Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Game Over(load)

About this time every year, every publisher on every platform decides they need to release every game they have in development. So we go from the summer doldrums to the fall overload. In the past few weeks I've picked up Rage, Skyrim, Gears of War 3, Zelda, and Mario 3D. And I'll be back to get Mario Kart 7 in less than a week.


Skyrim and Zelda were the ones I've been looking forward to for more than a year and they certainly haven't disappointed so far. The reviews of those two have been near perfect and from what I can tell, they've earned the praise. Zelda starts off extreeeeeeemly slow and assumes you've never played a videogame before, let alone a Zelda game. Also that you like reading lots of stupid unecessary dialogue. But once they introduce the controls, it seems to pick up speed. Skyrim builds on the great foundation that Oblivion built. The worst stuff is fixed and the best stuff is improved.It's an MMO without all those other pesky people.

Rage and GoW3 I picked up because they seemed like good games and they've been entertaining. Rage, in particular, is a lot of fun, moves quickly, and looks gorgeous.

Mario 3D Land should have been a launch title to really show off the 3DS' capabilities. It's pretty entertaining and finally gives me something to do with that system. I'm looking forward to next week when DS Lunch gets an upgrade to the new version of Mario Kart. Should be fun.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Zelda: Four Swords


Some of us took a very rare break from Mario Kart DS at yesterday's DS Lunch to play Zelda: Four Swords Adventures. Four of us, actually. Nice how that worked out. This was either free for everyone to download or part of the 3DS shambassador program, I don't remember which. Anyway, there were four of us with 3DS's today and that's what we played.

I had played through it on my own, beating each of the three levels to get a key that unlocks the last palace thing. It was basically a lobotomized version of Zelda when you play it this way. Sure you run around as Link with a sword and collect all the familiar items. But you can only have one at a time, and the whole goal was to get enough money so some chick (Zelda, I assume) will like you. That was about it for story, which made it kind of boring. Where it becomes a bit more fun is when you add 3 other live people, all racing to get the same rupees as you, while hacking at you and tossing each other off cliffs.
This was chaotic and sort of fun, but not very satisfying from a control standpoint. You move Link around like a slow tank and hope you get to the treasure first. It's not nearly as fun/chaotic as New Super Mario Bros. Wii, but it also came out much earlier than that game originally. Anyway, I didn't win any rounds and we can all agree that Kyle is a rupee-stealing jerk.