lobotomy42

Can I pick Baldur's Gate? Because that's the game I played the most this year. Costume Quest? That's semi-recent. No? Okay, how about Pikmin 3. Pikmin 3 was fun. I liked it. It had a very....good...quality to it. It made me think "Ah, this is pleasant."

Double Fine also prefaced their announcement with several documentary updates that seemed to indicate that project was going terribly awry whereas Charles Cecil came out of the blue and announced "Hey, we're doing it in two parts, and the first one is almost done." The Broken Sword "Part One" is releasing before the DFA Part One, despite the kickstarter launching six months later. It may effectively be the same thing, but the messaging and perception were totally different.

Well, it certainly was key to Nintendo's plans for the system a year ago. After a year of dismal sales numbers, plans have probably changed. I'd be sad too - I'm still waiting for a kick-ass asymmetrical multiplayer game - but not surprised. Not remotely similar. The Wii Remote is the primary interface for virtually every Wii and Wii U game released. Even if it's innovations as a motion controller were never fully realized, it was frequently relied upon as an NES controller stand-in and a pointing device. The Wii U Gamepad is used, after a year, primarily for its play-without-tv feature.

Without reading or reacting to the article, I can say that I am definitely overwhelmed by the amount of Mario platformers lately. It seems like Nintendo has transitioned from one Mario platformer every couple of years, either 2D or 3D, to now doing at least 1 a year of one or the other, sometimes one of each. It's a little....much? I am definitely unable to keep up and it's hard for me to believe intellectually that quality isn't being diluted as a result (although I have no empirical evidence at hand to support this view.)

So when does Episode Two come out? Also, can talk about the menu screen with Bigby just walking and looking left and right? I freakin' love that menu.

It's the inevitable destination of all Nintendo threads, sooner or later.

*ahem* Chibi-Robo

I have something similar but nowhere near as extreme. I hate, hate, hate starting a game or movie that has a "2" at the end of the title if I didn't play the first one. Also: I agree with others here that the Wii U has a pretty terrible basic OS and the setup process - if you want the firmware updates - is painful. It's such an enormous step backward from the the 3DS and even original Wii user experience that it's hard to believe the same company is responsible. Don't get me started on how the 3DS can run DS games without completely booting you into the DS menu while the Wii U can't manage the same with the Wii (which came out a good while after the DS.) Or how the Wii U's "Daily Log" has so many fewer features than the 3DS equivalent. Or, or or.....

I remember enjoying Sunshine at the time, but I also remember finding a couple of the stars insanely frustrating. The best part, as I recall, was using that water thing as a way to extent your jump for a couple of seconds and nail the landing. And then also those levels without the water thing at all.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday playing this. It has that "one-more-turn" addictive quality, but my feeling is that the game is wildly unbalanced - it seems possible to build a good number of stats with just a handful of early-level events, making the rest of the possible events somewhat pointless. I'm also not clear on the win condition, since I made it to Captain's Assistant (or whatever) and yet am still on the station. Also, this will ruin Facebook for you.

For whatever reason, it seems like Nintendo deliberately drip feeds the VC. Obviously they could just dump all their ROMs and titles at once and call it a day, but they don't. Maybe it's to give each title a week to a month to itself? It strikes me as something that seems sale-maximizing in the short term, but potentially damaging to the VC brand in the long-term. The iTunes store became a standard place to buy music only once people became assured that *everything* would show up there. Since that only barely happened with the Wii, and clearly won't happen with the 3DS, I have little incentive to start dabbling in the Wii U iteration of the VC. But then again, I'm not the sort of person who buys a lot of old Super Nintendo games anyway.

Super Mario 64 was, in retrospect, the most deviant of the main Mario platforming games. Sunshine tried to replicate the experience, but all of the 3D Mario games since then have been slowly walking the Mario experience back to a more linear, streamlined format, similar to the 2D games but in 3D.

Anyone here play the Resident Evil Deck-Building Game? It's kind of an insanely complicated rip-off of Dominion.

Man, it is so weird how the art style has ended up being the most divisive aspect of this game. It strikes me as pedestrian, playing it safe, but neither horrible nor wonderful. I am buying this game but if it's anything like the rest of the Zelda series, I will play it for six hours and then move on to something else and never quite get around to finishing it. (Statement reflects me and my attention span, not Zelda)

At the risk of alienating the one person on this thread who once kinda-sorta agreed with me: I actually like motion controls. I get that they aren't as good, will never be as precise, responsive, flexible and everything else and there are some (ok, most) games where they never belong and waggle sucks, etc. But hear me out: there is something to be said for the action you're taking to be representative of the action happening in the game. No More Heroes let you swing the Wiimote in a certain direction at a certain time as a way of punctuating a series of action moves. While that game could never be said to, you know, control well, it did *feel* neat when everything aligned. I also just tried out the Wii U Sports Club package* and played around with tennis for awhile only to remember how *easy* the whole thing is to fall into. The stakes in Wii tennis are just so goddamn low, the learning curve is very simple, and it just viscerally feels right, dammit. I haven't honestly used the PS Move or Kinect because my apartment is so tiny but I have no trouble imagining that they have similar strengths and weaknesses: low intimidation, easy learning curve, kinetic symmetry...and really crappy precision and timing. (*Tangent: Wii U Sports Club is actually a significant re-engineering of the controls from the original Wii Sports titles and not just an HD re-release! I did not know that going into it.) Intellectually, I understand that you are correct because the quantity of games available is just so staggeringly higher than in the past that the spread simply has to be wider. And as I admitted before, I'm mostly oblivious when it comes to indie titles so I assume everyone is correct when they say that the land of indies is a magical paradise of mind-blowing shit that redefines what it means to be human and eat cheeseburgers. But even so, I think it's fair to say that some major categories of games have narrowed in terms of what they offer even as the larger category of video games has expanded.

I can remember not using Steam because I hate Steam and still try to avoid using it when I can. I don't like not owning the games I own. I like to be able to replay them, and I don't want to only be able to replay them at Valve's mercy, however reliable they look now. This also applies to other "Games as a Service" things (XBLA, PS+) although I give PlayStation a little leeway because it's so close to free that I just think of it as a bonus. This generation for me has been disappointing. Nintendo gets most creative when its back is against the wall, and the Wii did so well initially that Nintendo reacted by resting on their laurels and shoveling out some mini-game collections for awhile. Once the 3DS came out and did *not* sell spectacularly well, they started taking a hard look in the mirror and really going for it again. We've now seen a steady stream of excellent titles from them again on both 3DS and Wii U, and so naturally their sales have plummeted. I expect that once they find something profitable again, their games will again suck. The Xbox/PS2/GCN generation wasn't exactly known for the hugely creative output of the major studios, but this generation seems somehow worse, if you're looking at AAA titles. It's Call of Duty flippin' everywhere, and even the mid-tier "Oh it's just some sci-fi action game" genre seems to be ready for extinction. When was the last time a non-Mario 3D platformer came out? RPGs will be next on the chopping block, I'll bet, after this latest wave of Skyrim-ization inevitably fails. The silver lining to all of this is of course the "rise of the indies" which I frankly have not paid attention in the least. This is almost certainly my own fault. But, seriously, there are like a thousand of these things. How on earth am I supposed to pick out which ones are good? I have a limited amount of space in my life for video games, so I rely on things like metacritic scores (I know, I know) and review blogs to tell me when a "must-play" game has arrived. I am not going to download every indie darling that shows up on Rock Paper Shotgun, sorry, I just can't. To some extent I can rely on brand names - I know that I'll play most Double Fine and Telltale games, for example - but there simply has to be a mechanism for sorting through the clutter other than "devote your life to video games." Publishers used to be this mechanism. It used to be the case that if a major publisher put its name on something, it meant some sort of faith in the product as a product itself, not a byproduct of faith in the brand. Or even the console makers - it used to be the case that console makers would invest in selecting / creating some "high caliber" games. As far as I can tell, this is no longer the case! I was reminded recently that it has been almost a decade since Katamari Damacy and Shadow of the Colossus were released. Has there been an artistic achievement in games as incredible as those games were? (Journey, I guess, is the best counter-argument here, although it did nothing for me personally.) Did we really peak a decade ago? Has the industry driven away all its auteurs? To me, this generation has been a bit of a letdown. Am I crazy? Or just old and cranky?

In anticipation of this game, I have started playing Apollo Justice which I borrowed from a friend two years ago and then never played.

Honestly, if you really want those games you can probably get them cheap for the original Wii and just use the Wiimote controller. Depending on how many you actually want, that could be cheaper than buying a PS Eye and Move (and involves one less peripheral)

It's been a long time since I've played the single player campaign in the original games, but nonetheless I feel comfortable saying that the single-player campaign in Pikmin 3 is essentially similar to 1 and 2. It's a bit shorter and the final level is a bit odd, it's true, but I wouldn't say that the campaign structure is much different. It's true that the bonus missions are, by their very nature, less fun, but the campaign is real centerpiece and it's worth playing for its own sake.

Oh man I love this so much. If each episode is as good as the first one, this may easily top The Walking Dead, which would be crazy impressive.

I second Pikmin 3 as being by far the best game on the system. New Super Mario Bros U is probably the best of the New Super Mario Bros, although I can understand someone being sick of that particular Mario iteration by now. Nintendoland isn't bad either, but I probably wouldn't pay more than $20 for it. If you have parties with friends who are comfortable touching each other in public (in non-gross ways) then Spin the Bottle: Bumpie's Party is a wonderfully weird party game. It makes use of the tablets and up to four Wiimotes, but will work with fewer as well. And it's what, $10?

Can't it be both?

The winged Pikmin are the best. It took me a long time to realize

Well that explains why it's so old!

Incidentally, I just redeemed some Club Nintendo points for their new Pikmin tote bag. I finally received it today and discovered that, for whatever reason, it features the Pikmin 2 cast (Purple, White) instead of the Pikmin 3 cast. And this is a recent item! Or maybe they're leftovers from some promotional thing ten years ago? Lazy design? I don't know!