BattleBlock Theater

The Behemoth - 2013 - X360/PC

BattleBlock Theater is the third game from developer The Behemoth whose previous games are Alien Homnid and Castle Crashers. It was designed by Dan Paladin (aka Synj) and Tom Fulp, both of Newgrounds.com fame and features the same art style and sense of humor you'd expect if you've played The Behemoth's previous games or are aware of their Newgrounds submissions. BattleBlock Theater is a cooperative 2D platformer that requires two players, connected either online or played locally to navigate through a series of levels that require players to be good platformers, puzzle solvers, and beat-em-up-ers. 

The core gameplay in BattleBlock is mostly good, but what makes this game stand out is the humor. In a bizarre but funny opening cutscene, a narrator (voiced by Will Stamper who is also an active Newgrounds contributor) explains that several friends have been shipwrecked on an island full of cats, because this game's roots are in internet culture. The cats have captured the surviving members of the shipwreck, including Hatty Hattington, the former captain of the ship. The cats, now lead by Hatty Hattington who appears to be the victim of mind control, are forcing the survivors to participate in gladiatorial like challenges in a theater for the cats amusement, which is the very ridiculous context to the actions you're performing throughout the game. The narrator is the real star of BattleBlock Theater and will chime in frequently to comment on the actions you're performing during each stage. When an entire level is complete, you'll be treated to another cutscene featuring the narrator sometimes explaining what's happening in the plot, but mostly just being funny with this game's uniquely weird sense of humor.

Each stage requires both players to cooperate to navigate through a series of traps and enemies, all the while collecting green gems. When enough gems are collected, the stage exit is unlocked, allowing you to advance to the next one. But if you really want to be a completionist, you can try to search for all of the gems in each level. There are two difficulty settings on BattleBlock theater, "Normal" and "Insane", both of which I think are very flawed. On normal when a player dies, they instantly respawn next to their partner. There's pretty much no challenge with this difficulty and because there's practically no punishment or consequence for dying, players are free to be as careless as they want while progressing through each level. This may be fine for some, but I personally need a little more tension and challenge while playing, so I opted for "Insane" mode. In insane mode, when either player dies, both players are forced to restart the entire level. From the beginning. Now this is fine for the first few handfuls of levels, but when the number of enemies and difficulty of platforming starts to rise near the middle of the game, this mode starts to get really frustrating, especially when you pull off a difficult section perfectly, but your partner dies and both players are forced to start the entire level over. I think BattleBlock could have really benefited from some different difficulty settings here. Either a checkpoint system or a number of lives other than just one would have been very, very welcome. This is a relatively simple thing that I think unfortunately really hamstrings BattleBlock Theater

BattleBlock Theater Video Review

Summary 

Overall though, this is still a pretty solid game. It's another good couch co-op game, a type of game which I personally love and have been enjoying its recent resurgence. There are also several competitive mini games included here, most of which I actually didn't mess around with much, but they look like they could be fun if you're into competing rather than cooperating. There's also a built in level editor if you want to make your own sinister stages for your friends to navigate through. All in all BattleBlock Theater is a good game to share with friends, and features the most absurdly weird, yet still funny sense of humor you'll find in a video game

Super Mario Maker

Nintendo - 2015 - WiiU

I think this game along with Minecraft would have been the two most amazing games for me to have as a kid. These are the kinds of creative games that would have captivated me for days and weeks. As it stands they're still quite captivating to me, but I simply don't have the free time to pour days and days into these games. For the uninitiated, Super Mario Maker isn't really a Mario game as much as it is an official Mario level editor. You can post your levels online to share and also play levels others have created. So it's either not a Mario game at all, or it's an infinite amount of Mario games, depending on how you look at it

The editor is functionally easy to use and create levels. You simply drag items from the toolbar and place them on the stage. It's a nice use of the WiiU tablet and is finally something first party from Nintendo that makes the WiiU tablet feel justified. Although the editor is functionally easy to use, figuring out its strange hidden quirks and odd UI design can be baffling at times. In what I can only imagine was a need to conserve UI space, certain items are hidden under other items, requiring you to shake item A to reveal item B. But not all items are shakable, and there's no way to tell whether or not they are other than trial and error. Furthermore, menu options and menu navigation are obfuscated in the UI by labeling them under random animals. How do I save my level? Do I click the dog? The robot? The frog? I know Super Mario Maker is somewhat of a spiritual successor to Mario Paint and Mario Paint used some of these UI oddities, but that doesn't make it any easier for people like myself who didn't play a ton of Mario Paint and/or don't remember what the various animals mean in relation to the UI. It may sound like I'm nitpicking, but I really did find this UI totally unintuitive.

When designing levels, you can do so under the original Mario template, the Mario 3 template, the Super Mario World template or the New Super Mario Bros. template. Choosing which template you want also dictates what abilities Mario will have when playing the level. For instance, Super Mario World Mario can spin jump and use Yoshi and the cape powerup. New Super Mario Bros. Mario can do all of these things as well as wall jump.

Once you dig in and start messing around with building levels, it really starts to bring to life how awesome the level designers at Nintendo are. Once you build a few things yourself and realize how hard it actually is to make a good level, it gives you an appreciation for how good the Nintendo level designers are at what they do. This is further exemplified when playing other creator's courses online. Unfortunately, I'd have to say the majority of the levels I've played online aren't that good and some are just downright garbage. There are some levels that are quite good, but finding them is a difficult task. The level filtering, searching and discovery options that exist in the game right now leave a lot to be desired. Nintendo has said they're working on a web portal that would partially solve that problem, but at the time of writing this review, that solution doesn't exist. Another thing I'd really like to see added is the ability to upload multiple levels together to make a "world" or a series of levels as opposed to uploading single standalone levels. Hopefully this is something they're working on as Nintendo has seemed willing to patch in additional content for this game already with the addition of checkpoints and conditional powerup items being added after launch

Super Mario Maker Video Review

Summary
Although the UI is confusing and there are a few features missing that I'd like to see added, Nintendo has otherwise succeeded in creating a tool that lets anyone with an imagination create a Mario level, bring it to life and share it with others. The drawback to this is that anyone with an imagination can create a Mario level, bring it to life and share it with others so there's a lot of, shall we say, not so great levels to sift through when looking at random stages online. Still, I've already spent many hours playing others' stages and have enjoyed making a few of my own and I look forward to spending more time in the future doing both in Super Mario Maker.

P.S. Here's a few of the stages I've made if you have the game and want to give these a shot:

James' evil castle: E1F2-0000-0034-E50A
The first level I ever made in Mario Maker. It's in the style of Mario 3. Not by best level; it was mostly me experimenting with the editor

P Switch Shenanigans: 6446-0000-003F-A95E
A difficult level in the style of Super Mario World designed for expert Mario players

Look Closely: 9244-0000-008C-61AD
I made a puzzle game in the style of Mario 3. See if you can figure out how to get through it

Undertale

Toby Fox - 2015 - PC

I like the Mother series well enough. I actually preferred Mother 3 over Mother 2 (a.k.a. Earthbound in the U.S.). Both of those games construct a fun and wacky world populated with lovably silly enemies but despite the goofy nature of their settings, they still both manage to pull off well written characters in an emotionally charged story. Underneath the layers of American culture parody and just general wackiness, there's still direct messages from the game's authors commenting on human life and friendships and other similar topics. Experiencing the wackiness and interesting stories of those games was my favorite thing about them. My least favorite part was the combat. Aside from the often humorous in-battle text, these games featured pretty standard and simple RPG combat systems. Mother 3 tried to mix this up a bit by awarding players bonus damage for attacking with the rhythm of the music (think Crypt of the Necrodancer), but I still didn't really find the combat system that interesting. Especially with the amount of grinding that these games practically require you to do before being able to advance to the next area. It felt like the combat was getting in the way of the excellent story, rather than complimenting it.

So now fast forward 10 years from Mother 3 to Toby Fox's Undertale which strongly evokes the Mother series visually, musically, thematically, and even directly at some points in the game. Like the Mother games, you play as a young kid wearing a striped shirt exploring a weird and dangerous world filled with wacky monsters. Thankfully, one of the big deviations from the Mother games is the unique combat system found in Undertale. Undertale's combat presents the player with an interesting twist which is that you actually don't have to kill any of the monsters in the game. If you choose to fight monsters, you'll be faced with a timing mechanic similar to something you might find in one of the Paper Mario games. But an alternative to fighting is using the "act" menu which allows you to talk to or interact with the monsters to finish the encounter without killing them. This usually plays out as a bit of a puzzle where you meed figure out the right combination of actions to pacify the enemy. Regardless of which of these two actions you choose, you'll be faced with a "bullet hell"-like system when you defend and the monster attacks. Different monsters have different attack patterns, so memorizing how to dodge them is it's own fun mini-game

Also created by Toby Fox, Undertale's soundtrack is an absolute delight. It's a mix of chiptunes, synths and the occasional live instrument and echoes various other RPG soundtracks from Final Fantasy to Earthbound. My favorites are Ruins which sounds like it could fit in any RPG ever, Another Medium which at times sounds like it's trying to evoke Thousand Year Door's X-Naut Fortress, Snowy, which perfectly sets the mood for walking through a winter forest, CORE which is a rockin' electronic dance tune, Death by Glamour which is a variation on the aforementioned CORE track, and ASGORE which sounds like appropriate epic RPG final boss music. For more examples of what I believe to be music references to other games, listen to Dummy! (which I believe to be an "Off" reference) Alphys' Theme (which I believe to be another Paper Mario reference), Amalgam (which sounds very Earthbound-y to me) and Oh! One True Love (which is undoubtedly a reference to Final Fantasy VI's opera scene). The whole soundtrack is really, really solid and I fell in love with it almost instantly

As neat as the combat is an even as lovingly crafted as the soundtrack is, the real star of Undertale is the story. The characters are very memorable and endearing and the quality of writing here is top notch. The way Undertale builds expectation and then throws you a twist just when you think you've got things figured out is masterful. It's rare when games can make me laugh, and I usually count it as a success if a game can tell a joke and even get me to crack a smile. Undertale had me laughing out loud on several occasions. It handles the serious, somber, relaxing, strange and horrifying moments in the story just as well as the humor. It's so rare when a game can hit all these narrative notes as well as Undertale.

Undertale Video Review

Summary
Undertale is one of the best and RPGs I've played in years. I found it to be not only an homage to, but an evolution and improvement on blueprint established by the Mother series. It's not a systematically deep RPG with layers of strategy or anything like that. But what it does do is use game systems to tell a well written story with endearing characters full of memorable moments. It also has a soundtrack that leaves a lasting impact almost as big as its characters. Undertale's unique battle system keeps players engaged dodging various projectiles in a bullet-hell like frenzy on defense while giving the player an option of a timing based fighting system, or a non-violent puzzle to resolve combat. Depending on your actions in battle, Undertale adapts acknowledges your actions in the story as well, which gives real weight to the decisions you make in the game. It's such a smart game and I enjoyed every second I played of it. I finished my first playthough in one sitting and am currently halfway through a second. I'll likely play through this a third time as well since there's just so many cool easter eggs and little things to learn about the game's story that you inevitably miss in one single playthrough. All fans of RPGs and good storytelling need to play this game. This was one of my absolute favorites of 2015 so far this year.

The Beginner's Guide

Davey Wreden (Everything Unlimited Ltd.) - 2015 - PC

Davey Wreden, who co-created The Stanley Parable, a game which I absolutely adored for its smart deconstruction and examination of game design, has a new game out. His new game, The Beginner's Guide, seems very similar to The Stanley Parable at first glace. Both fall under the sometimes derogatory genre of "walking simulator". Both begin by dropping the player in a foreign environment with little or no context or introductory story elements. And both have a narrator who serves as the main storyteller and provides some context to what you're doing in the game. And that's about where the similarities end. Players who enjoyed The Stanley Parable's quirky sense of humor should know that The Beginner's Guide has a very different tone and there's not many jokes or things that will make you laugh in the game. It's a more serious and thought provoking experience that invites its players to think analytically not only about the games they play, but the creators that make the games they play. 

The Beginner's Guide begins on a custom Counterstrike map where Davey Wreden, the game's creator, introduces himself as the narrator. He explains that the custom Counterstrike map, and every level other and short game that appears in The Beginner's Guide were all created by a developer named CODA who retired a few years ago from making games. Wreden, who claims he was influenced and inspired by CODA's work has complied many of his short games together into one mega-game - The Beginner's Guide - and has shared them on the internet in order to pique interest in CODA's work and hopefully coax him back into making games.

CODA's levels and games start simple, beginning with a basic custom Counterstrike map and then progress to more thematically complex games that explore conveying emotion through level design and dialogue with NPCs. Wreden accompanies your exploration with narrative commenting on the level design, CODA's design intentions and development process and also continuously elaborates on the nature of the relationship between CODA and himself. The Beginner's Guide is a fascinating game to play if you have any interest at all in game design and it really gets you to think a lot about the design process and the fact that developers themselves are human beings and how their emotional state can affect a game's design and also vice versa. 

The Beginner's Guide Video Review

Summary

The Beginner's Guide is a solid follow-up to The Stanley Parable. Although it's tonally and thematically different, it's still just as interesting as The Stanley Parable and I found it to be even more thought provoking. Check this out if you want to experience a more "mature" version of the Stanley Parable, or to see some really neat level design and emotional storytelling

Five Nights at Freddy's

Scott Cawthon - 2014  - PC/Android/iOS

I don't like jumpscares. At least not the ones in movies, television or games. Strangely, I enjoy events like Universal's Halloween Horror Nights which are entirely predicated jumpscares, but there's at least a high production value and good spooky atmosphere present in the many scare houses and other attractions at the park. And that, to me, is the key. I think jumpscares are at their most effective when a good atmosphere is constructed that makes you a little nervous and on edge. Then just when you least suspect it - BAM! Something pops out and scares you. And that's it, now you've got your audience terrified. It's tempting to keep going back to the well and get more jumpscares over and over, but each subsequent jumpscare loses some effectiveness as they become more frequent and expected - especially in the case of Halloween Horror Nights where something pops out at you every 5 seconds. Which now that I think of it is probably why that event doesn't get to me. But most games/movies/TV shows know how to use jumpscares effectively, which is when I start not to like them. I just don't enjoy being scared that way... Which is why I've been hesitant to play Five Nights at Freddy's for a while. It's a game entirely predicated on jumpscares and it uses them effectively

The premise of this game is that you are a security guard who takes a night shift at a restaurant known as Freddy Fazbear's pizzeria. During your shift, it's revealed that the establishment's mascot animatronics have come to life and of course are trying to murder you. Your job is to last from midnight to 6am which is approximately 8 minutes of real time. In order to complete the game, you have to survive five consecutive nights, hence the name of the game. My question is: after surviving one night and knowing the animatronics are homicidal, why would you ever come back? Anyway, you're instructed that the animatronics only move in the dark when you're not watching them, so you're safe as long as you keep an eye on their locations. Your player is stuck at their guard post so your only defenses are checking security cameras, turning the lights on in the dark hallways adjacent to your guard post and closing the electronic doors, but each of these actions consumes electrical power, of which you have limited supply. If you run out of power, you're totally defenseless and more than likely are going to get jumpscared. This game is particularly effective at using audio, or more specifically the lack thereof, to create atmosphere. It's really unnerving to only hear the quiet humming of the security cameras or the buzzing of the florescent lights while your're waiting for what seems like an inevitable loud and disruptive jumpscare.

Since people love to watch other people get scared, this game got a huge boost in popularity from "let's play" videos on YouTube. This first game in the series was relatively critically and commercially successful and has spawned 3 sequels with an upcoming RPG spinoff as well as a movie adaptation from Warner Brothers pictures coming soon. All of this is a little much for me, especially considering the game came out only a little more than a year ago. Don't get me wrong, I liked the game well enough, but having 3 sequels and a movie deal in less than a year seems a bit excessive, no?

Summary

Five Nights at Freddy's is a game that knows how to use jumpscares effectively. It creates a tense atmosphere and keeps the player busy tracking the locations of multiple homicidal animatronics which pop out to scare the player when least expected. I think it's a good enough game, but this game's relative popularity has always been a little confusing to me... I suppose most other people a good jumpscare a lot more than I do.

BioShock

2K - 2007 - PC/X360/PS3

Wooo!! 100 reviews! I figured it would be appropriate to cap off #100 with the original Bioshock since I started back in 2013 reviewing the same franchise with my very first review of BioShock Infinite. I still don't think I'm a great games critic or reviewer and I still have a lot to work on, but in re-reading my first review from two years ago, I can see how far I've come. In addition to more comprehensive and insightful writing, I've started including video reviews with my posts as well, in case you hadn't noticed. Of course having 100+ reviews and a ton of content introduces a problem of content discovery, which I'm attempting to remedy with new features like my games of the year list and my top 10 lists - both of which I intend to add to and update often, so keep an eye on those. Anyway, enough with the housekeeping, let's get on to talking about Bioshock.

I remember seeing Bioshock for the first time at E3 2006 before it was released later in 2007. It was by far the most interesting game trailer I saw at E3 that year. The underwater city setting, strange combat powers and gruesome violence were so unlike anything I had seen in a game before. When I eventually got my hands on the game it also played unlike anything I had experienced before, having at that time never played its spiritual predecessors, the System Shock games. Bioshock's combination of shooting mechanics, light RPG and puzzle solving elements, and high level of audiovisual presentation were unlike anything else around at that time. I remember being struck by how cinematic and directed the game felt. It felt like a movie. It felt like an amusement park ride where you're barraged by an overwhelming presentation of audiovisual effects that all spring to life as you pass by them. Bioshock's atmosphere was so unique and refreshing and it absolutely captivated me.

Bioshock takes place in the 1960s and follows the story of a man named Jack who, at the beginning of the game survives a plane crash that leaves him swimming in the middle of the ocean. You guide Jack away from the burning plane and to a lighthouse, the only structure visible in the vast ocean other than the flaming, sinking wreckage. Investigating the interior of the lighthouse reveals a bathysphere which takes you deep underwater and eventually reveals the massive underwater city of Rapture, where the remainder of the game takes place. The trip to Rapture is accompanied by a voiceover from a man named Andrew Ryan, who introduces himself as the creator of Rapture and conveys that he built the city as a haven free from external social, political or religious influences. But of course upon entering the city, it's immediately obvious that something has gone very wrong in Ryan's utopia and now masked and bandaged psychotic murderers known as splicers roam the remains of Rapture. You're contacted via radio by a man named Atlas who urges you to assist him in rescuing his family who he claims has been trapped in the bathysphere dock by Ryan. Atlas warns you to be wary of splicers who were previously Rapture's human residents, driven insane from abuse of a drug called ADAM.

When processed, ADAM becomes something called a plasmid, which when injected into a user's bloodstram can rewrite genetic code and grant its users dangerous and powerful new abilities. In addition to traditional firearms and melee weapons, pasmids serve as your main defense against splicers and Rapture's other many dangerous inhabitants. The use of plasmids also rewards players for their environmental awareness. For example, the electro-bolt plasmid is extra effective when targets are standing in water. Similarly, the incinerate plasmid is effective when used on oil spills that can be found throughout Rapture.

Experimentation with Bioshock's many plasmid powers is one of the most rewarding parts about the game. In fact, the game seems to reward experimentation and clever planning in general. For instance, when splicers are hurt, they often seek out a nearby health station to heal themselves. In addition to being used by the player to heal themselves, these health stations can be hacked to yield cheaper healing prices and to damage any enemies that tries to use it for themselves. Or the player can choose to simply destroy the station which yields several consumable first aid kits. Rapture's hostile security robots can be simply destroyed (they're weak vs. electro-bolt or armor-piercing rounds) or they can be hacked to aid the player in battle. There's a multitude of options available to the player on how to dispatch enemies and it's fun and rewarding to experiment with the game's many systems to find a playstyle and strategy that best suits you.

There's also a moral choice element to Bioshock. "Little Sisters" human girls who have been inplanted with a parasite and mentally conditioned to hunt for and gather ADAM are plentiful throughout Rapture. They and their powerful "Big Daddy" protectors are neutral to the player upon encounter, but Big Daddies will go hostile if they or the Little Sister are attacked. Dispatching a Big Daddy leaves the player with a choice: rescuing or harvesting the Little Sisters. Harvesting kills the Little Sister and grants the player a wealth of ADAM which can be used to purchase new plasmids and other useful upgrades. Rescuing the Little Sisters yields very little ADAM and gives few immediate bonuses, but rescuing multiple Little Sisters can unlock powerful plasmids later in the game.

BioShock Video Review:

Summary
Bioshock is a wonderful blend of an immersive and atmospheric environment, a memorable story, and well designed game systems that reward the player for experimentation. While Bioshock's sequels improved on some mechanics, I don't think they ever recaptured the brilliance of the original game and its great blend of atmosphere, story and game mechanics.

Contradiction - Spot the Liar!

Baggy Cat - 2015 - PC/iOS

If you've been reading these reviews for a while now, you've likely realized that I'm a bit of a video game music nerd. I stumbled across this game when I learned that one of my all-time favorite composers, Tim Follin, had returned to the video games industry since "retiring" from it in 2005 after his amazing talents had been wasted on mostly unknown or poorly received games. It was quite to my surprise that Follin was returning to the industry to work on a game not only as a composer, but as a designer and writer as well. So how does a game made by someone with no design experience who's been absent from the industry for 10 years play? It plays about how you'd expect, for better or for worse. It's not all bad though, Contradiction is charming in a unique way that I think can only be accomplished by a first-time designer who, as far as I can tell, has been isolated from the popular design trends, progressions and philosophies that have developed in the last decade or two.

Contradiction is a full FMV murder mystery game straight out of the 90s which I admit would have been way more eye-rolling if I hadn't just played the excellent "Her Story". You play as Fredrick Jenks, a British detective who is tasked with investigating a murder in a small fictional village. All locations in the village are essentially still frames, even though some are animated, and you can move between the frames by clicking on UI arrows displayed on the screen which always triggers a short movie of Jenks strolling to where you guided him. While interviewing suspects, Jenks has a list of topics he can ask about which when selected, loads an an FMV scene where Jenks grills the suspect about whatever you selected which often then reveals more topics to ask about. The main gameplay mechanic in Contradiction is to find pieces of the suspect's story that don't quite add up or are downright contradictions, hence the title. Most of the contradictions are pretty logical, but some are a little more of a stretch or are otherwise debatable. Thankfully, this game is pretty generous with hints and gives them to you in a way that doesn't make you feel stupid or like you're cheating. Jenks can go to the phone booth and call his chief who will generally point you in the correct direction to progress the game or also may hint at contradictions suspects have made.

Follin, whose composing career work dates all the way back to the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum days, also composed the music in Contradiction. It's not quite as in-your-face as some of my other favorites of his like this or this or this. It's more appropriately subtle and blends in perfectly as Jenks traverses the village looking for clues and interviewing suspects. Aside from the music, the extremely cheesy acting is another standout in Contradiction, especially with the actor portraying Jenks who loves to smirk at his suspects with his trademark goofy deductive grin. In fact, Jenks is so excitably overanimated and the acting in general is so cheesy that it makes me wonder if it was an intentional directorial choice or if Follin actually thought his actors were delivering believable performances. In any case, I'm happy about it. The delightfully cheesy acting seems to fit the style of this game perfectly as does the music.

But in addition to the cheesy acting, there are several other strange design choices and signs of low budget production you should be at least aware of before playing this game, especially if that sort of thing bothers you. I've heard this game was riddled with UI problems at launch that have since been corrected, but one holdover is the strange combination of topics Jenks can ask about with the physical items he's carrying into one functional grouping. Your items and your topics appear together, but you can't use a topic like an item and most items you can't bring up in conversation, making this a puzzling design choice. I've also encountered a bug a few times where none of the suspect's answers were selectable as contradictions and I had to leave and re-enter the scene in order to fix it. (Minor spoilers ahead). The budgetary constraints this game was made were apparent in the poor sound quality in the FMV scenes but especially obvious in the ending to this game. The latter half of the game really seems as though its building up to something as the plot starts sprinkling in elements of the occult and mysticism. But it's all thrown away at the last second when the murderer is revealed and the game just ends quickly and unceremoniously - but not before strangely setting itself up for a sequel. I later read that this abrupt ending was apparently due to financial constraints and a sequel would only be possible with enough support of the first game

Summary
It has design problems, bugs, obvious budget problems and wonderfully cheesy acting but I really enjoyed Contradiction in spite of itself. It was a flashback to the old puzzle games I played as a kid. All things considered, Contradiction is a pretty good first attempt at making a game for someone who has no experience doing this sort of thing. At the very least, I'm glad Follin is back doing things in the games industry and I hope he gets the funding and support to make a sequel so we can see what lessons were learned and what improvements can be made

Rock Band 3

Harmonix/Backbone Entertainment - 2010 - X360/PS3/Wii/DS

(On my Top 10 Favorite Games list)

I'm a big fan of the rhythm game genre and in particular the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. Now there hasn't been a release in either of these franchises since 2010. This fact, coupled with the decreasing sales and popularity of these franchises caused many people to speculate that these types of games were "dead". Then out of the blue, Harmonix announced Rock Band 4 and Activision followed suit with an announcement of Guitar Hero Live. Obviously neither of these franchises are dead (at least at the time of writing) and both have new games launching in the coming weeks, but I do think there are a few reasons we haven't heard from these games in five years. First and probably foremost was oversaturation. If you include the DJ Hero games and the various portable releases from each franchise, Harmonix and Activision combined to release thirty five Rock Band and Guitar Hero titles between 2005 and 2010. I'm serious. Check Wikipedia. The American economic downturn that occurred at the end of last decade certainly didn't do any good to either of these franchises that require players to buy relatively expensive accessories. Plus I think some players decided they didn't want to have ridiculous Fisher Price-looking plastic instruments cluttering their living space anymore. I think that last point still holds true in 2015, but there obviously hasn't been any oversaturation in a while and the U.S. economy is doing better which is why I think we're now seeing releases from these franchises. So what do I want to see from either Rock Band 4 or Guitar Hero Live? Let's take a dive into one of my all-time favorite rhythm games, Rock Band 3, and examine some of the things I think it does well and some of the things it does not so well.

Let's get the bad things with Rock Band 3 out of the way first. The game has obsession with realism and wanting the player to learn real instruments. This is fine when done well, and a game like Rocksmith really shows how this concept can be pulled off successfully. But Rockband 3's execution of this was way too complicated. Rock Band 3 introduced "Pro Mode" for guitar, drums, and its new keyboard accessory. Mad Catz partnered with Harmonix to sell a "pro guitar" with 102 plastic buttons. There wasn't really a great tutorial for this instrument, and the strange chord notation was almost impossible to interpret at the speed Rock Band throws notes at you. Especially for someone who has no actual experience playing guitar (me). This was the same problem with the "pro keyboard" which expected the player to play a 25 button mini-keyboard at full song speed. I actually liked the "pro drums", which added 3 cymbals to Rock Band's normal drumkit of 4 pads. I found it to be a welcomed challenge as opposed to an impossible one. But aside from the drums, I think the whole "pro mode" experiment was a failure, especially when you consider that none of the older DLC or other imported songs supported the pro guitar, and most didn't support the keyboard at all. They strangely did however, support pro drums. My speculation is that the songs were always encoded to differentiate between cymbals and drums, even though the original drum kits only had 4 pads. I think Harmonix has recognized this failure and has removed support for pro instruments and the keyboard peripheral entirely for Rock Band 4 although they will continue to support pro drums. 

The most awesome thing about Rock Band 3 is the massive library of DLC songs you have access to. If you include importable tracks from previous entries in the series, the total of playable songs is upwards of 4,000 which is pretty awesome especially assuming Harmonix makes this library available again for Rock Band 4. You can be practically guaranteed to find something you'll like when browsing the online store. Rock Band 3 also introduces vocal harmonies, allowing there to be more than one vocalist, provided you have more than one microphone. Tracks that support vocal harmonies will show separate vocal tracks with separate lyrics for each singer. Another new feature is the ability for players to drop in and out of songs on the fly without restarting a track. This, combined with the ability to make song playlists and enable "no-fail mode" made it very accessible as a casual party game. Rock Band 3 also features an expanded career mode and a more in depth character creator. All of these features combine to make Rock Band 3 a very full featured and well polished game

Rock Band 3 Video Review

Summary

Despite it's faults and it's misguided attempt to integrate playing "real" instruments, Rock Band 3 is still the most fun I've had playing rhythm party game. I've actually already played a pre-release build of Rock Band 4 at Pax and I think it captures all of the great things that Rock Band 3 did well. If people are willing to dust off their plastic instruments and hook them up to their next-gen consoles, I think Rock Band 4 should do just fine. I probably won't buy it initially as I don't even own a next-gen console yet, but I'm glad these franchises have been resurrected and I'm looking forward to eventually playing more fake plastic instruments.

Final Fantasy IX

Squaresoft - 2000 - PS1

(On my Top 10 Favorite Games list)

(On my Top 10 Game Soundtracks list)

See Also My Top 10 Final Fantasy Games List

After the more modern/sci-fi settings used in FF 6-8, Final Fantasy IX is a return to the series roots. It takes place in the world of Gaia, a world full of knights, mages, magic, and other traditional high fantasy. The story initially follows Zidane, who is a member of a band of thieves who is charged with kidnapping the princess Garnet of Alexandria kingdom. In a twist, Garnet is actually looking a discreet transport from Alexandria and consents to the kidnapping as it fits her own agenda. They are joined by Vivi, a young child black mage who is also accidentally kidnapped and knight captain Steiner who is Garnet's royal bodyguard and is loyal to his kingdom to a fault. The four are eventually joined by other party members and are swept up in adventure, conflict and conspiracy as tends to happen in Final Fantasy games. Also in continuing with trends in other Final Fantasy games, the plot does sort of take a dive off of the deep end at around disc 3 or so. Without getting too spoiler-y, the traditional fantasy setting does get strangely thrown out the window at some point, but the game is still worth playing if you appreciate good writing.

What sets this game apart from other Final Fantasy titles for me, aside from its setting, is its well written characters. Now those of you who have played other Final Fantasy games may be rolling your eyes at "well written characters", but I think it really applies to FFIX in a way that no other FF game before or since has achieved. The characters in FFIX aren't the flat, one-dimensional stereotypes of characters that are found in most JRPGs. There's also none of (or very little of) the angsty JRPG melodrama found in the rest of the series. The characters in FFIX are more subtle and nuanced which speaks volumes for not only the writers but the translation and localization process this game had to undergo. This game even has humor. Like legitimate, actual, intentional humor. And it works. Usually when humorous dialogue is written in a Final Fantasy game, it's facepalm material. It's funny, but for all the wrong reasons. FFIX gets it right in a way that really endears all of its characters to the player.

The battle system is... well... it's just fine. There's nothing really wrong with it. But there's also nothing really right with it either. There's nothing too broken like FFVIII, but also nothing that really sticks out and grabs your attention to make you want to keep playing just one more battle like FFVII. It's pretty straightforward and standard for a Final Fantasy game. It's pseudo turn based with the ATB introduced in previous games and your characters fit into pre-defined roles of black mage, white mage, summoner, knight, thief etc. Just about the only thing noteworthy is that all abilities you learn throughout the game are learned from using a specific weapon a certain number of times in battle. For instance, if you want to learn the "fire" spell, you have to equip Vivi with the "Fire Staff" or whatever it's called. This creates a sort of interesting dynamic where the weapons and armor you have equipped for your party may not always be the "best" speaking strictly statistically. There's also the new "limit break" system called trance, where your character becomes more powerful and gets access to new abilities, but this triggers pretty much just randomly and always seems to happen when you're in a random, easily winnable battle and never against a boss when you really need it. So yeah, the battle system is... just fine I guess.

What's way better than "just fine" and another notable reason to check out this game is another superb, phenomenal, varied and otherwise spectacular soundtrack composed by Uematsu. I think Uematsu has gone on record saying this was his favorite soundtrack he composed. It's not necessarily my favorite as a whole, but picking a favorite Uematsu soundtrack is like trying to pick a favorite burger off of the menu at Red Robin. I love them all. Standouts are the "Battle Theme", "Stirring in the Forest", "Crossing Those Hills", "Border Village Dali" and "Hunter's Chance" but the whole soundtrack is really a standout as tends to be the case with Nobou Uematsu.

Final Fantasy IX Video Review

Summary
It may not have the best battle system and the plot gets a little weird about halfway through, but FFIX is still worth checking out if you like a well written story with well defined characters. The writing and soundtrack are enough to carry you through when the battle system is being dull and the story is getting weird. This game really is pretty charming once you get invested in it and it's become one of my favorites in the Final Fantasy series and just in general

80 Days

Inkle - 2014 - Andriod/iOS

I've returned from my very first Pax Prime and it was amazing. I demoed Dark Souls 3, Final Fantasy XV, Mario Maker, Rock Band 4 and played many other indie games and met some of their developers. It was a really cool convention and I'd recommend it to anyone who's really interested in games as long as you don't mind long lines. One of the things I did to pass the time in these long lines, plane trips and other downtime was download and play a game called 80 Days.

80 Days is a game that re-imagines Jules Verne's classic 1873 novel "Around the World in 80 Days" as a choose your own adventure style video game. For those unfamiliar with the novel, the book tells the story of an Englishman named Phileas Fogg who makes a wager to the tune of 20,000 pounds that he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. In the game, you play the role of Phileas Fogg's valet, Passepartout, and you manage finances and make decisions on how to plot your route around the globe. The setting still takes place in the 1870s, but now everything is steampunk for some reason. It was kind of an odd creative choice to rewrite the world this way. It didn't do anything for me, but then again I've never understood the appeal of steampunk.

From a gameplay standpoint, this game is sort of like a cross between the Oregon Trail and maybe FTL, but it's more narrative focused than either of those games. It's really more of an interactive novel and it never really gets too "gamey". Most of your interaction will come through picking your character's dialogue from a few choices. It's probably the largest, most involved example of a choose your own adventure book. You can pick your destinations from a map kind of FTL style, but you have to weigh the pros and cons of each decision. Each route has a monetary cost, a time cost, and a "comfortability" cost. In addition to managing finances, you also have to keep an eye on Fogg's health which may start to decrease if you take wearisome routes, or don't stop to rest enough. You can also chat up strangers in each town which may unlock new routes or faster/cheaper routes on your map. Some conversations may even extend the narrative in a surprising way. Events in the game occur randomly as well, so each playthough is guaranteed to be different, even if you take the same routes through the same cities. This is perhaps 80 Days' most interesting feature, as it grants this game a high amount of replayability.

I can remember reading the novel in middle school, I think, and little bits and pieces of it came back to me as I was playing through the game. Most of the story is entirely new, and totally random and also based on the decisions you make, but there are lots of little winks and nods to the novel like the characters being very aware that traveling eastward with the sun vs. westward against the sun will gain them extra time (Spoiler alert for a 150 year old novel). It's a fairly well written game, which is good because there really isn't too much else about this game. The "gamey" parts of 80 Days feel somewhat ancillary to the story; they exist in more of a supporting role. The spotlight of 80 Days is on the story, not the gameplay

80 Days is a well written interactive novel, but it's a game that expects its players to draw enjoyment from its plot, so you might not care for this game if you come into it expecting a strong gameplay hook. At the very least, it's an interesting example of the concept of a choose your own adventure book taken to its absolute farthest point. I personally accomplished my journey around the globe in 68 days, easily winning Fogg's wager with ample time to spare. Check this game out if you'd like to experience your own version of Jules Verne's classic novel.

Dear Esther

The Chinese Room - 2012 (2008 Original) - PC

I've played a few of the games that are sometimes referred to dismissively as "walking simulators" by some. Journey and Proteus totally didn't connect with me while Gone Home came close. I thought The Stanley Parable was absolutely brilliant. Dear Esther, which probably can be credited with popularizing this genre, is no Stanley Parable but it did resonate more strongly with me than most of the other similar games I've played that fall into this grouping.

Dear Esther is a game about exploration. You explore an island by yourself and are occasionally accompanied by voiceover dialogue that elaborates on bits of the story. The story that is presented in the voiceovers is somewhat vague, and I'm pretty sure that was an intentional design decision. I later found out that on subsequent replays of Dear Ester, the bits of dialogue that play are actually randomly chosen, so you might hear one voiceover on one given playthough, but not on the next. Or vice versa. I'm okay with this decision to deliberately obfuscate the story, because I think you can piece together enough information from whatever dialogue is randomly chosen and combine that with the knowledge you gain by observing and exploring to come up with the gist of the story, even if some of its details are fuzzy. It's a game I found narratively similar to Dark Souls, of all games. While there may or may not be an absolute truth to Dear Esther's story, I found myself filling in the deliberate vagaries of the story with my own imagination, similar to what I had done in Dark Souls.

Dear Esther got its start in 2008 as a Half Life 2 mod, and was later re-released as a standalone game in 2012. I played the 2012 remake and found the audiovisuals to be top notch. Both hearing and seeing the wind rustling through the grass and the waves crashing on the shore really helped immerse me in this world in a way that none of the other "walking simulators" had done previously. I let my mind wander with the strange details of the story and tried to piece it together while simultaneously drinking in the high fidelity audiovisual presentation

Dear Esther Video Review

Summary
"Walking Simulators" are a pretty niche appeal. I think this game does it right though. High quality graphics and an interesting story were enough to keep me engaged throughout the experience, though I can definitely see those not used to this sort of thing finding it boring, or the vagueness of its story frustrating. It's definitely not one of my favorite games ever, but it's a neat experience if you're up for something different

Lethal League

Team Reptile - 2014 - PC

Lethal League is what would happen if you crossed baseball and dodgeball and then sprinkled in a little bit of Super Smash Bros. Sound crazy? It is a little bit. Allow me to elaborate: The point of Lethal League is to hit the opposing player(s) with the ball without getting hit yourself. The ball starts off slowly, then gains speed through continuous hits and bouncing off of the walls like in Pong or Arkanoid. You can alter the trajectory of your hits by holding the corresponding direction on the joystick when you hit the ball. You can greatly accelerate the ball's speed by jumping in the air and performing a "slam" which rockets the ball back down to the ground. Each of the 6 playable characters in the game have special traits and abilities that can alter the ball's velocity, timing or trajectory to fake out opposing players. The game can be played 1 vs. 1, 2 vs. 2 or free for all style, similar to Smash Bros.

This game also reminds me somewhat of Divekick. The game is very accessible, fun and easy to pick up and play, but I'm a little skeptical about it's long term playerbase retention. I confess I haven't played too much of this game, but I'm suspicious that Lethal League may not have the mechanical depth to keep players coming back for more. Even if it may be somewhat lacking in staying power, Lethal League is still a fun and fast-paced game to pick up and compete with friends or strangers online.

Also of note is the game's awesome soundtrack which falls musically somewhere between Hotline Miami and Jet Set Radio. Like Hotline Miami, the soundtrack is a compilation from several artists that still manages to have a unified sound. Of note is "Scream" by Bignic, "Ordinary Days" by Klaus Veen and "Urabon" by Grillo. I know I've said this before, but I love when game soundtracks have a unique sound like this. Not enough games do that.

Lethal League Video Review

Summary
Lethal League is a fun, fast-paced and accessible spin on the fighting game genre. I'm a little skeptical about this game's lasting depth, but you should play it yourself to decide where this falls on the scale between novelty and legitimate deep competition. At least I hope you'll be able to agree it has an awesome soundtrack

Her Story

Sam Barlow - 2015 - Mobile/PC

Her Story is a very unusual in that it's a full motion video game that was released in 2015. Don't worry, the FMV aspect of this game works really well, it's totally not cheesy and the actress in the game does a fairly decent job selling her performance. After you complete this game, it's hard to imagine Her Story not being a FMV game, I'm not sure it would have worked any other way. Her Story was made independently by Sam Barlow, who was previously the writer and designer of both Silent Hill Origins and Silent Hill Shattered Memories. This game, if you can even call it a game, shares a lot of the interesting ideas and creativity found in those Silent Hill titles

The premise of Her Story is that you are digging through a corrupted database of video interviews from a murder case in the early nineties. The database has been corrupted and fragmented, so you can't watch the interview clips in chronological order, but each video clip has been completely text transcribed, so you can search each clip by any word that occurs in the clip. So for instance, if you search "murder", all of the video clips that contain the word "murder" are returned to you. The other catch is that you can only see the first 5 results that are returned to you, so you'll quickly learn to be clever with your searches. 

The story opens up pretty quickly, giving you some names of important characters or important events to search, but the interesting thing here is that the story is presented totally non-linearly. Somehow though, through that I'm sure was many hours of playtesting and clever organization of what words occur in what clips, the story seems to unfold in just the right way, even if you watch the clips out of order. There's many cool twists and turns in the plot and figuring out whodunnit, how they did it and why they did it is really interesting and rewarding. There's no central gameplay mechanics here, only tracking the mystery in your head and coming up with terms to search then watching the video clips. So if you're looking for a gamey game, Her Story probably won't be your thing. But if you like a clever murder mystery presented in an unconventional fashion, you should totally check this game out

Her Story Video Review:

Summary

I really enjoyed Her Story, it was one of those experiences that keeps you thinking about it long after it's over. The story and its twists are clever and I enjoyed the unconventional presentation. If searching and watching video clips doesn't sound fun to you, you may want to steer clear of Her Story. But if you can let yourself get engrossed in the story and sorting out its mysteries, you'll have a fun time with this game

Dark Souls

FromSoftware - 2011 - PS3/PC/X360

I did it! Praise the sun! I've finished Dark Souls! Good Lord this game is mercilessly difficult. And also one of the best designed games I've ever played. If you've heard people tell you how good this game is, it's true. It's also no exaggeration how difficult this game is, so this is definitely not a game for everyone. I think if you're an seasoned gamer who's up for a challenge and you approach this game with patience and an open mind, you'll be able to discover the fun in building your character, experimenting with the game's systems, exploring the masterfully designed levels and discovering this game's hidden lore.

This game simultaneously does the best and worst job teaching mechanics I've seen in a video game recently.The Northern Undead Asylum where you begin the game serves as the game's tutorial. It teaches you how to move your character, to read messages on the floor, and that shiny things and bonfires are good. It teaches you how to defend with a shield by forcing you to walk down a narrow corridor with a guy on the far end shooting arrows at you. The only way you'll make it is learning to use the shield. It then throws a fairly difficult boss at you, teaching you that Dark Souls will be hard and that running away is a valid option and is sometimes the best one. You eventually have to kill the boss to complete the tutorial, but if you manage to scramble across the boss room before he kills you, a better weapon can be found and the game also gives you some hints for dealing more damage. The tutorial also teaches you what is probably Dark Souls' most important lesson which is that you cannot hack and slash your way through this game. You must pay attention to enemy attack animations, learn their tells, and understand when it's safe to attack them. It's an excellent tutorial for the game and teaches you all of Dark Souls' basic mechanics... but it doesn't address or teach its more complex mechanics at all. It's also easy to be overwhelmed by the spreadsheet of statistics presented to you on the player stats page, which isn't explained in detail. Dark Souls is a game that expects its players to learn its more complicated systems by experimentation or trial and error. Or just google everything, which is probably what most people do.

After completing the tutorial level, Dark Souls opens up quite a bit and becomes very non-linear for the rest of the game. You can take any path in any order you want, some paths are easier and intended to be taken first, some paths are harder and intended to be done later in the game, and some paths are completely optional and never required to finish the game. But you don't know which paths are which until you take them. Trial and error is another one of the design themes found throughout Dark Souls. Yes, it's frustrating at times, but the joy of exploring and discovering new paths or new secrets offsets the frustration of accidentally taking a path intended for later in the game and getting your butt kicked.

You can level up your character by spending the souls of the enemies you killed on upgrades while at a bonfire. If you die, you lose all of your accumulated souls, so you're encouraged to spend them often. Mercifully, if you can make it back to where you died, you can recover your lost souls, but dying twice in a row without recovery will see your unspent souls lost forever. It creates a sort of system where even when you're dying over and over again, you feel like you're making progress both through leveling up, and also by learning from deaths, memorizing enemy patterns and remembering level layouts. Progress in Dark Souls can be marked by killing bosses or discovering shortcuts that lead back to previously explored areas in the game, giving the game a bit of a metroidvania feel. You'll find that a lot of the weapons and armor in Dark Souls are not really statistically better or worse, just different. Some weapons may have comparable stats, but differing swing arcs or varying ranges. It's not so much a matter of finding the best weapons and armor in Dark Souls, but finding the ones that best suit your playstyle

There's also an ever-present multiplayer component to Dark Souls. You basically always play the game online, seeing ghostly glimpses of other players and reading the sometimes helpful, sometimes trolling messages left by them. You can also optionally opt-in to a cooperative multiplayer component to get assistance from another player to take down a difficult boss. The thing is, when you opt-in to the cooperative multiplayer, it also makes you susceptible to hostile PvP invasions from other players. It's a really cool mechanical tradeoff and another really smart design decision

The story of Dark Souls is communicated very unconventionally. Often NPCs will reveal very little about themselves or the world around them, so most of the narrative is communicated through environmental storytelling and also reading the item descriptions on new things you pick up. Don't be mistaken, there really is a lot of lore in Dark Souls, it's just hard to find and it's very open ended. The story purposely poses a lot of interesting unanswered questions and leaves it up to the player to fill in the gaps with their own imagination and interpretation of what happened.

Dark Souls Video Review

Summary
Dark Souls is probably the hardest game I've completed. It's also one of the best designed games I've played recently. If you can approach this game with a certain amount of patience and endurance, you'll really enjoy it. The feeling of finally killing that boss you've been stuck on is a feeling of reward that is unmatched in any other game. Even the little rewarding moments of finding a new weapon, or discovering a new shortcut or learning something new about the game's mechanics you didn't know before feels awesome. It's not for everyone, but the people who it IS for will find Dark Souls very enjoyable.

Final Fantasy VIII

Squaresoft - 1999 - PC/PS1

(On my Top 10 Game Soundtracks list)

See Also My Top 10 Final Fantasy Games List

Part of why I think this game gets so much hate, even from me, is that it came on the heels of Final Fantasy 7, of of the best selling and most well loved RPGs of all time. Final Fantasy 7 had a brilliant and customizable battle system, an engaging story with interesting characters and an awesome soundtrack. Final Fantasy 8 has... an awesome soundtrack, at least. To be fair, the story is pretty interesting all the way through the end of disc 1, but then things get so weird and hard to follow and major plot points are added and removed on a whim, as though the game has ADD and can't decide on what kind of story it wants to tell you. But the battle system is...oh god it's a total trainwreck.

So one of the many flaws of this game's battle system is its "junction" system. In FF8, magic spells are treated as a consumable item. Kind of a weird choice, but I don't have a problem with that necessarily. What I DO have a problem with is that spells are a consumable item AND the game allows you to "junction" them to your character to improve their stats. The better the spell, the more the stat increase. If you follow this chain of logic, you'll realize that if you have a high level spell junctioned to your character and you cast that spell, your character's stats will actually decrease. So then what's the point of casting magic? There is none in a normal playthrough, especially when you consider that your summon monsters, called GFs in this game, can be called upon to essentially cast any magic spells you'd want anyway, provided you don't mind watching a 45 second cutscene of the GF appearing EVERY FREAKIN' TIME. There's lots of odd decisions like this that slow the battles down in FF8 and make them tedious. Even the way you get magic is a chore. You can "draw" spells from an enemy, but depending on a few factors the game doesn't really explain, you'll only typically get around 3-6 spells per draw. Which means you have to sit in a battle and farm draw for quite a long time if you want to get up to the maximum of 100. But really the most broken thing about this game is when you discover you can manipulate limit breaks. Your character's chance of limit breaks are actually random in this game, another odd choice. The less health you have, the higher the chance of the limit break. But if you cycle your turn order, you can keep re-rolling the calculation that determines your limit break, essentially letting you limit break whenever you want. Totally. Broken.

Now that I'm done ranting about the battle system, on to the story (mild spoilers in this paragraph). It really does seem like it's gonna go somewhere for the first, maybe quarter or third of the game. But then we hit a point after disc 1 where the narrative has an identity crisis and starts grasping at different ideas and concepts and inserts them randomly into the story which results in a totally insane mish-mash of disconnected themes and gaping plot holes. I know Final Fantasy is a universe where characters get shot, sliced and burned in every battle, but the first huge narrative red flag is when one of the main characters is freakin' impaled through the heart with a giant icicle during a cutscene... and then is totally okay in the next scene. Like the game barely even acknowledges that it took place. Come on Final Fantasy 8! If you're not gonna take your story seriously then I can't either. 

The artwork and music are the huge redeeming factors of this game. FF8 features some of the most gorgeous hand-drawn backdrops in any RPG I've seen. And this might be controversial, but I think FF8 is Uematsu's best work. At the very least it's my favorite of his work. The relaxing "Breezy", the entrancing "Find Your Way", the mysterious "Under Her Control" and the nostalgic "Fisherman's Horizon" highlight the soundtrack. And of course "Man With the Machine Gun" does its best to keep the mindlessly tedious and broken battles from being too much of a nuisance.

Summary

This is far from the best Final Fantasy, and misses the mark on battle system design and storytelling. At best it's an average-ish RPG with a trippy story, some awesome music and inspiring artwork. Still there is something sort of intangibly alluring about playing this game. I must admit I've replayed this trainwreck at least 3 times now.

Mario Kart 8

Nintendo - 2014 - WiiU

I haven't quite figured out the difference between Nintendo and Activision. Why is it that Nintendo can continue remaking the same games over and over again and garner praise and fan worship while Activision is demonized for doing the same thing while running its franchises into the ground? (See Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Call of Duty). Is it the amount of effort/quality put in to each sequel? Is it the time between releases? Like it or hate it, I think Nintendo has perfected the art of iterative remakes and have applied their remaking expertise on the latest Mario Kart

So what's new in Mario Kart 8? It's the first Mario Kart game in true HD, and it looks very pretty. The new instant replay feature is a nice addition, but the touted hover-karts are mostly a gimmick with no really interesting affects on gameplay. If you include DLC, MK8 boasts the highest number of playable characters and the highest number of courses in any Mario Kart game. Priced reasonably at $7.99, the MK8 DLC pack includes 3 new characters. 4 new vehicles and 8 new tracks. The MK8 DLC is nice, high quality DLC done the right way. There's also the free 200cc DLC which unlocks mirror mode and the uncomfortably fast 200cc mode for those who enjoy an extra challenge.

Kart customization plays a big role in MK8. When selecting your vehicle, you must pick a body type,  a size (small, med, large), a set of tires, and a glider. All of these decisions have an effect on your kart's stats which can be viewed by pressing the start button while customizing your vehicle. I've found that having a good kart build that comfortably suits your playstyle can determine your success in MK8.

So I'm a big fan of Mario Kart 64 and its battle mode in particular. I think most Mario Kart fans would agree that Nintendo hasn't come close to reproducing the brilliance of the MK64 battle mode in any Mario Kart title since, and Mario Kart 8 is no exception. The implementation seems especially lazy in MK 8. They've just copy/pasted some courses verbatim from the racing mode and send some players forward and some players backward on the track which gives a sort of jousting with items feel. Except the courses are WAY too big to make it exciting. When you do finally find an opponent, you just sort of circle around the items and hope you get something good to finish them off. It just doesn't feel right at all. It doesn't have that "thrill of the hunt" feel that is given by the MK 64 tracks that were tailor made for battle mode like Block Fort or Double Deck. MK 8 battle mode is one of those things you try with your friends and then go "eehhh, let's never do that again".

Mario Kart 8 Video Review

Summary
Mario Kart 8 has the biggest roster of playable characters, the largest selection of tracks and is the prettiest looking Mario Kart game yet. The DLC is reasonably priced and packs a lot of bang for the buck. It's a shame the battle mode is total garbage. If Nintendo released a proper battle mode DLC pack, I would buy it in a heartbeat and Mario Kart 8 would likely replace Mario Kart 64 as my all time favorite Mario Kart game.