NSMB: UI'm still on four stars on my save. I did caught Nabbit in all worlds, the game even showed me message that i did. Catching Nabbit was the only time in entire game where i was forced to use inventory (except for cleaning it) for star power-up. It can be a bug or i'm missing some obscure condition again, but...
I don't care anymore. You don't want to give me my 100% completion, game? Fine then. I'm giving it to me myself. There, i finished NSMBU with 100% completion. I beat all levels, i collected all stars including on Star World, and found all exits. That's 100% in my book.
Final notes.
It's a shame that U version ditched Superplay videos that were accessed from the game itself in Peach's castle. It's more or less replaced by MiiVerse and notifications with youtube links to videos, but i wish i could just see where that one star is right from the game without asking anyone or going to internet.
Stars in 3-4 and 5-6 were bullshit. Not as bullshit as that one star (or exit) in NSMBWii that you took by drowning in quicksand for five minutes, but still pretty bullshit.
I loved how many shortcuts and secrets overworld has, it somewhat sweetens the hassle of dealing with it. My favorite alternative route was the castle in the clouds where the entire area of the level and one star is only accessible if entering the castle by this route. And on this part of the level, you go from right to left.
And finally my gripe with basically all 2d Marios i played. Desert Worlds. Usually second world in the game and the most annoying. Combination of how early it is and how hard it gets compared to first world almost made me ditch the Wii game. Similar thing with U and SMB3.
I think placing this world second is the reason why minuscule percent of players actually finish NSMB games.
Also i distinctly remember how i watched quick look for "Last Of Us" on TV, while playing the game on GamePad and i felt weird marveling at the graphics and animation detail on this game and at the same time collecting last Star Coins and catching Nabbit which felt like a chore by the end. It's like: "
here are the cool guys are whizzing by and playing THIS, and i'm here in the dust doing my stuff".
Assasin Creed 2What an ending, man. Very enjoyable mindfuck. The moment where
Minerva addresses Desmond/player directly through Ezio's memories was really memorable.
My main problem with the game is that i don't really enjoy actual assasin's stuff. Missions, assassinations and combat were either boring or annoying. When i was repeatedly grabbing and kicking
Rodrigo Borgia in the balls until he died (?) was the only downside of otherwise great ending. It was just sad to see such a great final environment and music marred by bad combat system and absent boss game design.
In the end the most enjoyable parts of the game for me were just chilling, roaming the city, looking for glyphs and feathers and codex pages, climbing up the towers and jumping from them (titillating considering i'm afraid of heights). Gorgeous environments, absolute pleasure to look at, Venice canals, carnival, all that italian architecture.
I also LOVED weird glyph puzzles, ambient otherworldly music and effects really did something with my head. Codex puzzle was also became neat when i realized what it is actually showing.
Platforming challenges in Assasin's tombs where great too. There were some killing to be made, but it was still pure Prince of Persia-style platforming.
I played it on PC, and there were quite a few big technical problems.
First, official controller support in the game is ATROCIOUS. You control camera by pressing triggers rotating it horizontally and you can't rotate it vertically at all and even beside that you can't map some actions to buttons. This is retarded and inexcusable. I was forced to use XPadder, took me a few days to set up everything more or less working. And because i had to emulate proper controls using keyboard/mouse i lost analog control over my movement, which was really annoying.
Hopefully Brotherhood (which i left installing before i left for work) will have proper controller support. The fact that there are quite a few Xpadder profiles for ACII on forums available and no profiles for Brotherhood is encouraging. This supposedly means official controls are already competent enough this time.
Second, UPlay ate my saves in the middle. I had to look over the internet for saves that were more or less close to where were i was, because another retarded decision by Ubisoft developers made it impossible to use later save and then just go back.
Third, some of the glyph puzzles seems to be glitching, they aren't showing me anything and don't even exit when i press any buttons. I had to close the window Alt F4. This could be because i messed around with my saves though, but again thank Ubi for that. Ah well, i can always see the reward for collecting all glyphs on youtube...
Fourth, map should show me locations. They probably didn't wanted to clutter the map with text, but come on, how am i supposed to know where Mercato Vecchio is by looking at
this? You can look for locations in in-game database and it will tell you what you did and what you missed in each city but all location are only indicated by pictures and are not connected to actual place on the map. Stupid.
Overall, i loved the ending, the music, environments, architecture, just roaming around the city and looking for stuff just feels so nice. Too bad about technical stuff, but messing around to fix them was worth it ultimately. Looking forward to Brotherhood and eventually III on my Wii U.