Anarchy Reigns can look like a scatterbrained mess of a game at times. Its art direction wanders all over the place, with character designs culled from a wide palette of visual styles. Imagine cybernetic burly dudes, skin-tight vixens, robots, and a dash of Dynasty Warrior costumes, and you'll start to get the idea. Its use of hub worlds and a scoring system to unlock new missions can appear obtuse and even arbitrary. Some may even think the single-player feels a bit tacked-on, mostly due to a oddly implemented campaign structure that can feel like a perfunctory way to unlock the remaining 16-player roster. And then there's the middling graphics, which range in quality from up-rezzed PlayStation 2 visuals to an almost-but-not-quite-Unreal-Engine-3 level of detail. If you can't handle these types of flaws, you probably won't find Anarchy Reigns that impressive or fun -- even at the tantalizing price tag of $30.
But there's more to Anarchy Reigns than these surface level flaws, and if you're willing to look a little deeper, there's actually a fun game to enjoy here. Anyone disappointed by its presentation and campaign structure will still find a surprisingly deep brawler to play with, and for developer Platinum Games that's kind of the point: Sure, Anarchy Reigns presents a handful of irksome single-player design decisions, but it ultimately succeeds in resuscitating the multiplayer brawler and applies a modern sensibility to a forgotten genre.
Well folks, what you just witnessed was Nintendo's atomic bomb. Not only are they releasing a new Pokemon generation for the Nintendo 3DS, but they are doing it within a year of the initial announcement. And it will receive a simultaneous worldwide release at that. For Nintendo, this couldn't come at a better time. The 3DS has managed to establish itself in both the U.S. and Japan, but it faces more competition than ever before. Pokemon is their trump card. Even more so than Mario, it's the one franchise with the power to trump the iPad and sell people on the idea of shelling out $200 for a dedicated handheld.
Knowing the stakes, it's not surprising to see that Game Freak has opted to go all out on this version. In the battles at least, the new 3D graphics look quite impressive. The cel shading in particular looks great and is a natural fit for a franchise defined as much by the anime (which is still going!) as the games. In a lot of ways, this is the fully-animated console Pokemon that people were pining for back in the days of the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube. The new graphics, however, probably won't bring with them a new format. Game Freak reps have told me in the past that they are comfortable with the 8 Gym/Elite 4 format as a way to gate progress and teach newcomers the basics. So in that, I expect Pokemon X and Y to be business as usual.
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JANUARY 7 | ODDS 'N ENDS
Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning Quarterly Performance Report
Cover Story: How does a new farmer fare in a season of Natsume's latest?
I
f Natsume wants to be known for their honesty, they should change Harvest Moon 3D's subtitle to "A Slow Beginning." The newest installment of their 15-years-running farming sim may feature some pretty revolutionary changes for the series, but these concepts find themselves initially buried beneath lonely and repetitive weeks (as with every Harvest Moon, the game divides itself into month-long seasons) of growing, foraging, and looking for creative ways to pass the daylight hours.
Around the third week of the game, though, A New Beginning adds a twist that throws your previous experience into a new light -- and explains why the population of your little village barely adds up to a triumvirate. Harvest Moon 3D doesn't just throw you into the boots of an agricultural amateur who's looking to make a fortune on farming, and possibly land a mate; it also tasks you with rebuilding the community surrounding your farm, which serves as a much less selfish goal than what's usually found in your typical "life sim."
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