’t enough. Right after Junior year, the Palm was starting on its last legs, and I realized that if I moved up to a GBA, I wouldn’t lose anything – so I did. I loved my GBA, didn’t have a problem with the lighting thing (my room had a great overhead light), and things were good. I would rotate through titles – selling back ones I was done with, picking up the new ones. It was fun.
Unfortunately, there was that big game drought in early 2002. There was nearly nothing interesting released. I think the last game I bought was Wario Land 4, which was fun but didn’t really feel like a complete game. For my graduation/birthday, I received a PS2; I was desperate for games, my GBA was getting underused…so in it went for store credit, along with all the games.
So for a good 9 months, there was no portable gaming for me to do. Then Katie picked up her Clie; nice and color and hi-res. I nabbed all my old games back and that’s been fun for some good puzzle-based gaming.
Then for my birthday this year…well, I got a GBASP as my main present, and I got it about two weeks before my birthday (June 6th, for those playing along at home). Why go back to the GBA? Well, they fixed the game drought. And the connectivity to the Gamecube certainly looks interesting, although we’ll see how it works out in actuality when I get a link cable.
Okay, so now, the dilemma. I’ve already picked up the most compelling reason to own a GBA right now (Warioware). I can pick up one other game as part of the birthday present. I have it narrowed to three titles, BUT I CANNOT DECIDE. So help me pick between:
Help me, fair reader, for I cannot make up my mind on this potentially life altering decision.