We want to play in ways beyond the gaming population's insular past, cavorting through catastrophes and destroying the present. Our future depends on the ability to create, and design, something new. It's fun to tear something down but there's a deeper joy in building something up. Besides, there's nothing more catastrophic than the wrong wallpaper.
Super Smash Bros. finds more tricks to play on Wii U
The colors pop. The theme song burrows its way into your dreams. Were Nintendo to take Arms away now, it would still exist as a part of our collective memory, a phantom limb we remember having always, even if we're just now getting the hang of this fascinating new appendage.
Star Fox Zero is a very fun game. But you first need to learn that lesson the hard way.
Old Man's Journey is a small, quiet game that you can tell was a work of passion. Sometimes the best way to get someone to listen to you is to whisper. In a just world, this spare kaleidoscope of memories and manipulated hillsides will garner as much attention as bigger games beset with earth-shaking explosions. As we all learn in time, it's often the smaller chance encounters that make the most impact on us. Especially when we look back.
In this way, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse is the more realistic of the two games released last week. Though one stars a human being walking among recognizable landmarks, employing guns and knives and other things of our world, it is the little pink ball of clay and his merry band of floating spike balls and giant hands with mouths that recreates a more believable, tangible world.
As another beat draws to a close, I take a break to wrap up this review. I’m hooked on this simple, but loveable title. While I’m still itching for a realistic police title, I’m pleased with how more games about law enforcement fiction are appearing in the last year or so, and Beat Cop sits at the top of the pile in terms of enjoyment.
But that's the thing with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Nintendo Switch. On Wii U, the game was over when you stepped away from your television. As the saying goes: You can't take it with you. But now you can. Now, the game is only over when you—or the baby—says so.
What’s so impressive about this latest Paper Mario game is that, for all intents and purposes, it could have been just as grinningly dumb. This is an adventure revolving around the antics of paper-thin varietals of cartoons. No one expects Tolstoy. But the writing is smarter than most serious videogames attempting to evoke actual emotions. And that attention to detail—and a restraint diametrically opposed to its surface lunacy—is what makes the experience so humorous.
Splatoon is not trying to corral unearned cool points with obscenity. Splatoon does not push us to accept its weirdness. Splatoon merely opens its suction-cupped palms to the sky and says, "Here," and we graciously accept, parched by the years of dusty, war-torn, bone-dry purveyors of damage masquerading as games. Each waterfall was in fact an oasis. Instead, Splatoon showers us with a heavy goop that feels amniotic. We emerge, new and refreshed. We are all squids now.