Aliens have invaded London! Who can we call to save the day?! The Agents of S.T.E.A.M. of course! Led by the Abraham Lincoln, it’s up to you to guide him and his ragtag group of steampunk soldiers through battle. Created by Intelligent Systems, Code Name S.T.E.A.M. is a turn-based strategy game with third-person shooting, a la Gears of War. Is this shake-up enough for it to move outside of the shadow cast by Intelligent Systems’ previous efforts, such as Advance Wars and Fire Emblem?
It’s cute! It’s colourful! It’s…the next big shooter? Splatoon for the Wii U dares to mix things up in a genre where most are still copying from the Call of Duty playbook. In fact, Nintendo’s newest entry into the genre strays so far from the norm that shooting other people isn’t your primary objective. As crazy as that may sound, it works surprisingly well here.
Painting the town red, blue and green in Nintendo’s paint-based shooter!
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!
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.
“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.
Super 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.
I get my bearings in this first beta for Nintendo’s latest. It doesn’t come through in the video, but once I got a hang of it, I had a blast! Can’t wait to play the final product!
I vividly remember the first time I ever played a Mega Man game. It was the summer of 1990 and a family friend that was a year older than me had come over to my house with his new copy of Mega Man 2. Having never heard of the franchise up until then, I had no idea what to expect when I booted it up. Within seconds, the music in my ears was all I needed to hear to know that I was in for something special.
It’s easy to make fun of Sonic the Hedgehog. For the last 15 or so years, the games he’s starred in have been mediocre at best to dumpster fires at worst. His glory days may be long behind him, but I’ll never forget the time when he was the king of video games.
In Third Person 