Gurnett

Given a lot of the other reviews I've read for this game, I wasn't expecting anything too great out of it, and my expectation were met. The graphics look like this game was a PS2 remaster, the dialogue is wooden and irritating. I kept searching for ways to skip the dialogue and was saddened that I couldn't. "BUT, the important part is the puzzles," I tell myself. Well, the first few puzzles provided an OK challenge. I was willing to look past a lot of problems with this game because I love puzzle games. Once I got more than 45 minutes into the game, the puzzles were simple and provided no challenge. I was hoping I could recommend this game, but I can't. If you have younger-ish children, this might provide a good challenge. Otherwise, skip this one and just replay one of the Uncharted games.

I was really looking forward to playing Lumo, so I rented it through Gamefly. 20 minutes into my first playthrough, I was told that I couldn't save because my save data was corrupt. I tried closing the game. It wouldn't work. I had to do a restart to close it. Then, I couldn't sign in to PSN. I erased my save data, hoping that would remedy the problem. About an hour into my 2nd playthrough, the same thing happened; corrupted data... and PSN still wasn't working properly. So, I gave up. As soon as I deleted the game from my system and rebooted, PSN started working again. This game really screwed up my system.

Despite awful reviews, I still bought this game. I'm an older-ish gamer (34) and I miss simple sports games, like MLB Baseball or Bases Loaded on the NES, and Baseball Simulator 1.000 on the SNES. This looked like a fun update of a nearly extinct genre. The game itself plays pretty well. And games are surprisingly fun. HOWEVER, I bought this game for two reasons: 1) It has a season mode. 2) It tracks statistics. Except it doesn't. The statistics tracker is completely messed up. Pitchers have gotten credit for wins in games they didn't even play in. Hitters get credited for home runs they've never hit. I beat a team 4 to 0, and one of their players *still* got credit for a home run. Seeing 1 home run and 0 RBI is the weirdest stat line humanly possible. I reached out to the company that makes the game on Facebook. They asked what the problem was, I explained it, and then they ignored me. I am never going to buy another RBI Baseball again. I wasn't asking much of this game. I just wanted 2 features. But I guess that was asking for too much. How can a game that tries to calls itself a baseball simulator not even get the basics right?

First off, let me start by saying that I LOVE Mario. I've played every 2D Mario game that has been released (including spin-offs like the Yoshi and Princess games). All that said, this might be my least favorite of every Mario game I've ever played. Is it fun? Sure. It's always fun looking for secret stuff and killing goombas. But it does everything else wrong. Collecting coins is usually fun, but when you're bombarded with them at every corner (I had levels where I had up to 600 coins on one run), it kind of saps the fun out of it. It's not fun if you're going to give it to me with no challenge; which brings me to the difficulty. This was EASILY the easiest Mario game I've ever played. I blasted through it in less than 6 hours, and finished with 184 lives. I may have had 2 or 3 levels that slowed me down, but none of the rest of it was cake. It gets a 6 because it's always fun being Mario, even if it was super easy. The graphics were nice and the sound was good. There's just no challenge behind it.

When I first started playing Rogue Legacy, I thought to myself that it wouldn't be good for more than 15 minutes at a time, and maybe it was better suited as an iOS game. Then I started getting into it. Then 2 1/2 hours flew by, and I was still playing. It's addictive gameplay, challenging you to get further and further each successive trip. If you like old-school Castlevania games, this feels like the genre perfected. The little bits of character added to the game, mostly in the form each successive heroes traits (I found the colorblind characters' black-and-white too be a bit distracting, while the characters with IBS made me giggle), is fun and breaks up some of the tedium. It took me 22 1/2 hours (and 204 deaths) to be the game, and I plan to go right back in with New Game +. For $16, it seems like a steal. One of the best games I've played in 2014, right up there Zelda: Link Between Worlds and Child of Light. As a note, this game is a grind. Lots of deaths, lots of leveling up, and sometimes you get the feeling that you aren't getting anywhere. If you don't want to grind levels to get your hero stronger, you may want to look elsewhere for you gaming needs.

This is an interesting look into Ellie's backstory, but there is too much down time between big events. It's can be slow and plodding at times. Then, when it does pick up, you end getting nonsense like a super-soaker fight between teen girls. I LOVE the Last of Us, and I'm happy I played it for the backstory, but $15 for less than 2 1/2 hours of gameplay feels like robbery. This DLC needs more of what made TLoU great. It was an OK experience, but there definitely isn't anything memorable about it. It needs more tense moments, more big twists, more anything.

I came into this game expecting more of an old-school gaming experience, and I stumbled into something very different. This is a 3rd person action/platformer. Any connection to Pac-Man appears to just be tacked on. It's like someone made a kid's game and decided that, to increase the appeal of the game, he should use Pac-Man. That being said, it's a very competent platformer. There's a decent share of cheap deaths, and sometimes the cameras and controls can be a bothersome, but it's actually pretty fun. It's certainly not as good as Psychonauts, but a lot of the gameplay felt similar. I wouldn't recommend spending $40 on it, but if you can get it for $20, there are certainly worse ways to spend your afternoon.