PixlBit

Nearly a hole in one.

After Mario Tennis Open, I was a bit weary of the next Mario sports game to hit the 3DS. It looked the part, but it didn’t have the same heart and soul of past entries in the series. Thankfully, Mario Golf: World Tour has restored my faith in the series as it carries that undeniable charm and addictiveness that makes the Mario sports games so enjoyable. However, it’s not without its share of ugly blemishes, namely a thin single player mode that feels like it was chopped in half for the sake of DLC – something I never would’ve expected from Nintendo.

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Kill the skies.

The wonder of some indie games that go for that retro aesthetic is they kind of live up to our brain’s memories of what those old games were like, without the warts we seldom remember.  Sort of like a period film, it might not be like how things really were, but while catering to our modern tastes, a finer piece of art is sculpted, one that has learned the mistakes of the past.  Luftrausers is a game forged out of what once was – not only with its 8-bit aesthetic, but also with its satirical Nazi artwork.  Both of these themes work for and against it, but overall what we have here is a great game that is a commentary not only on the past, but on the future. 

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It’s a curse to play such horrible garbage.

Imagine for a moment that you’re the world’s perfect predator, and you have an open and sprawling city that is now your playground after being at rest in the shadows for hundreds of years. You’re sneaking up on your prey, salivating at the heartbeat that is about to feed you when you suddenly step on a twig. The echo of this twig somehow alerts every known enemy of yours, and you’re suddenly flanked and flayed mercilessly without ever being given the chance to fight back. This is Lords of Shadow 2: everything sounds great in theory, yet nothing works the way it’s intended to do so.

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Babysitting with Yoshis – 2014 edition.

I’m the type of guy that doesn’t think its fair to compare one game to another, but in the case of Yoshi’s New Island, an exception has to be made. It’s the second follow-up to the SNES classic, Yoshi’s Island, and Yoshi’s Island is a very tough game to top. On the positive side, Yoshi's New Island does a lot of things better than the previous entry in the series, Yoshi’s Island DS, like getting rid of the annoying baby-switching mechanic and doling out some clever levels. On the other hand, it adds some new, underutilized mechanics, disappointing boss battles, and turns a definitive ability into a shallow gyroscope mini-game.

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