976 MY PARENTS ARE DEAD!

For the record, Jo still has her mom. The title is a reference. Search the net for it!

Okay, Best Buy had a really good sale on Kid Icarus Uprising, and I just went for it. I’ve learned over the years to trust my instincts rather than always wait and see what happens. In spite of all the stuff I’ve read about the game I just bought it. Kid Icarus was one of my favorite games as a kid. It was actually super hard to find by the time I was aware of it, so it’s one of the only used games I had at that time. I ordered it from a place called Funcoland. It had a few names over the years, but the company was infamous to gamers at one time. Back then ordering something was a huge fucking ordeal, so you had to be totally serious about it. I had played a friend’s copy, I think, and really wanted to finish it. Once I got it I played it a million billion times. Eventually getting the best ending of all. I still think it’s one of the best games ever for a variety of reasons, and it’s still fun to play after all these years. Which is not true for a lot of NES era games. It’s really a shame that it never got an actual upgraded version like Mario All Stars, Kirby, or what have you. It would look really great with a 16 bit overhaul, and I’d buy it again if it ever happened. X3

Anyway, Uprising finally showed up and when I had a free moment I tried it out. I was really taken aback by how wrong most of its critics were. I didn’t need the special stand to play it. The controls were nowhere near as bad as they were made out to be. It’s actually really fun. I’m not saying the controls are perfect, but they weren’t the travesty most of the net made them out to be. They are weakest in the ground levels. No one ever adequately explained how it works, even though Pit says it exactly IN THE GAME. It works like spinning a globe, and just like spinning a globe if you are turning fast accuracy suffers. In this way the controls suffer most. Once you get used to it it’s not a big deal, but in the heat of battle it’s easy to get lost. There’s also no way to auto target in the default control scheme, which leads to a lot of target searching in heated battles. Still, it’s not that bad. It’s better than Star Wars Battlefront on the PSP. At least I don’t spend half my time shooting the ground directly in front of my feet. Basically the various game reviewers I’ve heard from are crybaby pussies. You guys were way more accurate about the game.

The soundtrack to this game is phenominal. It’s on a level so far above recent games I can’t even think of something to compare it to. The last game I can thinK of that was close, at least for one song, is Smash Brothers Brawl. When I’m on the menu screen every so often I just take a moment to appreciate how good the soundtrack is, and you spend a lot of time there, so that’s good.

I like the weapon collecting and the way each one subtly changes how a level feels to play. The voice acting is top notch, and the writing is quirky. Kind of like the Mario RPGs. The game does not take itself seriously, and is very self referential. In fact, the very first words Pit says are “Sorry to keep you waiting.” Many times, when an enemy is introduced, the games shows you the NES sprites on the lower screen. Unfortunately it does this durring battle, so you can’t really get a decent look at it, unless you’re playing at a very low difficulty. Not that the sprites are anything much to look at… In a lot of ways Uprising is like the Metroid series. Old enemies come back, but are WAY more impressive than they were before. So Far I’ve beaten all the original bosses, not even realizing that the first one WAS the first boss from the original game because the upgrade was so extreme.

Anyway, I don’t remember if Nintendo offered a demo for Uprising, but it should have. I think that would have solved a lot of problems as far as crittics fucking things up for them. It’s a game you need to play to understand, and the first level shows you everything you need to know. I feel like if I had played a decent demo the re wouldn’t have been this long “I don’t know if I want this” period.