awholenother

i'd say this just about fills the need -- the need for need for speed..................................................................................

this game has a scary hold on me. if you are a hater, i hope you will read this as something informative. it is absolutely a mistake to pass on this game due to some notion that you are on the other team -- don't be dumb. so, last night i had read about a better way to manage my food inventory. for the first time in 2 weeks, i wasn't really feeling like playing, but i went in with just the idea of collecting some fruit and roasting it. and then it started. i warped to one of two areas on the map i had not revealed the map to, where i had previously failed to find some important location of the game. i got a horse from the stable and rode it. eventually i found the orange glow of a shrine and followed it. as i got close, i saw that shrine was right next to another stable. a guy at the stable invited me to try to break his record time in a horse obstacle course. i tried that about ten times and gave up. there was a girl at the stable, and she gave me the information i had been looking for -- she pointed me to that important location i had failed to find before. so let me try to convey to you a common feeling throughout this game: there i was, and the obvious thing to do was to just get in the shrine, but somehow something even more awesome had been thrown at me. i was torn, and decided to go to the important location. unexpectedly, there was a guardian along the way, so suddently i had to run with this laser pointed at me. whew, arrived at the location. there they told me i'd get something cool if i could bring the blue light from a hill all the way to the furnace outside. as i said, i still didn't have the map to the region, so i couldn't just look up the hill. i climbed the location, and sure enough from up there i could see the tower for the region. time to glide to it. along the way there was a third stable, and someone gave me a quest that it turns out i had already done, so that got checked off the list. got one of my three horses from the stable and rode the rest of the way. arrived close to the tower. some powerful enemies around, so i was careful. but, since i had beaten one of the divine beasts, i had a power-up that makes climbing so fast that enemies can't even aim their lasers. so, at last, map unlocked. so now i knew where the hill was. rode to it, found the blue light. now here is how messed up this quest is. you need to carry the lit torch to the important location. but anything you do will extinguish the flame -- running, gliding, riding the horse, drawing the bow, drawing any melee weapon other than the torch, breaking the torch by beating monsters with it, and even accidentally walking somewhere a little too steep, because you automatically start climbing with your hands. so what you have to do is walk from one place to the other through a path littered with monsters. but then i realized there were lamps along the way. you can light them with the blue light, then draw a sword, kill the monsters around you, then draw the torch, light it and move on. so not that impossible, but exhilarating. the last enemy in your path is that guardian from before, and you have to dodge the laser without running. phew, awesome. i made it. so finally i go back to the first stable and solve that shrine. then i say, **** it, let's try to locate a memory by just looking at the picture. meaning i would recognize a landmark from a picture and try to find the exact point on the enormous map where one would have that exact view of that landmark. that was a very interesting process, and something i had never done before. i tried to line things up; i knew, by how much my view was off, that there should be a lake to the left with an island in the middle. looked at the map, and there it was. glided to it. landed on the island, where a ****ing rock formation woke up to reveal it was a rock monster. not in the mood for that **** so i swam fast and found the shiny place on the shore. was rewarded with a nice cut scene with overacting princess zelda. so that was 7 hours after i just sat down to sort my food inventory. i never, ever do this with games. i'm 80 hours in and feel like i've done maybe 30% of the content i intend to do. 70 shrines and 80% of dungeons left to go.

no idea of how the frame rate is supposed to be ruining my experience. everybody is just online way too much nowadays and finding the dumbest things to argue about. this is obviously a magical game -- that's very clear within five minutes of stepping into its world.

I'm a brand-new fan of pikmin. i gotta tell, you, man. i understand it if you want to look at the number of games on other platforms and decide to go for them. i also understand it if you just like shooters -- i simply don't, and i'm including splatoon here. i have a ps3 where i can currently get digital games for one-fifth of the price of a virtual console game, and yet the thing just sits there. there is the current narrative that nintendo has lost its touch, but i honestly want to convince you that that's a lie told by outsiders. pikmin looked just as baffling to me a few months ago as it probably looks to you. and then i just got it. wow. it's rare for me to play long sessions of anything. on the ps3 i think i got obsessed with two games in total -- stick of truth and portal 2. but, without me noticing, this week i have spent 9 hours on this game. i suppose you'd call this a puzzle game -- one where each stage is an innocent-looking sprawling network of connected complexity, with objectives that lead into more objectives, with different captains that you switch between, using creatures with different skills to throw them at different problems in different quantities, splitting your army into two or three pieces to tackle problems at once from different places, so that everybody together solves the massive puzzle that is the level. things feel like real triumphs of team work -- it is quite the rare thing for a video game to pull off. even if you're thinking of some co-op game that does this greatly as well, i think you would love feeling it in this particular way that pikmin offers. after a certain point i had beaten the first boss, and in the process i had learned some of the game. then i realized i had lost my rock pikmin (creatures you can throw at glass to break it, and so on). so i decided to restart the game and do it over with my new knowledge. on exploration day 5 there was something i wasn't getting quite right, so i did that day three times over. by the way, i've never seen a game justify the wiimote and nunchuk quite like this. you use the pointer to throw pikmin as you run around with the analog. meanwhile, exclusive to this third installment is the gamepad, which sits on the arm of my couch giving me a map to just look at while moving, instead of pausing. if you're a pc gamer, maybe you will be tempted to emulate this, but trust me -- you will be missing out on the magic. maybe you can hook up your pc to a tv and get a wiimote to work with it, and have an android tablet work as the gamepad, but seriously -- at that point i don't see why you wouldn't just get a used wii u that everybody's selling to buy the switch anyway. anyway, it's **** magic. i think i'm gonna spend 40 hours on it or more (if i only ever play it once), and then i'm excited for the prospect of playing 1 and 2 (each $20 on the wii u eshop). and, no matter who you are, i'm 100% sure you **** hate some of the tendencies of the industry currently -- qte's, season passes, massive installs, day-one patches, broken games, unfinished games. nintendo, just by remaining decent, now stands out among everybody else by just giving you games on a disc that just work. i think you owe that to yourself. plus botw is coming up, so what better time to jump in? oh, and the wii u is a brilliant system with brilliant games. rest assured -- there is nothing wrong with the people at nintendo who make software and hardware. that was only a complete marketing disaster -- seriously, to this day you see amazon users baffled that their wii u games don't work on their wiis; like, what the **** as cool as the switch is, losing the second screen will mean that some things like pikmin and mario maker will never be as good again.

No Man’s Sky effectively portrays the loneliness of space by providing so little for the player to do that it’s tempting to flush one’s self out of an airlock just to break the tedium. Not that you can do that. That would be too interesting. After all the hype, all the promises, all the boasting of procedurally generated wonder and dynamic encounters, Hello Games’ “ambitious” spacefaring game is little more than just another crafting and survival experience, more about performing mundane, repetitive tasks than providing unique and exciting encounters. If you’re not sick of the hundreds of survival games out there already then No Man’s Sky, with its endless resource collection and irritating inventory management, might be for you. For anybody else, the allure of hopping from planet to planet just isn’t all that intriguing – once you’ve completed a long and dull journey from one world to another, you’re going to touch down and basically do what you did everywhere else. 02 The game’s biggest feature – that no one planet is the same – means very little when your interactions on each one are practically identical. Yes, there are dry planets, watery planets, cold planets, stormy planets – but they all adhere to the same simple rules. The major difference between a poison planet and a nuclear planet is the fact you’ll get a different logo next to the timer that tells you how long you can stay outside. The animals, mixed and matched quite obviously from a pool of recycled body parts, can be fed to uncover rare materials, but you can’t do much beyond that. Aside from the few that are hostile and prone to attack, the animals are just there to look weird. Upon encountering a large, dinosaur-like creature, I proceeded to use my **** jetpack (and boy is it ****) to ride on its back. I thought that would be fun. Instead, I just fell through its back because it had no solidity, leaving me to sigh and return to yet more mind-numbing resource collection. My disappointing experience with the dinosaur has come to exemplify No Man’s Sky‘s biggest problem – everything is so obviously faked, so unabashedly illusory. The universe is devoid of credible, tangible life. For as much as the game promises dynamic adventures, everything is scripted, static, held in place like cardboard cutouts in a fairground ride. Sentient aliens met along the way are never found just wandering the land. They remain stood or sat in place like static quest givers in an MMO – without the quests. Every now and then, other starships land nearby, but nothing ever gets out of them. To interact with their pilots, you must interact with the ship, at which point a character model pops up and you can have a text-based conversation with a pop-up character model. The world of an average Elder Scrolls game may be far smaller than No Man’s Sky‘s galactic sprawl, but it’s inherently more meaningful, vivid, and lively, because it actually has stuff to do and people to meet. 03 No Man’s Sky is indicative of a big problem the games industry has – conflating the size **** world with the quality of its character. It’s yet another game that pushes scale above everything else, but when it comes down to actually playing the thing, sheer landmass doesn’t account for much. I simply do not care that I can explore a universe when that universe contains animals a mere window dressing, lifeforms that stand affixed to one spot, abridged visual novel confrontations, and an endless need to shoot rocks and trees to continue micromanaging every banal detail of my character. The endless collection of resources needed to refill multiple fuel sources is a total drag, but it’s really the best bit of substance the game has to offer. An incessant journey from planet to planet, zapping carbon and iron out of plants and stones so you can journey to more planets in order to zap more plants and stones. This constant feeling of chasing one’s own tail for the sheer sake of it is found in many survival games, and it’s just as prevalent here. Everything is a chore, everything needs some special sort of fuel source, and there’s not enough room to carry it all. You start out slow, unable to sprint for long, with a terrible jetpack for a modicum of enhanced travel. One’s abilities can have upgrades crafted for them, but upgrades share the same restricted inventory space as everything else, meaning you need to choose between being able to sprint for an acceptable amount of time or being able to carry more things. This becomes less of a problem when you buy bigger starships to carry more loot, but it remains an annoyance and it makes the early game an uphill battle against crushing ennui. 04 Breaking up the “enjoyment” of filling your tiny (if slowly expandable) inventory with materials are frequent attacks from Sentinels – robotic annoyances that seem to be everywhere and further drive home the uniformity of this allegedly varied universe.

hearing all the crap people were saying about this, i was afraid. after all, the currency conversion makes all full-price nintendo releases crazy expensive nowadays in brazil. so i waited until there was a good enough deal that it was safe to take a gamble -- i had, after all, bought my wii u planning to play zelda games, mario galaxy games, and also star fox. so, to answer the big, scary question you must be asking yourself if 50 dollars isn't money you don't mind wasting: is miyamoto completely out of his mind? i mean, the guy who created zelda, dk, mario, pikmin, star fox, etc. -- could he have actually gotten involved with a game and released it if the game had no redeeming qualities? is nintendo in this bizarre position of having an old, senile legend with too much power just burning money? lol, no. are the controls difficult? i guess. but hear me out. if you're interested at all in this game, there is only one reason: you want to shoot lasers in space and feel an exhilarating rush, like being inside a star wars scene, to use a useful cliché. to me this game is very much exhilarating in that way. i suppose i'm not the most competent gamer, so pretty early in the game i saw myself dying and having to repeat some missions until i got them right. and indeed the controls were part of the challenge. but i couldn't wait to redo those missions, and let me tell you, i'm not really into getting my ass handed to me and retrying something a thousand times -- for instance, i'm pretty sure i'll never beat a mega man game. but this game is exhilarating. it's beautiful, it's a spectacle. it looks exactly as it should look. to agree with a good point made by kyle bosman, the lines they gave the female fox are, ugh, awful, but here's the thing: unlike a lot of games these days, this game is a game. as in, it has gameplay, awesome gameplay. miyamoto is the gameplay king. just think of how many of his games are still being played by obsessed fans 30 years later. so sf0 is exhilarating. and, seriously, how could it not be? that's really the only reason a game like this exists -- to blow you away with frantic action. and the action is there, and it's fun to repeat a mission to finally get inside the frigging enemy shield in the three seconds you have available -- whew! this game is made by nintendo and platinum games -- as in, bayonetta. so, really, shame on me for doubting them. and shame on all critics who are whiny **** for not giving the controls a chance. you'd think a critic would be required to be a more competent gamer than me, but go figure.

just wonderful. to my knowledge, this is the only time you ever see mario working as a plumber in a game. the story makes no sense at all, but in a great way. they just keep throwing bizarre scenarios at you, and you laugh hysterically. seriously, if, like me, you did not grow up on RPGs, this is a game to smooth you into the genre. it's inviting, hilarious, fun, ridiculous, satisfying. you have some platforming, some tasks you have to complete with some dexterity in real time. i'd say this and stick of truth are RPG masterpieces perfect for non-RPG players.

a game that was just made to make you happy. that may sound gay, but this game is not ashamed of it. the disgrace is that this seems to be an exception in the gaming industry these days. a game that is gorgeous, fun, colorful, pretty, and with cool gameplay with enough to differentiate it from nintendo's other platforming franchises. oh, and -- would you believe it? -- it's not broken at launch! crazy, right?

this is the game that made me care about user ratings, one of those games where you feel the clash between user and critic reception -- the clash that even makes the more paranoid among us wonder whether all those critics have been bought out. aaaaaanyway. this is a 2d platformer, which is to say it's a mario wannabe. it was hard enough for sega to try to get its platformers to stand out way back when, but they did manage, and the first sonic games are good, different and better-looking than the mario games. where sonic differed for being fast and cool, sackboy wants to stand out for being... slow, floaty, imprecise, i guess? and OH MY GOD there's a narrator that narrates the game like a children's book, and i'm gonna try to be fair here and saying without exaggerating that about 40% of the time i spent with this game was hearing his voice talk veeery slowly while i pushed buttons to try to skip his monologues. just awful. i get it -- the game is for kids. but kids in the 80s didn't need santa claus narrating video games in order to have fun, and they still don't.

i hate getting shot at. this is, to me, the perfect first-person experience. just stand there in a room figuring out how to get out for three hours. nothing attacks you. you just think upon layer upon layer of brilliant puzzles. but what this game has that no other brilliant puzzle game has is the best dialogue ever written for a video game, as well as the best voice acting by A LOT, done by stephen merchant, friggin' j.k. simmons and the glados lady. fantastic, and really a game you can probably replay forever, once a year, giving yourself enough time to forget the solutions.

perfect game, really. 3d mario in hd (although galaxy looks hd enough to me), with perfect controls, as always. i guess this outs me as not much of a hardcore gamer, but a game like this, however challenging, is still a breeze to finish all the way, because you're just smiling the whole time and taking it to bed with you thanks to the wii u's amazing controller. it's never a chore. you finish a few levels, then get to a point you can't go beyond because you don't have enough stars, so you have to go back and replay levels to find hidden stars -- which, in the hands of less skillful developers, could be a drag, but here is a gift, as you're given an opportunity to realize that hey, there's a whole third of this awesome level that i didn't know existed, and now i have the awesome feeling of discovering the secret entrance and exploring it. nintendo is about making you feel younger than you are. some people will say this game is stupid, but it's hard to hear them over the immense amount of fun i'm having.

i don't understand people caring as much about graphics as they do these days. i mean, i like looking at pretty things too, but, seriously, no one should ever demand for a game to look better than this. it is gorgeous, colorful, fun, outstanding. even the long stretches you spend sailing alone, which had to be put there in order for the game to load areas before you get to them, i think work in the game's advantage. this feels like a real adventure, and sometimes you're alone and lost in a huge ocean. may be the closest i've ever felt to being a hero.

bought this game used, played it for 1h a day for 18 days and finished it. i have to say, maybe 2h of that was loading screens, but it's worth suffering for a great game like this, one that would not be possible on any other hardware. you play as a cop, and in the game your character has a tablet with a map, some other stuf and, most brilliantly, a friggin' world scanner. as in, you're sitting on your couch in front of the tv, and the game tells you you have to scan your surroundings in search of something, so you hold up the gamepad between your eyes and the tv, and now that gives you x-ray vision of what is on tv. MOREOVER, if now you stand up and turn around, or look up, even though there's no tv image there, the illusion is not broken: the gamepad continues to give you x-ray vision of what would be there if your tv were a sphere that you stand inside of -- or, rather, if you were actually a person in lego city. so kudos. this developer took the wii u concept and ran with it brilliantly.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

easily the game with the most content you'll ever buy. i wish nintendo would let me download a million levels to my console instead of just 120 (then i'd have infinite content without even going online), but it's all right. so this is a game where, apart from making levels, which is great in itself, you go online to play. however, you only go online to download the level you want, which takes seconds, and then you're just playing a level that's installed. i mention this because, even if your connection is too crappy or unreliable for most online games -- which, on top of that, require the connections of everybody else to hold up, otherwise the session goes to sht, -- even then it will be good enough for a perfect experience with super mario maker! and i mean perfect, because no controller and game have ever been made for each other more than the gamepad and SMM. this is the only $60 game in my life i've ever bought day one digital, because i knew, as long as my wii u worked, i would never stop playing it, and i didn't wanna keep switching discs between this and the mere finite games out there. now not only was i right about not getting tired of playing (i've played 1,000 levels so far; think about that), but even i, who had never dreamed of making mario levels before, have now made dozens.

you could probably be entertained by this for one hour of each day of next year. so this is your guarantee that the wii u has you covered even if we have to weather another horrible game drought. get his and mario maker, and you seriously have an infinite amount of game to play.