Tom Nook is no longer the boss of you in the new Animal Crossing: New Leaf, which is coming to the 3DS in North America on June 9. You're the mayor. You're in command of this town. Well, somewhat... watch and see.
We got a hands-off demo of the new game at PAX East in Boston yesterday. You can watch that demo above. It doesn't look like the series' gameplay is getting much deeper, but vastly-improved networking options (streetpass, more online connections) should make it easier for more of us to play Animal Crossing as the social game it was always meant to be.
Plus, now you can go swimming.
In the video above, the game is being displayed on a TV. It natively runs on the 3DS. We had to lower the system audio, so you won't be hearing the music or sound effects. But you will hear a rep from Nintendo explain a lot about the game.
Warning: One of our guys in Japan has been playing this game since last year and is hooked on it.
As I mentioned in last week's installment of the Week in Gaming Apps, I spent the better part of this week moving all of my stuff from one place to another place. I figured the rest of the team might step up Monday through Wednesday, which is why there are only app reviews for Thursday and Friday. I suppose they were all getting ready for PAX East, so they're excused.
Speaking of excuses, this week's gaming apps are all brought to you by the letter Apple. Sorry, my Android friends, but my various Android devices are still in one of the many boxes surrounding me at the moment, so I was forced to spend what little free time I had playing excellent games on my iPad.
Pretty sure some of them are on Android though, or coming to Android. Eventually Android will completely take over and we'll look back on today and laugh.
A lovely little sliding puzzle game with a hint of evolution. Create combos to evolve pieces into more advanced pieces, see how far you can get. Rather engrossing.
Since the early days of the Cyberpunk pen-and-paper role-playing setting, I've been fascinated by the idea of highly-skilled computer hackers roaming the plains of cyberspace looking for a fight; More »
Everybody loves quick time events, those timed button presses utilized in today's high-tech interactive entertainment programs to help the user feel a modicum of control over grand cinematic sequences. More »
We all need to learn how to be human beings. Some of us may need more help than others, and that's arguably why this "advanced kissing techniques" video exists—so, while I'm sure it fills a need, just...oh my god. No, just no. Why? The kicker is, it's not the only video like it.
Look at this "Erotic touch techniques" video (it's not really saucy, just AWKWARD/not safe for life.) Both this video and the one before it are from "Date Camp."
Date camp is a thing. A camp. That teaches you how to date. And it has a YouTube channel.
It was from here that I lost control and tumbled deeper and deeper into a black hole of awkward YouTube videos. There's a whole channel devoted to them over at The Cringe Channel. I...can't stop.
Here's a dude trying to explain hentai. He has a lot of trouble.
An old favorite: Spongebob style. As in, Spongebob x Gangnam style. I thought this was a parody or not serious at first, then I saw the rest of the YouTube channel—the kid is serious about Spongebob. You have no idea.
First there was Nic Cage on Pokemon, and THAT was strange enough. Or so you'd think. Turns out that Pokemon's faces can get a little more alien, all with the help of the Pokebatchichooseyou Tumblr.
Really, using Pokémon as a template for other faces is a 'thing.' There's Nigel Thornberry on Pokémon, for instance. Who knows how many more of these things there are out there? What I do know for certain is: Oh, internet. I love you.
The first day of PAX East brought all manner of delightfully geeky, creative costumery to the Boston Convention Center. Our reporters at the event have been snapping as many photos as they can, all while keeping up with the hustle and bustle of one of the biggest video game conventions in the world.
Here are some cosplay highlights from the first day of PAX East 2013.
Everybody loves quick time events, those timed button presses utilized in today's high-tech interactive entertainment programs to help the user feel a modicum of control over grand cinematic sequences. the problem with quick time events, however, is that the graphical spectacle going on behind the prompts always threatens to steal attention away from important prompts. In John Burton's QTE: Press X to Not Die there are no annoying cinematics — just 30 seconds of pure, unadulterated button pressing.
Games like God of War and Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm dilute the QTE experience with their towering gods and elaborate ninja skills. How are we supposed to focus on the buttons when the developers are waving colorful pictures in our faces? QTE is just a black screen with a series of buttons — A, B, Y, X, 1-4, Left and Right. Just match the flashing prompts as quickly as you can for 30 seconds and you win.
It's a pure experience, like the initial stirring of puberty or your first taste of a grilled cheese sandwich — two remarkably, almost redundantly similar things. It's a game that makes one realize how far off-track we've gotten in the video game industry. While we're all looking for profound messages, keeping one eye open for potential controversy, we've forgotten that video games are, at their very core, all about pressing buttons to make things happen.
In QTE: Press X to Not Die, you press buttons. Things happen. Not particularly exciting things, but that's not the point.
In summary, this game is stupid, but I like it. If it weren't free I wouldn't buy it, but as a free thing it's lovely.
Poor Luigi, always in Mario's shadow. Even when Luigi set off on his own ghost-wrangling adventure in Luigi's Mansion over a decade ago, it was still as though he was defined by Mario's absence. The game dedicated a whole button to calling out Mario's name!
In the new 3DS sequel Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, the green-clad Mario brother is pulled back into the ghostbusting business. The ghosts are going haywire, you see. It's up to you round them up. You do this by unloading a charge of your flashlight on ghosts, and then using your trusty Poltergust 5000, a ghostbusting device that straps onto your back, to suck the ghosts up. That's not all you can do with it, though. The Poltergust 5000 has two functions: vacuuming and blowing. Like in the first game, you use these abilities to poke and prod your way through rooms. Who knew so many of the world's problems could be solved with an overpowered vacuum?
You'll capture ghosts, solve puzzles, and generally cause havoc. You aren't the only one causing mischief, either. The cackling, conniving ghosts cause trouble, but they're clearly having a lot of fun while they're at it. It reminds me a little of superstitious belief in some religious communities that says that when we lose things, it's really ghosts and angels having a ball with our possessions; nothing malicious per se.
Dark Moon feels supersized in comparison to the original game. There are six mansions (!), each with a bevy of themed rooms and multiple floors. The number of things you can do is huge, too—you can go from riding balloons, to watering plants, to setting things on fire and just about everything in between; this game features far more puzzles and objects to interact with than the first game did.
It's an adventure so grand and extensive that you won't wonder where Mario is. This is Luigi's adventure, and that's great, because honestly? Luigi is the more interesting character-even if he is a total scaredy-cat. It's funny to see the green-hatted brother cower and chatter his teeth at anything that moves, and it feels like he has more texture than Mario does.
The flip side of having such an extensive adventure is that, at times, the game feels like it drags on. If the first game could be criticized for being too short (or, in my books, just long enough), the new Luigi's Mansion could be criticized for being too long. You can tell Nintendo took the criticisms to heart and did their best to try to provide "value," but they resort to padding the game a bit too often.
WHY: Exploring abandoned mansions and bustin' ghosts: what's not to like?
Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon
Developer: Next Level Games Platforms: Nintendo 3DS Release Date: March 24th
Type of game: Adventure game with supernatural fishing—an odd combination, but trust me, it works.
What I played: Got to the final boss battle after about 21 hours of playtime. Messed around with the multiplayer for a few rounds, no more than a couple of hours.
My Two Favorite Things
The jingle that plays every time Professor E. Gadd calls Luigi.
Actually, Professor E. Gadd, period. I love it when that crazed man talks.
My Two Least-Favorite Things
Backtracking. Too much backtracking.
The game could definitely be shorter. (This time I have to go through and clean the mansion?))
Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes
"F*ck Mario. Luigi's where it's at." —Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku.com
"These stupid ghosts better not steal my house keys." —Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku.com
"Luigi, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES."—Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku.com
You go into all the mansions with the purpose of collecting the dark moon piece hidden inside, but each mansion is broken down into smaller levels. Even if you enter knowing exactly where the piece is, something always happens to get in the way: you might, for instance, have to recover an item deep inside the mansion, only to have it stolen by ghosts, but then you recover it, but then it gets stolen by a ghost-dog, then you recover it, and then…
The fragmented setup can lead to a lot of backtracking as you search for what might be different in a familiar location across multiple levels, which contributes to the padded feeling. But the level structure makes me think the game is best played in short bursts—no more than 30, maybe 40 minutes for later levels. That way, you don't end up backtracking too much in one go. When most of the levels are about 20 minute affairs, and because Dark Moon makes you hungry for exploration, keeping to short play sessions might be difficult.
I often wanted to keep going, even when the game absolutely stumped me—which happened more times than I expected. The folks at Next Level Games are clever indeed. Dark Moon is a game for the observant; you can think of it a little like a point-and-click adventure game. The objects you need to interact with may not always be immediately obvious—heck, they might not be visible at all.
That's where your new dark light comes into play, which you can use to make hidden objects appear. You use the same intuition you might in a Mario game when you think "this is where an invisible block would be," only in this case, only in this case, it would be some sort of everyday household item, like a vase or a dresser. Actually realizing that an item is missing someplace can take a while.
Solving puzzles and going deeper into the mansions also means encountering ghosts. Like before, you can think of ghost hunting as supernatural fishing, with the player having to 'reel in' the ghosts. The ghosts will struggle and try to run awa. You have to tilt the circle pad in the opposite direction. At the start of the game, catching ghosts is rather easy, but as you go along, not only does their HP increase, but stunning them with your flashlight becomes more difficult. Maybe they're wearing sunglasses. Maybe they're in a full suit of armor. You need to figure out how to deal with different types of situations, which can keep things fresh.
The ghosts, in a way, are what disappointed me most about this game. In the first Luigi's Mansion, the major ghosts were all characters—people who used to inhabit the spaces you explore. Ghosts so attached to the material plane, they continued living out their daily existence in the afterlife. It also made it feel as if Luigi was intruding, as if it wasn't really Luigi's mansion. (These newer mansions don't belong to Luigi either though! Why are the games called "Luigi's Mansion"?)
You only get repeating cannon-fodder ghosts, which made it difficult for me to get invested in that side of the game. It felt like the ghost-hunting was something I did in between puzzles rather than something fun to do for its own sake. It wasn't until the later portion of the game, where it gave me intense ghost battles, that I felt thrilled by these otherworldly encounters. Really, the later half of the game is where Dark Moon shines—the game takes its gloves off and gives you environments without maps, multi-room spanning puzzles, and mansions that are exotic enough that they can't be compared to the mansion in the first game.
That last bit is crucial, since at the start, Dark Moon might feel like a rehash of the first game, only not as good thanks to the ghosts' relative lack of character and ample backtracking. Newer players won't have a point of reference and might not care, though. My colleague Kirk Hamilton hasn't played the first game, and tells me he finds the new one to be quite charming.
The boss battles, meanwhile, tended to infuriate me. Without giving anything away, some battles felt too obtuse, while others require you to go through too much tedium. I suspect that half of my game time was me either being stuck in puzzles, or stuck on boss battles. I wanted to quit the game multiple times, and probably would have were I not reviewing it—but, I'm glad I stuck through it, since the game truly does have outstanding moments.
Finally there's multiplayer. You gotta give props to something called "Scarescrapper." There are four modes in Scarescrapper: Hunter, Rush, Polterpup and Surprise. I didn't dabble with multiplayer too much; I've only played a few matches with fellow Kotaku editors. Hunter reminds me a bit of a roguelike: the point is to climb through floors, capturing all the ghosts on the floor. You don't know what items do at first until you get them, and the rooms are randomly generated.
I also played Polterpup, which involves chasing down ghost puppies throughout levels. Both require coordination and communication with your teammates, as you'll need help with tough rooms, or to undo curses, traps and the like. Surprisingly, ghosthunting lends itself pretty well to multiplayer. I won't say it's on Mario Kart's level, but definitely something to mess around with if you're curious. It's too bad that you can't use the 3DS to talk to your friends while playing, and that you can't join mid-game (which makes falling out of a game a major bummer, as you'll have to restart). Though this does seem like a game that would be really fun to play locally, with three other players in the same room. Not everyone has to own the game to play, though the local download-play options are more limited than if everyone has the full game.
Nintendo has deemed 2013 the "Year of Luigi." And while Luigi's Mansion may not have felt like a game that needed a sequel, Dark Moon exists, and it has something to prove: Luigi can carry a game all by himself. I'm not convinced the series needed to go for more, more, more, (bigger! better! faster!) but I'm sold on Luigi himself. In fact, I want to see more of Luigi than I do his famous brother. Even if Luigi is kind of a goof.
Meet Amy Demicco. She's wearing the coolest dress in Boston this weekend at the PAX East convention. Her dress is made almost entirely out of playing cards for Magic: The Gathering. She estimates that she's got about 800 cards in this ensemble, mostly in the helmet.
Check out the video above and she'll explain why and how she did it.
Here's a close-up shot of her axe, which is also made of Magic cards:
There's one downside to all this: Magic cards, she told me, aren't all that sturdy. Sweat separates the fronts from the backs, and by the end of the weekend, her ensemble won't be wearable. For now, though, it's awesome.
Check out Amy's tumblr for more about this and other Magic-card outfits she's made and worn.
It's hard to know what to think about the next Splinter Cell right now. I liked Conviction but the last Sam Fisher game was a clear break with some of the series' more iconic elements. Blacklist is clearly trying to bring some of that tech/stealth feel back while also expanding the options and scope of the game.
This video shows how some of that will play out, with the same area done in non-lethal and more aggressive playthroughs and puts Sam's new mini-drone and other gear and moves in the spotlight. The game looks nice but I don't know that I'll be swayed until I get Blacklist in my hands myself.
Welcome to the Best of Kotaku, where I round up all of this week's best content.
