Tag Archives: mario kart

What I’m Playing: Week of 15-Oct-2012

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Yesterday was reportedly the last flea market being held at Upper Darby High School, so I scoured the school parking lot for some good deals as I usually do when these things pop up. I managed to pick up Mario Kart Wii for a measly $2, and We Ski and Mass Effect for $5 each.

I rented Mario Kart Wii a while ago when I started using GameFly, and I had only managed to win all of the cups on 50cc when I chose to return it. I haven’t done that much racing online, and I watched my VR score plummet 100 points after two lousy showings with King Boo last night. The 100cc Star Cup still remains out of reach for me, but I’ll win it some day.

We Ski is a prequel to another game I rented through GameFly a while ago, called We Ski and Snowboard. I mainly bought it so that I’d have another game to use with my Wii Balance Board. Of course, when I actually went to test it yesterday, I forgot to start the damn thing up, and had to resort to just using the controller to propel myself down the mountain. Interesting, but I can’t really gauge it until I know how well the Balance Board works with this game.

And then there’s Mass Effect. I foolishly went ahead and bought the PlayStation 2 version of Mass Effect 2 so that I could skip out on going to the game store to buy it for myself, but after playing it for a bit, I found myself lost because it felt like there were people, characters and events that didn’t make sense to me unless I played the first game. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an Xbox 360 or a Mass Effect-capable PC at the time, so I was lost, AND I had blown $60 on a game I simply wound up deleting to make room for other games. This time around, I’m gonna do it right, from beginning to (stupid, stupid) end, as both a male and female Shepard. Who survives? Who dies? Who will Shepard choose to “do the giggity”? I sure as heck don’t know.

Captain Plan-It

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Evidently, this summer, and the few weeks leading up to it are going to be for “doing things”. We haven’t yet talked about a possible date for the annual family vacation, but I’m almost certain that it’s going to happen. Before that does, me, my brother and a few friends of ours are planning to attend the TooManyGames convention. It’ll be the first time I’ve ever visited a gaming convention, and the first time in a while I’ll have visited anything this big. From what I hear, there’s gonna be card games, video games, tournaments, music, cosplay — the works. I’m going to try and most likely fail to make some headway in some of the tournaments they’re holding (namely Mario Kart Wii, Puzzle Bobble 2, and, yes — Pong), but I’m most interested in getting some good pictures of the event.

In non-video-game-con news, I’m in the midst of making plans to meet up with Lynn again sometime in mid-July, for our first meeting since last September. I’m hoping all goes well, and that there aren’t any major schedule conflicts. My combined excitement level for these two events is…somewhere very high on the excitement chart, to be certain.

Track Meet: What’s up with the Mario Kart 7 W/L records, anyway?

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It turns out I totally don’t suck at playing Mario Kart 7 online. I managed to boost my VR rating by 60 points despite only actually winning one race. I’ve seen a couple of players online with scores in the 700 range (the baseline is 1000), so my guess is that the score goes down if you place near the back of the pack in a lot of races. That used to be a problem for me, but since I’ve had a bit of time to get familiar with the tracks, I don’t lag behind the rest of the field as often as I do in certain other racing games. It also helps that my connection to this game is generally stable (I haven’t been dropped in the middle of a race or battle yet), so I don’t have to worry about having wasted two or three minutes going around a track with everyone else standing still.

I then go to look at my online record, expecting to see something in the range of 1W-9L or 1W-8L…but it doesn’t. According to my in-game stats, my racing record is 25W-25L, which seems weird, since I’ve only participated in 9 or 10 races of varying sizes. After looking at the profiles of all the other racers I’ve seen online, I’ve noticed individual win-loss records that add up to 25-25 when put all together. It reminds me of my track-and-field days in high school – whenever our school would compete against two other schools on the same day, our performance would be scored against each school individually, rather than as a whole (example: if runners from school’s A, B, and C finished in 1-2-3 order, then school A would be credited with a win against school B and another win against school C). I find it to be a bit of a strange way of scoring, but at least this method allows for tracking performance against fields of varied numbers of competitors. Otherwise, you’d have a bunch of people wondering why their win-loss ratio is in the tank, even though they consistently finished second behind that one racer who seems to know all the shortcuts.

Because your wishlist can never be too long

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Lovely (and I mean this in the least sarcastic way possible)…now I get to add The Last Story to my ever-growing list of games that I want to play (preferably before the end of this summer). That list now includes:

  • Atelier Meruru
  • Atelier Totori
  • Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2
  • Kid Icarus: Uprising (already preordered it)
  • The King of Fighters XIII
  • Mario Kart 7
  • Street Fighter X Tekken (recent Capcom dickery aside, their crossover games usually produce good results)
  • Super Mario 3D Land
  • Xenoblade Chronicales (damn right I preordered it)

Rhythm Heaven Fever was on this list, but I went out and bought it today since my sister already owns the original (and because I wanted to add something new to the ol’ library after I finished Sonic Colors on Monday night).