Thank you for this post. It reminded me that racing wheels do exist and that I always kind of wanted one, so I ran out this morning and bought this sucker for my 360. 
It’s really got a perfect balance of easy and difficult planets/levels. Sometime you finish a level first try in under five minutes, sometimes you get stuck on a boss and end up playing for hours.
I’ve heard from quite a few people who’ve grown bored with their Wiis (mostly male gamers with other consoles). If Wiis are still hard to find in your area, do what they did- re-sell the thing and make a tidy profit!
I agree with the OP’s hatred of muscle-memory boss battles. Zelda and RE:4 were particularly annoying in this. It all ends up basically being Simon with a graphical interface.
Metroid was an improvement, the bosses felt far less gimicky, but still the first thing I do now when I reach a boss stage is look up the technique or cheat on the web…otherwise I know I have a few dozen die-reload-die-reload-die cycles ahead of me.
Isn’t Star Wars Unleashed supposed to be coming out pretty soon for the Wii? That seems like a slam dunk. I would buy a Wii just for that.
Almost all video games become repetitive after a while. It’s because nobody has yet worked out how to do AI, in general. Without intelligence, the non-player characters in games are bound to be predictable. In the end you can always find some mechanical sequence of moves that fools the computer-controlled players.
The only games that last are the ones that get close to AI in some narrow field. Computerised versions of board games for example. The PC version of the railroad game 1830 remains one of the best video games I have ever played. It was made about 15 years ago and has low-res VGA graphics. But the AI is incredible, and that’s what keeps me playing it.
Same here. I’m not terribly good at platformers (I have yet to win Super Mario 1), and SPM was so easy it became boring. Super Mario Galaxy is significantly more challenging and much more fun on this account.
Personally, I feel games have gotten much too easy. Part of the fun, for me at any rate, of boss levels was dying the first five or ten times or so as I figure out what the technique is to defeat the boss. If I win on the first or second try, well, what’s the point? There should be some challenge to this. I don’t want a game to be nothing but an interactive movie.
Agreed, although the games I follow tend to have that old-school difficulty. Contra 4 and any game that Treasure makes come to mind.
I love a difficult, fair game.
There’s a fine line between a fun challenge and frustratingly difficult. Even though I grew up in the NES days, I’m not fond of the sort of challenge that requires you to play it over and over in order to learn how to pass it. The perfect level of challenge for me is to just barely make it through my first try with the pure power of adrenaline and on-the-fly skills. If I have to do it over and over, it just becomes a chore. Beating a challenging boss always feels like a great accomplishment, but it’s kinda dampened if it was only beaten because you memorized the pattern from playing it so many times and not from pure skill.
Yep. Fortunately for those who want to sell (and unfortunately for those (like me!) who want a Wii, they are still way above MSRP on places like Ebay.