I’ve completed the Wet ‘N’ Windy stages. Assimilate (stage 9) took a while, but otherwise all was good. No boss (thankfully!) and a diverting end of set game (toss monkeys in the air to convert letters in the credits into bananas), but no high score table. I can’t believe it would have required much effort to have coded a high score table - lazy.
I have now unlocked two more sets of stages Junglistic Journey and Blistering Sands.
Yesterday I went into Game and they had banana blitz (for the wii) and touch ‘n’ roll (for the DS) going cheap so I had to have them. Controlling banana blitz is fairly straightforward since a motion sensing remote is kind of an obvious fit to a game where you have to tilt the world. Controlling the DS version is harder (but not impossible).
I’ve completed a couple of worlds in Banana Blitz - the end of world bosses are an annoying addition to the franchise. We also had some multiplayer fun, but it looks like I’m going to have to get some more remotes sometime soon.
About an hours effort and I’ve collected all the star coins in worlds 4 and 5 4. Although theyit now shows as complete there is definitely one secret left on world 4 - there must be one more because there is an inaccessible mushroom house. Most of the coins required either mega or mini mushrooms, the remaining worlds will be a bit more varied - there are at least 50 star coins remaining.
Edit 29/03/2007: I’ve no idea why I thought I’d finished world 5, because I haven’t - there is plenty left to do.
By the end of Saturday I had reached a battle with the Master of the Curtain Mist in Silverpeak Gorge and no matter how I tried I couldn’t beat him. I decided that only having caught two types of monster to have on my side might be a problem - so I restarted. I’ve just beaten the Master of the Curtain Mist, completed chapter 3 and learnt loads of new spells. I went in with two Hydra, converted all the man crystals and then attacked the sage head on - one hydra attacking each of his two guard hydras and me attacking him - my HP got very close to zero a couple of times, but some rapid fire attacks sorted the sage out.
This seems to be a common problem I have with RPGs, I get a couple of hours in and realise that I’ve made some fairly large mistakes early on and have to restart. Not really the best of techniques - maybe I should start reading manuals?
Two new games, to occupy me when I’m on the bus, both RPGs (of sorts): Lost Magic is based around spell casting using the stylus; Lunar Genesis seems to be a more straightforward RPG.
I’m a little concerned by Lunar Genesis since I’ve already had to resort to gamefaqs owing to a strange bit of cause and effect. You start in the town of Port Searis as Jian who needs to meet up with his partner Lucia, so after ages wondering about not finding Lucia I resorted to a walkthrough - Lucia only turns up in one location if you have already talked to one particular person to ask where she is, which makes no sense I like to be given the impression that other characters are living their own lives and not just popping into existence because of my character’s actions.
I’ve finished stamp mode (and was completely thrashed at chess en route - I knew I was in trouble after the second move 
) which has unlocked a couple of extra difficulty levels. I’ve nearly[1] finished mission mode, with just 4 of the 30 missions left; unfortunately I still have one darts and two bowling missions to go (the other mission is field tactics which I don’t like either).
[1] for appropriate values of nearly 
I’m currently playing stamp and mission mode of 42 all-time classics. Stamp mode is odd since you progress to further games even if you lose (it just takes a little longer), however some parts of mission mode are evil - it seems to have taken hundreds of attempts to finish a Mah Jong game in under three minutes and how I’m meant to do okay at darts(not a natural video game IMO!) is beyond me.
It’s hard with some games to decide when it has been completed. Mario has rescued the princess, but there are loads of levels and two entire worlds I haven’t seen yet - so I feel compelled to continue.
I’ve reached world 8
This year work upped their Christmas gift from £15 of WHSmith vouchers to £25 of Tesco vouchers, so I bought New Super Mario Bros.
Since I was on holiday for a week I’ve decided I’ll do some retroactive blogging - believe me I wasn’t blogging on holiday!