Mario kart died when they put in auto powerboost. wtf Nintendo?

Double dash is still best Mario kart, too bad we will never get to play online.

you should be able to set up what items you can use

the wii mario kart is my least fav one

Beat GTA V. I cannot tell you a thing about the storyline.

Also just beat GTA 5. Not much to say since those that like GTA have probably already played it. I will just say that it's the most fun I've had playing a GTA since San Andreas.

Unlike 4 and it's dlc, driving around the city is a blast. The terrain varies constantly and there is a lot of traffic and random things going on as you drive around. I thought the story was great and pretty much made sense.

Online could be fantastic but rockstar does everything they can to make you work for the fun. Hopefully they will fix it up and give you better option for focusing on the missions you want instead of constantly waiting in lobbies hoping people will join the stuff you want to do.

just beat bit trip runner 2 - future legend of rhythm alien on wii u

totally worth the 10 bucks I paid - it was quite a bit easier than I hoped though

didn't even bother with easy and just right and it was still quite easy

amazing on the ears though - highly recommend

8/10

Did you play the first one? If so, how does the difficulty compare? Because I found the first one very challenging but also very fun.

I didn't play the first one - I'm thinking I should download it on the wiiware

I know my friend that I was mucking about the game with would have a lot of problems with the hard part, but I don't think your average gamer would

Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Was playing seasons on my 3DS and had to quit half way because it was getting too tedious. I decided to go back to LttP just to see if it was the series that wasn't holding up or if it was just something wrong with seasons. Turns out it was just seasons.

Going back made me realize that what made the original so great was how much fun it was to explore the over world. Traveling around is fast and interesting and there are plenty of secrets to find as you travel from dungeon to dungeon.

The problem with seasons was that you were constantly having to change the seasons as you traversed the map and it really broke the flow of the game. The map unlocking puzzles have always been the worst in Zelda because they aren't really puzzles. Once you figure out which key you need (ie which item) it's just a barrier that provides nothing other than annoyance to the player.

Thankfully LttP has very few of these types of puzzles. The game also has great dungeon design, although they tend to be kind of short and fairly easy to solve for series veterans. This was a great game to pull out and play and get caught up for when I get my hands on the new 3DS Zelda. Even more excited for that sequel now then ow as before playing LttP.

Did you buy it today? Amazing so far... hours in.

Unfortunately I'm getting it for xmas so I gotta wait

Knack - PS4

I just finished this game after 2 days on normal playing on normal. I didn't even know it was coop until after I just beat it and looked it up, so I am going to give it a go playing with the wifey.

Overall I would give it between a 6.5-7. It's fun, but meh if you are looking for the PS4 wow factor you were expecting on a new console.

Positives
- Graphics, easy use of controls, some solid music at certain points during the game to build up the scene

Negatives
- Absolutely linear...not necessarily a bad thing, but don't expect to have to explore at all unless you are punching walls to search for the breakable ones (which are easy to spot for the most part)
- Story...pretty lol, couple of decent ideas here, but I found myself hitting the skip scene button half the time since it got drawn out and annoying
- Length...its 13 chapters long and without giving any spoilers let's just say the average gamer will finish it quickly on normal as you get infinite lives and restart at the nearest checkpoint which there are multiple throughout the level.
-Repetition...found myself playing the same situation over and over which was usually 3-5 bad guys before the door would open to let me go to the next part....some scenes that were harder and different, but a lot of the same thing here
- Upgrades....there are probably about 7-8 upgrades (not counting relics) to which you need to find all the pieces for each upgrade (between 3-7). I actually didn't complete my first upgrade until about the middle of chapter 9 lol. Now I know I didn't find every single piece but 3/4 through the game seemed a bit wasted here...I assume they want you to play multiple times since you get to keep your upgrade status when you start a new game.

Overall it's still fun, just nothing ground breaking for a launch game outside of some visual stuff that was cool. It had some potential to score higher...maybe playing coop here will be more fun. It's worth a rental, but definitely not worth the $60 imo.

Got this game on XBLA, it rocks. No plot or anything, just addictive and sensory fun. Would definitely recommend.

Papers Please

Basically a game about checking for forged passports. If that is your cup of tea you'll enjoy it. I did, and it was also somewhat fun playing with another person there to check passports with you.

About 10 hours of gameplay, fine for the cost ($9.99)

8.5/10

Shadow Warrior (PC)

Easily the most fun I've had with a single-player FPS in ages. Shadow Warrior is an old-school FPS: fast-paced, hordes of enemies, unrealistic weapons and no regenerating health (although you do have a healing power).

The centrepiece of your arsenal is the Katana, and it makes for seriously fun first-person melee. In addition to being able to swing the Katana in any direction, it has a number of special moves. The only drawback is that it's ability to heal when you strike means that you'll probably use it much more than any gun, at least on the higher difficulty levels.

Your protagonist gains magic powers such as shields, knockback, levitate and heal as you progress through the game. All guns can also be upgraded to give them unique alternate fires, eg the crossbow's alternate is a remote-activated grenade launcher. And the shotgun's quad-barrel blast is a thing of beauty. Best shotgun since the Quake games.

Levels are large and semi-linear; there are lots of secrets hidden off the beaten track. It's important to get them if you want to max out your character; I didn't come close and I'm not sure it's possible to do so.

Combat consists mostly of fighting loads of in-your-face demons at once. It's a blast fighting a mix of beserkers who try to claw your face off and flying demons who shoot you from a distance. Big battles can be crazy affairs as greater demons stomp around buffing the lesser demons while inflicting damage on you.

Boss battles are unfortunately a bit of a letdown. Every single one follows an identical pattern - shoot the glowy things until the vulnerable point (another glowy thing) is revealed, shoot the vulnerable point until it covers up, repeat until all weak points are destroyed. There's also too little enemy variety for a game of this length; eventually it feels like you're fighting the same combination of demons over and over again. While there's some excellent level design in the early/mid sections, featuring Japanese-style houses and cities, later stages are less impressive and recycle areas.

All in all though, it's an absolute blast. It's certainly feels like a breath of fresh air in the stale FPS genre. Highlights how unimaginative and horribly linear the CoD and BF SP campaigns are despite their high production values.

8/10.

The Walking Dead Season 1:

I bought this a long time ago, played the first episode and somehow never went back to it.

It is a genuinely affecting game in parts, and incredibly frustrating in others. I'm going to spoil the rest of my review so I can talk about specific plot points:



Overall: 7/10, hopefully Season 2 improves on some of the things that annoyed me.

I agree with all that. Definitely disappointing if you think about it too much after playing.

Definitely didn't deserve the "it made me cry! Game of the year!" Accolades that it got. It's a decent choose your own adventure. Looking forward to playing season 2 once the whole thing comes out.

Gone Home [PC]

Prior to playing it I had only heard about in regards to the criticism that like Proteus, Dear Esther or the Stanley Parable, it isn't really a game. But people that I respect seem to really enjoy it so I picked it up during the current winter sale. It's a game that you can't really talk too much about without ruining the experience, but I will say that while it's very short it was still sufficiently gamey to keep me engaged, while I feel the aforementioned would not. My play through lasted a little over two hours, and I think I found everything there is to find after really taking my time with it. I would say it left more of an impression on me than a lot of games that I spent more money on, and I really enjoyed my time with it, but had I payed the full price of $20 I would have been angry with myself. The developers are free to charge what they want, but it's a pretty outrageous price for the amount of content offered regardless of the quality. Highly recommend if you can get it at a good price.

The Brigmore Witches [PC] - DLC to Dishonored

Finally played last missing part in one of my favourite games.
It took me 2 sessions to play it from start to finish (3 missions) - about 4 hours I guess, although I must say, that I didn't try all side missions.
The DLC is good. I enjoyed playing it. Every mission is interesting and unique. If you played Kinfe of Dunwall DLC, you can keep Daud's powers obtained there, which is very cool (I used this option).
As usual, you can finish missions on many ways. I was targetting for low overall chaos with ocasional kills , but making slasher out of it is also an option
If you enjoyed the base game, then you should definitely give Brigmore Witches a try - you won't be disappointed.

The Wolf Among Us Episode 1

Quite good! I lost interest in Fables, the comic that this is based on, somewhere around issue 60 or so when the writer's political leanings started creeping more and more into the work, but the story in this is really nice with some great moments of comedy, pathos and horror.

I think I liked Bigby more in this than I ever did in the comic, and he's probably the most likeable character in the series. It also felt much more like a game than a choose your own adventure novel as TWD Season 1 did to me.

I'm really fiending for a new dishonored, loved the game and all of the DLC even the weird training/virtual world one

Yeah, I liked all of it as well. But didn't they say, that new game won't be exactly like dishonored, but this will be some kind of new IP?

Gone Home - 8/10

I think this is a huge step for video games as a whole, as this is more of a narrative and less of a typical video game. There are very few puzzles, and they are quite simple, but that's not the point. The point is to get wrapped up in the story, and they almost get it right.

You are a college kid coming back from a year away in Europe in 1995, to find that your house is empty with a rather cryptic message from your sister telling you not to look for her. As you explore the house in a typical point and click style, you start to learn about the family.

Minor spoilers ahead.



While the whole game took me less than 2 hours, I did get wrapped up at times in the plot, and was almost moved to tears. I think that this is important as video games try and get away from being considered the bottom of the barrel when it comes to writing and story-telling. It would make a good after school special on lifetime, which makes it light years ahead of other video games as far as storyline goes. It makes me excited that we may be headed toward real stories in the future. It left a little to be desired, but I commend them for attempting to reinvent what we think is a video game.

Bioshock Infinite | PC

The last nvidia driver update finally let me finish this game without it crashing and artifacting all over the place, almost a year after it came out. There is still a huge problem with the audio in the game, where it's very hard to tell what direction the audio is coming from; sometimes enemies will sound really close and they're nowhere near, and vice versa; or Elizabeth will be talking and you have no idea where she is. NPC dialogue will start up and fade away at odd times and you have no idea where it's coming from, causing me to miss a lot of the little background story details that are what make a game like this interesting. The audio recorders were also a huge pain in the ass, never knowing if playing it right as you found it was a good idea since you might be about to trigger a new audio or story cue that'll drown it out.

There's no denying it's a gorgeous looking game, but I didn't find it very satisfying. I'm the type of gamer that has to stop and look at everything and poke into every corner, but there rarely was ever anything new to see other than some huge vista of far off islands or the same old shop interiors. The layout of the city is also something I felt could have been done much better; it's an entirely linear experience with the occasional side room that's incredibly obvious, with nothing behind it except the occasional audio recorder and item/powerup. Dark Souls is the standard I hold a lot of world building to, and Columbia is far less interesting to look around in and navigate despite having a far greater budget.

The shooting and vigors were also less enjoyable than in the original Bioshock, where you were actively encouraged to try everything out and should have found yourself using a wide range of weapons and abilities. Different enemies required different approaches, and ammo was scarce enough that you had to fall back on multiple weapons that you happened to have ammo for, and I didn't have that sense at all in this game. In fact, I ended up mostly using just the Carbine or Shotgun and the Sniper Rifle for almost the entire game, and the shock vigor to stun mechanical baddies. I haven't tried playing it on the unlocked difficulty, but health and ammo were never a concern in the hard difficulty and as a result the entire fighting aspect of the game just felt boring and tacked on. The vigor and weapon upgrade system was also pretty boring as another poster mentioned earlier, the former because I never felt like I needed to use vigors let alone upgrade them, the latter because they were just flat boosts like damage or spread or reload.

Item hunting was also a big annoyance to me. Mostly I looked in to every box and cranny for money figuring I would need it for some important upgrade that never came, but it easily took a 6-7 hour experience and turned it in to a 15 hour grind. Looking for items caused me to find a few secretish areas, but like I said, there was never anything really interesting in them. To compare it to Dark Souls again, it's far more interesting when items and upgrades are scarce and exploring the environment can reveal details about the world, the people in it, and the story at hand, but that level of environmental storytelling almost never happened in Infinite, and was left solely to the Kinescopes and audio logs, the latter of which always left me wondering why one of the characters would record something and leave it where it was found.

I'm still not sure what to think of the story; it feels like I missed some stuff, and it was interesting, but far too large in scope for the minimal amount of exposition or clues left to us to figure it out.

Conclusion: worth playing on sale, but mostly just for the experience of seeing what a truly gigantic budget can lead to in a modern game. Otherwise, it was fairly boring and I felt no real desire to see new areas or progress the story except to say I finished the game and to see if perhaps things got more interesting. Spoiler, they didn't. Mostly I just resent the game for not only failing to push the genre forward in any new way, but being hailed as one of the best games of the year. It's a little depressing to think that this will be the standard a lot of people are looking for in story driven FPS games now, and a game only needs to be given enough money to create over the top environments and crazy set pieces to top the charts, just like with Hollywood blockbusters.

weevil fear not, I just posted in the random thread that B:I was hated on hard by all but the mainstream critics. There has been more and more of a disconnect in recent years (especially this year, and honestly until the last 2 years or so I never thought this was the case) between the most hyped and best mainstream reviewed games, and the games that are ACTUALLY good and well-received by the non-paid-for critics. At some point the whole thing will collapse under its own weight, and while we'll still have the occasional expensive crap like Bioshock 4 and GTA6*, the smart people will all lol at them while we're playing the superior low to medium-high budget games.



*Unless of course they go with a goofy '80s Vice City setting including theme parks and the Keys, in which case all bets are off.

So I'm guessing it's a bad thing that my three favourite games for 2013 were The Last of Us, Bioshock: Infinite and GTA 5.