What Do You Want?

A few days ago I read a review of a high-end graphics card in the c’t magazine. The card featured nVidia’s latest and greatest GPU and a very elaborate cooling system which was required to reduce the fan noise to acceptable levels. I was shocked by the price of the graphics card. At €510 the graphics card was more expensive than our PlayStation 3 including most of the games.

That reminded me how happy I am that I don’t own a Gaming PC anymore. It was just a waste of money and time and on top of that frequently very frustrating: the noise, driver problems, hardware incompatibilities, and so on and so forth.

The quality of the graphics produced by the PlayStation 3 might not be state of the art anymore. But they look good enough for me. And I can actually focus on playing games instead of faffing around with the system.

I don’t have much luck with hard disks these days. One of the new hard disks in my server started reporting a lot of write errors after only a few days of service. I swapped its place with the other new hard disk to make sure it’s not a problem with either cabling or the motherboard but the problem remained.

Luckily I ordered the two new hard disks via Amazon who offer an excellent return service. They already sent me a replacement hard disk before I even shipped the broken one. Let’s hope this one works better.

Last month Nintendo released Super Mario Galaxy 2, the highly anticipated sequel of Super Mario Galaxy. As I greatly enjoyed playing the first game I had high expectations.

So the pivotal question is whether Super Mario Galaxy 2 is as good or even better than the first part:

1. If you have played Super Mario Galaxy in the past the intro and the first two levels will look very familiar.
2. The space ship which serves as the base of operations is a bit dull compared to Rosalina‘s observatory in the first game. And the Luma in charge of this space ship is somewhat annoying.
3. Fortunately things get better from here. In the second Galaxy your character Mario encounter’s Yoshi, a tame dinosaur, which he can ride on. Riding on Yoshi provides the player with a lot of new abilities. Yoshi can jump higher, eat enemies or swallow projectiles and fire them back at your opponents. By eating different kind of berries or hot chillies Yoshi gets even more astonishing powers like floating or super speed.
4. Mario himself can also acquire new powers e.g. by eating magic mushrooms. Among Mario’s extra powers are creating and walking on clouds, drilling holes or squashing his enemies by transforming into a rolling rock.
5. The design of the levels is as brilliant as in the first part. Checkpoints are now clearly marked by Bowser flags which Mario needs to touch. Some of the levels are however frustratingly difficult. You frequently wish for more checkpoints or more time.

All in all Super Mario Galaxy 2 is fun to play just like Super Mario Galaxy. But it somehow doesn’t have the special touch to it that made the first part a real masterpiece. It is nevertheless one of the best Wii games I have ever played.