Hype levels are over 9,000 for Dragon Ball FighterZ. After years of Namco Bandai putting the franchise into casual-friendly 3D fighting games, Goku and friends move to 2.5D with the assistance of the renown fighting game developers at Arc System Works. With their uncanny ability to seamless translate an anime art-style into games, along with their expertise in creating fighters, this is a match made in heaven. Did the final game shape up to be Super Saiyan levels of awesome?
There is a magic to Celeste that you won’t see at first glance. Having seen it in Nintendo’s Direct Mini, I brushed it off as just another Super Meat Boy clone. Hasn’t the world been subject to enough challenging 2D platformers with retro graphics? After playing this game, the answer is a resounding, “No.”
Telltale and The Walking Dead opened the door for the modern adventure game. Played from a third-person perspective, with a puzzle-solving and a focus on decision-making, it made new types of stories possible. Square Enix entered the space with Life is Strange. Playing the role of a teenage girl in a small town, you go through a really rough week in her shoes.
Season 1 of Pandemic Legacy was a revelation. Building on the signature cooperative germ-fighting gameplay of Pandemic by adding gameplay elements that made many of your choices have lasting ramifications, the end result was a riveting experience where carrying the weight of the world was equal parts glorious and soul-crushing.
Having already added so much to the game, how does one tackle the challenge of improving an already phenomenal game? Based on having played the prologue and 25% of the campaign, the answer might be to turn the whole thing on its head.
NOTE: The rest of this post will contain mild spoilers relating to the way the game is set up. Not much more than what you would get from the back of the box. If you do not want spoilers of any kind, skip this one!
Rushed out the door in 2016 to coincide with Capcom Cup, Street Fighter V was released in an embarrassingly bare-bones state. While I initially praised the game for its great gameplay and detailed graphics, the launch product was woefully lacking in many ways. From a single-player suite that didn’t include a traditional arcade mode, to unstable netcode, to menu items that had “coming soon” messaging as placeholders, the sorry state that the game debuted in negatively impacted sales and public perception in a big way. Had it not gained a foothold as the premier fighting game esport, this game would have fallen off a cliff into obscurity.
Despite the bungled launch, Capcom has continually put in the effort to improve the product. In the summer of 2016, they added a story mode as a free update. The netcode has been stabilized for the most part. They’ve even added 12 more characters as paid DLC to boost the current roster size to 28, with another six on the way. Unlike those incremental fixes and updates, Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition is a sizable step towards the game that this should have been all along.
After the hey day of Wave Race 64 and Jet Moto in the mid 90s, jet ski racing games fell off the face of the earth. It’s a shame that they did, as the inclusion of water physics makes for a racing experience unlike anything else on the marketplace. Originally released last year on other consoles, Riptide GP: Renegade aims to take advantage of this deficiency by being more or less the only game in town. While I’ve only played a few hours of the single player, I did want to note down some early thoughts on this one.
Over the past few months, the concept of a dream home has been a very real one for my wife and I. Having gone through the process of buying a home and now improving it to better suit our needs, everything gaming related has been pushed to the backburner in service of bringing our home to life. While it is far less expensive than the real thing, the Dream Home board game aims to turn the romantic elements of home creation into a family-friendly board game.
Floor Kids is a rhythm game about the art of breakdancing. Available on the Nintendo eShop, players will break it down to original music by DJ Kid Koala. Hip-hop video games are few and far between, but is this one worth trying based on its concept alone?
Who wins in the ultimate battle between knights, vikings, and samurai? Ubisoft hopes you can answer that question by playing For Honor. This novel game mashes up elements from team-based shooters and fighting games to create something unique. Does this battle between some of mankind’s greatest warriors live up to the hype?
Long before the series transitioned into the world of action, the Fast & Furious franchise focused on street racing. Fast & Furious: Full Throttle is a tabletop take on the series’ racing roots. Players will compete against each other in street races, vying for first place, without any of the punching and stunt work that would work its way into the action later. Does this licensed racing game have the nitro it needs to push it across the finish line?
In Third Person 