Category Archives: Nintendo

Best of 2013, Games, GOTY, Nintendo

Best of 2013 #9: Luigi’s Mansion 2

Leave a comment

Luigi's Mansion 2If I’m honest, I could take or leave Pikmin, but this is a revival from Nintendo’s GameCube wilderness years that surprised me by doing that wonderful thing of giving you something you didn’t know you wanted. Although it would have been pretty far down my list of desirable Nintendo revivals, Luigi’s Mansion 2 became a showpiece for the hardware, the atmospheric potential of the 3D effect, and the banner release for the Year of Luigi.

Only the fact that its qualities can’t sustain it throughout some gratuitous backtracking keeps Luigi’s Mansion from climbing further up this year’s list. But if you take your time, avoiding tiring of going through the same corridor for the fifteenth time, you’ll be rewarded with one of the most charming games around. It’s like the gaming equivalent of a Pixar movie, full of personality, wit and fun little touches.

Whereas the original Luigi’s Mansion disappointed as a flagship launch title for a new Nintendo console – it followed Mario 64 there, let’s not forget – I feel like the 3DS would have had a less bumpy debut had it arrived with a game as complementary to the hardware as this game. I loved it, and it’s now my go-to recommendation for new 3DS buyers.

Best of 2013, Games, GOTY, Nintendo

Best of 2013 #10: Bravely Default

Leave a comment

Bravely DefaultA lot’s been written about how JRPGs in general and Final Fantasy in particular have gone off the rails in recent years, but it frequently seems to escape the notice of such editorials that portable RPGs have thrived. While Final Fantasy stuttered on consoles, minor classics like Radiant Historia, The World Ends With You, Jeanne D’Arc and innumerable Shin Megami Tensei games have shone on the last two handheld generations. Dragon Quest saw where the action was, and now Final Fantasy does. Kind of.

Square Enix got cold feet, instead making this the spiritual successor to a minor Final Fantasy spin-off, but it doesn’t take long to see where its roots lie. Familiar enemies, items and tropes show up in a world that blends Final Fantasy IX – an easy way into my heart – with the style of the DS Final Fantasy remakes.

Some late subversion of various RPG stereotypes aside, it’s disappointingly conservative – more old-fashioned than nostalgic. But as a fan of classic JRPGs, I had a great time with it. It makes some clever use of StreetPass; it’s beautiful, making subtle use of 3D to add depth to its watercolour environments; and the return of the job system is welcome, since it’s one of my favourite character development systems that got left by the wayside for some reason.

JRPGs as big budget entertainment burned brightly but lasted only two generations. The likes of this show where the real talent has gone.

Best of 2013, Games, GOTY, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2013

Leave a comment

Wow. After the disappointment of 2012, where Halo 4 was good enough to make number 2 and my favourite game, brilliant as it was, was a year-old PC game, 2013 has been staggeringly good. Less in the way of indie titles and phone games padding out the list and – spoiler warning – a very surprising spread of host platforms given this year’s new developments. Some of the honourable mentions that didn’t make the final lineup would have walked on to 2012’s selections, to the extent that I’ll certainly put together something to flag them up, as they don’t deserve to be overlooked.

The rules, as always, are that a game must have been released somewhere in the world and played by me within calendar 2013. That means some omissions simply because I hadn’t played them – no Wii U means no Super Mario 3D World, unfortunately – and other 2013 contenders like Shin Megami Tensei IV falling victim to the curse of region-locking. Maybe next year for that one.

Posts will go live at 2100 GMT over the next ten days. Enjoy.

Below are my selections since I’ve been doing this:

Editorials, Games, Nintendo, Xbox

Bring Back Conker’s Bad Fur Day

Leave a comment

Whichever N64 game you want to play, chances are there’s a port, HD update, or Virtual Console release out there somewhere. GoldenEye’s a notable but understandable exception given what must be a minefield of rights issues – published by Nintendo, developed by Microsoft-owned Rare, based on a licence held by Activision, based on a film produced by a company that has since gone bankrupt and is now distributed by Sony – but at a push we have a couple of reasonably good remakes. How am I supposed to play Conker’s Bad Fur Day, though? It’s one of those annoying games that lacks a definitive edition – Persona 3 is another one – only with the frustration compounded by all the legal means being seriously compromised in some way.

The Great Mighty Poo in Conker: Live & Reloaded

What brought this to mind was selling my N64 copy. Given its condition and the fact that it came out quite late in the N64’s life, I made good money on it, but it was a hard sale to make because it’s a tough game to play legally nowadays. I could, of course, have plugged in the old N64, but that would be reliant on my controllers still working and, let’s face it, it’s going to look like shit on a modern TV. Plus, you know, £100.

Nintendo wouldn’t touch the game, so it was published in the UK by THQ and Rare kept the rights. Rare’s still owned by Microsoft, so no Virtual Console release.

Mercifully, then, we have the Microsoft-published Xbox remake, Conker: Live & Reloaded. It’s much prettier and it works on an Xbox 360. Problem solved? Nope. You see, it had its name changed before release from Conker: Live & Uncut, which should set off alarm bells. Compare, for example, the Great Mighty Poo scene on a Nintendo 64 to Microsoft’s adult-friendly shooter box. As someone who won’t watch a film when it’s been cut by seconds, this is completely unacceptable. No shit. Literally.

Microsoft isn’t new at this console game any more, and it’s certainly not averse to publishing adult content in its games. In that case, how about giving Conker the same treatment as Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, which both had excellent, well-received Xbox Live Arcade ports that updated the games and even added functionality that was dropped from the N64 originals? Get me a playable, uncut version of the game – hell, maybe throw in the lovely assets from the Xbox port – and you’ll both redeem yourselves for Live & Reloaded and make me feel much better for having sold out on my original copy.

Games, Impressions, Nintendo

The Kick Up the Arse That Pokémon Needed

Leave a comment

It’s funny what a difference a few tweaks in the right place can make. I wrote back in 2011 about my disappointment in Pokémon White, my first foray into the series since the GBA evidence to me that it was a series in decline. It was a sense of diminishing returns that left my copy of Sapphire abandoned and Blue as my only game with a full Pokédex, and a hardware generation and a couple of instalments in the game series hadn’t done anything to advance things substantially.

As you might have guessed, I’ve recently given it another go with Pokémon X. Fool me once and all that, but my 1998 self would have been so deliriously happy with a fully 3D Pokémon game that I couldn’t resist. And, unsurprisingly, not much has changed between this and Black and White. Nor, indeed, the Game Boy games. Maybe I’m a graphics whore or something, but the little changes here have made all the difference.

Pokémon X/Y Trainer

Graphics aren’t everything, sure, but they are something, and Pokémon X – or Y, but I’m going to talk about the version I own – doesn’t feel as half-arsed as Black/White did. Seeing those monsters in three dimensions, performing flashy attacks beyond bobbing the sprite up and down, adds dramatically to the personality and appeal. It’s like going from a pen-and-paper RPG to, well, a video game.

Another complaint I had about Black/White was that I found Pokémon to be insultingly formulaic. To illustrate:

  • It’s time for you to become a Pokémon trainer! Go and get your starter from the local professor!
  • Your rival picked the opposing element, so fight him/her.
  • Work your way through the gym leaders.
  • Thwart the plot of a criminal gang with a weird uniform, staffed entirely by incompetent henchmen.
  • Head to Victory Road and beat the Elite Four.
  • Uncover some secret of Pokémon mastery that the world’s scientists couldn’t crack a kid could for some reason.
  • Go after a set of one-of-a-kind legendaries.
  • If you’re not bored by now, pour months into building a competitive team.
  • Oh, and catch ’em all™.

Which Pokémon game am I talking about? It basically could be any of them.

X is the same, but by not looking just like it did on the Game Boy and delivering the occasional well-placed hit of nostalgia (see screenshot below) it tickles the urge that the last generation failed to. If I’d drifted away from the series and come back to this instalment, I’d have been perfectly happy with how much things had progressed.

Pokémon X/Y Mega Blastoise

It’s still not the 3D adventure that I would have killed for in 1998 – Monster Hunter looks closer to that ideal, so it’s feasible, though perhaps not from a small team on a release schedule like Game Freak’s – but as a much-needed improvement to a stagnated franchise, Pokémon X delivers. Given that delivering on the series’ potential would require Nintendo to release powerful hardware, show some ambition and overhaul a proven cash cow, I’ll take what I can get.

Books, Games, Nintendo

Is There a Better Book About Games Than Game Over?

Leave a comment

Game OverIt’s been a while since I’ve written anything about games, mainly because I haven’t been playing them. My free time has been dominated by reading, an ancient form of entertainment made modern and more ubiquitous by the Kindle I got for my last birthday. An ill-advised Goodreads challenge to get through 40 books in 2013 – a lot when you enjoy 1,500-page fantasy epics – and the pressures of another new job have dominated my free time in recent months.

I’m all about efficiency, though, so why not combine my twin loves by gushing over Game Over, David Sheff’s wonderful book about the rise of Nintendo. It’s both, for my money, the best book ever written about games and surely the greatest free gift to accompany a magazine since that before-they-were-popular pack of Pogs I got with the Beano. Like most who’ve read it these days, I got my copy on the cover of the tragically short-lived Arcade magazine in the late 90s.

The rate at which I burn through books and a surfeit of great literature to read means that I rarely read them more than once. The small list that I still return to occasionally goes like this: Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Lord of the Rings, The Lord of the Flies, and Game Over. Spot the odd one out.

Only I don’t think it is out of place there. We have two greats of speculative fiction with important things to say about human nature, a towering giant of fantasy, and a top-tier non-fiction book about business. It being about games dovetails wonderfully with my tastes, of course, but such an engrossing account of any industry in its heyday would be worthy of praise. It’s a comprehensive account of how Nintendo built up the industry as it exists today, the glorious 8- and 16-bit days, and the inner workings of a notoriously secretive company.

In that respect, it’s at least as good as, say, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography – a far better-known account of the rise of a technology giant, but one that’s been documented at least as well elsewhere.

Even speaking as someone without much stake in Nintendo these days, a proper follow-up to Game Over would be one of my dream announcements. An account of this quality to take us through Nintendo’s part in the rise of the PlayStation, the commercial decline of the N64 and GameCube years, and the boom-and-bust DS/Wii-Wii U era would make for arguably more fascinating reading than how Nintendo built the modern industry in the first place.

Now, though, GTA V is here. Finally, a game worth talking about…