Nintendo is usually good about bringing its biggest franchises to every game system they make. But while you may have thought it was more a matter of when than if they’d make a new Punch-Out!! for the Switch, well, we’ve got good news and some bad news. The bad news is that it might not happen because the good news is they’ve kind of done with Arms (Switch), a cartoony, three-dimensional fighting game that’s decidedly Punch-Out!!-esque.
At dinner, some people don’t want to eat their entre, they just want to skip to dessert. And it’s the same with gaming; some people don’t want to have to fight their way through tons of grunts just to get to the boss battle. It’s for those people that The Game Bakers are making the upcoming third-person action game Furi (PlayStation 4, PC). Earlier this week, I had a chance to see the game in action, and to ask Emeric Thoa (the game’s creative director, producer, and game designer) and Audrey Leprince (its executive producer and writer) about how the game is played, what story it’s going to tell, and how they got Takashi Okazaki — who wrote and drew the original Afro Samurai manga and worked on both animes and the first, but not the second, Afro Samurai game — to design the Furi‘s unique-looking characters.
I’ll admit it: I’m spoiled. When it comes to games, if I’m not given the option to change certain basic things, it can ruin the experience. Such is the case with FAST Racing Neo, a futuristic racing game for WiiU. Though it has solid controls, good courses, and a real sense of speed, it’s somewhat undermined by a lack of sound, view, and control options.
Viz Media’s Perfect Square imprint have announced that they will publish a collected edition of The Legend Of Zelda A Link To The Past graphic novel on May 5th.
Because he’s a piece of bubblegum who’s achieved sentience, Kirby is an abomination against God and nature. But as abominations go, he can sometimes be a lot of fun. At least that’s the case with Kirby And The Rainbow Curse for the WiiU, an addictive and challenging physics-based platforming puzzle game
While 2014 wasn’t a great year for video games — and no, I’m not just talking about that #gamergate crap — there were a bunch that I had a lot of fun playing.
Here now, in no particular order, are the best games I played in 2014.
In 1999, when Sega built their South Park pinball table, it ended up being the last pinball table they would ever make. Let’s just hope that’s also not the fate of Zen Studios, who are bringing South Park Pinball — a two-fer with the tables South Park’s Super-Sweet Pinball and South Park: Butter’s Very Own Pinball Game — to Pinball FX2 for the Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PCs via Steam; Zen Pinball 2 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, WiiU, and Mac; and Zen Pinball for iOS, Android, and Amazon Fire.
In Batman: Arkham Origins, the role of The Dark Knight is played by actor Roger Craig Smith, who previously voiced Ezio in Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations. But while Smith’s take on The Caped Crusader is largely cribbed from Kevin Conroy, who masterfully voiced Batman in 2009’s Batman: Arkham Asylum and 2011’s Batman: Arkham City (with a little Christian Bale thrown in for good measure), at the very least, Smith’s imitation of Conroy’s Batman is still pretty spot on.
As someone who loves Star Wars, pinball, and video games, but is not a big fan of playing games on systems with tiny screens, the idea of playing Star Wars Pinball for the 3DS is…well, let’s just say even C-3PO could feel the conflict within me. And he can’t feel anything.
But while Star Wars Pinball for the 3DS has its issues — most of which, admittedly, have more to do with the 3DS than the game itself — it’s still fairly addictive.