Token Female Gamer

The original Super Mario Bros was a seminal game. Not only did it spawn a legion of sequels, but it also catapulted the Mario franchise into the stratosphere in terms of popularity. It also happened to be the inception of my (and many others) life long Mario habit and still holds a very special place in my heart.

And though I’ve played many of the sequels, most of them diverged wildly from the original, expanding the world of Mario in many new and interesting directions.

All good things, but it does make me appreciate Super Mario 3D Land, as few games have evoked as much nostalgia for the original. 3D Land managed to capture the simplicity of the original Mario, with straightforward and short, yet interesting and challenging levels, simple graphics and minimalist backgrounds. But like all great sequels/remakes, Super Mario 3D Land doesn’t forget about progress and includes many of the features found in modern Mario games.

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This might come as a surprise but my pick is Tingle from the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker game. He is this totally hilarious middle-aged man who believes in forest fairies, so much so that his only ambition is to become a forest fairy himself, thus the costume. He also happens to be a skilled cartographer.

Though he is a reoccurring character in the Zelda series, he had a starring role in the Wind Waker game, resident mapmaker. But the real reason I liked him so much (besides being ridiculously funny) was that Tingle could help Link by connecting the Game Boy Advanced to the GameCube. It was a total gimmick, but I loved every minute. It certainly ensured Tingle’s place in this line up. =P

Character progression is one of those vital building blocks of the average role playing game and probably one of the most challenging to implement smoothly. Finding the balance between effectiveness and progression, while still maintaining a level of fun is what makes role playing games great (or bad as the case maybe).

But the game that does it best, in my humble (ha!) opinion, is the Zelda series. While Link doesn’t have anything as pedestrian as a skill tree, he is always getting acquainted with new weapons and magical artifacts. These of course just happen to be presented to him with such perfect timing, that he always has the perfect tool on hand to get through the next challenge.

Its incredibly satisfying to know that the ‘skills’, or in Link’s case tools, are actually going to be useful. No filler skills here!

The game also has a much more fluid leveling system. The only indication of levels is Link’s collection of heart containers, which provide him with more hit points. These do get collected as the game progresses, but many of them are available outside the general story line, so they only loosely indicate progress or skill level.

No matter what, Link is uniquely prepared for each and every quest he faces. His progress is brilliantly tailored to makes the game fun, interesting, and highly engaging.

In general I favor graphics that stay far away from the uncanny valley; preferably cute, with bright complimenting colors and clean lines. In short, Cartoony with a strong Anime slant.

The game I picked for best graphics in the first 30 days segment was Kiry’s Epic Yarn, a graphically brilliant game, which is a perfect example of my cuteness tolerance.

But Kirby is a round ball, and though very cute, isn’t really the greatest example of my bipedal character preference, nor 3D backgrounds. Guild Wars 2’s characters are fairly good and the backgrounds in World of Warcraft are pretty, but I think the game that sums up my artistic preference the best is Aion.

While I didn’t play the game for long, as the mechanics were troublesome at best, I still found the graphics stunning. I loved the character looks, very anime with lots of style options and the backgrounds were vibrant and lush with color, absolutely beautiful. If only the game itself has been as great as the graphics.

Super Mario has been rebooted five million times by now, but I still love each and every one of them. Super Mario 3D Land for the Nintendo 3DS is the latest of these and is my current favorite reboot.

This version, more then most, reminds me of the original Super Mario Bros, with its fairly simplistic level design and world selection. But it is a reboot, which means additions. In this case they added very minor 3D aspects to each level, yet most of the game still remains a simple 2D platformer.

What really makes this reboot enjoyable and nostalgic, is that they managed to pay homage to the classic by updating the content without adding too much. It is a great Super Mario Bros experience!

We all know what the answer to this is going to be right? Yeah, my current favorite mini game is the new World of Warcraft Battle Pets system, which is the perfect mix of challenge, simplicity, and collecting; a quite distractingly fun mini game.

But its been pointed out that the list is a bit MMORPG heavy. Thankfully one of my all time favorite games, Animal Crossing, is basically a collection of mini games.

The overall goal in Animal Crossing is to decorate and pay off your house; the mini games are the means by which to earn money. Fishing, harvesting fruit, digging up fossils, catching bugs, and selling turnips are some of the main ways to earn money in the game and each is its own fun little mini game.

What made the entire game so brilliant is that it wasn’t as simple as catching fish and selling them for profit, the game also tracked which fish were caught (or bugs, or fossils) and totally encouraged completing the entire collection. There was even a museum that would display donations, but only one of each.

But catching bugs and fish was quite tricky. The game was set in real time, meaning it used the console’s internal clock to simulate the real passage of time (one day in the game was twenty four hours long). Bugs and fish and fossils were also based on real life versions, which made the museum quite a learning experience.

The game also simulated the seasonal nature of these animals. Some fish could only be caught in the spring while others were only found in the winter, some preferred the lake, and others were only found in the ocean.

This meant that completing a full collection of fish or bugs was quite challenging but in the end really fun.

I might not like it in real life, but fishing in Animal Crossing was awesome!! It is certainly one of my favorite mini games of ALL TIME!

My Enchanter with her epic staff

I may be a bit soured by the latest World of Warcraft Expansion: The Dailies of Pandaria, but quests have been become so very tedious, repetitive, and simply another vehicle for story telling. In MMORPGs especially, but I find this also to be the case in single player role-playing games.

While I appreciate the guidance and rewards that quests provide, they just don’t feel very epic anymore. And by epic, I don’t mean that the story associated with them is incredible, I mean the challenges I face, the rewards I receive, and the flush of delight that succeeding brings.

I should probably be more specific, I’m only looking at explicit quests. This is different then the goal of a game, like Mario rescuing the princess or Link defeating Ganondorf.

But what to choose given my current ennui with quests, nostalgia of course! I picked my Enchanter Epic Quest from EverQuest as my favorite.

Of all the epic quests in EQ, I think the Enchanter Epic had some of the best design. Though it was really hard and I worked on it forever (months!), it was the perfect balance of solo work and raid help. Plus the raid mobs, while challenging and fairly rare, weren’t impossible (hello cleric epic). I was also lucky enough to have an extremely supportive guild and husband who made it all possible.

Probably the best thing of all was that the Epic Staff, that the quest resulted in, was literally a game changer for my class. It’s usefulness was certainly worth all the effort we put into the quest.

That was a truly epic quest!

Lets face it, most games are set in worlds that are facing some serious struggles and though this world we live in isn’t perfect either, I do appreciate that there isn’t an alien invasion at the moment; I like being able to step away from the Zombie apocalypse when I feel like it and return to a semblance of safe normality.

But if I had to choose some place, it would be the Pokemon Universe. The worst they seem to face is gangs. Oh they do face imminent world destruction sometimes, but really no one in Pokemon land ever knows about it, except for the intrepid heroine. But the real bonus of living there is that I could catch Pokemon. My very own collection!

Totally worth it.

This year, instead of just going out and purchasing everything I wanted for myself, I gave my husband a list. Its a short list, I’m trying to keep it simple this year and attempting to stem the flow of excess coming into the house. So what is the list, a Wii U and a Kindle Paperwhite. Two items I would really like, but am happy to wait for.

But then my husband came home today with this:::>

I have no problems with early presents. Besides, I’ve been rather down the past week, which made this a great little perk. Happy happy joy WiiU.

If anyone has any game suggestions let me know!!

Looking back over the past twenty-nine days, it is clear to me that most of the games discussed thus far could easily qualify for favorite game. I deliberately chose games that I liked for more reasons than simply excelling in one category. But choose I must, even though I’m sneaking in the past twenty-nine days as runners up.

My final choice is Paper Mario. It’s actually quite a perfect choice, as it manages to represent many of my answers from the past few weeks – Mario, RPGs, super cute graphics, turn based gameplay, and teamwork.

It’s pretty clear that I loved almost everything about this game. The graphics were incredibly cute with the paper characters in a half 3D world. I loved that I got team members with benefits. Skills were incredibly fun to play with and adjust. The turn based combat was a perfect balance between twitch based jumping games and slow RPG combat. I even liked the story.

Paper Mario left me with such a great impression that I still think about how much I loved the game, ten years later!

There you have it, my final answer.