Ultra Suck Fighter IV: PlayStation 4 Edition

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In its current state, Ultra Street Fighter IV on the PlayStation 4 sucks. I personally haven’t run into the more egregious stuff that some people have reported, but what I have seen is inexcusable. Sluggish menus. Online UI all out of place so that usernames cut off. Audio out of sync or cutting off. Decapre’s Scramble move running at a slower speed and traveling a shorter distance. Worst of all is the input lag. For a system with this level of horsepower, it’s inexcusable that it actually runs worse than both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. Three frames may not sound like a lot, but when many combos have timing windows that are 1 or 2 frames, it’s actually really hard to adjust if you’ve played this game elsewhere.

All things considered, the current state of Ultra Street Fighter IV on PlayStation 4 is baffling. This is pretty much worse in every way compared to its last gen brethren. Capcom, Sony and Other Ocean should be embarrassed for letting this half-baked port of an old game out the door in this condition. Until this is patched to fix all of these issues, don’t buy this.

Out Now: Splatoon

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My skepticism around Nintendo’s oddball foray into the team-based shooter melted away after experiencing the global testfire a few weeks ago. While I still have questions about how much content is in the package, I’m smitten by the game’s look, sound, innovative gameplay and polish. Splatoon may not seem like a Nintendo game at first glance, but it playing that beta proved to me that this has the big N’s fingerprints all over it.

I’m going to have to wait a bit before I get my hands covered in ink. Having ordered through Amazon, it appears as though my copy won’t be in until sometime next week. When it does come in though, expect a review and some video content from me in the near future! Happy inking!


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DC Dice Masters: Justice League Starter Set Review

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From Marvel to Yu-Gi-Oh, the successful Dice Masters series continues to expand its collectable card/dice game empire with household names. The latest addition is DC Comics with the release of DC Dice Masters: Justice League. Fully compatible with all other versions of Dice Masters, players can finally create epic battles between DC and Marvel characters, or mash them up in to create your own dream teams. Can this Justice League starter set meet or exceed the quality set by its predecessors?

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Amiibo Story: Gold Mario

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Gold Mario Amiibo

When Nintendo first revealed the Amiibo concept, it was inevitable that they would release multiple versions of the same character. As a means of being somewhat disciplined with my money, I’ve set a general guideline for myself that I would only buy one version of a particular character I liked. For certain characters, like Peach and Luigi, this rule should be pretty easy to uphold. For Mario, forget about it. If he’s in any other form than his classic suit, I’m probably going to fall for it more often than not.

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Uncanny X-Men #600 delayed from May until after Secret Wars and what it could mean

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Fans looking to close the book on the Marvel Now edition of the X-Men are going to have to wait a while. Brian Michael Bendis, the writer of Uncanny X-Men and All New X-Men confirmed on his Tumblr page that Uncanny X-Men #600 has been delayed from May to October 2015 for “editorial and commercial reasons”. Besides the obvious time difference, there are other, more scummy reasons why this delay sucks.

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Space Cadets Review

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Space Cadets aims to be the Star Trek game of your dreams. Sure, there are no shortage of Star Trek games or games inspired by Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi classic, but this one puts you and your friends in charge of operating individual stations on a larger ship. Of course, there’s a captain, but others are required to run engineering, the helm, shields, weapons and sensors among other things. Does its novel approach to simulating a ship like the USS Enterprise work as a quality board game?

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Far Cry 4 Review

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All Ajay wanted to do was fulfill his deceased mother’s final wish of having her ashes spread on her home soil. Instead, he gets tangled up in a bloody civil war that forces him to take arms against the evil empire. This is the underlying premise of Far Cry 4, the latest in Ubisoft’s hit shooter franchise.

I’ve experienced my fair share of unpleasant moments with past Far Cry games. The stealth sequences in Far Cry 3 forced me to give up the game towards the end, and I thought that the humour of Blood Dragon wore out its welcome long before the game ended. However, I keep coming back in hopes that Ubisoft will finally push their open world franchise to its full potential. Is Far Cry 4 the game to do it?

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Amiibo Story: Peach

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Peach Amiibo“Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!”

I have to admit, I never did save the princess in her NES debut. Not for a lack of effort, though, as my attempts at beating the original Super Mario Bros. have come up short. Even as recently as last year, I couldn’t get any farther than world 8-3. She may forever be trapped in that castle, though we’ve certainly shared some great gaming moments together.

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That Time I Had an Apple Watch for Less Than 24 Hours Before it Broke

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This one still stings.

Recently, a concerted effort was put forth by my family, friends and I to get me an Apple Watch for my birthday. As a sucker for Apple products and as someone who is highly prone to splurging on big ticket items on my birthday, this seemed inevitable. For the first night, I was very excited to explore all of the nuances that make this device tick (pun intended).

As part of this exploration process, I decided to unpair it from my phone. Displayed on my screen was a message that read something like, “This may take a while.” Little did I know that it would take much more than a while. When the process seemingly completed, the watch turned off. Holding the power button, it simply refused to move past the Apple logo. Knowing something was wrong, I hurriedly took it to the Apple store close to my work.

The good news is that Apple will take care of me for free and I’ll have a fixed or new watch. The bad news is that I’m watch-less for a few weeks and now have to live with the fear of bricking this thing again. Steff thinks I shouldn’t have tried to unpair it while on the subway, since I didn’t have access to a steady internet connection. There may be some truth to that, though I would like to believe that Apple would have considered this scenario in the design process.

From my research, this particular problem hasn’t been reported by anyone else, though I have my suspicions as to what happened. During the unpairing phase, the watch makes a back-up of its data on the phone. I’m guessing that this process failed, taking everything with it, including all of the data required to boot up. Something similar happened to me years ago with my iPod Nano, as a failed firmware update bricked that minutes after taking it home from the store. Maybe I should reconsider my fandom for a company whose hardware track record has been spotty with me at times, from the Nano incident, to an iPhone 4 with screen damage under the glass as soon as I opened it, and now this.

Was hoping to publish a review on the Apple Watch, but that’s obviously going to have to wait. You better believe though that this incident will show up in my final verdict. Fingers crossed for the rest of you Apple Watch owners that you won’t suffer the same fate!

 

Amiibo Story: Yoshi

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Yoshi AmiiboSuper Mario World has a deceptively amazing soundtrack. I don’t know if you ever noticed this, but that game basically has one song that’s repeatedly re-imagined throughout. By changing the tempo, instrumentation and bits of the melody here and there, Koji Kondo created a varied, yet wonderfully cohesive soundscape for my all-time favourite Super Mario game. I didn’t pick up on this until many years later, though there’s one audio cue that caught my ear immediately. Whenever Yoshi was on screen, he was accompanied by a sweet bongo arrangement. Those bongos in my mind became synonymous with the awesome that Yoshi brought to the table.

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