The World Ends With You

My review of The World Ends With You is up an this is a game that really has to be played for you to appreciate just how fantastic it is. If you read Penny Arcade, you'll know that Tycho is as in love with it as I am, and his posts go a long way towards explaining all the fun little quirks, more so than I could do in a review. You can check his take on it here and here.

On the one hand, I probably wouldn't have played it if I didn't have to review it, so I'm glad for the review, but on the other hand, having to rush through a game like this really does it a disservice. It should be explored and savored to really be enjoyed. Thankfully I still have tons of pins to evolve and items to buy and Noise to take out, so there's still a lot of enjoyment to be had.

Just to give you an idea of how much this game has seeped into my every day existence, today I read about how Nintendo just released a new channel for the Wii that will allow you to download game demos to your DS. As one of the ways to level up pins in TWEWY is to put the game in Mingle Mode and find another, any other, DS wireless signal, my immediate thought what that I can use my Wii to level up my pins. Demos? Fuck demos. I'm all about the pins baby.

All about the pins.

I'm on a roll, so I might as well just wrap up today's post now so that I have more time to play the mediocre slice of blasé pie that is Iron Man for the PSP. Yesterday my toy hunting was rewarded with both a Salvage and a Stealth Bumblebee. Stealth Bumblebee is a glorious toy. It's the new Camaro version, so it's a very stylish mold, and not so danged foot heavy as the beater Camaro version. The stealth version is yellow on black though, and with the translucent blue windows and the electric blue paint apps and the new head sculpt, it is one extremely pretty toy. He rocks he box with First Strike Optimus on the speaker in my home theatre room. Peep the gallery at Seibertron.com until I can get some pics up.

Salvage is interesting not only because he's a very nice repaint of Dropkick, one of my favorite new toys, but because of his character biography. Basically, he was a salvage truck until he was brought to life by the Allspark and now even though he's an Autobot and he's all for good and shit, he really just wants to go back to being a truck. I find that very interesting and very depressing at the same time. Assuming that he wasn't a sentient truck before being turned into a Transformer, he had no life at all, and then, once given life, he's immediately drawn into this conflict. That made me wonder if there is a class war of some sort between the Transformers from Cybertron that were Transformers pretty much from the start and the ones newly created on Earth. I mean, if my coffee table suddenly became sentient, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't give it equal say in various family matters. That got me thinking to how the new Transformers would pick sides once they became Transformers. On the face of things, the Decepticons turn into much more powerful vehicles, so they'd seem to have the advantage. And if you were, say a Ford Escort your whole life, and your owner treated you like shit, maybe you'd be pretty pissed and wouldn't want to save them from a life of enslavement. On the other hand, maybe you just like humans? That seems like the weaker of the two arguments. I don't know. All I do know is that if the 200 word character biography on the back of a toy can get me thinking that much, it's worth a purchase. I also know that I need to get out more and that I need to do some maintenance on my push mower because I've neglected that thing so much that if it comes alive it'll be looking to mulch my face off.