Nintendo Gamecube and Other Christmas Adventures

Well, be careful what you put on your Christmas wish list (especially if you put it at spot #1).

So I got my Gamecube and Mario Kart: Double Dash for Christmas. After less than 2 weeks, I have mastered the game against the computer and have unlocked all the secrets. Now I am doing some of the time trials (which I think you really should do first to get familiar with the tracks before you do the Grand Prix, but I like to jump into things and figure it out as you go along) and trying to unlock the “staff ghost” which is actually pretty hard.

The drawback of getting the Gamecube is that Nintendo has not released many really good games (in my opinion). There is Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles coming out, so I will take a look at that and a couple of old Zelda games that came with the Gamecube, but one of them is so disorienting that it nearly made me sick. On top of it all, I will probably have a job soon, so it really doesn’t matter.

I had a pretty good time back in California visiting relatives and friends. Mostly, it was normal stuff: gambling with Grandma and relatives (mahjong – hey, I think I almost broke even this time), spending time with friends, snowboarding and watching movies (though not as many as usual). The only really odd thing was that both when I left and came back to Shareena’s parents’ house in Sacramento, the power went out. When I left, it wasn’t much trouble, except that since there was no power in the refrigerator, I couldn’t find the leftover meat/cheese from our snowboarding trip to make sandwiches. However, when I came back up and the power was out (and it was out for over 12 hours), I was unable to do my laundry and Shareena had to pack in the dark. So that was quite fun to say the least.

Finally, Chicago get its first real snowstorm this winter as three inches of snow was piled onto poor Charlie (Shareena’s name for her blue Honda Civic). It took 15 minutes just to remove the snow off of him to take Shareena to the gym. Quite fun again.

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Mario Kart: Double Dash

1. It’s much funner playing with other people.
2. Turbo boost out of powerslide is best…learn to do it multiple times in one turn is better.
3. It is really the only game worth getting on Nintendo Gamecube at the moment (though Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles may be good too, but I probably do not want to spend 1000 hours getting past level 1).
4. Mirror mode is really not that hard after the first couple of tries…once you learn how to turn properly, it’s really not that bad.

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