Party Game Sundays: Mario Kart 8

Yes, it's been quite a while since I've written an installment of Party Game Sundays. I think I've missed three now, but I'm not too positive on that. The main reason I haven't written anything is because for two of the three weeks we've played the same two games. One of those games being the hot new Wii-U exclusive Mario Kart 8. I'm actually on a vacation right now, but I have a bit of time to myself, so I might as well tell you all about it right now.

Mario Kart 8 came out on Friday, May 30th. Much like Sportsfriends I wanted to play it immediately, so Noukeo and I went to Landers' as soon as humanly possible. In a few hours time we unlocked every character, and it was super fun the entire time. 

Dear Nintendo, baby characters are terrible. Please stop adding them to your games.

I wish that I could tell you that Mario Kart 8 is a revolutionary title that's going to change the course of the Wii-U, but I can't. It's another Mario Kart game. While I think it's a damn good Mario Kart game it's still the same thing you've played for years, but this time it looks much prettier. For a lot of people, like me, that's enough. What's weird is that I actually got to play Mario Kart 8 at a Best Buy last summer. Nintendo was doing there weird demo tour, and Noukeo and I went to play Mario Kart. Much as I had expected, it was some Mario Kart-ass Mario Kart.

What makes Mario kart 8 different is that your car can ride along walls, and go upside down. The karts and bikes can do so by transforming quickly mid-race. The wheels turn into some kind of crazy anti-gravity discs. This allows for the new courses to get all kinds of crazy. In one of my favorite courses you're literally driving straight up a waterfall. The retro courses also incorporate the anti-gravity mechanics in ways that make the old feel new once again. It helps that Mario kart 8 retains some of the new features of 7, like being able to drive underwater and glide through the air. 

The anti-gravity aspect of the game makes the courses super interesting.

One thing I noticed immediately about this Mario Kart is that it's harder to control. In the Wii version, I often drove automatic, because I didn't want to have to deal with all the power sliding shenanigans. In Mario Kart 8 there is no choice, so you have to power slide if you want to do well. Without power sliding it seems like most karts have little to no turning ability. It takes a while to get used to, but now I'm able to drift around corners like a pro. 

As you may have seen from footage of this hot new Mario kart product it looks incredible. Nintendo continues to use art direction to their advantage to somehow have their games look better than everything on higher spec platforms. Never before has Mario's mustache looked so incredible. The game doesn't look quite as amazing in multiplayer though, because they need to keep the frame rate up. It's still fun as all hell to play with friends though.

This is a hot highlight reel I uploaded. I was Rosalina.

Normally Nintendo seems as if they're painfully out of touch with what most people want or look for in video games, but in this game they actually did some really cool stuff. At the end of each race you can watch a sweet highlight reel of all the best moments from the race. You can even watch the entire race if you want, but that's just crazy. What's really crazy is that you can upload the 30-60 second highlight reels straight to Youtube for everyone's viewing pleasure. It's not the most exciting thing ever, but I feel like it shows that Nintendo is trying to get more in touch with what everyone in the modern world is doing. Another part of that is that the online multiplayer in this game works competently, which is pretty shocking to me. 

Describing Nintendo games, especially iconic ones like Mario Kart is getting increasingly weird for me. I love them, but they've been largely the same. It's easy to see that Nintendo is trying to change things up, but they're doing it incrementally. All I know is that Mario Kart 8 is a super fun game. If the Wii-U keeps getting titles like this it might actually be worth owning at some point in the future! 

The thing I'm most excited about from E3 2014

E3 is a very exciting time of year for me and all video game fans. We get to see exactly what we have to look forward to in the coming months. I could recap everything that E3 has to offer so far, but there are tons of video game websites much more well equipped to do that than I am. The reason I'm writing this is to tell you about what I'm the most excited about from this year's E3. To me it doesn't even matter what else happens this year, because nothing else will affect me as much as a single game announcement did.

Normally I get excited for game announcements, but this time I lost my shit completely and I'm not even embarrassed to admit it. One of my favorite games of all time is Grim Fandango. Back in 1998 when Lucasarts was still around and at its peak Tim Schafer gave the world an amazing story about the land of the dead.

Adam Boyes got on stage and announced that Double Fine (Tim Schafer's Studio) and Disney (They own all the Lucasarts properties now) have gotten together and are going to release a remastered version of Grim Fandango which will debut on PS4. Tim has gotten on twitter since then to say that it will be coming to other platforms, which is awesome.

You might wonder why I'm so excited for a game that was released in 1998. The answer is that Grim Fandango has played a large part in my life. It's one of the driving factors behind my interest in video games and their stories. It's one of the few games that I can honestly say I will never forget. I've played it to completion at least once a year since it's initial release. I remember every puzzle by heart, and can recite almost all of the dialogue. I realize that this makes me sound like a crazy person and I'm willing to accept that.

"Sorry for the wait, Mr. Flores. I'm here to take you now."

What's weird is that I'm not even necessarily excited to play this new version myself. I'm excited that other people get to play this amazing game. It's an old PC game, which is hard to find. On top of that it can't even run on newer versions of windows without a special program. Now people will have the opportunity to see this awesome game without having to jump through hoops in order to do so. 

The fact that I'm getting excited about new Grim Fandango information in 2014 is surreal. I don't even know what to think about this whole thing. All that matters is that Grim Fandango is being re-released and I could not be happier about it.

Note: Yes, I realize that the quote underneath the second screenshot should be Manny yelling at Glottis about his company car. However, I don't care. 

     -Manny

Game Time - May 2014

Finally the month of May is behind us, and it was just as good as I had hoped it would be. It all started off with Transistor the new game from Bastion creators Supergiant Games. I enjoyed Transistor so thoroughly that I beat it in a single sitting. Drakengard 3 came out the same day, but I didn't like that at all...

Then there was Watch Dogs. The game that everyone on the internet that everyone was so excited about until a few weeks ago when everyone started to hate it more than anything else in the world. I'm glad to report that once again people on the internet have overreacted. Sure, it's not as good as it could have been, but it's still a competent open world game.

I also played a whole butt load of Mario Kart 8, but we'll save that for the hot new edition of Party Game Sundays that will be up in a day or two. So without further ado, let's get right into talking about the sweet games of May 2014

It's game time!

Transistor

Supergiant games released Bastion in 2011 right around the time I started this blog. In fact, it was one of the first games I reviewed on this blog. Since then I've moved away from writing reviews, but that's not really the point. I absolutely loved Bastion and gave it a perfect 5/5 rating. It was a great RPG, and the way they had the narrator react to what you're doing was incredibly unique.

Now it's three years later and Supergiant has released their new game Transistor on the PS4 and PC. I pre-ordered it for PS4 and started playing it as soon as it became available. As I stated in this month's introduction I completed the entire game in one sitting. Well, I technically did it in one sitting, because I got up to go to the bathroom multiple times. Either way, I really liked Transistor, but not as much as I liked Bastion.

I also ate food during my very long play session.

Much like Bastion, Transistor has a narrator. It takes the form of your sword, the Transistor. You play as a woman named Red, a singer, who has had her voice taken from her. In the opening scene you pull the Transistor out of a man's body and are immediately thrust into the game with little to no explanation. I'd set the game up more, but that would take away from the game quite a bit. All you really need to know is that there is an evil force known as the process, which is taking over the city.

The way Transistor presents its story is odd. Little to no information is given to you up front and it's not ever really thrown at you either. If you want to get a feel for the city of Cloudbank you need to go looking for its secrets. Since Red can't talk the Transistor has to tell you the story, but since he's a direct participant in what's happening he doesn't necessarily have all the answers. One of the ways you learn about the world is through combat and it's technically optional.

This is the menu where you mess around with your functions.

Battling in Transistor has you wielding the Transistor, because it's a sword. As you progress through the game you'll earn various functions, which are the games equivalents of skills. Each function is a different ability, but it also has to do with a person from the game. My favorite part of the game is how much customization there is. You can use each function as an ability, but you can also use it as a modifier for other abilities, or use it as a passive buff. This allows for a ridiculous amount of combinations, so in theory everyone could be using their functions completely differently. In order to get all the information about a given person you have to use the function in all three ways to see all the information about them. This is how the game encourages you to experiment. It allows you to figure out how you like to battle, and find out more of the worlds story in the process.

The combat never got old for me. You can walk around and hit enemies with button presses, or you can stop time in order to enter a string of commands and then watch them play out. Figuring out how to chain functions together was one of my favorite parts of the game and doing so was extremely satisfying.

Combat in Transistor is very compelling.

What's kind of unfair is that I can't help but compare this game directly to Bastion. They both have music composed by Darren Korb, which is incredible. They also both have Narrator figures, which makes it easy to draw direct comparisons. In that way I think that Transistor has a weaker story, because a lot of the information isn't readily available and you have to go looking for it. Even when you find it all the world still leaves a lot to the imagination. The plot in Bastion came together on its own, which was something incredible when it happened. With that being said Transistor is an incredible game, and it shows that Supergiant wasn't just a one hit wonder. They sure know how to create beautiful worlds that truly draw you in.

Drakengard 3

I'm always down to play niche titles, which is one of the reasons I bought Nier on the PlayStation 3. It had weird characters and gameplay, but had a special charm to it. It was super weird and rough around the edges, but I enjoyed the living hell out of it. I was trying to unlock all the endings, but in order to do so I needed to find rare crafting materials with a super low drop rate. Instead of searching the same bush over and over for a large egg, I decided to put the game to rest and remember it fondly.

I played Nier years ago, so when I found out that Drakengard 3 would be coming to the U.S. and that it was a prequel to the other games in the series I was ecstatic. See, one of the many endings in Nier leads to the creation of the Drakengard world. I also know that people really liked the first two Drakenhard games for the PS2, which I've seen likened to Game of Thrones. I guess they both have tons of violence and deal with what are considered taboo themes. Needless to say I was excited ti play it.

I like nothing about Zero as a character!

Upon playing the game all hope I had that I would enjoy it was quickly smashed into oblivion. I've played my fair share of bad games, but this one was almost immediately unbearable. It begins with a fairly cool pre-rendered scene that sets up the main character Zero and her dragon Mikhail. Right off the bat Zero is not portrayed as a likable character. She is an intoner, which is basically a god-like figure that is meant to keep balance in the world. For some reason she wants to kill all of her sisters and be the only intoner. This is all fine and good, but there's really no reason for it. It definitely doesn't help that she just seems like a bad person. She swears a lot and most of her dialogue is what I would refer to as insufferable. I think it's supposed to be funny, but it just seems like the writing is trying way too hard.

Granted I only played about two hours, so maybe Zero gets better as a character. What's the most upsetting is how inconsistent she is. One second she's sweetly telling her dragon not to roll around and the next she's screaming about how she wants the dragon to shut up with a whole lot of obscenities thrown in.

Scenes like this often destroy the frame rate.

Sometimes for games like this I can try and look past the story if they have decent gameplay. Unsurprisingly Drakengard 3 doesn't have that either! It's basically Dynasty Warriors with like three enemies on screen at once. You have strings of square and triangle that differ depending on your weapon. You can switch to a variety of weapons, but so far that hasn't proven to be very beneficial. I'm sure there are various enemy types each weapon is good against later in the game.I might even enjoy the combat if the entire game didn't run like total garbage. For starters the game looks pretty terrible graphically, so I don't have any idea why the frame rate slows to a crawl if there are more than two things on screen. It's mind blowing, because all the locales are essentially barren wastelands with crates in them.

I've been reading that the game gets a lot better around halfway through, but I just don't know if I'll be able to get there. Everything about the game so far has put me off to it. It just seems like a bad game, and not in an endearing way like Deadly Premonition. It just seems poorly optimized and generally bad.

Watch Dogs

When Watch Dogs was first shown I pretty much lost my mind. The concept of an open world game where you played as a hacker was something I was very much interested in. It helped that the graphics looked insanely good too. I, and many other people at that time thought that this was going to be one of the first true next generation games to come to the PS4 and Xbox One. Over time more footage of the game was shown, and it was clear that the graphics shown at the original E3 event were a thing of the past. They still looked fine, but were nothing spectacular. I feel like this is the point where a lot of people turned on Watch Dogs.

Somehow people got a wee bit too hyped up for this game, because the backlash it's seeing across the internet now is mind boggling. There are numerous reasons people are freaking out about it, but the graphical downgrade is a very prominent one. I guess people feel like they were lied to, which is a semi-legitimate complaint, but it's nothing to condemn the game over. It still looks perfectly fine for an open world game. I feel like that's where the legitimate complaints stop though. Now people are upset because it's an open world game that isn't much different from all the others. You still get behind cover to shoot people, find collectibles on the map, and drive around a whole bunch. What really gets me is that the game was never advertised as anything else. Hell, this type of gameplay was even shown in the original E3 demo everyone was losing it over in the first place.

I think the game still looks fine graphically.

Yes, Watch Dogs is an open world game that has you hacking the objects around you to make them do things. You hack everything with the push of a button, which is the main thing that makes Watch Dogs different from other open world games. I've said it once, and I'll probably say it many more times, but Watch Dogs is a fine game. It's nothing spectacular, but it's not the kind of thing that you immediately condemn either. It's a perfectly competent game. The hacking actually adds to the gameplay in a meaningful way. It allows for combat to be done stealthily, as opposed to going in guns blazing. Sure, I went in guns blazing 90% of the time, but at least I had the option not to.

You play as the vigilante Aiden Pierce. His goal is to get revenge on the people who killed his six year old niece. Throughout the game you'll work with various people in order to find out the truth behind the savage murder. It's not exactly the most compelling story, but it does have it's interesting points. The main issue I had with it, is that about 3/4's of the way through the game there are some plot events that seem to only happen so that the game is longer. The game is already long enough, due to the fact that collectibles and side missions are literally everywhere, just as they are in other Ubisoft open world games. Most of the stuff is totally pointless and not very fun. The rewards were definitely not worth completing everything in my opinion.

Watch Dogs is another open world game, except that it has hacking.

Watch Dogs was fine. It probably took me around 30 hours to complete, and that's with me mostly main lining the story. I ended up doing a fair amount of side stuff on the way, but I'm sure if I wanted to keep playing I could go for another 20-30 hours to collect the rest of it. Overall it's just an average open world game with a whole lot of third person shooting. The hacking element is very interesting though, even if it does just have you pressing a single button. I feel like Watch Dogs is a proof of concept that can be expanded into something much better the second time around. Hopefully it makes an amazing transformation like the Assassin's Creed franchise did between its first and second games. Despite all the backlash from the gaming community there will almost certainly be another one of these games. It around 4 million copies worldwide already, which is nothing to sneeze at.

E3 Hype Train!

This coming Monday, June 9th, E3 2014 is taking place. I'm very excited as I tend to be every year. This year is kind of weird though, because so many game announcements are happening prior to the show. Hopefully there are still a bunch of Surprises left to be unveiled, because with almost every single cool game being delayed to 2015 the gaming community could use a little bit of excitement.

As for games that come out in June I'm kind of drawing a blank. Tomorrow I'll be picking up Tomodatchi Life for the 3DS, which should be pretty fun. I'm also currently playing through Murdered: Soul Suspect on the PS4, which has been being completely blasted in reviews. So far I think it's actually pretty good.

It's probably good that I won't be getting much this month, because I'll be going on vacation from the 16th through the 27th, which should prove to be very exciting. I'm sure I'll cook something up for the blog though.

     -Manny