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December 2, 2012

Review – Little Inferno

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 8:49 am

Review Little Inferno
Tomorrow Corporation aims to stuff your stocking with the must have toy for the Holidays, transforming the Wii U gamepad into the Little Inferno fireplace. All the good girls and boys looking to stay warm against the onslaught of never-ending winter can flip through catalog pages and order the latest must-have flammable products from the comfort of their home.

Yes, all the left-over splendors of the universe can be yours to burn while delighting at the spectacle and inhaling the sweet plumes of consumerism’s inevitable conclusion, via a proper pretzel twist on the ye olde notion of work-buy-consume-die that was quite a bit more popular to discuss before we all started knocking one another over for new iOS devices.

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November 27, 2012

Failed Review – Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 11:32 pm

Review Epic Mickey 2 The Power of Two
Given how much work goes into creating the elements that bring a videogame into existence, even releases that fall short of their goals tend to offer minor points of interest. I’ve often maintained that even the worst releases have good ideas seeded somewhere within their core – why else would people work so hard in the attempt to flesh them out?

But Disney is determined to prove me wrong, offering a disheartening view into the business side of game creation with the multiplatform release of Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, a game that feels as if it were assembled by machines in a subterranean dome. And while that may sound like an extreme appraisal of a project that clearly had human hands involved in its creation, anyone involved that ever had a love for playing videogames was clearly discouraged from expressing said love here, I assure you.

Any logical sense that guides the creation process has been abandoned in the bizarre effort to race the original Wii release to the bottom while selling you on the idea that the exact opposite is the case.

There are a lot of more fanciful and poetic paths toward opening a discussion about the game, but the simple fact is that I can’t be bothered.

Life is too short to expend the effort on Epic Mickey 2.

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November 25, 2012

Review – PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale

Review PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale
When PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale was announced it immediately drew comparisons to another popular game series, and it’s not hard to see why. All-Stars practically begs to be measured against Nintendo’s Smash Bros. franchise.

Normally I would try to avoid a point-for-point comparison of two titles, but All-Stars pulls so much from the Smash Bros. games—without even a hint of subtlety—that I think it’s only fair to compare the two, mercilessly. You can expect to find many such comparisons ahead.

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November 22, 2012

Review – Crashmo

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 10:19 pm

Review Crashmo
Nintendo’s plush sumo returns to push and pull more blocks for your digital bucks, this time attempting to retrieve wayward birds instead of children. After an awkward attempt to greet a visiting girl frightens her birds away, players will need to help Mallo solve the puzzles of Papa Blox’s Crashmo course in order to rescue each and fix the situation.

Papa seems to have been busy since last year, with the most immediate change being the addition of gravity – meaning that pushing one block will cause the others above it to fall, and offering Intelligent Systems a fresh chance to cram the game’s stages full of puzzles that seem rather impossible, until I chill out and realize the solution is rather simple.

That’s usually the way it goes, except for the times it doesn’t. Those are the terrible times. The dark times. The times when I throw myself on the mercy of Papa Blox for advice and he tells me to try moving some blocks, and I want to cry just a little.

Then I remember I can just skip around it and try again later.

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November 21, 2012

Review – The Walking Dead

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — Jason Westhaver @ 8:47 pm

Review The Walking Dead
Mere words cannot adequately describe what it’s like to play Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead. No game has ever taken me on such an emotional roller coaster; no game has ever made me shed as many tears; and no game has ever made me feel like such of a piece of shit for doing what I thought was right.

This is the epitome of interactive storytelling; the level of artistry we have spent decades searching for, and the most human game I have ever played.

Based on the comic series created by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, The Walking Dead is the story of life after the zombie apocalypse. While that may sound like a played out cliché, the series has always set itself apart by focusing on the human side of the story, rather than the traditional joyous killing sprees and high body counts. Unfortunately, in the case of the TV adaptation by Frank Darabont for AMC, they’ve decided to exploit this drama and bastardize the story into a run-of-the-mill soap opera.

Telltale has shown their intelligence and resolve by avoiding falling into the melodrama trap and creating a work of fiction that is genuinely moving, without being positively cartoony.

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From The Fire Panda Research Department

Filed under: Features — Tags: , , , — Jamie Love @ 1:57 pm

Scribblenauts Unlimited Fire Panda
It was pointed out to me earlier today that despite talking quite a bit about fire pandas in my review of Scribblenauts Unlimited, that I failed to show a single screenshot of my extensive research into the subject.

Rather than simply capture some screenshots, the following video will give you an opening tutorial into how to set your own pandas on fire, as well as a means of allowing them to live longer and more productive lives by spewing fire instead of simply burning from it.

As always, you can catch said knowledge bomb below.

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Review – Nintendo Land

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 9:25 am

Review Nintendo Land
Not unlike an exotic space parasite, Nintendo Land wants to keep me alive so that it can feed on me. It needs some piece of me to populate its virtual space, and I need to keep playing it to see what happens next.

It all starts off rather innocently as one checks into the Plaza and meets Monita, the robotic guide that lays down the rules for each of the park’s attractions, shortly thereafter cutting players loose to explore the twelve different games Nintendo offers as a gateway to understanding the relationship between your television and the Wii U gamepad. Playing these games then rewards players with coins, which can be spent on another game in the attempt to win objects that are displayed throughout your park.

And then Nintendoland does something new for Nintendo, offering players the chance to throw open the doors of their park to an online community, sorta. The act causes crowds of foreign Miis to wander around that space. Regardless of where other players are, copies of their avatars are walking through countless parks, their greeting messages displayed overhead to show everything from Zelda sketches to one Mii’s clever message “Has anyone seen my kids?”

Suddenly I’m moving through the park to read each blurb in some strange social console experiment, and despite every legitimate word against Nintendo’s long standing resistance to online gaming, the signature charm of the company’s designs have come from behind to offer something that grasps the online space in ways few of us could have anticipated.

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