(News)

The box art for Sonic Lost World has been unveiled, along with some extra information regarding both versions.

First off, the Wii U version will support off-TV play and a second player can chime in with a Wii Remote and Nunchuk (somehow). The 3DS version will feature fully-3D levels as opposed to 2D ones like past portable Sonic games and will have online competition game modes, as well as unique Special Stages. Speaking of online, it seems both versions will use the Nintendo Network in some way, as evidenced by the logos on the box art. The Wisps from Sonic Colors have been confirmed to be returning, and each version will have unique Wisps. What the Color Powers actually are/do haven't been mentioned yet.

(News)

A new reward is up in Club Nintendo as of today: a Super Mario Bros.-themed accessory box. It looks like it would make a great piece to put up on a dresser or desk to display or hold your games and accessories, the only catch being that it's a whopping 700 coins. It's in a limited quantity, so get it while you can.

(News)

The first trailer for Sonic Lost World has been launched, showing the first bits of gameplay. It looks as though SEGA's attempting to combine Modern and Classic Sonic in a gameplay style reminiscent of the cancelled Sonic X-treme (and with a slight hint of Super Mario Galaxy). See the trailer in the link below.

http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/05/28/sonic-lost-worlds-debut-trailer

Sonic Lost World will come out late 2013 and is exclusive to the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. No details as to how the versions will differ was given. Worthy of note is the eShop logo at the end of the trailer, hinting that the game will also have a digital release.

(Review)

I'll tell you what, when I first heard that Luigi's Mansion was getting a sequel, I was pretty excited. I never owned the original, to be honest; I could never find an affordable copy after I actually got interested in the GameCube classic. However, I had played it a few times at a friend's house and I had seen a Let's Play of it (particulary the Versus LP by AttackingTucans and JoshJepson), so I felt like I could at least somewhat put myself in the same mindset as someone who had already played it. The trailers for the game, the fact that it was going to be on the 3DS, and the massive room for improvement upon the original game's mechanics got me all hyped up; so much so that I planned on getting it launch day. While that didn't exactly happen due to money issues, I was able to get it within the next week though the 3DS eShop. I'll say this straight up: if you own a 3DS, this game is an absolute must-have.

Let's start with the story, shall we? Professor E. Gadd, the scientist who created the Poltergust machine Luigi used in the previous game, has apparently been researching the friendly ghosts of Evershade Valley ever since he helped Luigi rid the mansion in the first game of King Boo. Speaking of the devil, the ghost king himself appears and breaks what's known as the "Dark Moon", hence the game's subtitle. This item is what's keeping the ghosts friendly, and now that it's shattered and spread across the mansions of Evershade Valley, the ghosts have gone haywire and E. Gadd has no other choice but to call in his old pal Luigi to save the day...whether Luigi wants to or not. The green guy reluctantly "agrees" to help E. Gadd recover the pieces of the Dark Moon by infiltrating the five mansions one-by-one, and so begins our adventure.

Unlike the first Luigi's Mansion, which focused on one huge mansion that was explored in large chunks, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon is split up into individual missions, tasking the player in exploring portions of each mansion bit by bit. Every mission has a seperate ranking, as well, giving you one, two, or three stars based on health lost, time spent, ghosts sucked up, and money collected. Whether this setup is better than the original or not is up to personal opinion, but I found that it gives a new layer to the progression of the game. It makes it so exploring the mansions (which grow in size and complexity as the game goes on) doesn't fell incredibly overwhelming, and provides well-placed checkpoints for going back to nab all the collectables, which there are plenty of. The game rewards you for exploring every area of every mansion, giving completionists a run for their money. Every mansion has a set of twelve gems lying around, usually guarded by a puzzle or some form of time trial. Every seperate mission also includes a Boo, the most of which are surprisngly well-hidden; you'll definitely need to train your eye to find every last one of them (amassing to 32 of them). However, collecting every Boo, gem, and grabbing all the money you see isn't really all that worth it; if you're going for 100% completion it is, but if you're just doing it for the rewards, you could end up just a tad disappointed. The rewards aren't exactly worth the time spent for getting them, which is my only major gripe with the game. While finding every jewel and coin in the first Luigi's Mansion was encouarged and gave a different overall ending depending on how much you collected, finding more cash in Dark Moon only gives you five upgrades, and past that, having more money has no impact on the game whatsoever. Finding every Boo in a mansion gives you an extra time trial bonus level (one per mansion), which are pretty fun for me, but might not be for other players. I haven't yet found out what the reward for getting every gem is, if only because searching for them all is so hit-and-miss that I've given up trying. All that being said, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon doesn't have much replayability, but is still fun in the first playthrough.

If you want to extend your playtime in Dark Moon in ways other than replaying the same level over and over hoping and praying for the three-star rating, you might want to give the multiplayer a shot, which is surprisingly really fun. It's called ScareScraper, named due to the fact that it has to do with you and your teammates progressing up floors that increase in difficulty in a large tower in an attempt to reach the roof. There are three game modes: Hunter, in which you attempt to capture every ghost on a floor before advancing all while under a time limit, Rush, in which you scramble for the exit of a floor within another time limit, and Polterpup, in which you and your teammates hunt down the elusive ghost dog seen in the single player mode to move up a floor. The amount of floors can be chosen between 5 and 25 and the three difficulty modes are Normal, Hard, and Expert. The way the match can be tailored is perfect, because it allows you to adjust the difficulty for how many players they are and how skilled they all are. You can play alone if you want, but the only mode that really allows that is Hunter on Normal difficulty; the other two modes and difficulties are tailored more towards a full team, so you'll need friends to get the full experience. If you don't have friends who want to play, don't worry, because you can also hop into an online match. The multiplayer is diverse enough so that each player can have their own preferred settings and play style, so I'd recommend trying each one to find out what you like best. The multiplayer mode is simple, but will definitely keep you going back to Dark Moon if you really get into it, which gives the game at least some form of replayability. If you must know, I personally like Hunter on Hard with a team of 3 or 4.

The artistic direction of the game as a whole is definitely something to be a appreciated. Every puzzle doesn't exactly pop out as much as it does blend into the surroundings, which is a good thing in many ways. It makes the environments feel more natural, and some of the puzzles can actually give you a real challenge. Recent Zelda games haven't gotten me stuck as often as they used to, but Luigi's Mansion 2 had a couple moments where I got completely stumped on where to go (which isn't a bad thing at all; trust me on this). All five mansions are very unique in their designs, which prevents the areas from getting bland and repetitive. I find exploring each one is relatively fun; I just wish there was a bonus "open house" mission in which I could explore the entirety of the mansion without being restricted by story-based blockades. As with Nintendo standard, if the game's environments are unique, you can bet the music will be, too. The music is very atmospheric, as in it's not something I'd listen to outside of the game, but within the game, it works wonders. If you're simply walking around for a while, Luigi will hum along with the music, which is something fans of the previous game will recognize. Speaking of Mr. Green over here, Luigi's Mansion is a perfect example of why I prefer Luigi over Mario. While Mario is an emotionless everyman (with a few exceptions here and there), Luigi actually has a very defined personality in this game. It's the little things that make me feel bad for him having to go through what the ghosts keep throwing at him. For example, after rigorously searching the second mansion for a special key, the Polterpup swoops in and nabs it and tosses it out a window. Luigi sighs in annoyance, but quickly sucks it up and gets on with his quest. The technical advancements in the 3DS' specs allow for Luigi to have very defined facial expresions and movements, which gives more life to the character than anything I've seen in a long time. This is by far the best representation of Luigi you will ever see, even more so than the Luigi in the Paper Mario subseries. The writing befinits the characters of both Luigi and Professor E. Gadd, making the two some of the most lovable, funny, and charming Mario characters in existence.

Funnily enough, I've been rambling about everything except what makes this a game: the gameplay. It's virtually unchanged from the first Luigi's Mansion: you have a flashlight and a vacuum. Hit the ghosts with the light (used with A), and suck up the ghosts (hold down R to suck and pull back on the Circle Pad opposite the ghost's escape path). Sounds simple enough, right? Well, not exactly. Some ghosts can only be stunned with the flashlight after they deal out an attack or after you yank off their sunglasses, and sucking up a ghost requires you to pay attention to your surroundings so you don't get attacked by another ghost and lose more health and the ghost you were going for. Sucking up more than one ghost at a time for a bigger money bonus all while dodging environmental hazards and free-roaming ghosts requires some actual skill, which I give the game credit for. Players who are new to Luigi's Mansion as a whole might take a short while to get used to the controls, but veterans should be able to pick the game up and play right away, but while still being given a challenge. Dark Moon brings in a new set of ghosts completely seperate from the past game, and while the designs of said ghosts are more plain than the last, they have completely different behavoirs and attack patterns, providing a difficulty curve different from the last game. If you're worried about it being too easy, don't be. I actually found myself dying a couple times, most notably during boss fights. It's a good change of pace from the other Mario-based titles on 3DS which are a teetering a bit too close to short and easy. The addition of the Dark-Light Device also gives returning players something new to use, forcing the player to search even harder than before to find what they need.

Even if you've never played Luigi's Mansion before, I definitely think you should give the sequel a shot if you own a 3DS. The artistic direction, puzzles, multiplayer, graphics, atmosphere, and overall length makes this title well worth the $40 price tag. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon is available retail and on the 3DS eShop.

(Rant)

Funny how I get so worked up over people predicting the Wii U's failure when I'm about to do the same to the Xbox One. This article is slightly different in that respect, mainly because the bashing of the Wii U is uncalled for. People say the Wii U will fail only because of the Wii's supposed status as a "kiddie console", which occurred because the news sites wouldn't stop drilling that phrase into your skull. That feeling, for some reason, carried over to the Wii U, which isn't fair. However, in this rundown of the Xbox One, I have specific points as to why you need to stay as far away from this massive silver slab as humanly possible.

I treat home game systems like I do with Pokémon games. You can buy one and still get away with it, but if you want the full experience, you're gonna need the second one. I own a Wii for the Nintendo goodies that I can't go one generation without buying, but when new games started coming out that I had no way of playing, I turned to the Xbox 360. I would've gone with a PlayStation 3 if it weren't for the fact that the 360 is what all my friends had at the time and that it had Halo, which I would stay up until 5 AM playing with said friends. Getting a 360 let me experience some of my favorite games of all time, such as Assassin's Creed II, Sonic Generations, and Portal 2, and I don't regret getting it. Here's the catch, though: while Nintendo's massive first-party IP library is exclusive to their consoles, virtually everything else is on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3. You'd be hard-pressed to find a game that is exclusive to one or the other, making it so that if you owned a Wii and a 360 like I do, you wouldn't have a need for a PS3 because all the games out for the PS3 are also on 360. What it comes down to is whether you prefer Persona and Rachet & Clank over Halo and Fable. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Halo, but it's droppable. The obvious flaws in the 360 and the rumors of the "Durango" had me prepared to drop Microsoft entirely in favor of Sony...I just didn't expect that the Xbox One reveal conference would solidify my opinion so quickly.
 
The Xbox One conference opened pretty well at first. 500 GB of hard drive space, a significant imporvement over my 360 S' measly 4 gigs. It holds a whopping 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, allowing it to multitask between movies, games, and internet browsing. The controller, while really uncomfortable-looking, sports a D-pad that isn't somehow worse than the GameCube's, unlike the 360's D-pad. The console sure looks sleak, even if it's the size of my desktop tower. The best part is that the Kinect 2.0, as people are calling it, is pre-packaged with the system so that you don't have to pay half the price of the system to get something that doesn't have have anything worthwhile compatible with it. The disc drive is Blu-Ray and the Kinect camera is now 1080p.

See, it's all fine and dandy, right? It has nice features, and looks cool. What more could you want out of a game console?

Oh, wait, I know! GAMES.

Microsoft is under this moronic impression that they need to cater to "growing technology" and outfit their console with TV integration and sports and movies and music and STOP IT. We're investing in your console for games, not for fantasy basketball league plugins (which they actually teased; this is too stupid to make up). This whole mindset is absolutely ridiculous. As for the cool features they talked about, I realized partway through that the Wii U already does the majority of this stuff and so will the PS4, making owning an Xbox One pointless and a waste of cash if you're getting it for just the features alone, which is the only selling point right now because they barely teased any games whatsoever, but we'll get to that in a minute.

These are things you could get past, though. Some of these complaints are kinda petty. Maybe you want a whole bunch of junk like voice commands and TiVO shoved into what's supossed to be a gaming system. Maybe you want to use voice commands that are probably unresposive to turn on your TV as opposed to the Wii U's GamePad that even lets you take your game away from the TV. Well, does the actual gaming side of the Xbox One hold up enough to make the purchase worthwhile based on what they showed during the conference? I'd answer that with a resounding "Are you insane?!".

The Wii U is backwards compatible with Wii games. You can transfer your Virtual Console games over to it, if for a small fee. The PS4 can kind of do backwards compatibility; I'm still confused on how the whole game streaming thing works. So how come Microsoft completely cuts out backwards compatibility as a whole for both physical and digital games?! For a system advertised to be an everything-in-one system, it's pretty stupid that you'll have to have two huge boxes on the counter to be able to play all of your games. Oh, and if you're an Achievement Hunter, better kiss your hard work goodbye because your precious Gamerscore isn't transferrable to the new system. Low on money? Wanna buy a used game? Well, too bad! Every game purchased is registered to an account, meaning that you can't play any used games. They said you can transfer the license for a fee, but who knows how massive that'll be! They also brought up how many servers they have. Look, the cloud's cool and all, but if they crash, you're in for some trouble, because that's also where you'll be storing your save data for your games and your digital purchases. Not to mention there was no word of making Xbox Live Gold free as opposed to its stupid $60-a-year price tag.

Look, you're an Xbox fanboy and want to support this, whatever. It's your money. I'm just giving you friendly gamer-to-gamer advice by telling you to back away from this thing. It doesn't make any sense as to why you'd spend money on it when all it does so far is do anything but play games, and the few games announced for it aren't even exclusive titles. I used to defend the Xbox, but now, I'm not supporting this idocy anymore. If you complained about how difficult and annoying the 360 in general was to use, you're going to have a hell of a time with the Xbox One and trying to even get your games to work properly. Until I see some games that aren't repeat shooters and inane sports games, I'm not in the slightest impressed. I've made my decision; I'm switching to PlayStation as my secondary third-party system.

(News)

So the rumors turned out to be true. Quickly and suddenly, the original Sonic the Hedeghog has re-launched on the iOS App Store coupled with the Whitehead engine, an improved soundtrack, widescreen support, and an unexpected edition: playability of Tails and Knuckles. I'm excited to give this one a go. It's $2.99, but for those who already own Sonic 1 for their iOS device can download the new version of the game as a free update to the app they already purchased. Here's hoping that Sonic 2 gets the same treatment soon.

(News)

It's about damn time. Microsoft has announced that Microsoft Points will not be the currency used to purchase items from their next-gen console's store; instead, it will fully support real-world cash, just as the Windows Store in Windows 8 has. It will work exactly as iTunes and the eShop have for a while now; credit and debit cards can be used to load up your account, as well as gift cards that can be bought in-stores. Your account will have cross-platform capabilities, allowing you to use the same account to buy things on Xbox Live, the Windows Store, and the Windows Phone's App Store. Hopefully this will encourage Japanese and indie developers to lean more towards the Xbox again, as the MSP -> $$ currency exchange was downright awful.

However, the Xbox 360 will still fully support MS Points; this change only affects the next Microsoft console. No word yet on if Xbox Live's other main problem (having to buy a Gold subscription) will be fixed or removed along with MSP.

(News)

Through this announcement trailer, Capcom has announced that the highly-anticipated Ace Attorney 5 3DS game will be coming to Europe and North America. There's no specific release date yet, but it'll ship overseas during Fall of 2013.

(News)

It seemed like an oddly-placed promo, putting Super Metroid up as a Club Nintendo reward, considering the SNES classic was going to go up on the Wii U Virtual Console for a measly 30 cents in the following month (this month, May). However, Nintendo has suddenly pulled an act of kindness and has refunded those who have a registered Wii U the 150 Club Nintendo Coins they spent on Super Metroid if they took advantage of the promotion. It's a little confusing at what was trying to be accomplished by Nintendo here, but nonetheless, it's a helpful and gratefully-accepted exchange.

(News)

If you've yet to get the Legendary Psychic-type Pokémon Deoxys, here's your chance. From now until May 31st, you can download a special Deoxys into your Pokémon Black 2 or Pokémon White 2 game card. The "Plasma's Deoxys" will come equipped with a Life Orb and the moves Recover, Dark Pulse, Nasty Plot, and Psycho Boost, and will be Level 100. Oddly enough, it will not come in a Cherish Ball as all event Legendaries do, but rather in a Dusk Ball.