Yoshi's New Island

I should begin by admitting to a certain level of rose-tinted bias when reviewing this game. Yoshi's Island on the Super Nintendo was, and continues to be, my favorite platformer game of all time. In 1995 it was the first video game I ever played to completion, at the very formative age of three. As the first game I completed, Yoshi's Island set a lot of standards for what I looked for in future video games. Hearing that a sequel was in the works for 3DS immediately aroused my anticipation. Surely Nintendo would be giving this game some special attention, as the sequel to one of their most famous titles ever.

Well... Here we go.

So green, like broccoli. I don't like broccoli.

The new game, for Nintendo's 3DS, clearly drew inspiration from the previously successful Yoshi games, but that inspiration falls short of homage and ends up in the realm of plagiarism. A curious pattern emerged while playing this game where I was able to predict what the next level would be about before I even played it. This was more than just knowing where bosses would be. Predictions such as "3-6 is the hedgehog cave." or "4-1 has balloons I can ride" were so accurate because I played these exact same levels on Super Nintendo. Only, these weren't exactly the same. New Island's levels are hastily trimmed down to be as short as two or three small rooms. The impression I felt from playing these levels was that Arzest, the company responsible for living up to the legacy of Yoshi's Island, looked at its predecessor and viewed the levels in that game as a blueprint, a road map for success.

World 4-1, "the balloon level".

Unfortunately there are no road maps for success in game design. The thing that made those levels great, back in 1995, was that they were uncharted territory. The environments, the puzzles, the enemies, were all products of new ideas and imagination at work. Seeing it all re-done 20 years later can't instill any reaction more powerful than "Eh." I had hoped for some creative use of the 3DS's technologies, such as 3D, dual-screen, and the gyroscopic controls. The gyroscopic control was implemented, but in a way that was borderline unplayable. The vehicle sections from the SNES, seamlessly integrated into levels without feeling like minigames, are now instanced rooms where players must use gyroscopic controls to control the vehicles. This sounds like a painful challenge to overcome, but there really isn't a challenge, since failing the vehicle rooms still lets you move on to the next part of the level. If there's no punishment for failing to complete a part of the level, why are the vehicle rooms even a feature?

A lot of the child-like charm of the original wasn't in the painted backgrounds,
it was in the 2D cartoon sprites.

A little of that charm gets lost when half the game is suddenly 3D and "artistic".

The developers at Arzest were clearly pulling their design blueprint from past installments of the Yoshi series in their level design. I hoped I would be able to at least enjoy the game's art, and find some redemption in the fleetingly short levels that whisked by. Yoshi games are known for their unique and distinct artistic choices. Yoshi's Island made use of watercolor backgrounds and ragged crayon-like borders. Yoshi's Story was a colorful patchwork of cloth and cardboard. Yoshi's New Island seems to have not made up its mind about what kind of art style it wanted to portray, drawing from all sorts of color schemes, materials, and artists. The characters themselves are mostly just 3D models placed into 2D space, textured to appear painted. There's nothing wrong with this single choice, but the artistic mess becomes apparent when those painted characters are juxtaposed on environments that are drastically different. Some backgrounds were also 3D models like the characters themselves, trees flattened into the background. Others were just paintings with no depth to them. One background was a black-and-white pencil forest so poorly drawn I was convinced until going back a second time to inspect it that it was a pre-production concept sketch that somehow made it into the final product. In fact, the color of the game overall was very washed-out for a Yoshi game, usually colorful and vivid.

Whether these mountains are shrouded in mist or just unfinished
depends on how badly you want to like this game.

The poor distinction between game objects and background objects also became hindering to gameplay. I recall one experience where I wasn't able to tell where to jump next because the platforms were so similar to the background that I thought there were no platforms. This wasn't an intelligent gameplay choice, a "leap of faith" test. It was confusion that arose from lack of artistic direction. If we look at the past Yoshi titles, art was confined to a single style, but the use of that style was creative and inspired. Yoshi's Story separated foreground from background by cutting out a road in the cardboard ground. Yoshi's Island's characters and objects were separated from the artistic backgrounds by using lush sprite art instead of crayon and watercolor. In Yoshi's New Island, the art is so varied that it just comes across as messy. One particular level involved swirly paint around moons in the sky, like Van Gogh's Starry Night. I remembered seeing something similar in Yoshi's Island, and was disappointed to see that 20 years ago, this SNES title referenced Van Gogh the same way in a background image better than the 3DS title attempted to do now.

This level begins in the forest and escalates up to give you this
starry background at the end of the level. Beautiful.

The inspiration is still clear, but there's no stars.

Music was integral to my enjoyment of the SNES title. The fast-paced tunes from the platforming levels and boss fights, as well as the infamous "Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy" melody still ring in my mind. The music of New Island continues to play in my head too. Not because I enjoyed the tone-deaf arrangement of kazoos and xylophones, but because the same song was used in every single level. It was almost as if the composer was on a one-day contract and Arzest was in a mad hurry to pull as much raw sound as they could from the composer. I continued to pray, every level, that a new tune would play. By the end of the game I couldn't erase the song from my head. I've attached a link so that you can share my frustration:

THE MUSIC.

As a sequel, I expected New Island to carry with it some continuity from the original title, and perhaps expand the story. The origins of Mario and Luigi, their rivalry with Bowser and the Koopas, and Yoshi's role in the story, were all told 20 years ago. I hoped I would get to see what happened after Yoshi and Mario defeated Bowser, and perhaps raise the stakes. Baby Princess Peach seemed like a candidate for kidnapping. What I was treated to instead was an almost word-for-word copy of the original narrative. The stork at the end of Yoshi's Island finishes its delivery of the Mario bros., only to be told that he came to the wrong house. Racing now to the correct destination, which is somehow back over the ocean where Yoshi's Island resides, the stork is again ambushed by the wizard Kamek and Luigi is kidnapped while Mario plummets to the island, where Yoshi finds him and the journey begins.

You had ONE JOB!!

Right off the bat, Arzest managed to infuriate me as someone coming from the SNES game. This beginning cutscene completely invalidated my accomplishments from the previous title. Worse, it demonstrated how little time the writers must have spent on story. They took the story of Yoshi's Island, repeated it, and used it as motive to get people to play the game. The quest isn't motivated so much by Yoshi's desire to help Mario as it is the stork's incompetence as a deliverer of babies. Nonetheless, I played the game out of respect for its heritage. At least the battle with Bowser would be something to look forward to.

:)

The road to Bowser was riddled with other bosses, mostly giant versions of enemies I encountered in the levels. Yoshi's Island had a healthy host of bosses as well, all memorable for their art design, encounter design, and the castles they hid in. Naval Piranha's castle, for instance, was a giant sewer system filled with hungry Piranha Plants. Tap-tap's castle was a maze of pipes, some locked by corks that needed keys. Understand that this is a game I last played maybe 3 years ago. New Island is fresh in my mind from 3 weeks ago, and I can't say I remember the names of any bosses, let alone what their castles looked like, except for Kamek. Kamek himself is the mid-boss of every world, which unfortunately leaves out a lot of room for cleverer, more inspired bosses. For the most part I remember seeing lava and spikes in each castle, perhaps arranged a little thematically to suit the current world. The bosses, however, were never thematically arranged. I recall world 3 of Yoshi's Island, the jungle world, having a frog boss and a Piranha Plant boss. Those are jungly creatures that are well-suited bosses for a jungle world. The bosses of New Island were arbitrarily placed. World 4, the mountain world, had a fiery fish as its final boss. Again, it didn't make any clear sense why I was fighting these bosses.

This boss, despite not having fangs, is named "Count Fang".

Placement in the level progression aside, these bosses also all fought the same: shoot it three times with eggs, it dies. This was the constant all the way through to the final boss of the game. Something I've learned about intelligent boss design is this: Players should learn a skill in a level, then use that learned skill to beat the boss of that level. I learned how to make eggs and throw eggs in the very first level of the game. For all of Yoshi's skills, flutter-jumping, ground-pounding, swallowing, spitting up, making eggs, throwing eggs, I only saw one skill used to take down a boss, and that skill quickly grew stale. The bosses of Yoshi's Island gave the player opportunity to exercise every tool in Yoshi's arsenal, and in spectacular fashion. One boss transports Yoshi to the moon, which rotates like a treadmill as Yoshi runs around it, creating a dizzying gyroscopic battlefield that players have to ground-pound in order to damage the boss on the other side. None of that out-of-the-box thinking was present in these mind-numbingly simple eggfests.

Super Mario Galaxy and Angry Birds share a common ancestor in Raphael the Raven.

Fast-forward to Bowser's Castle, the final level of the game. Again, a fiery, spiky, generic castle. I was intrigued to see the automatic-scrolling hallway from Yoshi's Island before the final room. Perhaps this would live up to the epic fight I remember from 20 years ago. I begin the fight and quickly dispatch Baby Bowser's first form, and prepare to fight Big Bad Baby Bowser. This was the moment I had waited for. In the SNES, B4 would slowly walk toward you from the background, speeding up every time you hit him. After three hits, he begins constantly running. If he reaches the wall Yoshi is standing on, there's no timer to recover baby Mario, you simply die. It takes SEVEN well-placed shots to his noggin to defeat him. But this is Yoshi's New Island, where everything is shorter and less scary. Three eggs later, Baby Bowser was toast. It was as if I beat Bowser up when he was small, then had to keep beating him up to get his body out of the way so I could progress. The glowing eyes, the intimidating castle spires, the black sky, platforms shifting up and down into the lava, everything was there for this fight to be epic, but again, it fell short of even being fun.

What made him so scary on the SNES was that he was shrouded in shadow.
I couldn't make out his chubby little cheeks in a solid black silhouette.

But wait! A message appears on my screen, saying "From a rift in space-time, Bowser appears!".

You think I'm joking about the space-time rift. It's right behind him in this pic.

I had put up with this game up to this point. I had held on to my experience as a child exploring Yoshi's Island, and used those memories to press on. This was the point where I checked out. My investment in the game quickly diffused as I threw three eggs at Bowser and turned the 3DS off without even watching the end credits. For no reason at all, Bowser appears as the final boss of the game, overshadowing Baby Bowser, and the narrative justification for this is "A rift in space-time." Does this rift take me back 20 years so I can play the better version of this game and forget this horrible 2-day experience? If yes, then I'll bite.

Leave the stork tied up and let Yoshi deliver the babies.
At least he's consistent.

Yoshi's New Island was a promising title that could have lived up to its predecessor in much better fashion than the inspired minds at Arzest delivered. As soon as I put down my 3DS, an idea for how this game could have been better came to my mind. Instead of the stork returning to the sky and being robbed once again, Kamek magically imprisons the Yoshis in "?" blocks all over the island. One Yoshi makes it to Mario's house and takes him back to the island to rescue the other Yoshis. Mario's famous jumping ability is used to break open blocks as he and Yoshi venture across the island. This story serves as a continuation of Yoshi's Island, but also as further establishment of Mario's powers in his adult adventures, and it sets the stage for Super Mario World, where Mario continues to find Yoshis trapped in "?" blocks. This story came from my thoughts not even five minutes after completing Yoshi's New Island. What could have been accomplished by the team of professionals at Arzest, with a little more independence, and less reliance on the tried-and-true story of the past?

These vehicle sections would have been great as their own,
separate game. Yoshi doesn't even need to be in it.

After seeing this attempt to continue the story of a beloved classic fall so short of the mark, I wonder if Nintendo's efforts wouldn't have been better spent producing an HD remake of the original game, like Wind Waker, or the Metroid Prime trilogy for Wii. Of course, the next best response to this title, and the disappointment it has left me with, is to treat it not as an official sequel, but as a spinoff that didn't live up to its source material. I hope that game scholars continue to cherish Yoshi's Island for the innovative masterpiece of a game it was without allowing New Island to blemish its bright, colorful reputation.

Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

One of my favorite quotes regarding good game design is by Shigeru Miyamoto, and it goes like this:

"A delayed game is eventually good. A rushed game is bad forever."

Whenever a game gets held back for a long time, I remind myself of this wisdom and hold onto it in the hopes that the end product might be better for the extra time spent. In the modern age of game development that idea is no longer as concrete as it once was. Patches, expansions, and DLC are all able to enhance a game years after its original release, and improve players' perception of the original. I've never seen opinion of a game reverse as much as Diablo III when the expansion Reaper of Souls launched, however.

The original game was a much-anticipated continuation of the Diablo franchise. Introducing new hero classes, new crafting systems, and a new physics engine that implemented some of the new skills, the game seemed set up to be a huge success. Indeed, it was a financial success, breaking the world record for fastest-selling PC game of all time. Despite the sales, it was immediately apparent that Blizzard was unprepared for the game's launch. The infamous "error 37" kept players from logging into servers to play on launch day, and opened a lot of eyes to the inconvenience of always-online digital rights management. The game developers also underestimated the pounding their bosses would take, saying that Diablo, the final boss, would take months for people to beat on the highest difficulty. Surprisingly, inferno-mode Diablo was being killed in mere days by some players. The hype for Diablo III swept through the internet like a firestorm, and just as fast as it erupted, it dissipated.

Reaper of Souls has arrived now to clean up after the original game's mistakes, and offer players new reasons to head back to Sanctuary and slay demons by the numbers. The most notable issues the expansion has addressed are the issues with loot and gearing up characters. Where the original game had completely randomized loot that could yield stats from intelligence to strength, and most of these stats were irrelevant to specific characters, Reaper introduces a new loot system, coined "Loot 2.0" by the designers, that caters item drops specifically to the character you're playing. The loot is still random, as is half the fun of Diablo games, but the most important stats to have are always there. Your hassle isn't about just finding an item with a bare amount of strength, now it's about choosing between the pieces with critical strike, or haste. No matter what choice, your character is upgrading, but now the choices can be more meaningful than required.

Of course, Reaper is an expansion, and the fixes it made to the original are fantastic, but the new content it brings is just as important. Three big features come with the new expansion, that all add to the original content in some way. The first is the addition of another act to play through. Act V is a departure from the typical demon-slaying theme in Diablo, and instead pits the player against the Angel of Death, Malthael. I was intrigued by the story that surrounded the conflict between Malthael and the Nephalem heroes, listening to the supporting characters debate whether humans and angels really can coexist for good, or if humanity is something greater than the rigid definitions of good and evil established by Diablo's mythology. It seems on the surface like a very basic narrative. "There's a bad guy and we're good guys so we have to stop him." But playing the act to the end reveals that Malthael's motives may not be so evil, and what sort of darkness might lurk underneath the heroism of the Nephalem? Questions like this have me itching to know what will come next in the Diablo story.

Also new to the game is a sixth character class, the Crusader. The new class is a holy warrior that uses strength, rounding out the stat distribution as a second strength-user (intelligence for Witch Doctor/Wizard, dexterity for Demon Hunter/Monk, strength for Barbarian/Crusader). The Crusader immediately charmed me with his simply clever writing and Kenobi-esque way of speaking. If nothing else, I was compelled to keep playing a Crusader just to hear more of what he had to say in the story. Of course, playing as the Crusader is also an immensely rewarding experience. The signature weapons of the Crusader are his shield and flail. In a game of randomized loot, however, players don't always find themselves wielding a shield or flail, but the Crusader remedies this with abilities that emulate the signature weapons even when he doesn't have them. My favorite ability of the Crusader's was undoubtedly Sweep, a large arcing attack that summons a spectral flail and swings it in front of him. I was using a legendary dagger when I started using Sweep, and the spectral flail was so seamlessly animated overtop my dagger that the dagger was barely relevant to the awesome flashiness of the ability. Certainly, "flashiness" is the word I would describe the Crusader's playstyle with, while "humble" is how I would describe his writing. The two characteristics make for a very interesting character.

The third and final major piece of content added in Reaper of Souls is adventure mode, which was the most liberating addition to the game in my opinion. For two years, the only way players have been able to grind their progress in Diablo has been by grinding the campaign from Act I to Act IV, and then all over again. This process can get mind-numbingly tedious without yielding a lot of results. I was only able to play through twice before giving up on my third grind. But adventure mode frees players from the tunnel vision of grinding the campaign and allows them to seek treasure on their own terms. Every act's world map is open at every checkpoint, and all the bosses stand waiting in their rooms. If players want to just go boss-to-boss and headhunt for loot, they're welcome to. Or if they want to seek out that elusive dungeon they could never find in the campaign, they can go on a search for it. But the big incentive for adventure mode is the bounties offered for clearing specific dungeons, completing specific events, or killing specific bosses. Similar to a quest in the campaign, a bounty will give the player a huge sum of experience and gold, but will also give them a keystone which is used as currency to access a new type of dungeon, Nephalem Rifts. Nephalem Rifts are randomly-generated dungeons filled with enemies which, after they have all been defeated, summon a final boss that will drop loot equivalent to an act boss. The whole system is a great way to keep players hooked like gambling, because:

(a) They never know which bounties they'll get.

(b) They never know what kind of Nephalem Rift they'll get.

(c) They never know what kind of boss they'll fight.

The randomness of the Nephalem Rifts especially can be enticing, since it is possible to get a rift full of Treasure Goblins, which will probably require more than one trip back home to empty your pockets. But that randomness in the game space as well as the game rewards has given Reaper of Souls virtually infinite replay value as long as the servers run.

When Diablo III was first released it was a mess of a AAA title, and players burned through it faster than Diablo himself could burn through players with his laser breath. It was like a flash fire, creating a ton of buzz and then dying without any memory. Blizzard's games have a reputation for lasting a long time, and they took careful measures to make sure their struggling game would get back up and draw the players back. Reaper of Souls has, so far, been an enormous success, and if patches like the Paragon system or Infernal Machine pop up throughout the expansion, it can only get better from here.

Super Mario 3D World

As historic and beloved as the Mario franchise is, Mario games often come under fire by critics for being too re-hashed, or not innovating enough. These voices call out to Super Mario Sunshine or Paper Mario as successful deviations from the standards that Super Mario 64 and Super Mario World have set.

Super Mario 3D World, the newest 3D Mario platformer, is at first glance, possibly the most re-hashed of all the Mario games. All the successful elements of the past Mario games, from Bros. to Galaxy, are present in Shigeru Miyamoto's final Mario title as director. The plot of this game is about as deep as you'd expect of a Mario game: Bowser is back, kidnapping and building castles, so Mario's off to stomp him straight. This time, however, Princess Peach isn't the damsel in distress. Peach, Mario, Luigi, and even Toad are all the heroes of this adventure into a magic pipe-land inhabited by fairies. Having played Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and loved it, I'm now conditioned to expect some kind of elaborate twist or secret villain at the end of the game. The only effort SM3DW makes to twist the plot is the revelation that Bowser's final castle is not his final castle. Instead, he's running a carnival high in the stratosphere, and instead of a castle, he's built a black monolithic skyscraper that looks exactly like Lord Business's from The Lego Movie. Unless your hero instinct kicks in to rescue these fairies like your life depends on it, there is nothing compelling about the narrative to this game. But through 11 worlds and 350+ stars to collect, I kept playing. Why?

The world of SM3DW, split up into around 100 levels, offered some of the most exciting gameplay I have experienced in a Mario game thus far. Each level, clearly and concisely designed with a theme in mind (spikes, piranha plants, boos), evoked the memory of encountering these things for the first time previously in Mario's adventures. For a long-time Mario fan, this game is essentially a final exam. What makes the whole experience feel whole is that you don't just get to tackle this adventure with Mario. Playing as Luigi, Peach, and Toad gives the player four different styles of play to work with, a fantastic way to pay homage to Super Mario Bros. 2. In fact, in one way or another, SM3DW pays homage to just about every game in Mario's repertoire. There is even a level based on Super Mario Kart, complete with a remix of the theme song.

The levels themselves are a careful balance of the two types of Mario games, 2D and 3D, in more ways than one. The 2D games are always about finding the way to the flag or goal at the end of the level, while the 3D adventures task you with collecting stars (or shine sprites) across the map. Each level has a time limit and a flagpole, which marks the end of the level. But in the level are also hidden three green stars and a stamp that might be at the end of an intense platforming challenge, or carefully concealed by a puzzle. As if that weren't enough, players are also rewarded for touching the top of the flagpole at the end of the level, and for beating the level with every character.

An added element of depth in the gameplay was the option to play co-operatively. In past Mario games before New Super Mario Bros., this meant taking turns trying to beat the level. But now, the multiplayer Mario experience is as many as four people simultaneously playing the level all together. This was a source of enjoyment and frustration for me and my friends who joined me in playing, as we could work together to make some challenges easier, but were also hindered by the different speeds and physics of the characters. Getting too far away from your friends causes your character to enter an invulnerable bubble that brings you back to the group, and if you're playing Peach and Toad, the slowest and fastest characters, respectively, Peach will find herself in the bubble a lot unless Toad slows down. To keep the spirit of competition alive under the co-op intent of the game, the character with the most points at the end of the level is given a gold crown worth a few extra points if they keep it through the next level. The crown can be stolen mid-level by other player's attacks, which might distract players with a mindset to "win".

As the first major Mario title on Wii U, SM3DW makes full use of the console's HD graphics to show off some dazzling environments and effects with glowing particles, crisp models, and smooth animation. The aesthetic design of the levels themselves is also seamlessly professional. Some subtly brilliant design choices include the trees in the first level, where the cat bell item is introduced, which are actually shaped like the item, or the blocks in later levels that actually disappear and re-appear to the beat of the game's music. I also discovered on the slot machine bonus levels that hitting blocks in time with the music will always give the player a perfect jackpot. A game that encourages players to immerse themselves in every element of the design, from the art to the music, is an amazing example of design. The use of music, something that's rarely considered more than just a scene-setting tool, to actually train players to platform levels better, is an impressive feat for a game designer.

After two months of struggling to 100% complete the game, and being given a ride through a glowing neon pipe shaped to spell "THANK YOU" at the end of the final level, I applaud Miyamoto's farewell to his favorite son. The rewarding experience of reliving every major Mario title in one game, as well as re-establishing the modern Mario franchise, has made Super Mario 3D World this generation's Super Mario 64. In another 15 years, I'll be excited to see how this game has contributed to the plumber's legacy.

Mario Kart 7

Mario Kart is a game I grew up with, from Super Mario Kart through every game on. The series has, from game to game, done a good job remaining familiar to its past while innovating the game with new ideas. Mario Kart 7 does this by giving players the ability to glide through tracks on wings, and submerge into aquatic environments, all with unique physics for each terrain.

The new game brought back the familiar cast of Mario Kart, Mario and company, with a garage of new karts to play. Like the games since Double Dash, different karts have different statistics, which let you pick a character you like, and also a vehicle that suits your driving style. New to MK7 is the division of the kart into three parts, all with their own statistics, making the customization of karts a more involved and personalized choice. I found a lot of legacy karts from past games, the Barrel Train from Double Dash, and Mario’s B Dasher from Mario Kart DS. Mario Kart has a reputation for honoring its past with tracks from past games, so vehicles from the old titles fit into the game well.

There is only one notable new item in the Mario Kart arsenal this time around: a tanooki tail that hangs on the back of your kart and allows you to melee attack nearby opponents. It also protects you from one red shell. There is another new addition to the items in the game, but instead of a new item, it is a “7” that you can get from item boxes. The “7” will cause SEVEN items to rotate around your kart. However, it’s difficult to tell which item you’ll use out of the ring circling you. I accidentally used a mushroom to launch off a ledge, which caused me to lose the whole set.

The karts handle very fluidly, and they forgive mistakes much more than past games. Miscalculate that drift and bump the wall? Instead of catching on it and halting instantly, the karts will rebound and decelerate only slightly. Flying controls are easy to use, although it’s hard to gain more altitude after a jump than whatever your kart starts. Underwater controls are almost exactly like on land, but the cars do some nice tilts as they turn, and a propeller pops out behind the kart like a submarine.

To compensate for the ease of controlling karts, the AI for Grand Prix seems a lot smarter. Speed scales so that the karts in 8th, 7th, 6th place are always slow enough to catch up to, but the competition for 1st place is always fierce between at least three other karts. It’s hard to tell if the game is just that chaotic, or if the CPUs are actually able to snipe you with a green shell right before you bounce over a gap. But the beauty of Mario Kart’s balance is that the further behind you are, the more powerful items you find, so you’ll always be fighting to cling to that pole position.

Mario Kart 7’s contributions to its franchise are numerous, and all beneficial to the game. While some may mourn the loss of exploits like snaking from Mario Kart DS, the new balance to kart control and the new faces and vehicles make this game nothing short of a proper continuation to a classic series.