Game Time - October 2018

Game: Super Mario Party
Developer: Nintendo
Platform: Switch

I don't really like Mario Party and I never have. However, there's something special about getting together with friends and talking as much shit as possible. It ends up being fun for a few hours, but I never really want to go back and play more of it. I feel exactly the same about Super Mario Party.

The last few games diverged from the classic board game formula where each player rolls a die, moves some spaces, and collects coins to buy a star. They got rid of all that for everyone to move at the same time and collect star bits. Thankfully this game is a return to the classic Mario Party everyone used to love. The stages tend to be a bit smaller than in the past, but at least you get to see all of the board events in a single sitting. The mini-games are generally pretty strong. Some of them work as excellent showpieces for the HD rumble the Switch Joycons are known for.

For the most part it's another Mario Party game. The main difference is that each character can either roll a regular die, or a character specific die. These die have pros and cons, but they make choosing a specific character actually mean something outside of aesthetic pleasure. It's a cool addition that shakes things up a bit, but it's not quite enough to move the excitement needle for me. It's a solid Mario Party game, but that doesn't really mean a lot coming from me. It's fun to play with friends for a few hours, but beyond that it's not great.


Game: The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories
Developer: White Owls
Platform: Switch (and everything else)

I first became aware of Swery 65 when I stumbled upon a video series about his game Deadly Premonition. The gameplay was abysmal, but the quirky characters and story pulled me in. He followed it up with the Xbox one launch game D4 where he attempted to make an episodic adventure game using the Kinect. Sadly Microsoft cancelled it after two episodes, which left him floundering for a bit. Recently he found his footing and started his own studio called White Owls. They Kickstarted a game called the Good Life about a town where everyone turns into cats at night. While that was coming together and being funded the studio was working on their first game called The Missing.

The concept of the game is certainly strange. You play as J.J. Macfield, a girl who is on a camping trip with her friend Emily. During a stormy night Emily wanders away from camp and J.J. desperately tries to find her. Very quickly J.J. realizes that she can get hurt and regenerate her body. This is the central mechanic of the game. J.J's body will get mutilated in various ways to solve puzzles. You'll need to weigh down platforms with limbs, catch on fire, get concussions, and roll through tight corridors as just a head. If it sounds a bit disturbing it's because it really is. The whole vibe of the game is a bit creepy and it's trying to convey something through its mechanics.

My biggest issue with the game is that I couldn't stand the actual gameplay. J.J. moves too slow, and every animation goes on for way too long. The overall performance was pretty rough on Switch, and I heard from someone who played it on PS4 that it wasn't much better there. I pushed through my low level of enthusiasm, because I know that Swery can tell a great story. In the end the game definitely delivered. I think it is an important story, but I can't really say what it's about without completely spoiling it. If any of this sounded interesting to you I suggest you check it out.


Game: Forza Horizon 4
Developer: Turn 10
Platform: PC (also Xbox One)

I haven't played a racing game in a long time, so I decided to see if Forza Horizon 4 would run on my PC. It's starting to get outdated, but I didn't want to have to bust out my Xbox One. Luckily the free trial of Xbox Game Pass allowed me to test it out for free. I'm glad I did, because it worked flawlessly. Much more importantly though I ended up loving the game.

Outside of kart racing games the last racing game I played for any extensive amount of time was Burnout Paradise and that was a long time ago. Most of the games on the market now are too much of a simulation for me. Thankfully Forza Horizon bridges the gap and sits somewhere between the insane acrade nature of Burnout, but isn't quite up to the hardcore simulation level of a traditional Forza game. This time you're attending the mystical Horizon festival in the countryside of England. In this fantastical world the Horizon car festival lasts all year long. This means that over the course of the game you get to experience all four seasons. I would have expected them to be purely cosmetic, but handling and weather actually change for each.

At the end of the day Horizon is a driving game. You pick one of the 8 billion cars you may have unlocked and choose a race to enter. There are tons of event types, so if you don't like something you don't have to do it. There are so many events that sometimes it's frankly overwhelming. It plays well and looks stunning. Even though I beat the "story" I have been going back in every so often to bang out a race or two.

Game Time - October 2017

Is it halfway through November? Yes, it is. I realize that this October edition is very late, but cut me some slack I went on vacation! I had an absolute blast getting away from home! I went to a Halloween party dressed as Steven Universe, played Super Mario Oddysey a ton, went bowling, saw New Found Glory in concert, and ended the whole stint with a 24 hour stream for Extra Life.

Leading up to Extra Life I did not get a lot of sleep, and posting the donation and stream link here on the blog slipped my mind. However, it was a success nonetheless! Once again we had a goal of $200, but we literally doubled it and ended with $400. I said it during the stream and after, but I can't express my appreciation enough. As someone who doesn't stream or make videos very often it's absolutely crazy to see so many people come out and show support by donating.

We're here to talk about the video games of October though. The Switch has finally become exactly what I wanted it to be. The amazing games are piling up, and I want to snuggle with the thing at night. However, I can't let the Switch bogart all the attention, so I'll throw a bone to Shadow of War on the PS4. We'll launch into the video game discussion with Fire Emblem Warriors, bring the hype down a bit with Shadow of War, and then let the hype build back up and explode with Super Mario Odyssey. It's game time!

Fire Emblem Warriors

Every time I choose to write about a Warriors game I don't know why. There isn't a lot to say, because they're mostly the same. You play as a character and mash the same button a whole bunch to beat down thousands of enemies. Fire Emblem Warriors is very much more of the same, but now there are Fire Emblem characters! I used to find these games a guilty pleasure, but now I have come to terms with the fact that I genuinely love them. There's something so relazing about turning my brain off and mashing the same button for hours on end. Sure it's not hard, but it sure feels good to strike down foes with little to no effort like you're some kind of all powerful warrior.

Blindly mash and get tons of kills!

What's cool about FE Warriors is that it actually incorporates a handful of gameplay elements from the franchise it's drawing from. In case you're unaware Fire Emblem is a turn based tactical strategy game. In FE Warriors you control not one, but four characters. You can freely switch between them, but it's more efficient to open your map and give the units you're not controlling orders. This way you can focus on going ham while your AI companions defend or take over what they need to. It also makes use of the classic FE weapon triangle, which is another reason for controlling multiple characters per mission. Yes, you can beat enemies who you're weak against , but it takes forever. So if you bring the right characters into battle you can cover all the weapon types and never really run into trouble.

It's odd to see elements from the Fire Emblem franchise blend so well into a Dynasty Warriors game, but I guess it makes sense. Near invincible soldiers are the bread and butter of a Warriors game.

Shadow of War

I loved Shadow of Mordor and its nemesis system. Fighting orcs and having the game create dynamic rivalries was fascinating, and I couldn't get enough of it. Now that the sequel Shadow of War is here I'm not quite as excited as I thought I would be. Once again you take control of Talion, who is being inhabited by the spirit of the elf who forged the one ring. I am well aware of his name, but don't have the patience to try and spell it. In classic video game fashion you lose all the cool powers you amassed over the previous game and need to earn them back. I didn't even play the game long enough to earn them all again, because I just didn't want to keep going.

The fact that I didn't get way into this game continues to baffle me. The game is much larger and added a whole slew of new mechanics and content. A lot of the changes are interesting, but for some reason I just can't get into it. Part of the reason is that encounters with orcs in the original game felt special, and now in Shadow of War you can't turn a corner without running into a new orc to face off against. It happens so often that the encounters lose their luster and that's just a huge bummer. What's even more of a bummer is that all of the story missions are an unending slog. I still feel like the Lord of the Rings license isn't even needed for this game, but it's still here. You get to hang out with Gollum and Shelob, which is kind of cool I guess. The part where it turns sour is that all the missions are super generic and not fun. Have you ever wanted to follow Gollum around for way too long? If so, then this is the game for you! It's just a huge drag, because the draw of the game is the nemesis system and it isn't well implemented into the story at all. It's way more fun to run around the world like a moron and see what trouble you can get into.

The nemesis system makes its triumphant return.

This is one of the few games that I want to try and get back to, but right now I just want some time away from it. After playing a handful of hours I had to put it down, which made me pretty sad. Shadow of Mordor was one of my favorite games the year it came out, but this one just isn't doing it for me at all.

Super Mario Odyssey

I'm kind of distracted right now, because I have the TV near me playing Super Mario Odyssey speedruns. I have been enjoying watching Trihex blow through the entire game, but a few moments ago he brought up a valid point. He's doing the any % run, which means he's just trying to beat the game as fast as possible, but he doesn't want to be. He wants to move up to other categories that have him playing the game for longer periods of time, because he likes it that much. He wants there to be more Mario in his life, and I totally get where he is coming from.

This image makes me so happy.

Odyssey feels like the culmination of what Nintendo has been working towards with Mario for years. It has so much content that it's bananas, and a lot of it is catered specifically to long time Mario Fans. I won't spoil any of what that stuff entails, because witnessing it for yourself is magical. I won't lie, it was magical for me. Part of why I enjoyed Odyssey so much is that it made me feel like a kid again. It's a feel good game, and I felt good while playing it. What makes it special is that it feels both old and new, but in a proper blend. Mario 64 had you collecting stars, while Odyssey has you collecting moons. You still need to complete objectives to get them, but there are way more objectives now. You'll get them for beating a boss, but you might also get one for kicking a can the right way. There are over 800 moons to collect, which is mind blowing. It might seem a bit like overkill to have so many, but I personally think they're fun to collect. They give you a reason to explore, and you definitely don't need to get them all.

What really sets Odyssey apart from its predecessors is the fact that Mario can possess enemies with his hat. It's been possessed by a being called Cappy, which allows him to literally become his enemies. Yes Mario has his platforming skills, but now you can literally become a freaking Goomba. When you throw your hat and enter an enemy they wear Mario's hat and grow a freaking mustache. Possessing enemies allows for all kinds of new experiences that add a lot of fun to the game. That's what Odyssey is to me. It's a fun video game. A lot of modern games are cool and have a lot going on, but aren't necessarily fun. Mario Odyssey is exactly that for me. It's an amazingly crafted game with a lot of love, but above all it's just freaking fun to play.

The Wind Down

2017 has been a hell of a year for video games, and it's finally starting to wind down. There are very few games left that I want to play this year, and that is kind of relieving. I still have a ton of stuff I want to try and finish, but know I won't. I've finished a lot of games this year, but I have also found myself putting a lot of them down. I no longer have the patience to play things I don't particularly enjoy. In the past I'd power through games I didn't like just to say I did, but I think those days are behind me and that is probably for the best.

I'm trying to play through the re-release of the .Hack//G.U. trilogy right now, but I'm having a bit of trouble getting into it. The Steven Universe game is the only thing I'm actively playing right now, and I am enjoying it quite a bit. I would have finished it already if I wasn't trying to stream the whole thing. The new Pokemon games come out in about a week as well, and I'm kind of exited to play those.

It's hard to continue to be excited after beating Odyssey. As I said this year has been bananas, and I might have gotten my fill of what it has to offer, but I must continue on! See you guys in a few short weeks.

Game Time - October 2016

This month I'm a bit behind schedule, because I went on a short trip and streamed for Extra Life. For the trip I visited a friend halfway across the country which gave me a few hours on airplanes to play World of Final Fantasy. During Extra Life I played a bunch of multiplayer games with my friends, so nothing new to report there. We did however end up raising $269.69 for the Upstate Golisano Children's Hospital in Syracuse, New York. That's over double what we did last year! I always have a lot of fun doing it. The archive will be up on YouTube eventually, but I have to do some magic to get a 24 hour video up there. If for some reason you still want to donate it should still be up through December at www.extra-life.org/participant/gtwm.

Now let's talk about the hot new games I've been playing! I started off the month with the always hot Yo-Kai Watch 2. Level-5 churned out the second game here in the U.S. less than a year after the first one. It's a marked improvement over the first in almost every way. I played it way more than the original because of that.

Then a few weeks later I jumped right back into single player Rock Band, with the release of Rock Band Rivals. I still play multiplayer almost every week with a few friends, so the new modes were cool to check out. I do think that the single player additions are the true draw with this expansion though.

Finally, against my better judgement I ordered World of Final Fantasy on the Vita. I have been trying to be better with saving money recently, but I really wanted something new to play on the plane to my friend's house. I played the demo on PS4 and caved almost immediately. I think the game has a lot of charm, but the Vita version is pretty rough in spots.

It's game time!

Yo-Kai Watch 2

As most people know by now Yo-Kai Watch took Japan by storm a few years ago. It's popularity has waned a little, but it's still popular on a level that most games can only dream of reaching. For those who aren't familiar with the series you are a child with a magical watch (or pendant if you're playing as a girl) that allows them to see Japanese ghosts known as Yokai. The game revolves around you befriending the Yokai and using them in battle against other Yokai.

This game got railed in reviews for being too similar to the original game, which is certainly a valid criticism. In fact the first few hours are almost exactly the same as the original game, which is kind of a bummer. For the sake of this post I will be referring to the main character of the game as a male named Nate, because that's what I played through the game as. To start off, Nate gets the Yokai Watch stolen by two evil witches. He then forgets everything he knew about Yokai. In a strange turn of events he gets the watch back and relives the first few hours of the original game. He befriends Whisper the Yokai butler, and Jibanyan the cat who has a personal vendetta against cars. It's frustrating, because I just wanted to get to the new stuff. It's definitely good for people who have not played the series before though, because it allows you to get used to the town. You're forced to learn your way around, because you have to hoof it around town on foot until you unlock fast travel quite a ways into the game.

There are trains now. They're painfully slow!

The play area in Yokai Watch is the town of Springdale. It's not an exceedingly large area, and you get used to it quickly. Each area is very memorable and filled with detail. That's one of the things I love about Level-5 games. The places they make are just as big as they need to be and aren't filled with useless fluff. There are a few new areas in the game, but I didn't think they were super great. The crux of the story revolves around time travel, so you have access to almost every area in both the past and present.

While most people disagree, I actually like the combat in Yokai Watch, and the second game makes that a bit deeper. You have six Yokai in battle at a time. Three in the front and three in the back. The front row is attacking, while the back row is doing nothing unless they have special abilities. Your Yokai will attack and do spells on their own based on their personality and abilities. They're all on a wheel which can be rotated to fit the situation you're in. Bosses are my favorite part, because they test your mettle in ways the regular battles do not. You have the ability to place pins on specific enemies or boss parts, which makes your Yokai focus their attacks wherever the pin is. In boss battles this system is crucial, because you need to attack specific parts to stop special attacks or open up weak points. During the story your watch gets upgraded and adds some new abilities. Normally you can do special moves called soultimates, which expend a Yokais soul gauge to do a special attack. You have to successfully complete a mini-game in order to do the attack. With the new watch you can choose to do a moxie attack, which makes you complete the same mini-games but it expends the soul gauge of the two surrounding Yokai as well in order to power up the attack. I'm going to be honest, I never did this a lot. What I did end up doing is poking the enemy a whole bunch. If your enemy has a status effect you can poke it to do any one of the following: Increase affection, get more money, or do damage. These may seem like small additions, but they add a lot to the gameplay.

There are tons of new Yokai to befriend. Lie-in-Heart is my favorite.

The story is what doesn't really do it for me. The first quarter is a rehash of the original game. Once it moves to the time travel stuff it ends super quickly. It then transitions into a bunch of filler until you randomly have to go back in time again, which quickly leads up to the final boss who has no real motivation to be evil as far as I can tell. What bothers me about the story of Yokai Watch is that there are never any great interactions. Yes, Nate can talk to Yokai and control them , but there is no one else like him. Nate is experiencing all of this stuff and no other human (with a few rare exceptions) knows what's going on. I'm pretty sure something along these lines happens in the third game, so I'll have to wait for that.

I like Yokai Watch 2, but I now more than ever don't think it'll catch on in the U.S. like it did in Japan. It's a cool game, but I feel like a lot of the designs are holding it back. One of the main reasons I feel this way is that I don't remember most of the Yokai's names other than the main story related ones. The names are often lame puns that just didn't stick with me. I think that Yokai Watch has a lot of charm, and a great amount of detail, but its frustrating elements outweigh the positives a lot of the time. It's a pain in the ass to befriend Yokai, post game leveling takes too long, and the story is about as lame as it can get. Perhaps the third game can change all the issues I had with it and elevate it to a whole new level of popularity.

Rock Band Rivals

I've been playing Rock Band 4 on an almost weekly basis since it was released. Every Friday a few of my friends and I get together and rock out. For the past few months I've really only been playing the multiplayer with them and given up on single player. Rivals added a whole bunch of awesome features that got me right back into single player.

I'm going to be honest here. I love Rock Band 4, but it was a technical mess. Menus stuttered and everything took way too long to load. I literally couldn't stay connected to the in game store for more than five minutes and the leaderboards wouldn't update with my score half the time. When I first booted up Rivals my mind was absolutely blown. Everything ran silky smooth! The menus and in game store worked as intended, and even the animations when playing a song were smoother than they were before.

Getting together a crew is my favorite part of Rivals.

So previously I had beaten every show in the career mode, so there was literally no other content for me to play alone other than playing songs for high scores. I do enjoy that, but it eventually wears thin. With the Rivals expansion everything I do earns me EXP which is the best way to get me more interested in something. Now I level up just for playing songs! That's cool! The game also now measures your skill level on an instrument from 1 to 1,000. It made me feel good when my rating on guitar was 850. You can also now make a crew and gain experience by completing certain challenges and playing certain songs. These Rivals Crews give new life to the competitive Rock Band scene. Now people can recruit up to 29 other players for their crew and compete to get high scores every week. It gives new reason to try and get good scores on songs, which is really cool.

There is also a new story mode called Rockudrama, which I didn't end up liking very much. It's a documentary about the band you've created that follows their beginning to their eventual fade out from glory. It's presented in FMV sequences that are supposed to be funny, but I rarely laughed. There's something about FMV that really rubs me the wrong way. In old games it was trying to be serious, but since it was so low budget it ended up being hilarious. When it's in modern games I feel like it's often trying way too hard to be campy and funny, but it never really lands for me. Rocudrama is no different. It's a long series of people trying to make jokes work, but instead I found it to be really painful. At least it was fun to have a goal and unlock new venues and items.

This is Cool Terry. He's a character in Rockudrama. This is what you can expect.

Overall Rivals has impressed me a lot, except for the issues I've been having in multiplayer. The game ran and still runs perfectly for me alone. However, once we add in more instruments everything goes to shit. In case you've never played a rhythm game before, being on rhythm is very important. You know what ruins that? Constant hitching! For some reason the game randomly begins to hitch in multiplayer! We'll be playing, then the graphics will just freeze up and then skip ahead a little bit. This is absolutely unacceptable in a game where timing is literally everything. It makes the game unplayable. Restting the console works for a little bit before it starts happening again. I asked on the Rock Band Reddit if this was happening to anyone else, and it absolutely is. I really hope they fix this soon, or no one is going to want to play this with me anymore, which is a total bummer.

World of Final Fantasy

When I first saw World of Final Fantasy I convinced myself that I hated it. There's something about weird little chibi characters that really rubs me the wrong way. Then I found out that it's basically Pokemon, but with Final Fantasy monsters and fan service. Much to my chagrin I played the demo on PS4 and really liked what I played. You play turn based battles where two sets of three monsters are stacked on one another. The main characters are twins Lann and Reynn. They can be regular human size, and weird chibi size. There are three sizes of monsters you can get, small, medium, and large. When the twins are small they are medium size, and when they're big they are large. Each monster stack consists of one small, one medium, and one large monster. When the monsters are stacked they are stronger, because their skills, stats, and resistances pool together. The enemies are also stacked on occasion, so certain skills can be used to knock them down and attack them individually. The monsters can do the same to you, so you need to be careful.

In terms of combat it's pretty standard JRPG fare. I guess even the collecting of monsters is pretty standard now in most games. They're called mirages, I guess I should have mentioned that before. Collecting them is actually the entire goal of the game. Lann and Reynn wake up to find that everyone in their world is gone and they are alone. A god-like figure comes and tells them that they're lost their memories. In order to get their memories back she tells them that they have to go to another world called Grimoire and collect as many mirages as they can. Apparently they used to be crazy powerful mirage masters. I don't know if that's true or not, because I haven't beaten it yet.

They're so cute it sickens me!

So, most people in Grimoire are small. but the mirage masters are bigger and are referred to as Jiants. Yes, with a J. This means that the main characters often hide their true form, but you can switch between the two whenever you want. It's weird, because this game reminds me a lot of Kingdom Hearts, but with just Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy characters are scattered throughout the world, and they help out the twins in many different ways. Certain characters can actually be called upon in battle to perform powerful attacks. Generally a piece of music from their game plays when they show up, which is awesome as a fan of the franchise. Most monsters will be familiar too, which is always fun to see.

I don't have a lot to say about the game, mainly because I don't feel very strongly about it. I'm kind of shuffling through it in small chunks just to get to the end. I think it's interesting and I occasionally get pangs of nostalgia, but it's just alright. The plot isn't very interesting to me yet,  but I'm also only a handful of hours in. Hopefully it ends up blowing my mind, but right now it just seems like standard JRPG fare.

You battle as sweet stacks!

The thing that does drive me nuts is how bad the Vita version is. Man, does it not run well. Initially I played the demo on PS4 and it was totally fine. The Vita demo came out a few days later and it was noticeably not fine. The models are a lot more jagged as you'd expect from a Vita game, but it also doesn't run at a steady frame rate. In most parts of the game it runs at below 30FPS, and it gets even worse when your characters are big. It's nothing too horrendous, but it just doesn't feel good. What really bums me out is that the menus run slow. Often times I'll want to pop in and look at something only to have it hitch for a bit longer than it should. I get it, because it's on Vita, but man this should run better. However, the most egregious thing to me is that the voice acting isn't on the cartridge. That's right! You have to download the voices! For getting the day one edition you are given a code to download the Japanese voices. I was fine with this, because VO takes up a lot of space. Lots of games only offer English voices to save space. I booted up the game and quickly discovered something was wrong. Turns out you had to download the English voices too! Yes they're a free download, but I wasn't warned before starting the game that there would be no VO and to make it even better the download wasn't available on the store yet when I started playing! AGHHH! The download is just under 1GB, and Vita memory cards still cost a ridiculous amount. Do yourself a favor and buy the PS4 version.

It's happening!

I don't really know what I'll be playing this month, but I do know that Final Fantasy XV comes out on the 29th. To be honest I might wait a week into December and just write a thing about Final Fantasy XV, because man does it look awesome. I've tried so hard to keep my expectations down, but everything I've seen recently looks very impressive.

EDIT: I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT POKEMON! MAAAN, POKEMON IS GOING TO BE DOPE!

I am also getting the PS4 Pro on the 10th, so I can tell you all a little bit about that as well.

See you next time!

Game Time - October 2015

As I mentioned in the last edition of Game Time, my two most anticipated games of 2015 came out in October. That's right, Rock Band 4 and Disgaea 5 hit me on the same day! To no one's surprise those were really the only two games I played last month, and while I "beat" them I'm still playing the crap out of both of them. 

There's not much introduction to be done here, so without any further dawdling we're going to get right into it. It's game time!

Rock Band 4

There was a time around 2008 when video games centered around the playing of plastic instruments were very popular. The craze started with the original Guitar Hero, and Peaked around the time Rock Band 2 came out. Rock band was, and is a lot of fun to play in a large group. If you have all the equipment you can have a guitarist, bassist, drummer, and singer. Most songs only take a few minutes to complete, so it's super easy to switch people out as needed. I personally remember having like twenty people over to my house on a weekend I came home from college, and it was a complete blast. Much to my dismay that was around the time Rock Band 2 released, and that was when the plastic instrument fueled games started to burn out. Their decline was completely understandable, because there were over six guitar hero games, and at least 5 Rock Band Games. What made it even more upsetting was that Guitar Hero stopped focusing on guitar and started encroaching on Rock Band by adding drums and vocals in order to properly compete. The sheer amount of games being released at an insane clip caused the genre to collapse in on itself.

This is why Rock Band 4 has me so excited, because the plastic instrument genre can return once again. It's crazy, because Guitar Hero is also making a comeback, but they have returned to their guitar only focus, which means that it's not "directly" competing with what Rock Band has to offer. I feel weird saying that, because I really only play guitar in Rock Band, but that's fine. The reason I am so down with Rock Band 4 is because I can use all the DLC I bought when the series was at its peak, and I didn't have to buy new instruments either!

Man, there are no exciting Rock Band 4 pictures huh?

I've seen a lot of people complain that Rock Band 4 is a bare bones product, which it is. However, when you consider what the game is accomplishing behind the scenes I feel like the fact that it exists at all is a miracle. For the previous entries in the franchise Harmonix teamed up with EA and WB in order to get their games out. Now Harmonix is more or less a fully independent studio, and they did not get a major publisher for Rock Band 4. They instead partnered with Madcatz who is a hardware manufacturer to get the game out to the masses. This is extra cool, because Madcatz produced brand new higher quality instruments for the game. Even though I didn't need to I purchased a new guitar, and it's amazing. The strum bar is much sturdier than the previous ones, and it makes playing a lot more comfortable.

Now, this is where Rock Band 4 gets crazy. Not everyone is aware, but licensing music is a nightmare. Obviously Harmonix had to go out and license new music to put in Rock Band 4. What's insane is that they also went back and re-licensed almost every single DLC track from the previous entries. Over time they put out over 1,800 songs, and only a handful are not available for purchase anymore. So this means that since I bought some songs on PS3, that I was able to download those songs on the PS4 for no additional cost! It doesn't stop there though. It hasn't happened yet, but all the previous disc based games excluding Beatles Rock Band will be exportable to Rock Band 4 as well. The catch with those is that you had to have exported them into Rock Band 3 previously. In the case of Rock Band 3 you will have to have played it on your account so that they can verify your purchase of the game when the export becomes available. This only works going from Xbox 360 to Xbox One, and PS3 to PS4, which makes sense. Wait though, it gets even better! If you still have your old instruments lying around you can plug them into a PS4 and have them go right off the bat. The Xbox One makes it a little more complex, because you need to buy an adapter, but at least you can still get everything to work.

Rock Band 4 still looks like Rock Band!

Seriously, Harmonix went above and beyond in bringing Rock Band and all of its content to the current generation of consoles. The main game doesn't have much in the way of features right now, but it will gain more over time. See, Harmonix is going to use the game as a platform, which will have free updates over the course of the games life. All it really has right now is a career mode, super limited character creator, and quick-play. It's basically a vehicle to play your old content on the current generation of consoles, and it works very well for that. On top of all of this they have spun up the old DLC machine, and are releasing three new songs every week.

So far I've had a ton of fun playing songs every Friday with my friends. I'm not the best player, but I just enjoy playing the game. I'm not upset about the missing features that many others seem to be upset about, because they'll probably make it into the game eventually. There is a huge update patch already planned to come out in early December. Harmonix did a lot of work to get everything to work on the current generation of consoles and I seriously respect it.

Disgaea 5

Disgaea is a crazy franchise. It takes the regular strategy RPG genre and makes it infinitely more complex by throwing as many systems as it can on top of it. They all end up working together in the end, which makes this one of my favorite franchises of all time. I picked up Disgaea 2 on a whim in high school and ended up playing it and trying to figure out what the hell was going on for weeks. I stayed up like 18 hours a day at a friends house as we played through it and dabbled in the madness. What's cool about Disgaea is that it gets better with each iteration. I'm not talking about the story, but the gameplay. In each successive game the mechanics are explained better, and streamlined to make everything less frustrating.

None of this means anything if you've never played a game in the franchise, or you haven't watched it before, so let me explain a little bit. Strategy RPGs generally have you send around ten characters into battle. You then move them one-by-one on a grid. If they move up to an enemy they can attack, or use a skill. Disgaea plays like that as well, but it takes the level cap and cranks it up to 9,999. You can then start your character over by reincarnating them, and bringing them to 9,999 again at which point they will have higher stats. You can do that until the character is technically 186,000. This isn't exactly how it works in Disgaea 5, but it was like that in the previous games. As if getting to 186,000 wasn't crazy enough you can also go inside of your weapons and fight monsters in order to make them stronger. Everything can level up, and eventually you can do it ridiculously fast, which feels amazing! Disgaea is all about leveling and doing insane damage with overblown stats.

I did actually like these drawings.

You don't really see how crazy the franchise can get until the story is over, which in my opinion has been the worst part of Disgaea 5 so far. I streamed most of my playthrough of the game, which is now archived on YouTube. Near the end I started to get very impatient, because the story went on way too long for its own good. Most of the time the story doesn't bother me, but in 5 the overall plot is super generic. The only thing saving it is the characters interacting with one another, but sometimes even that is super awful.

The main character is Killia, who is a cool looking demon who likes to eat a lot. In the first scene of the game he saves princess Seraphina, and she "makes" him help her take down the evil Void Dark. Void Dark has been taking over netherworlds and generally being evil, and on top of that Seraphina's dad is trying to make her marry him. Obviously she doesn't want to do that, and for reasons not initially apparent Killia wants to take him down too. Through a series of events they meet more characters who are going against Void Dark and form a rebel army to take him down. It sounds alright, but the plot is the one of the most generic revenge plots I've ever seen. It doesn't help that the game is at least twice as long as all the other games were. Like I said previously the characters are cool, but even they wear thin. By the end of the game they had repeated the same lines and reasoning for so many hours that I just didn't care at all anymore. Every time anything would happen I would call it beforehand on stream, because all of the conflict in the story and between characters was so predictable. Like, if Killia hadn't been funny and cool then I might have stopped playing the story all together. If the characters had been allowed to interact without the stupid revenge plot getting in the way all the time it might have been an enjoyable story.

I thought this so many times during the story!

My favorite part of Disgaea games is when the story is over. That's when you unlock all the cool extra characters, and challenge stages. You don't really get to level like a crazy person until you get the proper maps to do it on. I am now in the process of going insane and leveling my characters to the best of my ability. There's always a point when you beat the game where you're too strong to level on the stages you have, but too weak to beat the enemies that let you level up super quickly. I'm stuck in the middle ground, but am on the cusp of breaking through.

If you want to see what Disgaea 5 is all about then head over to my YouTube Channel, and keep an eye on my Twitch account. All my streams are archived, and I've been recording videos of myself playing through the games many pieces of DLC. Even if you don't have any interest in playing, I recommend you check out what the game is all about anyways. It has a lot of interesting concepts that you don't see very often in  strategy RPGs.

Just When You Thought It Was Over

Even though my two most anticipated games of the year have come and gone, November is going to have some crazy stuff! For starters Yo-Kai Watch! the Japanese sensation is finally coming out in English on the 6th. Then, just four days later Fallout 4 is coming out. I feel weird about Fallout, because I'm not excited for it. I would like to be, but I feel like my mind can't comprehend that it's actually coming out so soon after its announcement. 

Then, as if Fallout wasn't going to be huge enough, Battlefront comes out the following week! How the hell am I going to play Fallout 4 and play multiplayer with my friends in Battlefront!? I want to cry, because my time management skills recently haven't been the best. That's not something to talk about here though.

Trust me, I'll find a way to play everything and then write about it next month. See you on the other side.

Game Time - October 2014

This month marked the beginning of my foray into the video world. As you may have noticed I streamed quite a bit of Spelunky, and even played through the entirety of Grim Fandango for charity. I also started posting videos on my YouTube channel, like my Let's Play of Bayonetta 2. However, this is still a blog so I'm not going to stop typing up this kind of stuff.

Since you can just go and watch me playing through Bayonetta 2 we'll be talking about some different stuff here. Shadow of Mordor came out for the PS4 and it's just as amazing as I hoped it would be. A Lord of the Rings game with awesome combat? I never would have believed it a few years ago.

I also played through Dust: An Elysian Tail, which was finally released on the Playstation 4. I saw my brother play a lot of it on 360, so I'm glad I finally got to see it through to the end for myself. I'll finish up by talking about the few hours of Freedom Wars I played. It's kind of like Monster Hunter, but with an anime style prison. I need to get back to playing it, so without further ado, it's game time! 

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Arkham Asylum changed the way melee combat works in modern video games. Its system was so solid that now almost every single game with melee combat emulates. Shadow of Mordor is no exception, which is a good thing. I like the Batman combat, so when it's put into other games I tend to enjoy it. You can seamlessly go from foe to foe and use special abilities as the combo grows. This game is super brutal, more so than most games I've played in recent years. It's super easy to decapitate and maim foes, which is both satisfying and a little bit disturbing.

You play as Talion, who is a ranger. His family was killed by Sauron, and then he is possessed by a wraith. Surprise, it's a Lord of the Rings game! What's weird is that this game could pretty much be anything, but for some reason it has a Lord of the Rings skin on it. The story is absolutely secondary to the gameplay. It takes place in Middle Earth, but it could probably have taken place anywhere with any other protagonist. Sure, I like the Lord of the Rings universe, but it doesn't make any reasonable difference here,

Get ready to stab all the orcs!

The main draw to Shadow of Mordor is the nemesis system, which works exactly as advertised. Being a Lord of the Rings game you fight a lot of orcs. They have a hierarchy. So you have normal grunt soldiers, commanders, and a few other classes all the way up to the highest which is war chief. All of the elite units have names, traits, and weaknesses. What's insane is that they remember you and what you've done. So every time you come into contact with them they will remember the scenario. If you defeated them they'll want revenge, or if they killed you they'll call you out on it. On paper it doesn't sound exciting, but in game it creates a lot of cool scenarios. 

The hierarchy of elite soldiers change as you go through the game. So if you kill someone, then another orc will rise to take their place. If one of them kills you then they'll get promoted as well. This system is the main driving force behind the game. You can interact with the system in numerous ways. Events will pop up around the open world, so you can influence them. Sometimes the elites will throw parties and you can poison their booze, or two elites will be fighting and you can help one, or kill them both. Later on in the game you can use your wraith powers to control the minds of enemies. In doing so you can pit your minions against other elites and make huge waves in the overall hierarchy.

This is how you know what's happening with the nemesis system.

Shadow of Mordor was an excellent game. It's the first open world game in a long time where I actively tried to do all the side missions, because they were well implemented. The nemesis system kept me coming back, because I wanted to experience more of the game world. It's super cool to have grunts talk about you and specific things that you've done. It's even more cool when you build a personal grudge against an enemy that essentially doesn't have a story behind it. All you know is what you've done to them and what they've done to you.

When games have a good system other games tend to steal it. Much like this game borrows heavily from the Batman combat, I hope that future games borrow heavily from the nemesis system. It would work quite well in many other franchises, and it can still be improved upon. It ends up creating very personal game experiences and stories.

Dust: An Elysian Tail

This game came out for the Xbox 360 a few years ago and I've wanted to play it since then. My brother got it and I could have played it, but for some reason I never got around to it. So when I found out it was coming to PlayStation 4 and it would be free for Plus members I got super excited. It was basically made by one dude, which is insane.

In Dust you play as Dust, who is an amnesiac fox/dog man. I remember when the game first came out there were a lot of people who were super against it because all of the characters were animals. A lot of people thought that it looked like it was for kids, which always upsets me. I don't get why people need to attack things for being what they perceive as childish. Anyways, as Dust you're trying to recover your memory and learn who you really are. In the beginning he wakes up next to a tree with a talking sword named Arah. A weird furry bat/hamester named Fidget is there as well. The story is actually pretty solid and there are some shocking revelations and plot twists as it progresses. In fact, I had the game crash during a pivotal moment in the story!

Dust is a beautiful looking game.

The combat in Dust is simple, but fun. Dust can swing Arah to do basic melee combos. He also has the ability to swing Arah rapidly in order to create what is essentially a tornado. When you hit enemies with it you can easily juggle them. To add an extra layer to it Fidget can use various magic attacks. When the magic is hit by your crazy tornado move it has various effects, but they're all very damaging. You want to get as many hits in a combo as you can, because the damage you're dealing increases with the combo, so does the experience you gain. 

It's a Metroid style game with a melee combat system. There are various areas you can't access until you gain more abilities. You can also pick up quests from various characters in order to get upgrades. It's a cool little indie game that's extremely polished. Every time I look at it I'm consistently amazed that it was basically created by one man. 

Freedom Wars

I have been excited to play Freedom Wars for a very long time. I still don't know how I feel about it yet though. I know I like it, but I can't help but feel like the game is missing something. For those who don't know it's essentially Monster Hunter, but in a weird future prison. People who are considered to be a drain on societies' resources are sentenced to prison where they are forced to work off their sentence. In order to do so prisoners must fight abductors, which take citizens to other cities to work. It's okay though, because a friendly hologram bear talks to you all the time.

At first the game is super restricted, because as a prisoner you have few rights. Doing certain things will add years to your sentence. So initially you can't speak to people, leave your cell, sit down, or take more than five steps. You eventually gain these rights by purchasing them with points you get from missions. The missions are where the game is like monster hunter. There are numerous types of abductors, which are more or less monsters. There are tigers, dragons, and many more, but they all look like weird glowing robots. 

The abductors are ridiculously large and kind of scary.

Most abductors have hollow casings on their body where they hold citizens. In order to rescue them you can either defeat the abductor, or grab onto the part and slash it until it opens. Basic combat is like most other hunting games. You start with a sword, which has basic three hit combos, and strong attacks. There are numerous sword types like light and heavy, but you can also get crazy huge concrete blocks on a stick and lances. Secondary weapons are guns, which also vary greatly. I tend to use light assault rifles, but there are also  rail guns, rocket launchers, and a whole lot more,

The main differentiating part of the combat is the thorn, which is wrapped around the player characters arm. It's a thorny vine, which you use like a grappling hook. You point it at a target and then you can pull yourself to wherever it landed. Since you can't jump this makes up for it. It allows you to cling to enemies in order to hit them. There are three types of thorn, which are attack, shield, and heal. I personally use heal, because I like to have as much health as possible at all times. You can charge the thorn in order to do various things. Charging the heal allows you to heal allies, and create a tree to heal yourself as well. Just hitting someone on your team with it will heal them. Attack and shield vary in terms of charging, but their names are pretty self explanatory.

You can use your thorn to pull enemies down for easier attacks.

One of the main advertised points of the game is that you can fully customize your AI partner. They are called accessories and are essentially your parole officer. It's possible to fully deck them out in whatever clothing you've unlocked and weapons that you're not using. It's not nearly as cool as all the advertising and pre-release coverage made it seem.

There is a lot of faction based stuff going on, but I haven't really messed with it yet. When you begin the game you join a Panopticon, which is named after a real life place. Since I live in New York state, I chose New York. You can donate resources to help out the overall score, or play multiplayer matches in order increase the rank of your Panopticon. I assume you get rewards for doing so, but I don't really have any idea. 

Fight for your panopticon!

I like playing it a lot, but like I said earlier I feel there's something missing. Most games like this have you increasing your stats constantly through armor and weapons. You upgrade your weapons in Freedom Wars, but it's done through a menu and then you have to wait a set amount of time for it to finish. There is no armor either, so I generally feel like I'm not advancing at all. I'm going to continue to play it, because I'm enjoying it. I just hope that it grabs me a bit more.

November is Coming

I thought that this was a crazy month for games, but it's nothing in comparison to what's going to happen in November. On the 11th everything pops off with the release of Digimon All-Star Rumble, Assassin's Creed Unity, and Tales of Hearts R. Then the following week we have Little Big Planet 3, and Dragon Age Origins. Three days later the most important release of the year Super Smash Bros. for Wii-U comes out alongside Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. 

I have barely had enough time to play what I got this month, but I'm going to have to find a way to persevere. Going forward you can expect me to post a whole lot more videos!

It's going to be a crazy month, so I need t get cracking on the stuff I haven't finished from October yet!

Game Time - November 2013

As of right now I'm playing way too many games at once. I can barely handle it. Amazon had a deal on the Vita, so I finally got one of those. Now I have all the free games from PlayStation Plus to play on the thing in addition to Persona 4 Golden. I still haven't finished 2 of the 3 PS4 games I got and now the Starbound beta is out and I need to be playing that. I don't know. There are so many games I've been playing that I can't even think of them all. It has definitely contributed to how late this installment of Game Time is. Man, I do this later every month. It really didn't help that I went to the fighting game tournament NEC 14 this past weekend. Now I have a raging cold and it totally sucks.

Luckily for me most of what I just went on about has happened in December. As you know this past month I got the PlayStation 4. I think it's pretty cool. You can read more about that here if you like. So as you may have guessed I've been playing the thing a fair bit. I played some of both Need for Speed Rivals, and Lego Marvel. Perhaps I'll get around to beating them at some point, but with my current amount of games to play I don't know that I will. Both games are pretty fun though. I'm not going to talk about Lego Marvel today. It's another open world Lego game.

I did however play all of Assassin's Creed IV, and it was awesome. I don't know how you can go from having III be such a disaster to having IV be so well put together. Being a pirate and sailing the open seas is a magical experience that I highly recommend.

At some point I bought Super Mario 3D world, because I decided I wanted to play another Wii-U game. At this point I can safely say that Super Mario 3D world is the best Wii-U game out there. Somehow the Super Mario Galaxy team can spin straw into gold time and time again. They should probably be allowed to make every Mario related game from here on out if they keep doing such solid work. I couldn't stop myself from playing until the end of the game in two sittings. I still have a lot of collectibles to find and I'm eager to jump back in and get them all.

Also, sorry if this becomes an incomprehensible mess.

Ready, set, video games!

Need for Speed Rivals

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit was an amazing game. Every Need for Speed game since then has not been. You could even say that they were kind of bad. Rivals gets so close to bringing back what I loved about Hot Pursuit. It has a lot of potential, but it's held back by some of it's own mechanics.

Much like Hot Pursuit, Rivals is a good old fashioned game involving cops and racers. If you choose a cop you have to try and take racers off the road using any means necessary. You also get time penalties if you drive dangerously, which totally sucks. If you choose a racer you just race and try not to get taken down by the cops. In my opinion playing as a racer is much more fun. Being penalized for getting knocked around isn't something I want happening to me in a racing game. Especially when other cars are constantly smashing into you.

Races start out simple enough, but the cops ALWAYS show up to ruin them.

When it comes down to it Need for Speed Rivals is a competent racing game. You drive around an open world and go from event to event. The terrain is extremely varied. One moment you'll be in the desert and then all of a sudden you'll be on a mountain with snow all around you. As you race around the world and complete events you'll get speed points, which happen to be the games currency. You'll use it to purchase new cars, power them up, and purchase power-ups. You get them for doing almost anything, what's hard is keeping them. In order to get the speed points to keep you need to bank them at a hideout. If you get taken down before that point you lose them all. This is a huge risk-reward scenario. The longer you stay out the more speed points you get. When you complete an event you get a multiplier, but it's nearly impossible to stay alive for more than an event.

Normally the game will throw you into a server with around 8 other players. It doesn't tell you if they're cops or not. When you're with other humans you'll almost surely die very quickly, because they actually know how to be efficient. Normally I turn off the internet so I live a bit longer. The problem is that so many computer players spawn. Playing as a racer doing almost anything will trigger a chase. Then before you know it you have a million cops on your ass. It ends up getting pretty frustrating. Sometimes I just want to do an event in peace, but that just can't happen. At least in Hot Pursuit you knew which events would have cops in them before starting. Since Rivals is in an open world the cops are everywhere all the time!

On average this many cops are chasing you...

It wouldn't be as bad if the open world was put together better. If you want to race with friends you really can't unless you challenge them to a head to head race. This requires that you find them on the map first, which is kind of hard, because everyone is driving as fast as possible. If you want to do events with other players you might as well forget about it. That would require all the necessary players to be at the event starting position. On top of that you have to not get killed on the way there, or you'll have to start super far away from the event again. I wish there was some type of party system in the game or something to make multiplayer a little more playable. As it is right now it's basically a single player game where other players happen to be in the same world for their single player experience.

Oh yeah, there's a story too. Surprise, it's not good. Every story scene consists of a computer screen with video of racers or cops on it and some weird chat. In the background a racer or cop is spouting off nonsense about freedom or justice. It's all super self righteous bullshit, but in a funny kind of way. There's a racer named F8 in the story, which is pronounced fate. That's edgy I guess? The story seems to be trying way too hard to be something it's not. Need for Speed the Run taught us all just how terrible stories in Need for Speed games can truly be. So I guess I should be thankful it's not that awful.

At least it's not this game.

As a racing game it's fine. It handles how you'd expect it to. That's what makes it mediocre. With an untapped open world and bad multiplayer mechanics Rivals is kind of disappointing. If you're looking for some free roam racing you'd probably be better off playing something like Forza Horizons, or better yet Need for Speed Hot Pursuit.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

I really liked the real world plot of the Assassin's Creed franchise. Then Assassin's Creed 3 happened and killed it for me. I don't really know where it went wrong, but it went horribly wrong. On top of the real world plot being destroyed, the in animus plot wasn't very good either. It felt very disjointed and there were way too many time skips for absolutely no reason. Connor was a decent character in the beginning, but unlike Ezio in the previous games he was a major bummer. Assassin's Creed 3 was a disappointment on many levels for me and it almost made me stop playing the franchise.

The first few trailers of Assassin's Creed IV looked interesting to me. I'm a huge fan of pirates, so that helped out a lot. I had originally decided not to purchase it at all, but Watchdogs got delayed and I needed a game to play on the PS4 at launch. Much to my surprise it even got excellent reviews. I ended up liking AC 4 a whole lot. It somehow managed to reinvigorate my interest in the franchise.

You'll be stabbing lots of people in AC IV.

As you may have guessed you play as an Assassin in Assassin's Creed IV. Well, he's not actually an Assassin to start with, but he sure is good at assassinating people. You play as Edward Kenway, who is the grandfather of Connor from Assassin's Creed 3. Edward is a happy go lucky pirate trying to make his way in life. The best part about Edward is that he's a fun character. He doesn't really have a whole lot going on except for the fact that he wants to find treasure and have fun. Sure, he's not the deepest character ever, but he's just fun to play as. He's a pirate and he acts like one. He still dons the Assassin's robes and stabs fools from behind, but he can also sail a ship on the high seas.

While Connor could sail a ship in Assassin's Creed 3, Assassin's Creed 4 expands on that concept quite a bit. In order to get from place to place Edward must sail across the ocean in his ship the Jackdaw. It's an open world game, so there are tons of places to explore and things to do. You can fish, take over naval bases, battle other ships, and sing some sweet sea shanties. On land you can do the same things as you could in every other Assassin's Creed game. There are additions, but none of them are really worth nothing.

Edward is a fun character who's a bit of a badass.

The overall story isn't anything to write home about. Edward is looking for a place called the observatory, because with its power he will be able to get rich. It's an interesting enough tale, but it really starts to feel like a slog in the middle section of the game. It felt like one of the longest games I've every played, but that might be partially due to the fact that I was trying to do all the side activities. There are way too many side activities.

Much to my surprise the game actually has a story outside of the animus as well. All of the terrible events of Assassin's Creed 3 have still happened, but somehow the setting manages to be interesting. You are a faceless employee at Abstergo Entertainment, which is a video game company the Templars use as a front. They develop games for the animus. You are a developer on their newest pirate game, which is why you're playing as Edward. You can get out of the animus and walk around the offices in first person. It's really weird, but in an interesting way. There is still an overarching plot, but it's nothing special. I think they're floundering after what happened after AC3 and decided to just keep an overarching plot, because the series has always had one.

Sailing the high seas is surprisingly fun.

Assassin's Creed IV is another Assassin's Creed game. The difference is that it's actually good again like Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed 2 were. The gameplay is largely the same as it was in previous iterations with the addition of boat combat on a much larger scale than in Assassin's Creed 3. I played it on the PlayStation 4 and the graphics were incredible. The topical environments look very vibrant, but the water in the ocean is absolutely mind blowing. If you have any interest in the Assassin's Creed franchise still you should probably give Assassin's Creed 4 a chance.

Super Mario 3D World

Video games have become much more complicated over the past few years. In most cases games put complex systems and graphics over the gaming experience itself. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but sometimes it just gets tiring. Sometimes I just want to sit down with a game and have fun. That's exactly what happened with Super Mario 3D World. I've been getting increasingly frustrated with Nintendo recently, but for a brief moment they've done something beautiful. The Wii-U now has a game that I'd say makes buying the system worth it.

I didn't buy New Super Mario Bros. U, or Super Luigi U. My stance on 2D Mario games that take around 4 hours to beat and cost a full $60 is that they're a load of bullshit. While it might be a great game for those four hours it's just another rehash of the New Super Mario Bros. formula that Nintendo thinks is the greatest thing ever. Truth be told I'm kind of over 2D traditional Mario games now. I think 2D Mario games died when Super Mario 64 came out. If I want to play classic Mario I'll bust out my Super Nintendo and play some classic Mario.

I'm pretty much over 2D Mario games.

Nintendo has always been able to make the most out of the hardware they have. Even though the Wii-U is on par with the PS3 and 360 I thought it would be left behind in graphical potential. Much to my dismay I'd say that 3D looks far better than anything I played on the PlayStation 4, which is a next generation console. Much like Pikmin 3, 3D world uses its art style to its advantage. I would be willing to go so far as to say that 3D world is the best looking game I have played this year.

What's funny is that it's looks don't really mean that much, because it's just straight up fun to play. In essence it's the same game as Super Mario 3D land for the 3DS. Despite that it doesn't seem like a rehash, because there's enough new content to keep things interesting. Every single level is unique, and there are quite a few levels that introduce mechanics only used for that specific level.

Many levels use mechanics that are never seen again.

Much like Super Mario Bros. 2 you have the option to play as multiple characters who each have their own special abilities. Mario plays exactly how you would expect him to play. Luigi can jump a little higher and flutter his legs to get farther. Peach can float for a while, which allows her to get much farther with her jumps than other characters. Toad's ability to pick stuff up super fast in Mario 2 wouldn't really help him in this game, so now he just has the most mobility. Once he starts running he can fly through the stages with incredible speed. You can also unlock Rosalina from Super Mario Galaxy once you complete the main levels. She can jump a second time by spinning, which wasn't very impressive to me. Much as I do in all Mario games that allow me to I stuck to using Princess Peach. Her floating ability makes precision jumps so much easier.

When I first saw the trailer for 3D world I didn't know what to think. Mainly because the new suit turns you into a cat. The pick-up is a bell, which then puts the person who picked it up into a colored cat suit. It allows you to slash and run straight up walls. I don't like cats, but the cat suit is amazing. It pretty much breaks the game and makes it easy to get anywhere. I often found myself going back to the first level to pick it up.

Princess Peach was my character of choice for most of the game.

What I don't like about it is that it's meant for four players. The levels start off super wide and seem a bit empty, because four people could be there. This also makes the starting levels a little bit easier than I'd like. I don't think that games that involve precision platforming should be multiplayer. It just makes every level pure bedlam, because everyone dies all the time when someone gets ahead. Lucky for me the later levels get very challenging and I can't even fathom how you'd be able to get through them with multiple people. There are a ton of levels in the game, and you can unlock extra worlds and levels by getting all of the collectibles. Each level has three green stars and most of them have a Miiverse stamp to collect. You will also want to reach the top of every flagpole, which seems easiest to do with Peach.

Super Mario 3D World is fun. I can't say that enough. The game controls amazingly. When mixed with the truly incredible visuals and jaunty orchestrated soundtrack something truly memorable is born. I want to get back to collecting everything the game has to offer, but with so many other games I need to play I sadly might not get to for a while.

Christmas is Almost Here

It's almost Christmas, which means that this edition of Game Time is horrendously late. I'm going to warn you that the December edition of Game Time will probably be horrendously late as well. I've already played a ton of games this month and I'm sure to get a whole bunch more to play on Christmas. Perhaps by Christmas I'll be able to breath out of my nose again!

Since I have so many things to talk about I'm thinking I might do two editions of Game Time to be able to fit everything in. Perhaps I'll just write up a thing about the Vita and how awesome it is. It's a real shame that Sony isn't helping it sell at all.

I don't know. I have a lot of games to be playing, so I'll see you next time.

     -Manny