Annal

Picked-up Mario Kart 8 just in time to capitalise on the free game promotion; Wii U should arrive today; in the meantime, I played through a 50cc circuit on every Mario Kart game I own.

• Super Mario Kart was simplistic but still fun.
• Mario Kart 64 was just as good as I remembered.
• Mario Kart: Super Circuit was even better than I remembered.
• Mario Kart: Double Dash!! has aged incredibly well; probably my favourite of the bunch.

I haven't actually played Mario Kart DS, Wii, or 7, so I'm willing to bet 8's gonna feel kinda fresh.

P.S. Ghost Trick rules.

Fate

Finally sitting-down with Ghost Trick on DS; four chapters in, and I'm stoked to see the rest. There's so much character, and the visual design is incredibly stylish... It's also available for iOS, and totally worth your time.

Tried Band of Monsters on Android because it was free... I'd read it was a solid Pokemon clone... It's not. The translation is actually painful to wait through, and the basic battle system doesn't impress.

Bought Paper Mario for N64, OlliOlli (which is rad) and TxK (which is awesome) for Vita, The Last of Us: Left Behind and Rain for PS3, and Wonderful 101 for Wii U because I dunno why.

5

I love id Tech 5. I wish RAGE had a better ending. Wolfenstein: The New Order is awesome and cheesy and over-the-top and still awesome. Play it.

Bought a Wii U because I found a better deal than the Mario Kart 8 bundle. While that bundle gets you ~$75 worth of free stuff for $350, it was brought to my attention that a factory-refurbished Wii U plus Nintendo Land is only $200... So that plus Mario Kart 8 plus a Wii Remote Plus plus this $5 coupon for Target will get me $90 worth of free stuff for $300! I don't get the plastic steering wheel, but I can live with that :)

Also, hey, speculators, the only thing unique about that Mario Kart 8 bundle is the box; it is NOT worth $500 :(

Power!

Posting this from my new old 1.8GHz G5 iMac; got it for free. Installed OS X 10.5 and 2GB of DDR400 RAM. Web browsing is a little sluggish and it can't seem to handle HD video streams... That is to say, playback is chunky and the whole system tends to power-off under stress. Wheee!!!

More Raven!

Before digging-in to Wolfenstein: The New Order, I figured I should finally track-down a copy of Raven's 2009 Wolfenstein... I'd heard it wasn't very good... It isn't very good. It's not bad, but it is incredibly rough. The cutscenes look cheap, the voice acting is cheesy, the character animations are awkward, the open world is a chore to navigate and doesn't add any real kind of immersion to the experience, and this is on id Tech 4!? DOOM 3 looked much better :( Still, once you get the rhythm of the game, it's not a slog to finish.

Also, Phantom Hourglass is now the second Zelda game I've officially abandoned because its gameplay just wasn't fun for me; the first was The Adventure of Link. Making me blow on and yell at my DS isn't very fun when I'm on the subway or late at night; an option to do otherwise would've been swell. I hear Spirit Tracks is more of the same... No thanks.