I definitely remember 2005 as the year the DS was finally starting to grab people by the ears.
Grab people by the ears? Isn't that something parents do to punish their children? Was Nintendo punishing its fanbase for not taking notice?
Anyways...
Looks like there isn’t much released during 2005 that I played. Gaming-wise, I think I spent most of the year playing Smash Brothers Melee as it is the year in which I reached 100,000 matches. When this happens, the game gives you a message telling you to go outside. I can’t think of any other game with such a message. Gotta love it.
Anyways, I still haven’t played Resident Evil 4, or any Resident Evil for that matter despite owning the first two games. The series has just never interested me for whatever reason. However, with Resident Evil 4’s more action-focused gameplay it has a better chance of being something which I’d like. I think the Wii version is now $20 so maybe I should finally pick it up.
It wasn’t until after I already had Mario Super Sluggers that I bought Mario Superstar Baseball; I was curious about what kind of changes were made, plus I’m on a quest to own all Mario games anyway. The control interface is borderline terrible, especially batting, it's hard to pin down exactly why but it just doesn't feel right. I do know why fielding is bad though; movement is a bit slippery and there's no way to switch control of fielders. You'll get control of the shortstop even though the ball rolls right under the 3rd baseman's feet. There's literally no way to stop a bunt because you'll get control of the pitcher instead of the catcher. Granted, there are a few small details that are missing from the sequel, but the gameplay just got so much better. It is also more difficult than Sluggers but only because of the poor controls and abundance of tedious tasks.
Mario Superstar Baseball does have the best menu music out of all of the Mario titles though.
Super Mario Strikers is another game which I bought after getting the Wii sequel. While Mario Strikers Charged is an alright game, it lacks polish in key areas such as balance, is light on game modes, and has a very dramatic style quite unbefitting of Mario characters. Super Mario Strikers, on the other hand, isn’t “Mario” enough in that it doesn’t offer up enough twists on the gameplay and the characters don’t have very distinct personalities. Even so, the gameplay is solid, and the 4-on-4 makes for a fast action-packed football game. There’s more emphasis on passing and getting your players into position, so the game requires more skill than its sequel as well. Best of all though is that its art style doesn’t depress me.
My Game of the Year for 2005 would be Battalion Wars. Love it. The game brings you a lot closer to the heat of battle than the average strategy game. And with direct control over one of your units, you really feel like you're causing some damage, rather than just watching a staged battle. Battalion Wars is a great mix of strategy and action, but you'll need to get past the first couple of missions before the real battles begin.
I enjoyed TimeSplitters Future Perfect as well. It was a little rough around the edges feature-wise, but the gameplay was enhanced and had more variety than before. The story mode is a bit short but it had some epic moments when Cortez meets up with his past and future self. There’s lots to do in the Arcade League and Challenge modes; going for high-scores is, well, challenging! The stage builder was a lot more robust and was capable of creating fairly complex arenas, I spent many a sleepless night just building away.
Heh, Pokémon Emerald. Yeah… I’m going to resist going on one of my would-be famous Pokémon rants. This game started strong but slowly it became more and more tedious. Many of the new Pokémon seem uninspired, the new elements to the battles just made them more random, stat building is as tedious and vague as ever, and the game did away with the interesting day/night system of Gold/Silver. There are also too many Pokémon that you need to trade with other versions to get, which is just lame. I didn’t even bother with all of that stuff at the end because creating teams for all of those events at the Battle Frontier would take hundreds of boring hours of level grinding.
Why would there be a sequel to Mario Kart DS? No system to date has received more than one. There’s no real need to because there’s nothing which would have been a worthwhile inclusion until new hardware is released. The retro tracks are probably the thing I dislike most about Mario Kart games, especially since each version has different physics and the retro tracks don’t play as well as in the original version.
Other games released in 2005 which I have yet to add to my collection include Geist, Killer 7, WarioWare: Twisted, and of course The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap.
Topic: A Decade of PGC/NWR: 2005 (Read 10652 times)
