Review: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D (3DS)

The Zelda franchise is one of my personal favourites, so I have been anticipating the remake of Majora's Mask on the 3DS. Typically criticized as the strangest Zelda and perhaps the most unusual, Majora's Mask takes players on an emotional journey where they are confronted with happiness, grief, and in extreme cases, even death.

It's hard not to give away a few plot spoilers (for a game originally released back in 2000) when reviewing Majora's Mask -- you have been warned.

Review: Dying Light (PS4)

Normally we only have one reviewer assigned to each title, but Dying Light presented an interesting opportunity.  With two review codes and two reviewers – one who likes zombie themed TV shows and games and another indifferent to them – you get two unique viewpoints on Dying Light.

Story/Gameplay Mechanics
Dying Light is Techland’s latest foray into the Zombie genre, after the release of Dead Island (2011) and Dead Island Riptide (2013). This is their first entry making use of next gen hardware, but has the transition been kind to them?

I'd Buy That for a Dollar: Magical Drop V

Sometimes I like cruising Steam to see what sort of stuff they have available for dirt cheap. Is the game horrible? Underrated? Is it a half-assed mobile phone port being snuck into the library? Sometimes it turns out that the game is actually pretty decent; it's just that for whatever reason the publisher has it up for a buck. Such was the case with Magical Drop V. I'd played some of the older games in the series from back in the 90s, and enjoyed those, so I got to wondering why this installment was so cheap. As it turns out, it was rushed to market and wound up being a buggy mess. Folks were rather peeved by this, and it wound up getting mixed reviews, relegating it to some far flung, long-forgotten fringe of the Steam catalog. However, years later the game appears to work just fine. At least it does for me. So, what I got out of the deal was a fun little puzzler for essentially a sack of nickles and a button.

Review: Persona 4 Arena Ultimax (360)

One of the hardest feats to pull off is switching a video game franchise from one genre to another, either as a companion title or a whole new direction.

Halo did rather well as a real-time strategy in Halo Wars after beginning as a killer first-person shooter. WarCraft took a wildly successful real-time strategy and turned it into the biggest massively multiplayer online role-playing game ever. For the Persona franchise, the leap was role-playing game to fighter, in Persona 4 Arena, released in 2012. Following that success, 2014 brought a refined sequel, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax.

Learning to LoL

For the longest of times, I simply couldn't get into MOBAs. There was just something about them that didn't rub me the right way. I'm not sure if it was the length of the matches, the RTS-like feel to how everyone handles, or maybe it was the community's, I just don't know. Any time I'd try and play something in the genre, I would quickly lose interest and move on to something else. This has been changing in recent weeks. I think part of comes from getting off a bit of an RTS kick, after plowing through much of the Dawn of War series, and a few other games. It may have put me in the right mindset to tackle MOBAs again. It also helps that I'm playing with some real life friends, which shields me from the full brunt of some of the less pleasant folks who seem to gravitate toward these types of games. In any case, I find myself in the unexpected position where I sorta, kinda, vaguely find myself enjoying League of Legends for a change.

Review: Zombeer (PC)

Look hard and you'll see the
Plants vs. Zombies reference.

While 2011's LA Noire was made to accommodate and elevate many of my specific tastes in entertainment, Zombeer takes the things I like and beats them with a baseball bat and heaves the whimpering bundle into a dumpster.

While I revelled in the LA Noire's grittiness and attention to detail lavished on an open world adventure game dressed in an episodic police procedural from the 1950's, Zombeer takes everything base and stupid and throws it together without thought or planning. Zombeer opens with "K" waking up in a bar with a bad zombie bite and his girlfriend absent. From there the game wades through hacked together, uninteresting pop culture references.

Review: Shadowrun: Dragonfall Director's Cut (PC)

Can you really have too much of a good thing?  Well, yeah, if it makes you sick of the thing you're consuming.  Too much sugar leads to diabetes.  Too much delicious fried chicken can cause heart attacks.  Too much good beer will kill your liver stone dead.  But too much cyberpunk RPG goodness?  That's just crazy talk.  Little pale skin, maybe, but plenty of adrenaline to keep the heart pumping and plenty of well crafted storyline to keep the brain firing.  Which is strange, since the “Director's Cut” of Shadowrun: Dragonfall seems to have a running theme within its characters and story about people who do have too much of a good (or even bad) thing, and the different ways that it can warp and scar them.