Hitman Tommy's Second Pick Up Video

Well this has been a long time coming. Where has the summer gone? If you've listened to Episode 4 of the Two Crude Dudes podcast you heard a little bit about what I've been up to since my last post in June. Made a family trip to Chicago and my wife and I have been preparing to welcome the first addition to our family.

But of course while real life was going on Tyson and I still found the time to get out there and find some more games. However I talked already on the podcast about most of the games that I've bought. I'm currently working on a blog regarding a recent conversation that Tyson an I were having about my NES collection. I'm hoping to have that up in the next day or two. But in the meantime here's a video with one of my most recent online pickups.

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Email:
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Two Crude Dudes - Episode #4 - Strange Animal Crossing

Two Crude Dudes Episode #4 is finally here! 

"Hitman Tommy and Super Robot Tyson return! Too many games to alphabetize has sidetracked us for a few months, but we are back with a fresh episode of Two Crude Dudes. Fueled by beer and Hot Tamales, and motivated by the moving sounds of Gowan, we boldly burp ourselves back onto the airwaves. This episode covers the underrated Wii U, remembers the Sega Master System, and covers our adventures looking for retro games to add to our obscene collections. Our heroes also braved the wilds of Kijiji to hunt for rare "game" to mount on our walls. Will Tyson escape the clutches of a green haired rapist? Will Tommy load his bases with hatred, or can Tom Kite calm his nerves? Filled with 1000% of your recommended daily intake of dick jokes, the boys throw all professionalism out the door to bring you their inner musings on game collecting. Maybe our ruthless commitment to find cheap games is due to our criminal minds? We stand accused before you..."

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Super Robot Tyson

River City Coma

Hi everyone!

It's been pretty quiet around here lately, so I just wanted to drop a line to let the world know that we did not die in a tragic video game avalanche. I've been very busy with work and dealing with a family illness and Tommy took a vacation with his family to Chicago! I'm sure he did some game shopping on the trip, so expect a blog from him soon. Two Crude Dudes is still in the works and we just need to find an evening to record. I've also been whoring myself out to another podcast, so that has been a busy project too. Stay tuned!

One of these explosions is Tommy farting deep dish pizza. The rest were from Godzilla...

Super Robot Tyson

Buyer's Remorse #22 - Keep Out of Direct Sunlight

Welcome back!

It's been far too long since I updated the blog, but things have been pretty busy in the Super Robot household lately. Also, since the weather has been beautiful and sunny, I've been making an attempt to stay indoors and play more games!

While we have been doing some of our usual game chasing, it seems that both myself and Tommy have been a little more selective instead of grabbing anything cheap. I touched on the evolution of our collections in my last blog and we have stayed true to form. He's really focused on the NES collecting and I'm going for more quality over quantity. Here's a few pics of some recent scores and then I'll run down some of the things I played.

 
I actually found the complete TurboGrafx-16 games at Value Village for a few bucks and the boxed GBA games were picked up for $7.00 each at a pawn shop. Metroid Zero Mission has been my top GBA want for a long time as I'm a huge fan of Metroid Fusion and never ended up getting Zero Mission. I also really wanted to have it complete in the box too, and my patience paid off. 

I'm tempted to make a "Half Minute Hero" joke about "That's what Tommy's wife calls him", but I guess I'll refrain.

That's about all I picked up, except for a nice score of some more Nintendo Power magazines from a thrift shop. Making a checklist for what I need for NP was an excellent idea. I love checklists. I love alphabetizing. I love organizing. I love color coding things and aligning them by height. Help me...

This makes me upset.

So what have I played recently? Check it out:

Wii U:

I'm pleasantly surprised with my Wii U. The second screen gaming is something you don't really appreciate until you try it. The tablet feels natural and I don't have to wave it around. The Miiverse community is a really positive place for Nintendo fans and after watching Microsoft drive people away with E3 and their retarded Xbone, I'm feeling much more loyal to the big N. Nintendoland is a great amount of fun and a good way to show off the system. I find that I use the word "fun" a lot when describing my Wii U and it just feels easy to pick up and play like my 3DS. When I play Xbox 360 or PS3, it's like I have to plan for it, or hype myself up for it, but the Wii U feels more "part of" my living room. Strange, eh?

Scribblenauts Unlimited: 

This was my first bulk of Wii U gaming. It's pure joy and great fun to watch. My only complaint is that I spent a lot of time staring at the game pad and did not really watch the TV. You also start to get crazy creative and then can feel derailed when the game does not contain a fairly standard adjective or noun. The sounds and music don't have a huge amount of variety, but it looks great in HD. Once you've rode a giant chocolate friendly dancing rainbow Cthulhu, all other arguments are invalid.

Rabbids Rumble: 

Another pleasant surprise! I bought it in a budget dump bin at Giant Tiger as I'd heard it was fun. While the Rabbids are no longer funny, the Pokemon style battles in the game are addicting. You play a lot of minigames to traverse across the maps in the game and then battle a group of three Rabbids to advance. Every time you defeat a group of Rabbids, you can choose one of them to add to your stable. The game has over 100 Rabbids to collect and I ended up with 52 after completing the game and finding some with QR codes and spotpass. The minigames make full use of the 3DS with AR Games, blowing into the mic, tapping, swiping, steering, yelling etc. It's sometimes not the best game to play in bed as you might decide you want to play an AR game and you have to turn on a light, dig out the AR card, and get out of bed. The game is simple and easy, but the paper-rock-scissors battles are great fun and use some strategy. Picking and leveling up your team of Rabbids is also important. In the end my Flaming Farts and Flaming Belches were tough to defend against. Good budget title for some distracting minigames and some engaging battles that don't go on too long. I'd give it a solid 3.5 BWAH! out of 5...

I have also started playing Bioshock Infinite and a little bit of Mario U. Both games are awesome and I'll talk about them in the future. I'm a huge mark for Bioshock and I'm hopelessly in love with Elizabeth from the new game. I'm trying to get my wife into Bioshock cosplay, but it's not working.

Metroid Zero Mission:

Finally! An enhanced remake of the NES version of Metroid with new play mechanics and story scenes. It plays similar to Metroid Fusion or Super Metroid, but is just a perfect balance of the Metroid formula. It's a masterpiece for the GBA and a must own. You can even play as Samus out of her power suit and when you beat the game, you unlock the NES version of Metroid. The length is shorter, but it's replayable with multiple endings and it begs for speed runs. I have beaten Metroid Fusion many, many times and it's a "go-to" title for me. I imagine Zero Mission will be another regular favorite of mine. The "Metroidvania" style of gameplay is one of my favorites. 

I'd also like to close out by advising everyone to go buy Mighty Switch Force HD on their Wii U and their 3DS. Both titles are on sale right now in the e-shops and anything that supports Wayforward and spreads this awesome game is a good thing. I'm addicted to both versions of it and plan to buy Mighty Switch Force 2 very soon. 

Wow! I think this is the least amount of stupid memes and dick jokes I've had in a blog so far! Maybe I'm growing up! 

NOPE!!!!!

He's the Jack-Rabbid. Get it?

Thanks for reading! New episode of Two Crude Dudes should be coming soon. I'm hoping we can do it this weekend. Take care!

Super Robot Tyson

Buyer's Remorse #21 - The New U

Finally back with a brand new Buyer’s Remorse. Initially this entry was planned not to be a Buyer’s Remorse simply because I hadn’t felt like I’d added much to my collection that it would be worth devoting a whole entry to the concept. However as more time elapsed I did pick up a few more things that are worth a quick mention. But as opposed to doing my usual rant of telling you one by one all the things I’ve picked up I have put them into two pictures. One that is older stuff and the other has the new generation items. Then to close off this entry I want to talk a little bit about my first encounter playing the Wii U.

Speaking of the Wii U I’ll start with my recent pickups for the current generation systems. As Tyson talked about his Wii U purchase in his last entry I’ll spare you the details of mine as it was almost exactly the same. We went the same night, traded in lots of games that we had no need for in our collections and made use of a couple promotions that GameStop/EB were offering at the time. If you want more info regarding this please check out Tyson’s last blog right below this one. As a result we both were able to get a good deal on the Wii U system as well use some trade towards a few games. Saying our bundles came with ZombiU and Nintendo Land I didn’t pick up any other Wii U titles that night but instead grabbed the new Tomb Raider and Ni No Kuni, I forgot to include these in the picture below.

I wonder when they'll figure out that Wii U games don't have to have a 'U' in the title

I also went back with another stack of games that I was hoping would meet the criteria for their trade in deal and was able to gain a bunch more store credit which netted me my two other Wii U games Lego Undercover and Super Mario Bros U. I don’t usually trade anything in but considering some of the deals that Tyson and I find this particular offer was great as in most cases we were getting more in trade than we had paid for the game originally and were titles that were really just padding our numbers as opposed to being something that we really wanted to play.

In the picture below are the games I found through a combination of Value Village, pawn shops, retail stores and the flea market. I was very excited to find a couple more NES titles to add to my collection but the big find was definitely the Sega 32X in the box. One of the local retail stores finally had dropped their price on their 32X’s by over half of what they had been selling them for. I walked into one of the locations that I don’t get to too often and they had a boxed one out for the same price as their loose ones so I didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger on it. That particular day sort of turned into Sega 32X Saturday as I also found 3 loose games for it at Value Village for a couple bucks a piece.

I'm going to get drunk one night and Fred Couples and I are going to ride Yoshi's and play golf in Syberia 

Obviously the big pick up this time around was the purchase of the Wii U. I honestly hadn’t expected to pick one of these up anytime soon. Mainly because they were initially a little slow out the gate but Nintendo has really ramped up the amount of announcements and it did start to intrigue me a little more. Factor in that we were able to leverage the EB sale in our favor and suddenly getting one so soon seemed like a no brainer. So far since making this purchase I’ve probably had the time to play around a dozen hours of games for it and just want to share my initial reactions to the experience.

Wii U Console Menu- Found it relatively easy to navigate. I do own a Wii and a 3DS so the learning curve was rather small due to the similarities. Not much to say about it but I did probably spend an hour checking out the options and tailoring my preferences.

Wii U Control/Game Pad- I was very impressed with the feel and layout of both the Pro Controller and the Game Pad. I’ll admit that I was one of the people sneering at the Game Pad when it was first introduced. I just didn’t see the appeal of using a “tablet” to control a video game. However Nintendo did a great job laying out the buttons and so far from what I’ve played the small features that some of the games have built in to enhance the game play using the screen have been neat. I can’t wait to see what developers start using it for once they’ve had more time with the technology.

Nintendo Land- This was the first game that I tried on the console. While it is more or less a tech demo for things the system can do, they did manage to design some very addictive and competitive “Attractions” for the player to try out. I know my wife and I got very competitive at DK Crash Course the first night we tried it. But I’m going to be bias and say that Yoshi’s Fruit Cart was my favorite thing to play in the game.

ZombiU- The reviews this game got early on were rather unfavorable but the longer it’s been out people seemed to have softened their stance. This game was a very pleasant surprise and while I’ve only gotten to spend about an hour with it so far I can’t wait to sit down and have a good solid play through with it. I’ve been very impressed with the overall atmosphere of the game and was a real treat to skulk around the shadows as a survivor during a zombie apocalypse. Most other recent outings that other zombie games have put forth have an emphasis on action as opposed to survival. Sure you could go around killing everything you see but is that really a proper use of supplies? Guess we’ll find out.

Super Mario Bros U- If you’ve read previous entries you’ll know that my wife loves Mario games. In fact the night that I came home with the Wii U her first question was did I buy Mario; needless to say I went back in short order and bought it. I’ve played about two hours and my wife has probably logged about double that. I don’t have a whole lot to say about it. Honestly its Mario if you’ve played one of the recent titles in the series you’ve played this game. They’ve added new levels and a new squirrel? Power up but that aside it’s the same thing that Nintendo has been putting out for this series. That being said if it isn’t broke don’t fix it.

That more or less wraps up all I had to say about my first 10-12 hours with the Wii U. I’m sure as I have more time to spend with it I’ll comment as such in future blogs. I have picked up Lego Undercover recently and do really want to play it but I really want to put more time into ZombiU before I start another new game. Anyways as usual thanks for the taking the time to read this, until next time!