Helping
Who knew! It’s almost E3 time already! Nintendo has put up an E32K3 page with some announcements.
You mightn’t be aware of it, but possibly Jenny’s all time favorite video game is Secret of Mana. Do you know why she liked it? Helping. It was a two player cooperative game. Each person controls one character on screen and you fight monsters together and help each other. Jenny likes competetive games, but she LOVES helping games. Unfortunately they are few and far between. That is, until now!
The first Pikmin was a great game. You indirectly control a swarm of little aliens to do various tasks, like build bridges, collect stuff, push rocks around, and fight bugs. Now Pikmin 2 is coming out, and it features a helping mode! Both players control the little aliens. This sounds like lots of fun. “I’m going to lead the blue ones across the water to get the item, you collect as many yellow and red as you can and try to fight off the bugs until I’m done!” “ROGER!” But that’s not all…
Somehow Mario Kart is helping now too! This new version is called Mario Kart Double Dash!!. Kind of like the ancient game Fire Truck, each cart is driven by two players. One deals with driving, the other with weapons and fending off the other drivers. You can switch positions during the race to take advantage of each character’s specialties. This is great. I wonder why the sudden fascination with helping at Nintendo?
Also a new F-Zero is coming. How can you go wrong with an F-Zero game? This one is made by Sega and allows you to share data between the home version and the arcade version. That feature will probably take off in Japan but I doubt anybody will use it here.