Games: No More Heroes III (Nintendo Switch) review

GAME REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

NO MORE HEROES III
Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture

Publisher: Marvelous

Platform: Nintendo Switch

 

Goichi Suda, alias: Suda51, remains a rarity in the world of game design: a true auteur. That's not to suggest there's a shortage of well-known or talented designers out there, but few have back catalogues which feel as much a result of a singular artistic vision. As is the case with his stated or assumed influences from the film world, artists like David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky, Suda's games presents worlds which are outwardly insane, but inwardly purposeful. The original No More Heroes was, on the surface, about a lightsabre - sorry, 'beam katana' - wielding geek slaughtering his way thorugh an array of eccentric bosses to reach the top of an assassins' ranking list, all in hope of getting into the pants of a sexy femme fatale. Underneath, it was a story about letting go of past traumas, about how a life of killing destroys the soul, and the emptiness of pursuing external glory rather than personal fulfilment.

No More Heroes III marks a return for Suda to the director's chair of a major game, having withdrawn from the spotlight for over a decade following an extremely difficult experience with EA Games developing Shadows Of The Damned. A small-scale warm-up to this game, 2019's Travis Strikes Again, was the first time Suda had been credited as a game director since the original No More Heroes in 2007. Despite NMHIII's flaws, it is a bold and exciting a reminder of how much the gaming world has missed him.

Games: Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury (Nintendo Switch) review

GAME REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD + BOWSER'S FURY
Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo 

Platform: Nintendo Switch

 

Nintendo's latest console, the Switch, is awash with games carried over from its previous one, the Wii U, which sold far less well. It's a strategy which has been a boon for Nintendo, padding out the Switch's library with games which never got the chance to sell as well as they might have, but less so for those of us who owned a Wii U in the first place, who have found original releases few and far between. In order to combat this, Nintendo has taken to adding extra material to the games in question. On the whole, this material has been half-hearted at best, with an extra character added to Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze and a few token side-missions reusing environments in Pikmin 3.

The headline extra in the port of Super Mario 3D World is a mode entitled 'Bowser's Fury', a more substantive addition which, were it not for its short length - about two hours to see the credits, perhaps four to finish everything - could be called a new game in its own right, one possibly hinting at a more open-world, non-linear future for the Mario series than even Odyssey, the Switch's own original Mario title.

I Want Your Love & I Want Your Revenge: No More Heroes Game Analysis

In honour of the first two No More Heroes games being ported to the Nintendo Switch this week, it seemed as good a time as any to reissue an analysis I wrote up many years ago of a game series inspired by such diverse sources as Alejandro Jodorowsky's abstract Western El Topo and the Brit Punk music movement of the '80s, filtered through the lens of geek and video game culture. No More Heroes is a satirical and often surreal gaming extravaganza which I urge everyone who hasn't already taken a trip to the superbly named town of Santa Destroy to pick up as soon as possible.

Until developer Goichi Suda makes a concrete statements on the matter (which he won't – Japanese modesty prevents it), no-one can say for certain what ideas were suplexing around in that brain of his during the creation of the No More Heroes series. Everything from here on in is speculation, but hopefully speculation informed enough to offer a new perspective on the games and enhance your enjoyment. I will deal with the themes running through both games, so be warned that SPOILERS abound.

   

Games: Super Mario 3D All-Stars (Nintendo Switch) review

GAME REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

SUPER MARIO 3D ALL-STARS
Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo 

Platform: Nintendo Switch

The 'All-Stars' moniker carries prestige when it comes to the Mario brand courtesy of a beloved 1993 compilation of all the Mario platformers up to that point, improved with modern graphics, physics and controls. It was one of the earliest and most successful examples of the gaming remaster, which has in modern times become commonplace: take a highly rated game from a previous console generation, tart up the visuals and plonk it on a new system for either new gamers to enjoy or old fans to pony over their cash a second time for an improved version of a previously enjoyed experience.

Nintendo have not so much taken up this trend as been consumed by it: the Nintendo Switch's predecessor, the Wii U, was a dismal failure financially, shifting a meagre 13 million units during its four years on the market - as a point of comparison, the Switch has sold in the region of 61 million in a similar time frame. This disparity in sales has led Nintendo to port many over their Wii U games over to the Switch, having presumably realised that there are millions of gamers who never had the chance to play them. While financially prudent - ports are quick and easy - this is frustrating for those of us who own both a Wii U and a Switch, particularly as these ports are not exactly high effort. Unfortunately, that comes to a head with Super Mario 3D All-Stars, a release which despite the historical importance of its three assembled games, represents Nintendo at their laziest.

When I Soar To Worlds Unknown: Symbolism And Imagination In Myst

If you so much as glanced in the direction of a computer in the mid-90s, you'll have heard of Cyan's seminal graphic adventure game, Myst, which not only heralded the advent of the CD-Rom as the format that would drive the future of computer gaming but also achieved the rare feat of becoming a cultural phenomenon. In 1993, everyone was playing Myst and when they weren't playing it, they were talking about it.

Completing one of the game's notoriously complex puzzles became a point of pride and social worth, bringing with it the satisfaction not only of in-game progress but also being approached by awe-struck peers desperate to know how you pulled it off. New sights and accidental discoveries were instantly broadcast amongst friends, desperate to claim the front-runner spot in the race towards the game's conclusion.

The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask - 20th Anniversary Retrospective

When The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask was released twenty years ago last week, it was with less than a year before the N64 was to be replaced by the GameCube. Although technically a quickie sequel, created in a single year using the same (albeit upgraded) graphical engine as Ocarina Of Time, Majora responded to the question of how to follow one of the most important games in the medium's history by taking its predecessor's epic scope and making it smaller and more intimate.

Producing a masterpiece on your first attempt can be as dangerous in many ways as a failure: not only do you have to deal with massively disproportionate expectations of brilliance for your next work, but are also bound by how much of the original can be changed or replaced without attracting ire.

Games: 007 Legends review (via Hit-Reset)

GAME REVIEW 
   

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

007 LEGENDS

Platforms: XBOX 360 (version tested), PS3, PC, Wii U

Developers: Eurocom

Publishers: Activision

Players: 4 (plus 12-player online)

The final mission in 007 Legends is not included on the disc, but will be made available later as free DLC. Why, you ask? The official answer is to avoid spoiling the movie, which itself only raises the question of why the game wasn't released at the same time. A quick glance at the Call Of Duty: Black Ops II release date should provide your answer. In short, Activision have rushed out an essentially incomplete game to avoid a full version either cannibalising or getting lost in the wake of its flagship title. As it stands now, the game just stops at the end of the Moonraker mission, immediately cutting to credits from a cutscene which apparently leaves Bond floating in space without so much as attempting re-entry. If that weren't bad enough, XBox 360 owners will have to wait three weeks longer than PS3 owners before being able to finish the game, as Sony have exclusivity rights on the free DLC providing the game's proper ending. Sigh.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much the game all over, evidently rushed and showing few signs of being properly thought through. Replaying classic Bond missions in video game form isn't a bad idea, and while a little odd to see Daniel Craig using (obnoxiously branded) smart phones in the middle of Goldfinger, it shouldn't be an issue for anyone who played Eurocom's very respectable previous effort, GoldenEye Reloaded. More problematic is how little effort the game makes in tying its six scenarios together, despite spending an interminable amount of time plodding through the stories of each. The framing device is a scene from the pre-credits sequence of Skyfall, where Agent Eve (Naomie Harris) accidentally shoots Bond off the top of a train, rather than the enemy agent he's grappling with. As Bond plummets into the river below, his mind flashes back to past adventures.

Click here to read the full review at Hit-Reset
  

Unfinished Business: Steam Sale Backlog - Half Life 2 Episode 1

I don't get Half-Life 2. The original is decent enough, immensely innovative for 1998 in its storytelling, set-pieces and continuous gameplay, but the sequel left me cold. You need to know that, because if HL2 is among your all-time favourite games, and there's a fairly good chance it is given the reverent tones in which the game is traditionally discussed, you probably won't want to read any further.

Episode 1 encapsulates many of what I find confusing about the worship the game seems to attract. It's competently made, and the Source engine does impressive work for 2006, but there's nothing special about any of it. Episode 1 is of decent length for what is essentially the first DLC - thanks for that, Valve - but offers little by way of original ideas, satisfied to offer fans a second helping of what they gobbled up two years before. For those who loved the game, that's fine, just don't expect it to hold up so well six years later.

  

Movies - Resident Evil Retribution review

FILM REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

RESIDENT EVIL RETRIBUTION

Dir: Paul W.S. Anderson

Stars: Milla Jovovich, Aryana Engineer,  Li Bingbing, Michelle Rodriguez, Johann Urb

Running Time: 95 mins

Reading the gaming community's reactions to the recently released Resident Evil 6 demo makes me wonder whether Capcom are slowly trying to transform their game series into something closer in tone to Paul W.S. Anderson's movies. The games started out as relatively slow paced survival horror, based in and around single locations which, for all the unashamed absence of real-life logic, were a puzzle unto themselves. This might have been the case for the movies too, except horror supremo George A. Romero was fired after the studio disliked his version of the script, which stuck closely to the games' mythology. Anderson was the man to replace him, and discard virtually everything from the games (bar the villainous Umbrella Corporation, existing here in name only) in favour of a global-scale, high-tech action arms race.

Capcom's Resident Evil 6, meanwhile, appears to have also abandoned its roots in favour of a flashier approach. Resi 4 was the first to push the series closer to action than horror, but 6 increases the character count, broadens the scale of the threat, and significantly heightens the action. Fans are complaining that the series has lost any trace of its identity. By contrast, Anderson's movies know exactly what they are and who their audience is, and have settled into a rhythm which allows them to make good on their modest goals.

  

Unfinished Business: Steam Sale Backlog - Football Manager 2012

When people talk about games so good they monopolised their genre, Zelda and Mario remain the most popular touchpoints. As formidable as Nintendo's franchises are, none can hold a candle to Sports Interactive's Football Manager series in terms of market domination. Having started life in 1992 as Championship Manager, few competitors have lasted more than a handful of years before conceding defeat. Even following an enforced name change due to SI's departure from publisher Eidos, the rebranded series (now published by SEGA) comfortably continued its run of form, even sweeping aside a rival bearing its former name.

More remarkable is how, for all the refinements and features added over the years, the core experience remains much as it was in the earliest instalments. It's slicker, quicker and packed with nuance, but SI's game is one of the few not starring an Italian plumber (although perhaps if you look to the nation's lower leagues...) to have a legitimate claim to having perfected its genre at the first time of asking.

 

Unfinished Business: Steam Sale Backlog - Bastion

[Unfinished Business is a feature where I take an unplayed game or unwatched DVD that has been languishing on my shelf and chronicle my experiences with it. THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE GAME.]
  

I feel like I should be more enthusiastic about Bastion than I am: it is a game with a great deal to recommend it and only some niggling control issues (in the PC version, at least) on the downside. Its hand-painted visual style and gently engaging soundtrack fuse a colouring book vision of a fallen utopia to the sounds and iconography of a frontier Western. As graphical technology slowly flattens out and developers scramble to include the latest lighting or physics effect to prove their game's superiority over its rivals, it's a welcome relief to find a game focusing so strongly on its artistic, rather than technological, identity.

The in-game narration is another neat touch, lending a trace of hope to the otherwise melancholy tone. In many end-of-life scenarios, books and stories are treasured as links to a better past, providing hope that such good days may come again with old mistakes learnt from and repaired. Bastion has the player creating their own story, setting out a legend of how the world came to be repaired following a fall, rather than how it reached that point. It's a subtle framing device, putting an original slant on a well-worn concept.
  

Retrospective: GoldenEye 007 (Gaming, 1997)

If you want to feel old, consider that today marks GoldenEye 007's fifteenth birthday. The seminal shooter of its time, few games have entrenched themselves so firmly in the memories of a generation: just imagine what teenagers of the late '90s might have achieved had it not been for Slappers Only in Complex, or Proximity Mines in Aztec. How many friendships might still have been going strong were it not for the unfairly diminutive Oddjob providing too great a temptation on the character select screen.

Though many of its players' fondest memories come from hours spent pretending not to look at their rival's quarter of the deathmatch screen, that pioneering multiplayer is only a small part of a legacy rarely acknowledged as fully as it deserves to be. GoldenEye 007 is a landmark achievement in game design, both very much the product of its time and a work whose influence is undeniably the source of the FPS-dominated gaming culture we play in today.

  

Unfinished Business: Steam Sale Backlog - Deus Ex Human Revolution 'The Missing Link' DLC

[Unfinished Business is a feature where I take an unplayed game or unwatched DVD that has been languishing on my shelf and chronicle my experiences with it.]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution was one of my favourite games last year, managing to be both respectful to the groundbreaking original while streamlining some of its more unwieldy elements and allowing players a welcome degree of freedom in achieving their goals. The game tailed off at the end, slipping into thoroughly unwelcome modern habits of forcing the player down certain paths and attempting to disguise its diversion into linearity with meaningless, pre-set 'choices'. The game's greatest triumph came in its city hubs, vast urban spaces packed with sidequests, hidden pathways and locked doors. During the story missions, the game struggled to maintain that same sense of openness.

It's a shame that the Human Revolution DLC, 'The Missing Link', fixates on the weakest part of the game and mostly ignores the positives. DLC is not something I'm willing to invest in normally, but the opportunity of spending a few extra hours in Adam Jensen's world for a tuppence (damn your temptations, Steam Sale!) seemed as good a place to start as any. Unfortunately, it ended up summing up much of what is unappealing for players about the DLC model.

  

Unfinished Business: Steam Sale Backlog - Just Cause 2 (Games)

[Unfinished Business is a feature where I take an unplayed game or unwatched DVD that has been languishing on my shelf and chronicle my experiences with it.]

If The Void, last week's entry in my Steam backlog playthrough, represented gaming at its most artistic, this week's title is unabashedly ridiculous and trashy. Just Cause 2's sole aim is to indulge its players' every destructive whim, stripping away every one of the medium's pretensions to storytelling merit or depth in favour of a constant flow of gargantuan explosions in colourful environments.

Though hardly subtle in its aims, the game is powered by the kind of experimental streak so lacking in many of its peers. The third and first person shooting genres have mostly settled into a COD-inspired groove of reducing the player's interactivity with their surroundings to almost nothing, with their sole responsibility being to hold the analogue stick forward and press the firing trigger occasionally. Just Cause 2 is not a great game, but lays the right foundations for one to be created in the series' future.

 

Unfinished Business: Steam Sale Backlog - The Void (Games)

[Unfinished Business is a feature where I take an unplayed game or unwatched DVD that has been languishing on my shelf and chronicle my experiences with it.]

Another Steam Sale has come and gone, leaving my library drowning in discounted, unplayed games in its wake. Over the coming weeks, I'll be using this Unfinished Business feature to push through my backlog and chronicle my experience with each title. The first article, written prior to my summer holiday, covered this year's indie critical darling, Dear Esther. While this week's title heads even further away from the mainstream, future instalments will cover (not necessarily in this order) the likes of Just Cause 2, the Half-Life 2 episodes, Batman Arkham City, Deus Ex: Human Revolution DLC 'The Missing Link', Bastion, Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Football Manager 2012. In other words, there'll be a bit of something for everyone.

Whatever your tastes, it's unlikely a game like The Void will fit into them. When players or critics talk about 'art' games, the reference is usually to visually stylish games such as Ōkami or Viewtiful Joe, along with the occasional more appropriate example like the aforementioned Esther. Such questionable choices are sadly demonstrative of the industry's struggle to comprehend the nature of artistic expression, and how the gaming medium can fit into it. The former two examples are cited for their beauty alone, despite neither seeking to evoke any particular emotion or reflection from their players. If an artistic experience is solely measured by attractiveness, as such choices would suggest, Pippa Middleton's buttocks should perhaps be reclassified as a mobile art gallery. Dear Esther has greater depth (than Ōkami or Viewtiful Joe, not Pippa Middleton's rear), but scales back its interactivity to such an extent it can only debatably be called a 'game'. The Void, on the other hand, is one of the first games to have a legitimate claim to being a work of art in its own right.

  

Games - Why Animal Crossing should have been Nintendo's Wii U online hub

A week has passed since Nintendo failed for the second time to convince gamers why the Wii U will rectify the mistakes of its predecessor. The problem seems to be that while Nintendo is telling everyone still listening that their console has a clear purpose in improving the gaming experience, they seem unsure of what it is. With the Wii, Wii Sports directly translated physical motion into in-game action, communicated in absolute terms by asking players to swing the remote as they would a racket in order to play tennis. Nintendoland requires explanation in order to understand the rules of each mini-game, where Wii Sports engendered immediate understanding between player and game, with the controller function bridging the two. The Wii U game may put the gamepad's various uses to action, but unequivocally fails when it comes to communicating any core concept underlying the console, other than it has loads of features, but no defining identity.

The Wii U also marks Nintendo's attempt to build an online social hub akin to Microsoft's XBox Live or Sony's PlayStation Network. The result, the strenuously named Miiverse (how could a corporation as big as Nintendo not feature a single employee to suggest putting a 'U' in front of that name?), appears a similar mishmash, involving gathering your friends' Miis around pictures of games they are playing, onto an otherwise blank screen. It looks both half-hearted and slightly baffling, shoehorning an entire online network into the Mii plaza with none of the warmth or fun Nintendo otherwise take such effort to include in their games. Had they been willing to dedicate a little more time to their online social service, they might have realised the answer had been waiting on their doorstep all along.

   

Games - Pikmin 2 Wii review

GAME REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non- Functional.

PIKMIN 2: NEW PLAY CONTROL

Format: Wii

Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo

Players: 2

Pikmin 3 was one of the few parts of Nintendo's conference at this year's E3 to be well received, so the long-delayed release of the series' second game on the Wii could prove a canny publicity manoeuvre, perhaps enough to salvage disillusioned fans' enthusiasm for the Wii U while filling a gap in its predecessor's increasingly barren release schedule. Funnily enough, the game proves equally well-timed in terms of storyline, with Olimar returning to the Pikmin planet (never explicitly named as Earth, despite the obvious similarities) with companion captain Louie in order to help save his freight company from going broke due to predatory debtors. Somehow, the game's charm is only enhanced by its vision of a recession able to be reversed by a hunt for fruit and assorted amusingly named tidbits. Between this and last year's Boom Street, Nintendo seem to be on a single-handed mission to make the financial crisis fun. In that context, the coin-oriented gameplay of New Super Mario Bros 2 seems pure wish fulfilment.

Moving on from its amusing timeliness, the game is an excellent fit for the Wii. Little King's Story was an excellent game, but its refusal to use the remote's pointer - dishearteningly abandoned from the Wii U's main controller - looks a strange decision in light of the speed and ease it brings to commanding your army of carrot people around the undergrowth. A little twitchy when responding to a tilted controller, perhaps, but boding well for the Wii U iteration.

  

E3 2012 Conference Predictions (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo)

It's that time of year again, with the gaming industry lining up its biggest and brightest upcoming releases for their debut showing on the packed floor of the Los Angeles Convention Centre. The buzz ahead of this year's set of conferences is around Nintendo, who are readying to show off the 'hardcore' credentials of their new console, the Wii U, ahead of its launch later in the year. While both have new hardware on the horizon, Sony and Microsoft have said they won't be showing it off this year, although will want to have something special to pull out of the hat to reign in Nintendo's thunder.

After the jump is the E3 2012 press conference schedule, plus my predictions for what surprises could be in store from the big three...

  

Retrospective - 3D Monster Maze (Games, 1981)

With at least one new console set to take the E3 stage in a few weeks, technology will be the word on every gamer's lips. Yet despite the expansive resources available to today's developers, it's surprising how few modern games manage to be genuinely scary. While there are some emotions, like love or to an extent laughter, which the medium's artificial nature might be expected to struggle with, fear is one that games should be capable of producing fairly easily.

Though interactive entertainment lacks film's ability to control how an audience experiences a potentially scary situation, gaming can place its players in uniquely vulnerable positions. The lack of a sense of meaningful death is an obstacle, but not one impossible to overcome: games have been scary, just not very often. In fact, gaming's ability to fray the nerves could be seen as proportional to how limited the technology was at the time.

  

Can Traditional Third Party Games Ever Succeed On Nintendo Consoles?

A recent leak revealed a sequel to Ubisoft's Rayman Origins as destined for Nintendo's upcoming console, the Wii U, sparking the usual heated debate across the internet about whether Nintendo will finally succeed in releasing hardware as beneficial to third party developers as the manufacturer themselves. The Wii's enormous userbase has been perceived as a sales white whale, with many of the 'new gamers' brought into the fold by Wii Sports and Wii Fit failing to make the transition to traditional genre gaming, at least for titles not released by Nintendo.

While these views are repudiated as biased by Nintendo loyalists, they have become so common that it is hard to deny they must represent the feelings of at least a tangible number of upper-tier third-party developers. Such feelings also seem backed up by numbers, with only a tiny number of third-party genre games achieving that all-important million sales mark on Nintendo's console. Many don't even make it halfway, or if so, only after major discounting from retailers. The evidence seems damning, proof of a trend supposedly reaching as far back as the days of the N64. Is it then true to say that traditional third-party games can never represent a viable investment on Nintendo consoles?