And boy, I have to say that the entire experience is amazing. Nintendo really outdid themselves here.

For the most part, the entire game play is smooth just like its predecessors. But there are a few things that make this game worth every penny. The only one that you absolutely have to go into mentioning is the one about multiplayer through the game mode.

Most games try to scroll you through the game and drag along all of the players. New Super Mario Bros. Wii however, uses the player that runs to the farthest edge of the screen as the one that drags the game. This means that you technically could kill your teammate if you move too far and they haven’t caught up. You can also screw them up by jumping on top of them and so on, which makes it absolutely frantic when you’re playing on an ice level with ledges.

But in the same instance, it makes the entire game fantastic. You can bust through a level with multiple people trying to achieve the same goal. Before, this was only reserved for FPS shooter types or capture the flag. Not even close for scroller games. But now, it’s a seamless play where gamers are immersed in the same screen (no splitting) and are looking for the same things like coins and such. Team effort at its finest, which is actually a whole new level of game play.

I have to say that I haven’t had a chance to touch the Super Guide mode yet, but this definitely has a lot of replay value. Even my wife, whom usually just watches me play the review titles had to pick up a controller and couldn’t put it down.

The game itself does come with a pretty thick manual, and if you’ve never played any of the Marios before, I would probably suggest you familiarize yourself with at least the concept. I personally prefer to play it with a controller instead of the nunchuks being of the old school Mario play. Would be interesting to see it actually work with the classic controller too, but obviously that wouldn’t work with some of the movements you need for this game. Either way? I’m looking forward to waking my wife up bright and early this weekend to finish beating this sucker. And I’m sure that anyone that has that old Mario nostalgia would entirely understand.

Code: PC-MAC-PDV
Get US$8 off a purchase of US$50 or more

Code: AK-NZU-GBD
Get US$12 off a purchase of US$100 or more

These codes expire at the end of 2009 and are available for one-time use only (meaning, first come, first serve). I don’t believe you can combine them with other codes, and it doesn’t work for other promotional items. In any case, a little pre-holiday savings from yours truly.

The whole one-way thing is okay, but it makes it a huge marketing thing for Sony and instead of really harnessing the power of social networks. Somehow, I think tying the statuses together would be interesting.

In this update, the Photo Gallery has also changed somewhat in the browsing, and the background colors for friend statuses now are customizable. Makes it interesting, but I think that if they’re starting to go down the path of user interfacing, then there has to be more feature changes than color codes. The 3.10 firmware was pretty interesting but I have to say that the upgrade process was sort of blech.

This is what I mean by it. The website for PC update wasn’t updated by the time the one from PSN was up. The PSN updating showed the versioning before the download server was up so you could see that there was a new firmware but couldn’t update it. The entire thing was actually not very smooth until it kicked off.

Definitely would like to see more improvement in the future.

Bugs
There is still a strange bug, but ever since the patch, there are many times that I would chop up metal as the worker and actually have the pieces disappear into thin air. You’d get the points for the chop, but can’t pick up the piece. There is also an audio bug that carried over from the original code where if you switch teams, then you can’t hear your team but can hear the other team and converse with them. Sounds like a if/then logic error somewhere, but I’m not definite about that. In any case, that is usually corrected during the game after or sometimes mid-game, but it is a strange chat bug.

Game Join Interface
Unfortunately, there are certain hosts that do not allow joining, due to ports or firewalls, or whatever else. I’m not really sure why you can’t join, and others can, but it just happens. But when this happens, you can usually tell that the network connection is going to fail, but you have to wait for the timer to time out before you can rejoin another game. It would be fantastic to be able to cancel a game join, and close the connection. It also would be great if there was an advanced list of games out there or something where it gave a status of how many games were currently playing. This might not be possible due to the fact that Fat Princess is really more P2P based, than server side, but it would still be interesting.

Hosting
I can’t explain how annoying that the kick/ban features were taking out and how it allowed those players that just want to screw up the play for others to come out of the wood work. Just by my own count (and these are only the names I remembered to document), the numbers have grown on the Wall of Shame since the patch. It could be the same account, but I’m going to say that there were a couple instances that there were players that found it amusing to copy the infamous tkpanda14888 after seeing what he did. And legitimate players that are trying to play the game can’t do anything about it anymore.

We really implore Titan Studios for a way to stop this type of systematic degradation of the game. Be it through a voting system, or bring back the banning, from my own experience, there really just has not been as many problems before as there are now because we can’t even police our own community now.

Team Balancing
Currently, the team balancing code is pretty strange if you ask me. You can actually have players join up and unbalance the teams even more if the losing team has less players. Now, why that is, I’m not sure. If the teams are even, I think that there should be a preference towards joining with your friend that you clicked on when joining a game, and if not that then any other friend that perhaps is already in the game. This gives you the chance to at least game with your friends but keeping the teams balanced out.

PSP Interface
We all know that the PSP is getting a version of Fat Princess sometime in the future (at least that’s the word). It would be fantastic if the PSP version was a downgraded resolution of the PS3 one, so that those that are on the go, can actually match up with their friends on the PS3. That would mean that either the PS3 version would only support eight players maximum for those types of games, or the PSP version would have to support 32 players maximum but at a lower resolution (which is obvious due to the screen size).

While having a separate game is great, I can’t explain how many times I was out in public and feeling like I needed a little Fat Princess fix where I could join up with my friends that I usually gamed with on the PS3. Creating this type of transparency between consoles and portables is something that not many have attempted and is actually something that I have always felt would be a tremendous boon to the gaming industry.

Synopsis
I can’t really say too many bad things about the game itself. Much of the above are more wants than needs, and things that have been voiced often enough by others over chat to mention. And truthfully, for the fifteen dollars that you spend on this game, and almost three hundred or so hours on this particular game, the cost per entertainment ratio has far exceeded any of my expectations. Believe me, when I say that if you’ve ever played CTF type games, this is one unique gamer experience.

I think that as a user, I would have liked it better if it was an application that I could install and/or delete and could get updates with but I also understand that Netflix probably didn’t want to shell out for the bandwidth that most of the developers have to do when it comes to selling on the Playstation Network. Not sure why it couldn’t have been some sort of installer though.

In any case, the real reason I set it up was to see how it compared to several devices that I had already. The best setup yet would probably be Windows Media Center, which allows searching for movies. The Netflix interface is slick and gives you not only the top 100 movies of each genre type that you’re more likely to watch, but it also loads pretty fast. It allows browsing through the “up to 100″ movies which is nice. I think it would have been more worthwhile if it also added the search toolbar, which would have been somewhat useful.

Outside of that, it is a little more feature rich than the Roku interface, and it seems to play the movies just fine. I did run into a problem at the get-go for my test with “Red Sonja” where the sound wouldn’t play, but that could have been a Netflix side issue, and not the interface passing through. We’ll see if it starts up again. If so, then there might be some QA issues with testing this first version of the disc.

I will say that activation with Netflix was a breeze. It took all of a few seconds for the code activation to sync up. Overall, the feel of this instant streaming client is pretty good and I believe is probably slightly better than the Xbox 360 version. I would still rank it behind the Windows Media Center version due to the lack of search bar, but even without that, I’m glad that it’s now on the PS3.

First off, this patch proves one thing. What the community calls “glitching” with the villager up the side of cliffs and such, was indeed not a “glitch”. Why anyone came up with that term to begin with is beyond me since this patch proves the fact that surfaces were made for different types of jumping abilities and such.

Class changes:
Second, with the new warrior speed improvements, and more health, it’s too bad that if the guy falls into water, he doesn’t drown. I mean, come on. The new class balancing basically made the worst class into the best, and downgraded some classes that didn’t need to be downgraded (specifically, I’d say the Ranger and Worker). Priest is still a great class to play regardless of the range and power drops and Mage wasn’t touched.

Maps:
New map wise, the New Pork map is completely crazy vast. I think this map actually could take on 64 players itself if the P2P servers could handle it. It would be great to have some way to sell or develop new maps by the community.

Bugs:
Voice chat is still bugged. This is where depending on how you join the game, or switch teams, you might be on one team but can hear the entire other team’s conversation. New bug where mining for metal, had the metal disappearing. Couldn’t recreate but I didn’t look too hard at it.

Scoring:
With the new scoring, it’s been basically tweaked down so that you basically suck at scoring. Which probably was an effect of keeping the title, but it does make it sort of… bleh.

Host system:
While the host now cannot kick or ban players, it also becomes an incredible annoyance. Mainly because with the several clans that I usually hang with (Broccoli Crew, Mr. Ts, Rockstars), these individuals usually are pretty fair with kicking the people that try to mess up the game. Namely, tkpanda148888. This guy just goes around and tries to sabotage games entirely which while apparently gives him great pleasure, it creates a terrible gaming environment. There are others, but known throughout the community, this guy is one serious jerk.

Thus, there should be a voting system. Perhaps if you can vote throughout the system and have to register at least a percentage of votes to kick or ban someone. With the new patch, I also found that there are hosts out there that I used to be able to connect to and now cannot. Sounds like some changes on the server side.

Synopsis:
Overall, the feel of the new patch is pretty good. I’m not really enthusiastic with the class changes, but overall it shows that the developers are always watching the scene and taking notes from the community. That makes it all the more worthwhile to support them in any sort of paid endeavors that they release. Outside of that? Get your Cakey ON!

I think I finally figured out why Hulu is blocked on the PS3. There were rumors that it might have been a Microsoft deal, and Hulu was being pretty silent about it, but no one has ever postulated that perhaps Sony was the one behind it.

Now I could be entirely incorrect here, but it’s fascinating that now PSN carries Naruto: Shippuden, as one of the shows that is being distributed. Obviously for $1.99 per episode. Now this is a little bit different than the other version that Hulu had since this one is actually dubbed with American voice actors instead of subtitled, but this could also be the copyright reasoning behind why Hulu isn’t allowing any shows on the PS3.

Very sneaky, if this hypothetical was true. And I have to admit that the more I think about it, the more it seems like that’s the case. Especially with this new evidence of Funimation releasing this.

Hey, I get the fact that we have to pay for content. But if you’re going to release it for free online, then why selectively block browsers? Let us watch the subtitled and buy the dubbed or none at all. It’s super lame if it’s one or the other while those on other consoles don’t have this issue.

It seems like 2DBoy, the makers of World of Goo, have extended their birthday celebration of “pay what you think it’s worth” experiment until October 25. The usual $20USD game is now… on average… $2.03USD. But even more interesting is that they put out a little survey to see why the average was at what it was and they came up with the conclusion that the largest percentage of people could only afford what they had paid.

And with the economy as it is currently, it’s amazing that fifty-seven thousand people put up even a little bit. Inside of a week. I think that goes to show that either gamers are holding out for the big things that roll sixty dollars for your console and not buying extraneous impulse buys, or that impulse buying of third party developers are getting hit hard by this economy. Either way, it sucks royally and I’m glad that 2DBoy provided an opportunity for those that wanted to contribute to do so.

That makes it all the more worthwhile.

In other news, there’s also a few chain letters going around saying how Sony is going to give away $50USD worth of PSN credit if you forward that letter to see which PSN-IDs were active. Amusingly, they said that they’re tracking it through the database. Whomever wrote this chain letter forgot one crucial bit. If you can track messages through a database, then you can also track active PSN-IDs. At the very least, the last sign-in is definitely logged in a database form or else you wouldn’t be able to see when your friends last logged in. Totally child’s play when it comes to these types of scams.

Really, why people buy into this stuff is beyond me. There’s no such thing as “free” via the simplistic PSN messaging system. If they (Sony) were going to grant you anything free, they would send it to your registered email that’s linked to your account. And on top of that, the same thing would happen to both closed and open beta invites. They DO NOT come through the messaging system as much as you’d love it to be that way.

Don’t hate the messenger if you bought into the above: hook, line, and sinker.

If you do a break-down of the cost by percentages in a rough scale, you would image that:

Development Studio: 50%
Publisher: 25%
Operations: 10%
Retailer: 5-15% (including discount)
Discount: 10%

Here is where it’s strange. In both Operations and Retailer, Sony basically absorbs most of the cost here since bandwidth is cheaper than creating packaging and distribution. Not to mention that you basically cut out the retailer altogether which means there’s at least a 5% savings. So why is it that downloadables never see this particular savings being passed on? Let’s be frank here, if you look at music CDs that you buy through iTunes, generally they’re about ten or eleven dollars compared to the retail thirteen or fourteen when they come out. That markup is what is being cut out.

With Sony’s PSN, it doesn’t seem to be the case until after the item is out for a long time, which means not only do they shoot themselves in the foot for adoption rate, but the actual break down shows that they’re basically taking out the retailer and taking that chunk too. Nice. Doesn’t make you want to go buy anything online, now does it. For me? If you’re going to make me buy it for the same price, I’ll take the pretty box and booklet any day of the week.