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By combining classic platforming with Wii U specific features like Off-TV play and beautiful graphics, Paper Monsters Recut manages to shake up the somewhat stagnant platforming scene by being just plain fun. The variety of the game is fantastic, and Mobot Studios did a great job with this title. Paper Monsters Recut deserves a spot on your Wii U hard-drive.
All in all, Super Smash Bros. for 3DS feels great, and anything left to be desired will be automatically fixed once the Wii U version strolls along.
All in all, I'm glad to have experienced a game like Hyrule Warriors and also that I went into it without any great preconceived notions. What I found was an interesting addition to the Zelda franchise, enjoyable in a mindless way, and fun for scholars of Hyrulean lore. I would venture that any Zelda aficionado would find the same, just so long as you keep those wild expectations in check!
Despite a limited number of songs and an incredibly small number of game modes, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy garnered critical praise when it first launched two years ago. Its sequel is now here, packing in more songs and game modes than ever before. In fact, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call not only contains several times the number of songs as its predecessor, but a vastly larger number of game modes, collectables, and characters. Yes, bigger is truly better. Unfortunately, however, a few shortcomings prevent Curtain Call from truly reaching its full potential.
The last decade saw the rise of popular rhythm games such as Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero. With that craze now long dead the rhythm game genre is attaching itself to other gaming genres. KickBeat – Special Edition is one of these games which strives to straddle the line between the beat\'em up and rhythm genre and strikes just the right chord in its execution. Zen Studios has put together a package that\'s both visually appealing and absolutely fun to play.
The first crossover between Professor Layton and Ace Attorney is a fantastic adventure that is sure to please fans of either series. At its best it is an engaging and entertaining visual novel, while at its worst it is less than sum of its parts.
Teslagrad from Rain Games has at long last arrived on the Wii U. But was it worth the wait? Fortunately, the answer to that is a resounding yes. The game is positively brilliant and nails everything it sets out to do, from the unique visuals to the ambient music to the elegant gameplay.
Overall, the game plays great and offers unique pinball challenges in the comfort of your own home.
Overall, however, The Fall was very enjoyable. For the $10 asking price, you receive a great story and solid game play in a four-hour episode. The game has a great ending that has me eagerly anticipating the next episode of the game.
Steamworld Dig was one of the biggest surprises to come out of the 3DS E-Shop. Slipping silently, unnoticed, into the store, Image & Form\'s title soon spread by word of mouth to become one of the 3DS digital shop\'s biggest successes. Now, it makes its way to the Wii U\'s download service. But is it worth a buy for either new players or those who have bought the game already? Well, I\'ll just say this: it is awesome.
In the end, I found myself in the old routine of having "just one more go" instead of actually writing this review like I should have been doing.
It seems like forever ago since I first heard of Shovel Knight and with the continuous delays, the wait was never an easy one. It\'s no secret that I\'m a massive fan for old school Mega Man, so when Shovel Knight was classified as a "melee-focused Mega Man," it instantly became my most anticipated game. I purposefully ignored all of the trailers and previews, so I could go in blind and complete the nostalgia, pretending I just picked this game up off a store shelf without knowing much about it. It\'s rare that a game can live up to the hype and rarer still when a game surpasses it. I had no idea that Shovel Knight was going to be as good as it turned out.
I didn\'t have much of an idea as to what to expect going in to Ittle Dew. From what little I\'ve seen of it, it seemed like "Zelda clone" could have been appropriate. After playing and experiencing all it had to offer, "Zelda clone" would be doing it a great disservice. Ittle Dew ultimately crafts a unique and charming adventure that often made me laugh and definitely made me sad when it ended a handful of hours later.
Perhaps it was at the point when I saw Chuck Norris doing yoga with Batman, the Joker, and Barack Obama or maybe it was when Princess Peach was rejected by Peter Griffin. At some point while playing Tomodachi Life, I realized how much the game activated my imagination. When I was little, I was never one to play with action figures or make up fake storylines for fictional characters to partake in, but with Tomodachi Life, I have never felt my imagination so stimulated. I feel like I am managing a virtual dollhouse of celebrities; that is okay, because I have never had so much fun planning the daily goings-on of my Miis.
To say that Mario Kart is popular is an understatement. Few series have ever matched its twenty-year legacy of sheer popularity and critical acclaim, so needless to say, Mario Kart 8 has a lot to live up to. Expectations have perhaps never been higher, as this is the first entry on a high-definition, online-competent console, but the game pretty much fulfills all of them. It is classic Mario Kart and that means it\'s great — the game even throws in several cool improvements and additions to the franchise. But it is not quite perfect, and by no means is it a revolution.
It's amazing how, after twenty-two years of games, that Kirby can still offer a fresh experience, despite never leaving the second dimension for his main titles. I love how Kirby, as opposed to Mario or Donkey Kong, regularly changes up the formula without losing what makes Kirby special and really shows off what can be done in a 2D space. Triple Deluxe doesn\'t shake up the formula drastically, as it sticks closely to 2010's Return to Dreamland. What it does do, though, is make great use of the system's 3D, offers a classic Kirby experience, and tons of alternate gameplay modes.
When Nintendo released the original NES Remix last December, the first thing I and many others thought — after our initial reaction of "Wow, they released a game the same day they announced it" — was that it would be awesome if they made one with better first-party NES games. Well, it certainly didn't take long to get our wish; just months after the original, NES Remix 2 has been released and it contains Nintendo's best games for the NES. The quality of the base games naturally has a huge effect on the remixes and NES Remix 2 is a little shorter than the original but much sweeter.
The visuals, the gameplay, the music, the story, and everything else — when all of these elements come together perfectly and form a true world. A world that takes no effort to get lost in, a world that takes you far away. Individual parts of a game are huge, to be sure, but it is a world that we as gamers truly crave, a world that takes us to an experience beyond anything we previously could have imagined.
Having played every Professor Layton game released, I have seen both the highs and the lows of the franchise and it saddens me that Azran Legacy marks the last title featuring the infamous and titular Professor Layton. With this in mind, I went in hopeful that Level 5 crafted a game suitable for Layton’s departure, a game which would allow him to go out with a bang. Unfortunately, although the presentation of the game and the finale to the game were grand, the rest of the game failed to be anywhere near as exciting as the rest of the Professor Layton franchise.
Bravely Default is a game that excites me about the future of the JRPG genre. It takes the standard JRPG that we have grown used to, adds in several new features, and modernizes the genre for the new generation. So much is done right that I hope other developers look to it as an example. Unfortunately, what Bravely Default does so ingeniously in its first forty hours falls apart in its last fifteen. What could have been a revolutionary game is debased by the horrendous endgame that Square Enix could have so easily omitted.