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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.
Read Only Memories manages to frame current issues in a neo-noir light, and excels in many ways at that. I'm still thinking about Turing's notion of the social contract, and how that relates to the way we interact with others.
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?
I 100% enjoyed all of my time with The Beginner's Guide, despite a few instances of clumsy writing, up to the point where the last chapter slipped over into the epilogue. I feel like the tail end of the game is almost kitschy in how it plays out, and I believe that the game would have been so much stronger and braver for ending with the last voiceover of the final chapter. By continuing to go on and on with the narration, I felt like I was being robbed of significance by someone attempting to visually and emotionally sew up something that could not be repaired. This is all to say that you should play the game.
Unfolded is playful, and despite its limited scope, its fumbles, and its twee preciousness, I can't help but smile while playing it. And we don't get enough games that play around with what the hardware they're on can do. Those simple interactions might be mere gimmicks. But if you have children who can revel in the magic of seeing the results of their creativity on-screen without having to delve into an editor for hours, or aren't afraid to get a bit precious yourself, Tearaway Unfolded is a story worth playing.
Perhaps the best that can be said about this expansion is that it's ultimately a step in the right direction for one of last year's most disappointing games and offers a glimmer of hope that Destiny might, within a few years time and a handful of updates, actually be a consistently great game rather than a pile up of both great and poor design decisions that frustrates just as often as it delights.
We want to play in ways beyond the gaming population's insular past, cavorting through catastrophes and destroying the present. Our future depends on the ability to create, and design, something new. It's fun to tear something down but there's a deeper joy in building something up. Besides, there's nothing more catastrophic than the wrong wallpaper.
Soma isn't much of a horror game, but that's not a big loss. It uses horror trappings as a jumping off point to find more intelligent and interesting trails to follow. Its follow-through, save for a few instances where I felt it succumb to the bindings of its genre, is impressive. When it talks about something, it goes for it, and the results are rarely pretty or happy but almost always intriguing.
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 animations and "feel" of the game is right. The actual mechanics seem a little swingy to me and the AI, while it certainly doesn't cheat, is a little too unforgiving. Can that be tweaked? Absolutely, and I hope it is. While I find the game fairly average, the attempt is novel and worthy of praise, something that I hope Hammerfall can capitalize on.
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.
It's a game that's often obnoxious and clumsy in the handling of its subject matter and the treatment of its own characters, but it's also that rare game that showcases the treasure of undying delights to be found within meticulously crafted interactive worlds.
There are moments of absolute joy to be found here, like leading a group of foes into the lair of a beast that will devour them or even juking over an enemy combatant and firing a missile up their exhaust, but they're rare instances, buried deep in the heart of a frustrating grind that doesn't do much to separate itself from the legion of rogue-likes out there. Sadly, in the end Galak-Z is yet another would-be great game undone by a ho-hum execution of ideas that must have sounded great on paper.
It's not just the online mode: from play to unlock design, I did not have a good time with Toy Soldiers: War Chest. This anecdote might sum it up best: a friend back from a long trip watched me play a single mission. We sat in silence through interminable wave after wave, and about halfway through the hour-long mission he blurted out "why are you even playing this?" I didn't have a good answer.
Until Dawn is genre-changing across the board, and I literally cannot wait for other games to pick up even 1% of what it brings to the table in terms of narrative and design innovation.
Because the challenge stays reasonable enough throughout, Volume's stealth systems remain satisfying and, most importantly, a consistent echo of the game's narrative.
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.
Submerged is a game you could easily cruise through in just a couple of hours, but the narrative rewards were enough to keep me searching the city for additional clues despite action that eventually became tedious. There are solid ideas at play here, sure, but the lack of challenge or any substantial meat on its bones make Submerged flounder where it should soar.
Perhaps it's an approach you can only take when you've iterated on the same game for about ten years. When you've built so many levels you're confident many people won't actually see all of them. When you stop caring about achieving something, and just want to do anything. And the best part of N++ is that it thinks that's just fine. You can do all the furious, adrenaline-pumping jumps, complete every level perfectly and top the leaderboards. But you can suck, and that's okay too.
Guild of Dungeoneering might be my new thirty-minute game, unseating Spelunky as the game I play while waiting for dinner to finish cooking or while I'm listening to an album. It keeps me playing without bleeding me dry, and I think about lost fights and incomplete dungeons for longer than I should while not playing the game.