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[nrvalleytime]

Some of their pieces over the past few months have struck me as examples of what I need in gaming reviews.

The technical issues are discussed, but it's always done in such a way that it begs us to see the souls of the games we play, critiquing not only the end-product but each step or rationale of those who create. It's been great learning to appreciate and view games from this perspective.

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/super-smash-bros-finds-more-tricks-wii-u/

If you start up the software known as Super Smash Bros. for Wii U a second time in a day, the menu music will have changed. The game, you then realize, is self-aware. It assumes you’re going to play it. A lot. And so even this, a tiny consideration, an understanding that a sound heard over and over ceases to be a sound—now it’s just noise, or nothing at all—is a bellwether of what is to come. That the alternate menu music is a lovely samba version of the original menu theme adds to the overall feeling that this game has become sentient: enough to have a sense of humor, and to know what is beautiful and what is not.

Unique to the Wii U game is the option to use an “amiibo,” the new line of figures that launch alongside Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and will be used in various other Nintendo games . . . It’s a gimmick but a clever one. And it reinforces the essential nature of toys and how we, at one time, once reacted to them: with the belief that they led imagined lives. Now, in a way, they can. This little creature fights its own battles. You can see it right there on the screen. What takes place in our mind—a toy coming to life—now plays out as we once wished.

Here, then, is another sign that Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is self-aware: It knows the difference between those who win and those who get in the winner’s way, and that one is no better or worse than the other.

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/there-best-way-play-grand-theft-auto-5/

Because, while I hated Grand Theft Auto 5, I loved Los Santos. I missed Los Santos when I shelved the original game at its conclusion—my attempt to kill all three idiot protagonists by starving them of attention. I missed that California sky, at once pale and electric, somehow bigger in its circumference than the oppressive gray expanse I find myself under. Does the earth begin lower in California? I’d wonder, and then I’d beeline for the horizon until the city was just a distant island behind me. I missed the pause that occasionally settled over me in Los Santos—when, for example, I’d find myself standing in the mountains, gazing at a shack I had never before seen. Who lived there? I’d poke around, trying to get a feel for it. I’d declare it home base for fifteen minutes, as I tried to shoot birds out of the sky.

But what I mean is this: Grand Theft Auto 5 is, this year moreso than last year, one of the truly astonishing audio-visual experiences in a medium full of them—and that the sterner strictures of its online mode make for a sense of progress vastly different and more felt than the ones in the single-player mode. The only dick jokes you’ll hear are the ones murmured into a headset, and, if you've followed my walkthrough, you'll deserve it, anyway. Los Santos, for its part, finally feels bigger than them.

http://killscreendaily.com/articles...n-transdimensional-wormhole-and-nothing-safe/

But with this month’s DLC for Mario Kart 8, we’ve gone full-bore Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The peanut butter and chocolate are mixing, my brothers and sisters. And the taste causes me to ask one of two questions: “Why haven’t they done this sooner?” spoken with exuberant impatience, and, with a tone closer to subdued horror: “What have they done?”

Ultimately, the choice may mean nothing more than: My god, this is fun! Because each of Mario Kart 8’s new tracks are simply that: racetracks on which to race. But the power of these characters and their worlds stems from the richness and detail and “realism” of each, having existed as a single entity prior to being pulled into this intra-Nintendo mosh pit stop. “Mute City” as a track in Mario Kart 8 only exists because “Mute City” exists, in the SNES launch title F-Zero, and each subsequent sequel. The Excitebike-inspired track only exists because of the NES motocross game of the same name.

Mario Kart 8: The Game is an LP, ready to be traded amongst siblings and handed down through the generations. Mario Kart 8: The DLC is a radio program, available now, while the airwaves are full, but eventually lost in time. Listen closely, everybody. While you still can.

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/super-mario-sunshine-ecco-dolphin-and-beaches-videogames/

Part of the fantasy of Super Mario, Donkey Kong Country and other virtual cartoons is that the status quo is laziness. For a man often called a plumber, there is very little to suggest Mario ever does any actual plumbing. Donkey Kong we know is a layabout. For one, his quest is often initiated by the usurping of his snacks—a giant Scrooge McDuck pile of bananas he keeps within arm’s reach, instead of the bananas that grow everywhere around him. Secondly, he is a gorilla. The least casual thing he does is wear a tie.

ames and cartoons are often moralistic, but sloth is a mixed message: a state of freedom from worry seems to be life’s greatest reward. Ecco does not seem like a busybody. Ecco lives in an ocean that isn’t turbulent or stressful, and one Mario has tried to escape to. When you play Proteus, you’re already there, looking for the variables within it. In our own lives, we work for the weekend, and can’t wait to get away to the beach. Where life is nothing but a fantasy of sunsets, white noise and tiny castles.

I hope Super Mario got back there, someday.

These writers manage to blend aesthetics and construction in their pieces, history with perspective. It's refreshing.

 

[Krejlooc]

hardcore gaming 101

RetroGamer