I've always thought the original series was the best, even better than the Mega Man X series. The NES games were challenging, despite their relative simplicity. Yeah, some enemies and bosses were ridiculously hard, and jumps appeared downright impossible—the disappearing “vacuum” blocks come to mind. But the beauty of the games was that you could do a lot with just shooting, jumping, and sliding. Capcom made the most out of the limited core skills Mega Man had available—not to mention the audio hardware of the NES—and as a result made one of the best action-platformer series in the history of video games, which will soon be nine games strong.

Not much, according to the impressions Steven wrote last month. The guitar is exactly the same and still benefits from using the Wii Remote's wireless components, meaning it probably costs less to manufacture than the other guitar models (but those savings are obviously not passed on to us). The gameplay is just "Guitar Hero III+", as there are no new modes or features whatsoever. And the song list, aside from being loaded with awful Aerosmith material, is about 30 songs shorter than what we got in the last game. So, you're paying a higher price for just over half the content. The sad thing is, despite my indifference towards Aerosmith, I should be a potential customer for this game just because I already have a Wii guitar and have been addicted to Guitar Hero multiple times already. I might actually consider this purchase if the price matched the value (~$30/$70).

So far, it looks like Steven "Windyman" Rodriguez and I will be the only two representatives from Nintendo World Report, although we may try to get TYP access at the door, since he lives nearby and won't be risking much to try it. I'm trying to be realistic about just how exciting the show is going to be, since it has shrunk so drastically and we won't have the traditional, massive staff presence. However, I should still have some fun social time with all my other friends in the gaming business.

I think it was the Virtual Boy; I had always wanted one as a kid, but never did get one because they were just too expensive at the time. On a whim, after the system had randomly popped into my head, I decided to check around and see how much one went for. While perusing the listings on eBay I realized just how cheap it now was and bought one purely for the novel value.

The trend continued from there. Shortly thereafter I was back on eBay looking to see what some of the other gaming stuff out there costs, essentially all the stuff I had missed as a kid. I found a Dreamcast lot and paid around $30 for the system, a full set of controllers, a couple VMUs, and five or so decent games. Needless to say, this wasn't the last transaction I made on eBay. The purchases began flowing as I realized I could experience everything I had once missed by avoiding a few new game purchases.

The first problem is that not all publishers offer price protection. You may be wondering, "What is price protection and why is it important anyway?" It means that if a retailer orders ten copies of Super Mario Galaxy and only sells five before Nintendo drops the price, Nintendo will credit the retailer money to account for the price cut. This is a good strategy because it encourages the retailer to stock a lot of copies so that customers can actually buy them. However, it is something of a risk to Nintendo because it means that they are responsible for every copy of Super Mario Galaxy on shelves rather than letting the game retailers be responsible. Of course, to minimize this risk, Nintendo only offers this protection to big chains (Wal-Mart, EB Games and so on). Further minimizing this risk is the fact that physical copies of games cost relatively little to manufacture (the money is mostly in the development time and marketing).

For the honeymoon, my new wife and I went on a trip out of the country to sunny Cancun, Mexico. During my time there I made sure to squeeze in a bit of gaming and kept my eyes peeled for anything and everything gaming.

Due to the lengthy plane rides to and from Cancun, I brought along my DS and one of the two Zelda games I never finished, The Minish Cap. Now I know what your thinking, I didn’t stop playing the Minish Cap because there was anything wrong with it, at the time something more interesting had come along (Resident Evil 4) and it demanded my attention. My wife had already beaten the game somewhere in the ballpark of 3 times (she reaaaally loves Zelda games), putting me to total shame because I had gotten all of 1 or 2 hours into the game.

This problem had reared its ugly head when I first got the game, on launch day. If I let the game sit in the system overnight, no disk would appear on the Disk Channel the next day. I had to manually eject the disk, then re-insert it (sometimes many times) in order to get the system to recognize the disk. A minor irritation, sure, but nothing I wasn't willing to live with. Never did I think that something was horribly wrong. Well, Mario Kart Wii came out, and I virtually abandoned Smash Bros. in favor of that Blue Shell-ridden game for weeks. Then, I started playing Odin Sphere (you should, too). Now, about a month later, I tried popping Smash Bros. in for the singular purpose of checking my friends list for shits 'n' giggles.

Nintendo fans were understandably disappointed with Ubisoft's showing at their annual media event, Ubidays. While the Xbox 360 and the PS3 got new iterations of The Prince of Persia and Beyond Good and Evil, the Wii and DS got games like "Petz Dogz Wii" (which might only have "Wii" in the title because the screenshots look similar to Nintendo DS title Nintendogs) and "Imagine Teacher."

Some of their disappointment made its way to Ubisoft's public message board. The thread a moderator had created just for Ubidays 2008 became inundated with upset owners of Nintendo systems. Much of it was indignant, much of it questioned Ubisoft's decision to "forsake" the Nintendo systems, and much of it just seemed depressed. There were the usual animated gifs and clever catch-phrases, like calling Ubisoft "Ubicrap," that one would expect from an Internet message board.

Of course, games stored on a hard drive (or miniscule amount of internal memory) take up significantly less shelf space than games stored in DVD cases, but that's not what brought me to writing this post. If you are a serious gamer like myself, and by serious I mean wanting to play more games than you physically have the time to, you probably stress about the possibility of certain must play titles becoming rare before you get around to purchasing them.

Herein lies the problem. Taking a quick look at my own shelf, I see great games like Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, Xenosaga, Killer 7, Chibi Robo, and Prime 3, all of which are still safely wrapped in their original plastic. Why haven't I touched these games? Because I don't have the time to play them all. Why did I buy them anyway? Either I got a good deal, or I was genuinely worried I wouldn't be able to find them again. When you look at what happens to some games, like DDR Mario Mix or Pikmin 2, you begin to see why the possibility of rarity can definitely be a stress point for game purchasers.

So which ones should I cull? Certainly, the MK and WF channels are mandatory. If I ever just want to play some Kart at lunch, I can just boot up the channel and take part in a tournament or race a friend. I can see how I compare to other Kart players around the world and with my friends (I'm about average). That's all I need to do at lunch. The WF channel is great for when friends come over and want to try the game, or I'm in a hurry and just want to see my Wii Fit age. I love these game-specific channels, because they have practical functionality.