Ultimate Thumb Pain!

i've never considered myself anywhere close to a hard-core video-gamer. not even remotely close. i do enjoy playing video games quite a bit, but with a couple of jobs and the ridiculous amount of movies i watch eating up most of my time there just isn't enough awake time to dedicate to a life of gaming.

i do, however, own several video game consoles. most of them were bought past their prime on account of me not wanting to spend hundreds of dollars on a console. one of my favourite consoles is my Nintendo GameCube. it's a really brilliant little piece of machinery. about the size of a Mac Mini, the GameCube packs a ton of power and graphics processing abilities into a small package. the mistake that Nintendo made in putting this into the american market is that it uses mini-DVDs for it's games. since mini-DVDs cannot be bought in spindles of 100 for next to nothing, it leaves pirating GC games pretty much out of the question and as much as anyone may want to argue to the contrary, this will hurt sales in north america. pirating of Xbox and PS2 games runs rampant which results in massive console sales for Microsoft and Sony respectively. Nintendo relies solely on the quality of their games - and with Mario on their side quality always abounds.

but my day hasn't been spent playing Mario games. today i bought a copy of Ultimate Spiderman for GameCube. it's been a while since i bought a game, but i have a pretty open weekend this weekend and thought i'd give it a go. i've always been a fan of the various Spiderman comic books, though i have not been a fan of the recent Spiderman movies (i'm sorry, i just couldn't watch it. i promise i will some day). this game is based on the comic book of the same name, and i'd have to say that one of the things i love most about this game is that the entire game is animated to look like the comic book. there are comic book cut-scenes and videos. anyone who comes from the old-school comic book era would appreciate that i think. on top of it, the controls seem reasonably intuitive and the game starts out simply enough that someone who likes to play video games but doesn't get much of a chance can jump right in and get started.

the game isn't anywhere close to new. i *think* it's been around for over a year. long enough to get on most consoles' "Best Seller" type lists. it only cost me $20, and in my opinion was very worth all twenty of those dollars. give it a try. lots of fun. if you're a hardcore gamer it's probably only worth renting and playing through a couple of times, but if you're just a once-in-a-whiler like myself just buy it.