What Are You Playing (Winter, 2013-2014)

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed - Played a decent chunk of the Vita version and it just doesn't do it for me. I've never really gotten into any kart racer and it looks like that trend continues.

Firefall - Even though I tried this twice before and found it whatever, I downloaded it again today for really no reason whatsoever (I actually meant to install Blacklight and I'm still not sure how I ended up with this) and am enjoying myself a lot more than I did before. Why that is I couldn't tell you, because it still pretty much feels exactly the same. I guess this time a lot of the components seemed to click so I've been running around doing random tasks and having a good time. There seems to be a lot of flavor text just for the hell of it, as they went for kind of a sandbox route and the descriptions of a lot of stuff don't actually tell me anything. This really makes it more confusing than it needs to be since there's so little hand-holding in the first place, but I guess it works out.

Blade & Soul - Yeah, this is good. Thanks to designs by Hyung Tae Kim (same guy who did Magna Carta) the proportions are nice and wacky, but I love his art so it's not even a thing for me. Sure do wish NCSoft would get around to bringing this over so that I wouldn't have to deal with 300ms Chinese servers. Ah well, at least the English patch is coming along.

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Originally Posted by YellerDog

Super Mario 3D Land - held off on this for a long time, finally getting into it.

The Tanooki Suit removes all difficulty from the proceedings, whole thing feels like a cross between New Super Mario Bros and Mario 64.

I think it's actually pretty good! There are a lot of really creative bits going on (the ghost houses, the 3D puzzle stages, the sawblade platforms); it is babby-easy, but the sheer, relentless POLISH on everything puts it over.

Out of this and Super Mario World, this may be the better Easy Mario Game. I still have no desire to play Galaxy, so YMMV on that.

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Galaxy is kind of lame anyway. 3DLand gets difficult near the end and more difficult after that.

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Chili Robot Demo - that French guy sure talks a lot! So many tutorial breaks! Does the talking ever stop?

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there were like 3 kind of long tutorials in the main game. The talking never ever stops... Like half the reason you'd get into a Skip game (that isn't a bit Generations title) is the talking. Chili Robot is especially a talking game. Did you play the other Chili Robots?

Broken Age (PC) - It's beautiful and quite funny in that Double Fine way, but it also feels simplistic compared to the adventure games of yore. I hate the way the inventory is handled. Unless I'm missing something, you have to manually drag items from the menu at the bottom onto what you wish to use them for - no scrolling through your stuff via the mousewheel. Still, the presentation is wonderful and I very much appreciate that underneath all the silliness, it's got that same somewhat melancholy/sad vibe I got from Psychonauts years ago. I think I'm already about halfway through it.

The Banner Saga (PC) - Prince Ludin is fucking awful. Also holy shit the art/animation.

Galaxy is the best Mario game possibly of all time.

You can say that in the same way you'd say "The Wand of Gamelon is the best Zelda game possibly of all time"

there are a lot of possibilities, and one of those might include Galaxy 1 being the best Mario of all time

but that one would be pretty miserable, the world where they didn't even announce Mega Man Legends because MMX was so popular they just went nuts with that crap, where only 2 Gyakuten Saiban games came out and only in Japan, where Final Fantasy XII was another Nomura-Toriyama game. Mario 1, 2, and 3 never came out in that world, and they just went World-64-Sunshine-Galaxy-NSMBU, with Mario Land 2 as the only Mario Land

there wasn't even a year of Luigi in that world...

Galaxy was like Mario Tomorrowland. I really liked it, but 3D World is a bunch better.

Why do you feel such animosity towards Mario Tomorrowland, Finch?

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Originally Posted by Mzo

Galaxy is the best Mario game possibly of all time.

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IBTN, though I haven't played 3D World yet. Galaxy destroys 3D Land.

You're out of your gourd. You probably don't even remember where you left your gourd and couldn't crawl back into it even if you wanted to (which you clearly don't).

I didn't care much for Mario Galaxy.

I know it's not popular on the internets but I still wish Nintendo would revisit the SM64 design - big open worlds, hunting for stars, etc.

Galaxy was okay. It had one good level.