As long as they're running and updating Guitar Hero TV, I'll carve out time for this game. It may not be the party machine that Rock Band 4 is, but it offers something no other game, and really, no other TV station, currently does: a powerful combo of play, nostalgia and discovery. I mean, I'd never buy a Darwin Deez record, but I'm glad I've seen that video, you know?
You're probably thinking this isn't cut out for anybody past a certain age, that it's just for kids. If you feel that way about games, well, bless your heart. This is a medium where the most acclaimed and best selling games feel like the idle doodles of a middle-school boy. I'll take my light-hearted joy where and when I can when dealing with videogames, and few games are as joyous or adorable as this one.
It's a minor part of the game—Chibi-Robo will find snacks during his clean-up duties, and can give them to his hungry plane friend for a useful return—but it's so weird to see real products in a game like this that it stands out more prominently than it should. Here's a fictional game world, devoid of all people and recognizable buildings, filled with stuff you'd buy at Wawa during a road trip. Actually, that might make it the most ingenious thing about Chibi-Robo! Zip Lash: it's not just trying to sell you something, it's trying to sell you something you'd buy to kill time in the back of a car, just like the game itself.
Of course Harmonix will need more than just the diehards to make this game a success, and that's the biggest problem the game faces. Five years is a long time, but it doesn't seem like it's been long enough to jumpstart the kind of nostalgia needed to make these games feel fresh again. The game itself is everything you'd expect from Rock Band, but are enough people expecting anything from Rock Band in 2015?
The steady trickle of new playable levels in the Toy Box probably won't include anything as impressive as the Play Sets, but the sheer volume of extra material, and the ingenuity displayed by your fellow players, should keep you playing Disney Infinity 3.0 until the next version inevitably rolls around.
The ability to muck about with our most powerful memories and experiences is bewitching and almost unthinkable, but that's the core of Super Mario Maker. It's exactly as good and as bad as you think a Super Mario level editor would be, and that's entirely subjective upon your own thoughts and opinions.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture feels trapped by its medium, forced into one of a handful of approved genres because that's what is expected of videogames. The Chinese Room knows how to create vibrant worlds, and fills Rapture's with a number of believable characters. If they trusted fully in these characters and their lives, or the audience's willingness to be fascinated by them without a sci-fi hook, Rapture would have been stronger for it. Anybody interested in games as a storytelling medium should play it, even if its light is reined back in right on the verge of transcendence.
Titan Souls is an example of a game that successfully uses nostalgia as a jumping off point and not as a central reason to exist. The name and art style might make it seem too familiar, but if you can play through that you'll see it quickly establishes its own identity. It's still a bit of a novelty, but at least it fully commits to that novelty, much like you'll probably commit yourself to defeating every titan once this game sinks its hooks into you.
Despite the off-putting steampunk aesthetic, the weird roster of fictional and non-fictional characters, and the relative shallowness of the strategic elements, Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. doesn't grow tiresome.
There might be rough patches, but the friction falls away when I'm locked into the core of Ori and the Blind Forest. We here at Paste Games believe that Metroid is pretty much the best game to emulate. Unlike games with concrete missions or levels, a great Metroid-style game never gives the player a reason to stop. They pull us through on a steady current of gradually expansive play that makes us never want to put the controller down. Ori expertly nails that rhythm, timing out its revelations and offering enough unique ways to navigate its world to maximize the player's engagement.
This is a game and a concept that could benefit from a sequel. And if we're lucky, it'd give us an even deeper look at this gorgeous yet squalid Dickensian London.
So maybe life isn't strange, but at least the game tries.
I can't argue with the logic behind a handheld Smash Bros—people will buy it, people will love it, Nintendo will make money and everybody will be happy—but I might have to wait for the upcoming Wii U version, where even the secondary screen that I hold in my hands will be significantly bigger than the one on the 3DS. It's not the game's fault, of course. The game is big. It's the picture that got small.
Wolfenstein: The New Order doesn't transcend either of its genres. It's another first-person shooter that's also just another victorious Nazi alternate timeline. It's proficient enough at both action and world-building to merit attention, though. It may not be a world I want to hang out in that often, but I'll at least try to save it once.
Tropical Freeze is hard. Even when it is hard it is adorable. The difficulty escalates at a steady pace, and never spikes dramatically, which is what a game's difficulty should do. Every aspect of the action, from the standard platforming to the periodic undersea investigations to the exploits involving mine cars and rocket ships, fits smoothly into the game's world. And best of all is our itinerant rhino friend, always ready to bear up to two gorillas aloft and bulldoze its way to the end of the level.
A Link Between Worlds addresses that history head-on, but somehow creates an identity that’s more fulfilling and surprising than any Zelda since Wind Waker. It might have the same map as A Link to the Past, the same overhead perspective, and the same weapons and archetypes that appear in every Zelda. It’s not the same as any Zelda you’ve played before, though, because even this reliably good series is rarely as elegantly designed as A Link Between Worlds.
Assassin's Creed IV owns its corniness. It might lack self-awareness, but it has no shortage of confidence, and that's as exciting as getting your own boat and pirate hat.
Rayman Legends is a videogame without pretense, and that might be the most crucial decision its designers made without even realizing it.