Following up on today's Nintendo previews

Earlier today, we posted all our previews from last' week's Nintendo Media Summit. You can find them right here. I've got a few thoughts and anecdotes that, for one reason or another, I wasn't able to work into the previews I wrote. So what better place to share them than in our new preview blog? No place, is the answer. Without further ado, I give you an itemized list:

Mario Kart Wii
Perhaps you've heard, but we've got a little routine around here at the GameSpot offices known as Kart Kall. Everyday at 2:30 we get together in the main lounge to play ten tracks worth of Mario Kart DS. We've been doing this for a long time, and the level of competition is quite high. Well, I brought that experience with me to the Nintendo event where I managed to raise a few eyebrows with a steady string of first place finishes. It got to the point where if I was about to start up a match with another journalist, I had to first warn them, "Listen, I'm probably gonna beat you but don't feel bad. I devote an obscene amount of time to this game. You should pity me, if anything."

Boom Blox
This was definitely one of the surprises of the show for me. It looked really good, and I had quite a bit of fun with the multiplayer session I got to take part in. I devoted quite a few words in my preview to the game's physics engine, which is surprisingly good for the supposedly hardware-challenged Wii. Looking at still photos of the game doesn't do it justice; you've got to see those blocks teetering on the edge of falling to really appreciate the physics behind it. You know those crazy youtube videos of Crysis where a dude stacks thousands of barrells and knocks them all down? Boom Blox reminded me of that, but in a very lite version. Still very cool-looking, though. One other fun tidbit: I jokingly asked the senior producer, Amir Rahimi, if the game would have any Spielberg easter eggs in it (like the Jaws theme) knowing full well this would be a copyright disaster. He told me the game only has original easter eggs, but they did make a short video just for their own personal amusement where a block-shaped Indiana Jones was outrunning a block-shaped boulder to match the look of the game's NPCs. That definitely made me laugh.

World of Goo
It seems "physics engine" was the phrase of the day for me, because World of Goo is another Wii game with a solid foundation of algorithms and cosines and square roots running the show. (Can you tell I was an English major?) Although I sucked badly at this game, it was still very impressive to see running, and even more impressive to play. I mentioned my first encounter with the game in the preview, where I managed to screw up by building a tower of goo that would make the Leaning Tower of Pisa look structurally sound in comparison. The game's designers told me this was a later level from the game, so it's supposed to be hard, but I'm still a little unsure. I'm definitely gonna get World of Goo when it comes out, but it seems like it'll conflict with my notorious lack of patience (the reason I can't play RTS games). But there's something so twisted and surreal about this game that I feel compelled to bypass my usual tastes and do some serious strategic thinking.