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The BBC confirmed today that the originally planned trilogy of Dr. Who games has been cut short. Paul Joffe of the BBC, Speaking with Polygon, stated that, "We will not be releasing any furtherEternity Clock games, nor did any other go into production."
The Eternity Clock received generally poor reception from critics and consumers. Citing "a plethora of bugs" and "sadistic checkpoints, the game earned a 3.5 in our GameSpot review. Regardless, the relationship between the game's developer, Supermassive Games, "was and continues to be good," according to Joffe. However, he added, "We also have no current work with Supermassive. We do have Doctor Who games in the pipeline and we will be announcing these in due course."
Future games in the using the Dr. Who license will very likely be mobile. Joffe said, "We're determined to focus on mobile, console didn't fit into the long term strategic vision in cases where BBC Worldwide would publish," Joffe said.
The first leg of the journey is a familiar one: within moments of waking on a lonely beach, you are fending off the lurching undead, receiving only a few words of encouragement to help you find your bearings. And that's just fine. Clicking on monsters until they die is now a role-playing tradition, and Path of Exile trusts your instincts. It allows you to discover its world's mysteries without immediately overwhelming you with its complexities. And it all starts with the clicking, as it so often does.
Given its initial similarities to the Diablo series, it's no surprise that Path of Exile's players so frequently compare it to Diablo III, a game they treat with much disdain. This always-online game's chat channels are often filled with statements like "This is the sequel to Diablo II I always wanted," and developer Grinding Gear Games clearly looked to Blizzard's classic for inspiration: the dark and arcane continent of Wraeclast recalls Sanctuary's murkiest regions, and the skeletons and wildlife you encounter in the early hours are much like the foes you manically clicked on years ago.
Path of Exile is not a mere retread of Diablo II, however, though it smartly uses this familiarity to instill comfort before introducing you to the diverse mechanics, vaporous dungeons, and wandering phantasms that give the game its unique identity. After you reach Wraeclast's first sign of civilization, quest givers send you into the wilds, where you slaughter goatmen and cannibals as one of six classes. (A seventh class, the scion, unlocks when you first reach the final act's conclusion.) The click-happy action leads you across three increasingly large and intriguing acts. The standard hellions and scavengers that populate Wraeclast's sandy beaches give way to religious temples swarming with floating banners that strike you with deathly bolts of electricity. Path of Exile masterfully builds its world without spending unnecessary time on narrative exposition. Each underground network is more squalid than the last, until you're sure you can smell the stench on your own clothing. You leave behind unremarkable forests in favor of intricate hedge mazes and ramshackle city ruins, and as the world deepens, so too does your investment in it.
That's not because Path of Exile tells a stupendous story. Magniloquent sentences spill from characters' mouths, but the stories they convey are less interesting than the lilt of their speech. "Clarissa pesters me with pity once more," says one resident. "There's only so much broth, so many bouquets a man can take." Such alliteration is more at home in written language than in speech, but it sounds reasonable in Wraeclast, as if the exiles realize that they themselves are this barbarous world's only source of tamed culture. This place is much like Dark Souls' kingdom of Lordran, where I was drawn in not so much by the words the characters said as much as I was by how they said them.
Your body is a temple. This place is also a temple.
Wraeclast's wildness is amplified by multiple mechanics that subvert genre tropes in intelligent ways. You don't collect piles of gold here; there is no use for such extravagances on this callous continent. Instead, you barter with merchants, and indeed, with other players. Scrolls of wisdom, which you use to identify equipment, form the basis of the economy, though players and merchants may require you to give up valuable whetstones if you want an orb that improves a health flask. And like that orb, health itself is a precious commodity that you cannot just purchase from a wandering salesman. Instead, you equip health and mana flasks that fill as you murder your attackers. Like other kinds of equipment, flasks can be modified with orbs that you loot from corpses. Swigging from a flask doesn't just replenish your magical energy; the refreshing liquid may also temporarily add knockback to your melee attacks, or remove bleeding.
Electrified golems emit crackling orbs in all directions as your friends sling arrows and knives into their petrified flesh.
I see Wraeclast through the eyes of my witch. And she is truly my witch, different from the other witches I encounter in Path of Exile's shared areas. The game provides an astounding number of ways to customize your abilities, starting with skill gems. Your active abilities are not determined by a talent tree but by jewels you insert into slots on your equipment. Both gems and slots are color-coded, and you may only insert a gem into a matching slot. You earn some gems by completing quests, but others appear as loot after a particularly energetic battle, and the game doesn't restrict your choices based on your chosen class. Path of Exile offers an incredible amount of skill flexibility, and showers you with a bounty of treasure.
The abundance of loot that clatters to the ground as you slash through a quiver of cobras is continually useful, in part because its value does not rest on its core attributes alone. You must also consider the number of gem slots items contain, as well as the colors of those slots. Some gems support others, causing an ability to last longer, or turning a single fireball into an entire trio of them--but they only function when the support slot is joined to the slot it modifies. A rare robe might seem a remarkable find, but may not allow you to retain your preferred skill composition. The higher you level, the more gems you collect, and the harder the choices you must make become. You can apply certain baubles to your equipment to change the colors of gems, the number of them, and how they are linked, but there is no guarantee that the randomized result will be any more to your liking.
Make sure to use your portal scrolls when grouped, lest you get separated from your party.
One of the earliest gems I found in my travels allowed me to resuscitate corpses as shambling zombies. I could fling fire from my wand and generate a ring of ice, but I soon found myself wanting to play the role of necromancer. Later, I was summoning skeletons from thin air and resurrecting fallen creatures as phantoms, and ultimately could forge a spiritual sentry out of the melee weapons and shimmering armor littering the ground. I scavenged the Imperial Gardens with a 15-member undead entourage, watching my minions tear living statues to pieces while I shot bolts of energy at the most dangerous adversaries. A few glitches occasionally interfered with the fun; I sometimes wasted mana by trying to cast the animate guardian skill on items the spell can't affect, for instance. But I was compelled to push onward at every step, anxious to find an array of gems and armor that fully supported the witch of my dark-fantasy dreams.
Many mysteries still await me, even in the savage regions I've already charted.
I found myself relying on my fatal flames when my minions were vanquished, particularly when corpses were in short supply. If you rely on certain key skills in this manner, you should approach Path of Exile's extraordinary passive skill tree with thoughtful care. This massive web of passive augmentations is a shock the first time you open it; the entire range of possibilities stretches beyond the confines of the screen, your eyes glazing over due to the sheer magnitude. If you get too experimental with this tree, you could ruin your character, wasting points on skills that don't improve your effectiveness. That's a scary proposition. Common sense is the talent you must rely on here, presuming you don't rush to the Internet to research popular character builds. By the time you reach vital branches in the passive skill tree, you should already have a decent idea of where your path might lead.
Perusing the passive skill tree is an intellectual delight when you're hanging around town, preparing for your next adventure. Nevertheless, bloodthirsty combat forms Path of Exile's ironclad foundation, and the moment-to-moment thrills are inescapable, especially if you invite other players to the battleground. It's easy to join up to five others, and should you create a public party, at least a few others are certain to accompany you on your journey. Marching forward as a full party is a visual treat. Electrified golems emit crackling orbs in all directions as your friends sling arrows and knives into their petrified flesh. Multiple marauders hammer on a colossal walker as you conjure an elemental deluge. Some boss fights prove difficult should you face them alone, but fellow exiles are quick to leap to your aid. Sometimes too quick, as it turns out: in a few cases, my powerful teammates quickly slaughtered the opposing general before I had time to blink.
Ethereal knives do plenty of damage in spite of their ghostly nature.
It's too bad that Path of Exile's competitive play is so limited. Not only does joining a player-versus-player queue force you to stay in a village, but you can participate only when your level falls within certain bounds. (If you're too high in level, you're out of luck.) Overall, however, you couldn't accuse the game of wanting for content. Various leagues reshape the rules, making bosses more difficult, adding unique items, and implementing permanent death. Other leagues pit players against each other in races, spurring participants to level up as quickly as possible. And even after it seems you've exhausted every possible option, collectible maps give you access to unique adventuring areas with various modifiers applied to them.
Considering that Path of Exile costs you nothing beyond some Internet bandwidth, it provides an embarrassment of pleasures. If you like standing out in a crowd, you could toss Grinding Gear Games some cash by purchasing a cosmetic accessory, like a nature aura to surround your wand, or a pet ferret to tail you. I'm so fully committed to Path of Exile that I've spent a bit of coin myself, and my witch is only one of many wayfarers I intend to guide through Wraeclast. Many mysteries still await me, even in the savage regions I've already charted.
The announcement was made following an application by the South Australian Attorney General to request reviews of each game's rating. As a result, the classification board will be meeting on November 18-19th and December 2nd, 4th and 5th to "consider the applications". The games in question are as listed:
Each game was originally granted an MA15+ rating by the classification board. Following the reviews, the Australian Classification Board will be posting the results accompanied by reasons for decisions made on the official Australian Classification website.
The MA15+ rating is the second highest rating which can be granted to a video game in Australia. An R18+ rating was officially introduced on January 1 this year. Since the introduction of the R18+ rating, two games have been banned from sale in the country. Both Saints Row IV and State of Decay were initially refused classification, which prompted developers to submit modified versions of the game to be granted an R18+ rating.
Oliver Franzke, Lee Petty, Greg Rice and Tim Schafer from Double Fine Productions discuss ways in which they leveraged modern technology and methodologies to deliver a game that preserves the ideas and experiences core to the traditional adventure game.
Congratulations! You have been randomly chosen to become God. As the newly appointed ruler over all creation, you shall be whisked away to the heavens above to fulfill your holy duties--which may include battling mermaids and flirting with angels.
Such is the fate of Renya Kagurazaka, an everyday, mild-mannered, dime-a-dozen, completely generic high school student. That's right: The Guided Fate Paradox presents a truly nightmarish scenario where God is, in fact, one of us. It's a goofy premise, since a lot of this fate guiding involves helping a weak-willed zombie find his courage or a knightly couple fall in love.
Sadly, the game chooses not to embrace this silliness, and instead gets bogged down in a workaday, good-versus-evil plot culminating in a workaday, good-versus-evil showdown. The fact that you're playing as God is of no real consequence; it's just a flimsy rationale supporting the game's singular purpose: level grinding.
The Guided Fate Paradox is a turn-based role-playing game played on a grid. Combat and exploration are not separate modes, so every step your take, or attack you make, counts as a turn. After you act, your partner acts, and then all the enemies act in unison. As you fight, you collect equipment for Renya--aka God--and friends to use, which confers new attacks, spells, or other special abilities. It's a play style reminiscent of the roguelike genre, but with a Japanese RPG twist in character advancement and death.
Paradox's woes start with leveling up, which is divided across many systems. By juggling these different systems, Paradox makes you feel as if you're getting stronger, but the complexity of this system also makes it difficult to understand exactly how strong you've become.
Renya may hold the title of God, but in practice he mostly just runs around punching robots in the face.
This is especially vexing when Renya is humming through a dungeon, dropping all challengers with a single blow, and a few floors later wanders into a foe that can do the same thing to him. Finding a happy medium where your abilities are comparable to your foe's is a rarity, which is disappointing since those moments are when Paradox is at its best. They force you to stop and think about the battlefield, and carefully calculate every action.
Surmounting one of these encounters is a triumph, but it's short-lived. Renya inevitably outpaces his foes, and then it's back to the mindless slaughter. Some different enemy types would help break up the monotony, but Paradox has only a handful of different foes and none of them are especially interesting to fight. Many simply behave like zombies, wandering aimlessly until they spot you and then relentlessly attacking you until defeated. A handful of boss encounters offer complex challenges, but aside from those endeavors, enemy encounters are simple affairs. One of the most complicated enemies you encounter is a snail with a shield covering its face. The shield blocks all attacks from the front, and the snail follows you around. Besting this devious adversary requires all the trickery and guile of maneuvering someone behind the snail for a flanking attack.
A variety of stage gimmicks, including explosive traps and moving platforms, attempt to put a spin on these encounters. However, the enemies and stage gimmicks don't play off each other in interesting ways, unless by total accident. The only constant in Paradox is the grinding: a circular system that rewards grinding with the ability to do more grinding.
Not even death can stop the grind. One of the cheapest items in the game lets you escape from any dungeon with all equipment in tow, so there's really no excuse for dying. You can also safeguard your best equipment in a special vault that lets you continue to use it without the fear of losing it upon death. And if the worst should come to pass, you don't have too much to worry about so long as you remember to save your game before entering the dungeon.
You're rarely without a companion, but they lack any sort of tactical finesse.
After you finish the game--a feat that could easily set you back more than 40 hours--something interesting happens. A survival dungeon is unlocked. This dungeon negates all of your base stat advancement, and lets you use only the items recovered in that dungeon. You can improve your characters and their items, just as you would in the rest of the game, but that progression is lost once you leave the dungeon. This goes a long way toward providing a consistent, satisfying challenge. Both Renya and his enemies start at the same level and advance along a similar curve. Play smart, and you can make life easier for yourself by getting ahead of that curve. Alternatively, if you rush through the dungeon the enemies will quickly outpace you.
With its intricate leveling system and randomized dungeons, The Guided Fate Paradox succeeds in creating a game that can easily gobble up biblical amounts of time. It's simply too bad all that time spent ends up feeling like a waste when there's no great payoff for all that hard work.
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Konami has confirmed details for its upcoming Data Pack 2 for Pro Evolution Soccer 2014. The free pack will include updated team rosters, 11 vs. 11 mode, and additional Competition Mode features.
Data Pack 2 will bring all team rosters up to date, with team changes to reflect all player transfers. Over 800 new faces will also be part of the pack, upgrading the appearance of players such as Manchester United's Da Silva twins, Boca Juniors' Riquelme, Real Madrid's Isco, and England's Jack Wilshere.
In response to feedback from the PES community, 11 vs. 11 mode will also be implemented as part of Data Pack 2. Online competitions and master league online competitions will be added to the game's Competition Mode. A Team Play lobby system will also be incorporated.
Fans can also expect changes to the chat format, and gameplay tweaks, which Konami did not specify.
The Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 Data Pack 2 will be available to download "later this month".
The first few minutes of Call of Duty: Ghosts don't paint a terribly accurate portrait of what lies ahead. You barely have time to take stock of the idyllic Southern California setting before fire begins raining down from the heavens, destroying every car and home in sight as a shouty man commands you to follow him to safety. But whereas Infinity Ward's recent work on the Modern Warfare series was weighed down by bewildering plot twists and an affinity for restricting its most exciting moments to noninteractive set dressing, Ghosts tells a lean, straightforward story that throws you into plenty of spectacular situations, but with more breathing room to appreciate the action. Along with the outstanding new Extinction co-op mode and an abundance of clever refinements to competitive multiplayer, Call of Duty: Ghosts is a refreshing and thoroughly satisfying entry in the blockbuster shooter franchise.
Much of Ghosts' success stems from its own sense of humility. Infinity Ward has done a great job reining in the excesses of previous Call of Duty campaigns, replacing the crumbling Eiffel Tower and runaway Tube trains of Modern Warfare 3 with a less heavy-handed approach that employs spectacle--and there's no shortage of that here--as more of a complement to its core combat. It's a game that avoids falling in love with its own cinematic ambitions, allowing the ruthless combat and well-paced encounters to take center stage over the plot.
It's a good thing, too, because the story is every bit a predictable tribute to American military might. After the collapse of the Middle Eastern oil economy, South America's oil-producing states join together to form an economic and military superpower known as the Federation. Naturally, the Federation decides to hijack a satellite weapon system and turn it against the United States. The conflict that follows is one centered on the Ghosts, an enigmatic tier one task force with a penchant for lethal efficiency and sweet skeleton masks.
Ghosts is full of atmospheric touches, like bubbles discharging from your gun when fired underwater.
The whole thing feels like a geopolitical Mad Lib, but a functional and rather harmless one. Ghosts delivers just enough narrative to serve as a catalyst for its whirlwind tour through global warzones, while resisting the urge to club you over the head with plot twists and gratuitous shock-and-awe moments. In many ways, Infinity Ward has crafted a story that reflects the stoic nature of the Ghosts themselves: focused, efficient, and committed to the task at hand.
The approach pays off: Ghosts features a terrific collection of shootouts and set pieces, largely unburdened by the sensation that you're merely an extra in someone else's adventure. At various points you go after a missile launch center by tank and an offshore industrial facility by helicopter, each serving as excellent examples of how well Call of Duty's zippy and responsive controls can be applied toward massive, fully navigable battlefields. It's also a game with a knack for crafting tense shootouts in unexpected locales, highlighted by a brief jaunt into outer space that has you floating from one piece of debris to the next, aiming the shots that will make a Federation soldier's helmet decompress in a gruesome hiss.
These bombastic set pieces are complemented by more subdued moments, like a deep-sea scuba mission that has you swimming through gorgeous reef formations while avoiding enemies both shark and human. Then there are the more tightly scripted scenes, like prowling through a dense jungle while using a motion tracker to spot enemies, or rappelling down the side of a Caracas skyscraper as you quietly snipe soldiers patrolling its interior. Moments like these further the game's excellent pacing, serving as welcome palette cleansers after some of the more spacious and chaotic battles.
Tank controls are unapologetically agile in Ghosts.
It all adds up to a campaign that follows the familiar rhythms of the series, but in a more varied and generous way. There's a real willingness to let you stretch your legs and soak up the spectacle, driven by the feeling that--for the most part--you're the one at the center of the action.
There are some missteps. Using your pet dog to take out enemies serves as an entertaining staple of the game's early missions, but this gameplay mechanic completely disappears for the latter half of the campaign. Your AI squad mates still have a habit of occasionally running in front of your gunfire as thought you don't exist, and a few levels follow the bland corridor template a little too closely. But those issues aside, this is an impressive campaign that uses the series' winning formula as more of a roadmap than a shackle.
Ghosts is even more impressive on the next-gen hardware of the PlayStation 4. While the current-gen versions are just as competent as ever, rendering the chaotic shootouts at a smooth 60 frames per second, the PS4's next-gen artistry creates a much more immersive battleground. Those effects are most noticeable in the levels that emphasize lighting: the soft bokeh effects of floating embers on a burning oil refinery, or the way moonlight refracts and ripples while underwater. It's essentially the difference between a PC game running on high versus low settings. Each version is functionally the same, but all those extra effects add up to a more engrossing experience. (Note: Our review of the Xbox One version remains under embargo until a later date. Activision did not provide access to the PC and Wii U versions.)
This is an impressive campaign that uses the series' winning formula as more of a roadmap than a shackle.
If Ghosts' story campaign is an example of its developers leaving Modern Warfare behind, its approach to co-op takes that trend one step further. Gone are the Spec Ops missions from Infinity Ward's previous work, replaced by a new co-op campaign dubbed Extinction. Much like Zombies in the Black Ops games, Extinction presents a playful alternate reality where you and up to three friends are dropped into a battle against fantastical enemies. But instead of shambling zombies, you're fighting a swarm of buglike aliens. The way these enemies scurry up the sides of buildings and burst forth from underground hives changes the dynamic in a monumental way: you're still employing Call of Duty's signature shooting mechanics, but you're doing so against an enemy whose animalistic movement makes it much more imposing and unpredictable than your average foot soldier.
Extinction's various progression systems make for a steep learning curve, but boy is it fun.
Extinction is an ambitious hybrid of tower defense, Left 4 Dead, and Borderlands. You're drilling into alien hives as you move through the backwoods and small-town streets of rural America, each drill site its own standoff against swarms of incoming enemies who grow larger and nastier as the campaign progresses. There's a class system that allows you to play complementary roles, an in-game skill tree that lets you beef up your character on the fly, and a scavenging system where taking the time to rummage through a dumpster might reward you with a new weapon sight. There's also an economy that encourages fun twists on teamwork, like the ability to pool your money together to unlock a helicopter strike when things get really tough.
None of these ideas are remarkable on their own, but the way Extinction blends them with Call of Duty's fast-paced action is tremendous fun. Throwing a hypno knife at an acid-flinging scorpion to turn it into a friendly, debating whether to buy a turret gun for yourself or a crate of incendiary ammo for your team--Extinction is full of all these little moments and decisions that add up to a stellar co-op experience. This is Call of Duty venturing as far outside its comfort zone as it ever has, but the payoff is immense.
A more familiar experience can be found in Ghosts' competitive multiplayer. The frantic pacing and close-quarters encounters are every bit as enjoyable as they've ever been, augmented by contextual lean and running slide abilities that make for more fluid transitions in and out of cover. Infinity Ward has taken a delicate approach to the existing multiplayer progression, though a new perk weighting system promotes better player balance while still giving you plenty of ways to micromanage your loadouts.
One of the features that Ghosts introduces to multiplayer is a character customization system that takes those abstract player levels and wraps a greater sense of ownership around them. You can now create a roster of personalized soldiers, each decked out in a wardrobe full of custom armor and equipment. Facial designs, skin color, and gender are all options you can use to craft your own characters, and then you take those creations one step further by leveling them all up independently of one another. For a series that has long given you such granular control over your weapons and abilities, it's nice to finally be able to apply that same level of personalization to the characters themselves.
Multiplayer maps have you fighting everywhere from Scottish castles to Alaskan fishing villages.
That customization system is what drives the new Squads mode, a feature that pushes Call of Duty eerily close to the realm of management sim. Squads is where you take your custom characters and turn them into a full-blown team of AI soldiers, leading your creations in competitive matches against teams designed by your friends--even if those friends happen to be offline. It essentially spreads the rewards of repeated prestiging out across different soldiers, giving dedicated players a new kind of progression for the countless hours they will spend leveling up.Squads is clearly a feature designed for the most hardcore Call of Duty players, but it's also a testament to just how deep the well of competitive experiences has become.
Yet Squads is hardly the only addition to Call of Duty's competitive landscape. Ghosts introduces a number of clever multiplayer modes that keep a keen eye on the series' strengths while taking a playful approach to how you can interact with one another. Blitz is like a twist on American football: players dash toward scoring zones on the other team's side of the map, warping right back to safety if they're successful and becoming sitting ducks if they fail to properly judge the scoring cooldown timer. Hunted takes a Hunger Games approach to multiplayer design, giving players one handgun and 10 bullets to start and forcing them to fight over randomized weapon drops that fall from the sky. And then there's Grind, an evolution of Kill Confirmed that makes players take the dog tags dropped by fallen enemies and run them back to a handful of specific locations in order to bank points. Each of these game modes adds a devilish new wrinkle to the multiplayer experience, taking an already exceptional collection of competitive options and expanding them further.
From an exuberant campaign full of spectacle and variety to the way Extinction's unpredictable aliens force you to use those targeting skills in entirely new ways, Ghosts strikes an excellent balance between the familiar and the novel. This is a game that's keenly aware of the series' strengths, but doesn't find itself beholden to them. No matter what standard you apply, Call of Duty: Ghosts is a terrific first-person shooter.
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The Mario & Sonic series has always, and perhaps bizarrely, mixed accessible minigames, topical sporting events, and gaming nostalgia. It's an odd but enduring mix, one that's given us Charmy Bee cameos in a stylised re-creation of England's capital city for London 2012, but sadly the mascot duo's fourth outing falls flat.
In Mario & Sonic's first outing on the Wii U, developer Sega starts with a major change for the series: Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games demands that you make use of the Wii MotionPlus across its collection of 20 Nintendo and Sega characters and 25-odd minigames. The hardware boost ensures an extra degree of controller fidelity in new and returning Olympic events including skiing, figure skating, and curling. And while the move creates an additional expense for families with only a few regular Wii Remotes kicking around, the MotionPlus helps bring a touch of finesse to a previously waggle-intensive series.
Don't worry: the Shy Guy is wearing a protective mask.
It's the forced addition of the GamePad that serves to complicate matters, shifting the series away from its simplistic roots. At best you've just got to explain each individual mechanic to a group all holding different configurations of controllers, but at worst you've got to contend with groups of irate children arguing over why one gets to have a GamePad and the others don't.
The GamePad is incorporated in various ways, and like with many aspects of the Mario & Sonic series, there are both ups and downs. Biathlon, a new event for 2014, mixes cross-country skiing on the Wii Remote with a shooting range, letting the player at the top of the pack shoot via the GamePad while forcing others to use the more complicated Wii Remote. It's a sporting event that hasn't been well translated into a party game, suffering too much from the fact that it's the person who's already ahead that gets placed in the most advantageous situation.
Bobsleigh is another example of an event that's complicated by the GamePad's involvement, only one that's far more endearingly preposterous. The leader steers the vehicle with the GamePad while barking orders at up to three other players, who lean their Wii Remotes to the left or right to help steer around corners. Sitting cross-legged in a row on the floor isn't required, but it does make this event a lot more fun.
Snowboard slopestyle, meanwhile, has you take turns to get the highest score on a downhill run, with points awarded for speed, jumps, and grinds. You steer with the GamePad, and flick the touchscreen to perform tricks. It's simple but fun, and is pleasantly different from the more traditional downhill skiing.
Many returning events are identical to their previous incarnations, though some have been spruced up a bit. Hockey, a particularly drab addition in Mario & Sonic's last wintry sojourn, fills in the hole left by the absence of soccer and beach volleyball, now functioning as a kind of cut-down NHL that has you darting around a tiny rink making chaotic overpowered shots while a Shy Guy sits in goal at each end. It's a lot more fun than you'd expect from such a rudimentary implementation, but it's also hard to imagine it being something you'd want to play multiple times.
Figure skating pairs easily takes the crown for the barmiest minigame. Two players are judged on synchronising their movements, and while you're each allowed to hold a Wii Remote, it's when you play together by holding hands around a single controller that the real silliness kicks in. Having one player clumsily spin around the other in real life while an onscreen Daisy pirouettes elegantly around Dr Eggman is enough to put a smile on anyone's face, although you might need to encourage your immediate friends and family members to finish a glass of wine before joining in.
There are highlights, then, but too many events prove to be a disappointment. I've always found it particularly difficult to feel anything but boredom for this series' ski jumping and speed skating modes, and the downhill slide offered by skeleton is handled with more panache by skiing and snowboarding. But it's Sochi 2014's Dream Events that are especially lacking, with the series' former fantastical twists now reduced to half-baked spins of preexisting events wrapped loosely in the aesthetics of the Sonic or Mario series. Snowball scrimmage is the worst of the lot; it's a crude third-person two-versus-two battle with flat snowball-firing guns.
The Mario & Sonic series has been an inclusive experience, catering to all players of all skill levels, but Sochi 2014 complicates that simplicity.
Developer Sega attempts to add value with a flurry of other modes, with Legends Showdown acting as the game's campaign. As opposed to the technically involved London Party board game of London 2012, Legends Showdown simply peppers a cluster of events with the odd cutscene, as a quartet of characters face off against shadow versions of themselves. Each area is capped off with a boss battle against one of the Sonic or Mario series' more obscure characters, including E-102 Gamma, Birdo, and Jet the Hawk. The mode is completely dull.
Medley Mania is similar to Legends Showdown, but presents clusters of events without any narrative context, and Action & Answer Tour mixes individual events with a quiz show . You must complete various feats during randomised events, such as exposing a picture hidden in smoke with curling stones. It's the most successful additional mode in the game by a country mile, forcing you to keep a little something extra buzzing around your head while competing.
It's unlikely you'll ever be this delighted when playing the game.
The game also adds online competition to the series for the first time, but only via four events: Olympic events freestyle ski cross, snowboard cross, and short track speed skating, alongside multi-vehicle Dream Event winter sports champion race. You can be matched into games alongside strangers or people from your friends list, and online multiplayer is tied together with a national metagame. Winning points in an event goes towards a ranking for your country, with the game displaying the national rankings on the main screen and also via in-game updates on the GamePad.
The Mario & Sonic series has been an inclusive experience, catering to all players of all skill levels, but Sochi 2014 complicates that simplicity. The game's long-winded tutorials have a wearying effect, and the most enjoyable events--which are the simplest, coincidentally--are essentially identical to events from previous years. There are dribs of fun to be extracted from the overall package, but from the outset, it's hard to shake the feeling that this is a series that has now thoroughly outstayed its welcome.
The Mario & Sonic series is the perfect example of the kind of charming, bite-sized, and all-inclusive entertainment that defined Nintendo throughout the Wii's golden years, but a lack of creativity and a poor implementation of the Wii U GamePad ensure that Mario & Sonic's fourth outing in six years fails to secure a podium finish.
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This week on New Releases, no one wanted to compete with Call of Duty: Ghosts, but we find a few games worth mentioning; Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy, Zumba Fitness World Party, the new Arma 3 Survive campaign and early access to Space Engineers.
Double Fine Productions, the studio behind Brutal Legend, announced that they're collaborating with Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward on the upcoming independently published game Broken Age.
The announcement came during the Day of the Devs event in San Francisco and on the private backer forums for Broken Age. Ward will be voicing one of the characters in Broken Age, and the reveal was accompanied online by a video showing him in the studio recording lines and improvising with Tim Schafer.
Although there is no specific launch date at this time, PopCap says that their addictive puzzle game will not be an Xbox One launch title. Speaking with GamesBeat, PopCap said, "Peggle 2 is a 'launch timeframe' title...But [it] will not launch day-and-date with the Xbox One -- instead, it will become available a few weeks later in December."
At Gamescom, Microsoft formerly listed Peggle 2 as one of the 23 titles coming to the console on it's November release, but PopCap called this a mischaracterization; their game was always meant to release sometime shortly after launch.
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