So Santa Claus decided to visit our house a little early this year!
I had mentioned a while back that I was strongly leaning towards picking up a Wii U – Mario Kart 8 pretty much sealed the deal on that one. And then old faithful started acting up, first randomly turning off after you turned it on until it had a chance to warm up and finally culminating with a debilitating POP that led us to unplugging it from the wall out of fear of burning our entire house down… 😛
Well, all of this culminated in a bit of a shopping spree at Best Buy tonight where, in addition to ordering a replacement TV to be delivered just before Thanksgiving, we also pretty much cleared out the aisles of damn near every Wii U game and accessory that they had! We actually did the same thing years ago when we got our original Wii – it had come out a couple of years prior, so we finally ended up getting one with some of our wedding money, nearly filling a shopping cart with games and controllers to catch up on what we’d been missing for the past couple of years!
Anyways, tonight we’ve been playing around with it on the TV in our bedroom because as much as a part of me actually considered waiting three days to see it all for the first time on our brand new TV, the sane part of me said, “What are you, nuts?! Nobody buys a new game console and then lets it sit in the box for three days!!!”
Initial reactions:
- Mario Kart 8 looks beautiful – the graphics are simply amazing and even from what little I’ve played so far, I love what they’ve done to add new dimension to the tracks. The tracks going up into the air are pretty wild!
- Super Mario 3D World is decent … except for the damn cats, which seem to plague just about every level. I’ve always liked the Mario Galaxy perspective and allowing two players that can’t interfere with each other as they play is nice. But those damn cats…
- Hyrule Warriors is unexpectedly my favorite so far – it’s an interesting twist on a Zelda game that’s already managed to suck me in, and it makes me want to find the time to revisit the rest of the series, too.
- Wii U Sports Club is, well, troubling. Several of the games are basically Wii Sports +1, so it seems silly to buy it again. The worst, however, is golf because the whole put the Wii U Gamepad on the floor – while it’s a neat effect – is also a ridiculous notion for anyone who has anything other than adults in the house! Seriously, the dog nearly stepped on the thing like a dozen different times in the twenty minutes we were playing.
- New Super Mario Bros U … the verdict is still out on this one.
Good grief – it’s already 3AM and I have absolutely no desire to go to bed at this point! 😛