Review: Mario Party: Island Tour (3DS)

For the first time ever, Nintendo has brought the popular Mario Party franchise to the portable 3DS. If you liked the games in the past, you are likely going to feel right at home here.

The main quest feels a bit like an interactive Monopoly game where four players compete against each other to be the first to reach the end. There are seven differently themed boards that players will explore, rolling a set of virtual dice and competing in a variety of mini-game challenges. Winning the challenges (or at least ranking high) will net you some additional items such as the ability to switch positions with other players on the board or sending them back several places on their next turn.

Feature Preview: Skylanders Swap Force (Part III)

Last week, Sidd was in Albany, New York to take a tour of developer Vicarious Visions studio. During the trip he got a chance to talk to the developers and get some hands on time with the game. In our first two feature articles (Part I, Part II, we took a behind the scenes look at the game talking about everything from the character creation to how the story was crafted. In this third and final article gives us some hands-on impressions of Swap Force for the Xbox 360.

The Skylanders series has garnered a cult-like following over the past couple of years and has sold millions of copies worldwide, which is to say nothing of the number of toy sales that has generated.

Review: New Super Mario Bros. 2 (3DS)

"In [the Mushroom Kingdom], you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women."

- Tony Montana (Scarface, 1983; paraphrased)

New Super Mario Bros. 2 certainly takes a more serious and dramatic turn when it's viewed through the lens of Brian de Palma's ode to drug-fuelled, mid '80s, Cuban gangsters in Miami. It's still a Mario game as it's traditionally known. It's a side-scrolling platformer where goombas are flattened, blocks smashed, turtle shells hurled, and tricky platforms navigated by, what else, jumping. And the coins... so many coins.

Hardware: Nintendo 3DS XL

Right out of the gate, Nintendo's 3DS XL addresses my two main issues with the "regular" version of the 3DS: the screen is much larger and the stylus is stored on the right side rather than the back of the unit.

Everything else remains the same, aside from the obvious look of the unit (and the headphone jack shifted to the left), which is reminiscent of the DS before it officially launched way back in 2004. It's the rounded corners and edges that do it.