Legendary: Dark City is the first major expansion to Marvel’s deck-building game. With 17 heroes, 5 masterminds, 8 new schemes and more, owning this would basically double the size of the experience. There’s definitely a surface-level appeal to having more of a good thing, but do the cards in the expansion improve on the core experience?
From the advent of bootleg Famicom cartridges, to the Nintendo World Championships, to WarioWare, the act of remixing classic NES games is not new. Recently, Nintendo surprised the world by dropping yet another take on those iconic NES titles with NES Remix on the Wii U. Featuring 16 titles, this compilation takes those works and splices them into hundreds of mini challenges. Are you ready for yet another take on games that you’ve probably played dozens, if not hundreds of times before?
Season 2 of The Walking Dead video game puts you in the shoes of Clementine. Despite being a little bit older and painfully aware of the world around her, she’s still very much a child. This is the theme that drives episode 1 and will likely carry through the season if she manages to make it through. After playing through the events from All That Remains, I really hope she does make it through.
How do you follow up one of the greatest games ever made? Well, if you’re Nintendo and you’re trying to create the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, you wait 22 years before making and releasing The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Exclusively on the Nintendo 3DS, it retraces some of the steps of its predecessor while introducing some of the boldest innovations to the formula yet. The end result is a game that brought out the same child-like joy I felt playing as Link at his 2D best while set in the freshest Zelda adventure in a long time.
One of the first products to come out as part of the PlayStation 4’s big indie push is Contrast. Created by Compulsion Games, this is a puzzle platformer that forces you to think of shadows in a different light (no pun intended). While it definitely looks cool and has an interesting gameplay hook on paper, some glaring production issues put me off fairly quickly.
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There is a sense of unadulterated joy that Rayman Legends creates that few other games of this generation have. It’s that type of feeling that you felt playing your first Super Mario game where traversing every level is an opportunity to overcome a challenge while exploring every nook and cranny for the next cool thing. Despite the fact that I’ve been playing platformers for decades, this recaptures that magic through a plethora of fresh ideas and solid platforming action is executed to perfection.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was a bit of a write-off. Sure, it sucks that we as gamers got a sub-par experience due to the turmoil between Activision and former studio heads at Infinity Ward, but there’s nothing anyone can do about that now. With Ghosts, now is an opportune time to make good on their last misstep while proving that they can continue to deliver the goods even without many of the staff that originally established the franchise. On one hand, I think they’ve done just that by providing an experience that is on par with their past efforts. However, the innovations we saw in Black Ops II are sorely absent here, while Infinity Ward’s new ideas do little to liven up a stagnant formula.
Super Mario 3D Land is a very tough act to follow. To this day, I have fond memories of how it perfectly blended the 2D sensibilities of classic Mario within its 3D environments. I would go as far as saying that it’s better than any of the Super Mario Galaxy games. Are the cat suit and 4-player co-op enough to propel Super Mario 3D World above its predecessor? On their own, no. However, combined with the plethora of brilliant new ideas and a remarkable level of polish, this convincingly earns its place as one of the best Mario games ever made.
NBA 2K14 and I got off on the wrong foot. Upon first booting up the game, I was immediately thrown into a quick match between the Miami Heat and the San Antonio Spurs while the game installs in the background. This took a good 30 minutes to complete. It’s odd being forced to play as the Miami Heat in a game where there’s only background music, but I guess I’ll take that over waiting a half hour for it to install. Once I completed that, I thought I’d finally get to play some hoops in its MyCareer mode. Instead, I largely sat through what seemed like hours of exposition that played out through a barrage of painful cutscenes.
As much as I love the first and third iterations of the franchise, Contra as a whole has way more misses than hits. The franchise has struggled to find new ways to freshen up the formula, especially when it haphazardly forayed into 3D. As a spiritual successor to Contra, Hard Corps: Uprising gives the series an anime twist thanks to the handy work of Arc System Works, who are best known for Guilty Gear and BlazBlue.
In Third Person 