Majora's Mask 3D Review

My history with Majora’s Mask goes back almost as far as I do. This was the first game I ever actually owned, having gotten it for one of my birthdays. It’s also the first Zelda game I’ve ever played.

Since then, I’ve played at least part of every Zelda game released on a Nintendo system. My opinion of the series has ranged from great to bad. But ever since I first played this game, it’s always had a special place in my heart.

PROS:

-The tone of the game is dark, but not too dark. A darker tone for a story is hard to pull off. You don’t want to go too dark, or you’ll just be seen as trying to be edgy for the sake of being edgy, like Shadow the Hedgehog. But if you don’t go far enough, you end up with Twilight Princess.

Majora’s Mask is the only Zelda game to feature actual death and other depressing topics. The entire game only gives you 72 in-game house to live, and if you fail your task, everyone dies.

-The music is outstanding.

Koji Kondo, the man behind many of Nintendo’s most popular soundtracks, was the composer for Majora’s Mask, and as a result, Majora’s Mask 3D. The soundtrack has a perfect mix of somber and bright and cheerful.

-The graphics are wonderful.

When looking at the graphics for Ocarina of Time 3D, I got a little bit worried about how Grezzo would re-capture the art style in Majora’s Mask for the 3DS version. I’m happy to say, my worries were in vein.

The graphics of Majora’s Mask 3D are greatly detailed. The textures are sharp, and the models are highly detailed. And yes, the moon is absolutely terrifying.

-The controls are excellent.

If you have a Circle-Pad Pro or New 3DS, you can control the camera the same way you can in the Gamecube and Wii U Zelda games. This extra camera control isn’t necessary to enjoy the game, but it does add a sense of freedom.

Aside from the camera, you can equip items to the X and Y buttons, as well as two touch screen buttons.

You can also use gyro controls for items that use a first person perspective.

-The story is absolutely fantastic.

The story begins with Link looking for a friend, when Skull Kid uses his two minion fairies to scare Epona, enabling Skull Kid to steal Link’s belongings, including Epona. After chasing Skull Kid, Link is transformed into a Deku Scrub.

Tatl, one of Skull Kid’s minion fairies, joins Link on his quest to turn back into a human. But as soon as Link finds a man capable of returning him to his former self, he is also informed that the world will be destroyed in just three days.

This is the main storyline for the game, but it’s not the only one.

-The focus is on the world, not the dungeons.

You only have a total of four dungeons in the entire game, but the game is still decently long. This is because of the focus on the world around the dungeons, rather than the dungeons themselves.

Throughout the world building, you’re seeing the frustration of the people who live in the town. And by the time you get everything and talk to everyone, you will hate Skull Kid, that’s why I enjoy the item you get for completing the game. You want Skull Kid to die a painful death. If you want to see me go into more detail, stick around after the end slate. There will be spoilers, this is your spoiler warning.

CONS:

-The bosses are bad.

Three of the bosses ranged from bland to bad in the original game. But they were changed in stupid ways the 3DS remake, especially fishy over here. The final dungeon boss was probably hurt the most. They made the fight itself way more cool, but it takes forever to finish.

The bosses should have been tweaked, not changed entirely.

-The Bombers Notebook.

The Bombers Notebook is a mechanic in the game that keeps track of who you meet and what they want you to do. This problem is that it always brings up another screen tells you meaningless information about who you just talked to. This ruins the flow of the game. You should have had the option to turn it off.

OVERALL OPINION:

Majora’s Mask is my favorite game of all time, and this remake is what I’ve been asking for for years. I will admit, I didn’t enjoy this remake that much at first. But after a bit of time, and a second playthrough, this remake truly is excellent. If you haven’t played Majora’s Mask before and you have a 3DS, I would greatly consider getting Majora’s Mask 3D.

Mario and Luigi Paper Jam Review

Mario and Luigi Paper Jam is the latest entry in the Mario and Luigi series. This is also the second time they’ve mixed Marios, the first time being in Mario and Luigi Partners in Time.

Paper Jam features a new character, Paper Mario. Paper Mario has some features that the other characters don’t have, such as being paper thin.

Pros:

The graphics are nice. I’ve always enjoyed when a game can pull off the 3D but actually 2D look, and this game pulls it off. I’m pretty sure the characters are actually two-dimensional, but that just shows how impressive the effect is, I can’t tell.

The gameplay is enjoyable. What would a Mario and Luigi game be without the gameplay? Something closer to Earthbound, but that’s not the point. The gameplay of Mario and Luigi Paper Jam is just as enjoyable as the previous games in the Mario and Luigi series. Attacks are fun to use, and satisfying to use well.

The music is pretty good. Most of the songs are really good for the areas they appear in. The music of Mount Brr is my personal favorite.

Cons:

The story is the most bland out of all the Mario and Luigi series. As of writing this review, I beat the game less than a week ago, and I can’t even remember my motivation for beating Bowser, you know, aside from being done with the game.

The story starts with Luigi knocking a book off a shelf, which contains the paper mushroom kingdom. This releases a lot of Paper Mario characters into the world of the Mario and Luigi series, though mostly just Toads.

And that’s where the story stops being unique. Bowser takes Peach and Paper Peach, and the Marios and Luigi must save them.

The “jokes” get old fast. There is one joke that keeps getting used for the first two thirds of the game. This joke being that the paper characters are flat. The first couple times it’s somewhat funny. Then it gets old. But just because it’s old doesn’t mean they’ll stop using it.

There’s virtually no comedy later on. There’s a point in the forest where they actually do something different, they try to be funny. It felt so strange to actually smile at a joke in the later half of the game. In the earlier part of the game, there’s actually a bit of comedy! But they seem to take the story so seriously that they forgot it was a Mario game.

There are no original boss battles. Every Mario and Luigi game has had unique bosses, or bosses we’ve never seen in any Mario game before. This game has NOTHING. In fact, two bosses are actually the same boss, just one is paper and the other isn’t.

There’s almost nothing from the world of Paper Mario. You have Paper Mario, Paper Peach, Paper Bowser Jr, and Paper Bowser, and a whole bunch of smaller enemies. But what if you had to fight Doopliss or Wracktail. Or what about a mention of Vivian or Goombella. Or you, reference anything but Sticker Star? Maybe I should have clarified, there are some small references to Sticker Star, but that’s the only Paper Mario game with any references.

Paper Toads.  Throughout the game, you’ll encounter missions where you need to rescue various Paper Toads. Some Paper Toads are in actual danger, and some aren’t. Some missions are timed and some aren’t.

From a story standpoint, you’re saving them and giving them to Toadette so she can make you more papercraft objects to fight with. But think of how much cooler it could have been to have it work in a similar way to Pikmin, where getting more is optional, but it makes things go faster. Instead we get cheap padding to make the game longer.

Enemy attacks are horribly unfair. In most Mario and Luigi games most enemies are fairly easy to predict. This is not the case here. You will need to fight an enemy several times before you can have any confidence in your ability to dodge or counter their attacks.

On top of being able to predict enemy attacks, the game also completely fails in terms of a difficulty ramp. The game gets extremely hard randomly in the middle of the game. It’s so bad I had to turn on easy mode.

Paper Mario is overpowered. Paper Mario gets the ability to clone himself, at first six times, but you can increase it later. When you have six clones, you won’t take actual damage, you’ll just lose a few clones. When your turn comes back around, you can just fill back up on clones. This makes boss fights incredibly easy.

Some songs get downright repetitive. I mentioned earlier that many of the songs are really good. But then you have songs like the battle music, which gets old. On top of that, almost all of the songs are happy sounding, which means that there’s essentially zero contrast between music. Partners in Time is an example of a game that has good contrasting music. An example of this can be found here.

Overall Opinion:

I can’t recommend this game to anyone. It starts out kinda fun, but becomes tedious pretty fast. In terms of if the game is worth it, I think not. I got about twenty five hours of playtime, but I only enjoyed around five hours of that playtime.

What we know about the NX

This just in, Nintendo has announced... nothing.

You've probably seen lots of people making claims about what the NX will have as features, and when the NX is coming out.

Here's what we know:

-It is being made by Nintendo. This is important.

-It will be a dedicated game system. This is stated in the image used to demontrate "My Nintendo" (source)

-It will use Nintendo's new membership service titled "My Nintendo" This is stated during Nintendo's investors meeting. (source)

Here's what we don't know:

-When it comes out. No date, or even year, has been shared by Nintendo in terms of when it comes out. The only official statement from Nintendo is that more will be shared about it in 2016. (source)

-The specs. We have no idea how powerful the NX will be.

-Games. We have no idea what games are coming out on the NX.

-What it will be. We know the NX will be a dedicated game system, but we don't know if that means a successor to the Wii U or the 3DS.

I hope this has cleared up some information about the NX.

Donkey Kong 64 Review

Pros:

-Donkey Kong 64 features one of the best soundtracks on the Nintendo 64. All of the level music in Donkey Kong 64 sounds perfect for the setting. The music for Jungle Japes sounds like jungle music, and it also sounds similar to the music heard in the first level of Donkey Kong Country, which adds a bit of familiarity to the game.

-Donkey Kong 64 looks absolutely wonderful for a Nintendo 64 game. The texture quality and model quality are both rather impressive for the time the game came out, and the system it came out on.

-Ground-based movement is fun. This might seem like a strange thing to praise a game for, but this is a huge component for what makes a game feel fun.

Cons:

-Donkey Kong 64 starts off extremely slow. I know why they have five tutorials, and they do their best to be fun, but the tutorial levels don’t teach you anything you won’t already learn through trial and error, which you’ll need to do lots of anyway because…

-The controls are a pain to remember. Almost every action requires you to press two buttons. Using your camera? Z button plus C  down. Want to use your instrument? Z plus C up. This isn’t the only issue involving the controls though.

-Different button combinations do different actions. If you’re playing as Tiny Kong or Donkey Kong, holding Z and pressing B will will slide your forward, which give you a little bit of a speed boost, or at least makes movement more fun.

If you’re playing as Diddy Kong or Chunky Kong, you’ll perform a different action, which isn’t even remotely helpful in getting you where you want to go.

-There’s too much to do in this game. There are five characters, and each of them have collectibles in each and every level. This increases the length of the game significantly, but it’s not done well enough for it to be fun. And nostalgia will only do so much to make you have a good time with this.

-Without going to spoiler territory, the final boss is glitchy.

Overall Opinion:

Donkey Kong 64 is an enjoyable game. The music and level design makes playing the game fun. This game is NOT for everyone though. If you want to play a collectathon, this is a good game to go for.

Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer | Review

For those unaware, Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer is a spin-off of the Animal Crossing series, but it takes most of its inspiration from the latest entry in the series, Animal Crossing New Leaf. In Happy Home Designer, you design houses for animals from the Animal Crossing series. But let’s discuss Happy Home Designer further.

Pros:

-This game is bright and cheerful. It’s what you’d expect from any Animal Crossing game, even a spin-off. You can choose a season each house will appear in, though it’s purely cosmetic. Trees during the springtime are pink, it snows during the winter, it’s the kind of detail you’d expect from an Animal Crossing game.

-House building in this game is much easier than it is in New Leaf. The touch screen has a map of the house, including the objects that you’ve already placed. Dragging an item with the touch screen will change the items location in the house.

-You can have an insane amount of custom patterns, and custom patterns play a much bigger part of Happy Home than they do in New Leaf. You can do the normal stuff like paths and wallpaper. But you can also customize curtains and rugs for houses.

-You can decorate houses for almost every character in the series. This includes special characters like Isabelle, though you need a special amiibo card for the special characters.

-Speaking of Isabelle, she will let you design the interior of different major buildings, like restaurants, schools, and stores. And the amount of freedom they give you in the creation process is amazing.

-You only get to help one animal during an in-game day, but don’t worry, because this is the first Animal Crossing game that doesn’t follow a real clock. There are only two times of day in Happy Home Designer, day and night. You can work on a single building during the day, and at night you can walk around the plaza, assuming the place you want to go isn’t closed.

Cons:

-Furniture and music is unlocked when you design a house for certain villagers, so let’s say you want to put a specific TV in someone’s house. You better have helped a character that unlocked that TV, because that’s the only way to get it.

-I’m a guy who likes a sense of progression in his games. New Leaf provided that sense of progression with badges, house expansions, and the museum. In Happy Home Designer, you get almost infinite houses to build, which limits the sense of progression significantly. You can also build a very small number of public buildings, which almost feels like the ending of the game.

Overall Opinion:

I don’t mind the idea of a game where you build houses, but I expected a little bit more to this game. This is the same price as any other first party 3DS game, at $40. If you like Animal Crossing, wait for this game to be half that price.

Hill Climb Racing | Review

Hill Climb Racing is a game that exists mainly on the mobile phone market. It’s available on Android and iOS devices, but most of my playtime has been on Windows version.

Now onto the game itself. This game is mostly just a physics game where you drive strange vehicles through strange terrain. For instance, a tank driving on the moon, or a tractor in a volcano. The combinations are key to success in this game. Some combinations can lead to unexpected results.

After you acquire a vehicle, you can use coins you collect to upgrade that vehicle. Upgrades differ from vehicle to vehicle, but every upgrade will help you out the long run.

This game does contain microtransactions, but they’re extremely fair. You can buy coins, and buying even the least amount of coins will remove ads.

And even the ads are fair. Whenever you are on the menu, there will be a little ad on the bottom of your screen. They don’t make noise, and they’re only present when you’re on the menu.

There are only a couple of problems I have with the game, the main one being the soundtrack. This is it. I’ve been playing the only song the game has for this whole video. You can, and likely will, mute the music pretty quickly.

The only other problem is, it’s extremely short. The moon was bassically made for farming money, and after that there’s little point to playing the game.

This game is a time-waster. It’s what you come to expect out of mobile games. This game is an excellent way to waste some time, or occupy your hands while watching something else.

Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze | Review

The Donkey Kong Country series got its start in 1994 with the game Donkey Kong Country. Donkey Kong Country had an amazing soundtrack, great controls, a partner system that I wish more games had, and fantastic level design. This game was a huge hit when it first came out, and it’s easy to see why.

It spawned a sequel just a year later, titled Donkey Kong Country 2 Diddy’s Kong Quest. The platforming is pretty much the same as in Donkey Kong Country 1, but the levels were even bigger, the soundtrack was greater, and DK was replaced as a playable character. Now you get to play as Dixie Kong, who can use her hair to float gently to the ground.

This game also got a sequel titled Donkey Kong Country 3 Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble. This game removed Diddy, and replaced him with the king of nightmare’s himself, Kiddy Kong. People don’t like him… like, at all. He’s not that bad in game, but his promotional art is horrifying. Aside from Kiddy Kong, we were also given another great soundtrack and more fantastic levels.

But at this point the formula was getting stale. No new games happened to the series for several years.

And then we have over a decade of silence from the Donkey Kong Country series. Until we finally got… No that’s just silly, get out of here. There it is! Donkey Kong Country Returns!

This game kept it relatively safe, mostly sticking to the formula of the first game, but this time you have simultaneous multiplayer! It added lots of controller lag, but it mostly worked fine.

And now we get to the star of the show, Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze. The first Donkey Kong Country game to be made in high definition. This game marks the return of Dixie Kong, and the debut of Cranky Kong as a playable character.

Pros:

While this feature was also in Donkey Kong Country Returns, Tropical Freeze continues to feature simultaneous multiplayer. Player one will take the role of Donkey Kong, while the other player can choose between Diddy Kong, Dixie Kong, and Cranky Kong.

As this is the return of David Wise, the composer for the original games, this game returns to the tradition of having an amazing soundtrack. There are plenty of new songs, but several songs from the earlier games were re-done in this game as well, and they sound fantastic.

Donkey Kong Country Returns added an additional move to Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong’s arsenal of attacks, blowing. This move was never really utilized well, and it was completely removed in Tropical Freeze. This is, of course, a minor thing, but it’s nice to see pointless features removed.

Using a Wii U Pro Controller or the Wii U Gamepad, you won’t need to shake the controller at all. The controls are much snappier than in Donkey Kong Country Returns as a result.

Cons:

In the first two Donkey Kong Country games, Cranky existed to crack jokes at the players. Sadly, these jokes don’t exist anymore, which takes a lot of the charm away.

The level design feels less inspired than previous Donkey Kong Country games. Levels hardly ever relied on bottomless pits in the original games, but that’s the main way you’ll die in this game. It’s also incredibly hard to skip level segments in this game, which was a blast to do in the original games.

I’ve never had an issue with how the characters felt control wise in Donkey Kong Country 1, 2, or 3, but they feel extremely stiff in Tropical Freeze. Platforming becomes a lot more difficult when you can’t make any wrong moves.

The Wii U Gamepad’s screen has no function while playing on the TV. Most players will choose to play the game on their TV, and this works fine, but you cannot change your mind while playing the game, and the Wii U Gamepad’s Screen is turned off unless you choose to display on the Wii U Gamepad’s screen, where it won’t display on your TV.

Animal Buddies are still mostly gone. Animal Buddies were in Donkey Kong Country 1, 2, and 3, but were mostly ignored in Returns, and stay mostly ignored in Tropical Freeze, only giving you access to Rambi, and Squaks as a powerup.

Additional Notes:

There are now several puzzle pieces in each level that are available to collect. You can also choose the collect a K, O, N, and G in each level, similarly to the first three games.

Overall Opinion:

This game is much better than Donkey Kong Country Returns, though I wouldn't put it past the original games in the series. The platforming is far too stiff for me to call it a superb platformer, but it is a fantastic game if you want a challenge.