With two new consoles launched and Nintendo having sent new Mario and Zelda games into the wild, I think we can call 2013 done for new game releases. Well, except for Ys: Memories of Celceta
and the State of Decay Breakdown DLC. Ok, now we can call it done.
Deals
These deals only go until 11/27 at which point the madness of Black Friday and Ochre Thursday takes over. You’re on your own for those sales.
Toys R Us – Buy CoD: Ghosts for 360 or PS3 and get 50% off any other PS3 or 360 game. Get a free $50 gift card and copy of Halo 3 with purchase of 4GB Xbox 360. Buy one, get one 40% off all Skylanders Swap Force figures. Free game priced $19.99 or below with purchase of 3DS or 3DS XL.
Target – Get the Skylanders Swap Force for $49.99. Get a free $25 gift card with purchase of Wii U Mario bundle. Buy select Xbox One games and select shitty junk food products and get a free $10 gift card and a lifetime of shame.
Best Buy – Save $20 on all Disney Infinity starter packs. Purchase Zelda: A Link Between Worlds and get a code to download Zelda: Oracle of Ages.
Boy I wish State of Decay would go on sale.
I’m buried in gaming awesome; took down Phoenix Wright this weekend (best one since the first, hands down), now going between Mario, Zelda, and XCOM.
Love the new Zelda – the dungeons are wonderfully bite-sized.
Love Mario, the levels keep getting better and better with tons to do. Not as good as Galaxy, but definitely amazing.
XCOM continues to impress. I just did a scripted mission in Newfoundland, which I’m from so bonus points there, and it was hands down the best, hardest, most tense mission I have played in the game. I was running with top-ranked troops and I still lost two of my best to the scenario even on normal.
You are dead wrong about Mario. It IS better than Galaxy. And Galaxy was the best Mario game ever made.
Anybody that thinks every Mario game is the same is full of shit. It’s a timeless, classic design that can be riffed on indefinitely. The things that worked in Super Mario Bros. have been brought forward but with lots of new things. The game is just sheer joy to play, it is the kind of game that made me fall in love with the medium in the first place. Skip all of the hateful, negative angry teenager AAA shovelware and get this wonderful game.
The new Zelda is incredible too. It’s definitely steeped in nostalgia for Link to the Past, but then suddenly there’s completely new mechanics. The 3D is the best seen on the 3DS to date, it looks awesome.
Aside from those, I’m playing a bunch of FIFA 14 and maybe a game or two of Resogun. May go back to try Xenoblade Chronicles after I finish Wind Waker.
I haven’t found it quite as good. Galaxy wowed right out of the fate; 3D World took longer to start really gelling.
No argument on Zelda, the 3D is amazing. The tornado rod is entirely too fun.
I don’t know, for some reason this one strikes me as the ur-Mario game…it feels like it was explictly designed to sort of be that. I really liked what Tokyo EAD did with the levels in Land- they were 3D, but very rooted in 2D design principles. And they had a focus that made them feel more compressed yet without a loss of scope or exploration. They brought all that into World. It feels absolutely like _classic_ Mario should but then there’s new material that really shakes things up. There were some complaints that it’s like a “greatest hits”, but I think that’s in its favor. They even bring in the best from SMB2.
There was a moment I had Friday with it that was just quintessentially Nintendo…I got the first fire flower and I saw one of those zoom tubes. I thought “I bet I can throw a fireball through that” instinctively. I did, and it went through and hit a Goomba. A very simple piece of undirected exploration that sums up why Nintendo’s development is the best in the business.
Zelda is just STUPID good…some very meaningful changes to the formula that I hope carry over to the Wii U title.
About a year ago, I posted some positive thoughts about the opening levels of Assassin’s Creed III here on No High Scores. I made it clear at the time that I was only offering first impressions — and I maintain today that the game opens very strongly — but it’s hard not to feel like I lost a lot of credibility when it turned out that the rest of the game was a mix of tired mechanics, lousy mission design, and triumphantly bad writing.
Therefore, I’m going to wait another week before I offer up any judgements about my time with Assassin’s Creed IV. Ubisoft would never ship a game this good without perfecting some sort of proprietary boxing-glove-on-a-spring technology to for all their remote customer punching needs.