Boom! Two more bite the dust from Danny's backlog!
Current Backlog Size: 9 Wii games, 8 GameCube games, 3 3DS games.
Goal: See the end credits for all of these.
Progress Since Last Update: Beat New Super Mario Bros Wii and Goldeneye 007. Starting on Kirby's Epic Yarn.
I’m going through games at an unbelievable clip compared to what I usually do. Since my last update when I just beat Eternal Darkness, I’ve knocked two games off of my backlog – New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Goldeneye 007.
At the time when I was playing through New Super Mario Bros. Wii, I had just gotten through playing and reviewing New Super Mario Bros. 2 on the Nintendo 3DS. While I did play NSMBWii around the game's initial launch, I haven’t really touched it until now. Playing through the game really exemplified how similar all of the games in the NSMB series are. Having nobody to really play through the game with (I live alone), I played through the Wii version all by myself. The experience wasn’t overly challenging, but it was quite a bit of fun. As I mentioned above, there are a lot of things that are reused in NSMB2, so much so that it’s kind of ridiculous and made me feel all the more confident about my review. After beating the final boss, I thought about going through World 9 to complete the game 100%...then I saw that I needed to collect ALL of the Star Coins in all of the worlds. With a backlog like the one I have, this just wasn’t an option for me. Now you guys tell me, does that cause me to miss out on some of the best parts of the game?

After playing through Mario, I had the urge to get into something a little more gritty, so, I went back to Goldeneye 007 on the Wii. I bought this game last holiday season for around $15 on Amazon and fiddled around with the first few stages shortly after the holidays. I had heard great things on the NWR podcasts and from other gaming outlets as well. Being an avid fan of first-person shooters (mostly Call of Duty on the 360), owning the best FPS on the Wii just made sense. Picking it back up after months of letting it sit, I opted to play through the game using a Classic Controller Pro. While I’m not totally against pointer-and-nunchuk controls in a first-person shooter, the traditional method of playing makes more sense to me and is something that I’m more accustomed to.
The game is phenomenal! It’s pretty sharp looking and the presentation is about as close as you can get to James Bond without it being a movie. Some of the sections of the game tried to suggest that you play through stealthily, however, I found that it would sometimes fall flat. The Jungle level, on the other hand, was the perfect chance to try to incorporate stealth into what had pretty much been up to that point a run-and-gun experience for me. It was great taking out soldiers silently and hacking enemy turrets to use against my foes. What’s great about the game is that even though it may suggest that you play a certain way in some of the levels, it never restricts you. Coming from the insanity that is Modern Warfare 3, I found this refreshing.
I’m now trying to play through Kirby’s Epic Yarn and am now a few worlds in. I’m hoping to clear the game as well as a few others before I get really busy with the Tokyo Game Show coming up in a few weeks!