Nintendo just wrapped up their latest Nintendo Direct, and as usual there was a lot of information included in the 40 minute presentation. One of the main themes of this Nintendo Direct was Amiibo, but we’ll talk about that as we hit each individual highlight. Ready? Lets go!

Right out of the gate Shigeru Miyamoto brought us some new information about Star Fox Zero. The title is ready to go, and is going to be very similar to Star Fox 64. It will have branching paths both in levels and across the system map. Teleporters were indicated to be a big part of both the story and the branching paths. The game looks nice visually, but the most interesting ideas were in the way that the Arwing can transform and how that allows you to access the multiple paths. It was also indicated that when you beat the game, it will open up even more paths. Star Wolf returns, and there will be special tactics employed to battle his team throughout the game.

Two player mode was also shown off, allowing one player to move and another to shoot.

Of course, Nintendo loves Amiibos, and the Smash Bros. Star Fox Amiibo will unlock the classic SNES Arwing, as well as “some other bonuses.” After that, Project Guard was revealed to now be complete and is actually Star Fox Guard. Players will take the roll of Slippy’s uncle Grippy (ughh) and set up cameras to protect their mining site from enemy robots. Its a tower defense games from what was shown, but with a unique asymetrical twist. You can edit the placement of enemies in levels and them upload them for players around the world to take on.

Star Fox Zero and Star Fox Guard will come as a bundle, or can be purchased seperately on the eShop (or at the bundle price digitally). The games will release on April 22, 2016.

• Next up was Splatoon. They are making changes to matchmaking and weapons. The theme here was to get items and abilities that aren’t currently used into a more frequent rotation. There will be weapons picked by Sheldon, and  Nintendo seems to be hoping to shake up the multiplayer of Splatoon. Given the game’s success, trying to shake up the meta can only be a good thing.

• Nintendo also showed off Mario and Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. MOVING ON.

Did you know that over 6.2 million courses have been created? Nintendo does, and they’re expanding the game again. Now you can shake Thwomps and they will turn into skewers. Shake a p-switch and it will turn into a key. Similarly, shaking a door will turn it into a key door. This means that creators can now expand their devious creations even more. You can place special coins that will summon a key when all are found, forcing exploration.

As if all of that wasn’t sadistic enough in the hands of the collective internet, Nintendo is launching a new 100 Mario Challenge Super Expert Mode, giving you 6 fiendishly hard levels to beat. Beating the mode will add new Mystery Mushroom costumes. The update will be available on March 9th.

• Next up was Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem, now known as Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE. We didn’t get to hear much about this game other than it is a super stylish JRPG.
• Lost Reavers, Namco Bandai’s free to play online shooter is still coming, and its look pretty good. Team up with players, kill bosses and loot things. I’m in if it’s not pay to win. Open beta comes April 14.

Paper Mario is getting some more love this year with Paper Mario Color Splash. Mario and co will set off to restore color to a tropical island paradise with his paint hammer. You can splash Toads to revive them, or splash a whole house to free a ton of them. Combat will see you painting and using cards in keeping with the theme of the game. The game is currently set for 2016 release.

• Pokken Tournament is still coming out on Wii U. It looks gorgeous and the showed off Machamp getting a 900 hit combo. The fighting looks fast, fluid and fun. Pokken Tournament comes out on March 18, 2016.
• March also sees the introduction of the new rewards program, My Nintendo. Little information was given, but it starts this month.
• Mini Mario & Friends Amiibo Challenge was shown off. Its basically March of the Minis with Amiibo and is a free game for Wii U and  3DS, with the catch being that levels are locked to specific Amiibo.
• The NEW Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console is getting some serious love in the form of SNES games. A special mode will be available called perfect Pixel, which displays the games in their original resolution. Games are available starting today, including Pilotwings and more.
• Game Freak has made a horse racing solitaire game called Pocket Card Jockey. Thats a thing. Coming in May.
• Azure Striker Gunvolt 2 is coming, with new features and new playable characters. From March 2nd- June 1st, the original will be offered at a discount, with the sequel coming out this summer.
• Fire Emblem Fates Revelations comes out on March 10th, and Nintendo is ramping up the DLC releases with new maps coming regularly.

Hyrule Warriors is coming out on 3DS, and the new game sees a plethora of new characters, including Linkle. Hyrule Warriors Legends will have new content available as well, including a season pass that includes 4 DLCS and a bonus costume for Ganondorf. On launch day, anyone who gets a physical copy of the game will get a download code for a free Hyrule Warriors 3DS theme. Plus, you can transfer Hyrule Warriors Legends characters into the Wii U version. Also revealed was Medli. The harp wielder from Wind Waker is a free download available when the first DLC releases.

• Disney is making an art game called Disney Art Academy. It will teach players how to draw in a variety of styles.
• Bravely Second was show briefly, including the new caster variations that allow you to combine spells. There will be a demo available for the game that includes an exclusive side story that will allow you to carry rewards into the main game. Oh, and theres a Catmancer. A Cat…mancer. The demo will be available on March 10th with the game launching on April 15th.

Dragon Quest 7 is coming to the 3DS in America. Regarded by many as a classic, the game has been totally remastered, giving characters updated looks and bringing the world into 3D. The story has also been completely retranslated. Nintendo promises it will feel like a new game. The game comes out later this year.

• Monster Hunter X is coming to the west as Monster Hunter Generations in Summer 2016. If you play on a system with Monster Hunter 4 save data present, you will get special bonus content. There will also be a special collaboration that lets you dress your hunter as Marth from Fire Emblem.
• Metroid Prime: Federation Force was shown off. Nintendo tried very very hard to convince us that it belongs in the Metroid universe. We here at the station were NOT convinced.
• Rhythm Heaven MegaMix is coming to 3DS. It offers 100 games from the series past and 30 new ones.

The final big announcement was Kirby: Planet Robobot.  In this new adventure, Kirby still copies abilities like always. But he also has a robobot armor that can destroy pieces of the environment as well as copy abilities of it’s own. There is also a new four player co-operative quest mode that has you and friends fighting bosses. Along the way, you can collect pieces of tablets to unleash a massive team attack. And you can level up your Kirby’s and become stronger and take on tougher bosses. The game is also Amiibo compatible. Certain Amiibos will give Kirby character specific abilites, such as Mario giving Kirby the UFO ability. The game will also launch a new line of Kirby Amiibo when it comes out on June 10th. These Amiibos will grant Kirby a copy ability and a costume. And the new Kirby grants an exclusive UFO power.

The Skylanders franchise is teaming up with the advocacy group Autism Speaks for a series of toys-to-life figures. The centerpiece of the Light it Up Blue campaign is a series of blue and white Skylanders Superchargers figures launching today, a joint press release states.

Four toys — including two characters named Splat and Trigger Happy, as well as two vehicles called Splatter Splasher and Gold Rush — are available for sale now in the United States and Europe. Toys will go on sale in Canada on April 1.

“Since the debut of the franchise, we’ve heard from parents that Skylanders plays a special role in the lives of their kids on the autism spectrum,” said Activision’s Josh Taub, senior vice president of Skylanders product management. “The entire Skylanders team was deeply committed and proud to bring these special toys to life. If they can put a smile on a child’s face, then we know we’ve done our job right.”

“Autism affects one in every 42 boys and one in 68 children in the United States,” said Peter Morton, Autism Speaks’ vice president of corporate development. “We’re proud to work with Skylanders, an iconic franchise that’s known for bringing joy and magic to kids and families.”

With The Division coming out soon, Digmbot and  Artemiss join up to offer their opinions on what they’ve experienced so far with the game.

Digmbot

Tom Clancy’s Division is coming out in just a few days, and I’m remembering my own time spent with the beta. There was one extremely frustrating stream, and about 4 hours of off stream play. Perhaps the one thing I could say about The Division is that the shooting mechanics aren’t awful. They aren’t particularly good either, but they aren’t terrible. The game is competent. It aims to put you into an open world New York rife with waist high cover for you to crouch behind while you shoot at enemies and then loot them, and it does so. It aims to include RPG elements, and it does so.

The glaring issue I have with this is that it is not fun. The game controls fine. It isn’t particularly satisfying feeling to slowly dodge roll into cover, or clamber precariously over a car hood, but it does it when I press the button. It just feels chunky and slow. The cover mechanics such as switching between cover or vaulting over are as tried and true as the come. So is blind firing from behind cover. New York is certainly nice to look at, though not on the level they promised us in the original trailer. But all graphical complaints aside, The Division is uninspired. It takes all of the checklist boxes of an open world game, a cover based shooter, and a loot based game and doggedly ticks them off. The setting, which is admittedly intriguing can’t – for me- save gameplay that is utterly dull as dishwater. Even the loot is uninspired. In most loot based games (Diablo and Borderlands come to mind), there is an immediacy to the loot. Shiny new toys! That do crazy things! Destiny pulls this off especially well from a visual standpoint. Guns look awesome in Destiny. And in Borderlands they do insane things like shoot lightning. In The Division the guns…make slightly larger numbers pop up above enemies head’s when you shoot them. They might reduce recoil slightly. They might up your ammo count by 5 rounds in a magazine.This isn’t compelling loot. When I play Borderlands, as soon as I grab a new gun I immediately open my menu to stare at it and see if I should equip it. When I was playing The Division, I usually remembered I had new loot after 20 minutes or so when I opened the inventory for some reason and saw the little tag. It’s just not compelling, which to me is a huge problem in a loot based game.

Let’s move on to the other thing that I find most egregious about Tom Clancy’s: The Division- bullet sponge enemies. Over the years Tom Clancy games have conditioned us to expect realism. Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell and the like have made it clear that these are games grounded in reality. If you shoot someone in the head with an AK-47 in Splinter Cell or Rainbow Six, they will die. In The Division, they will continue walking straight towards you as if nothing happened. Common thugs wearing nothing but hoodies can take 10 to 15 rounds to the face. This is a subjective thing, I get that. But the name Tom Clancy and bullet sponge enemies do not belong in the same game. And even beyond the idea that this is  Tom Clancy game, video games in general have conditioned me to the idea that if I shoot a baddie in the head with a real gun, he’s going to go down. If I shoot him with a hyper powered badger gun in Borderlands, ok he might not go down. Because he has shields and is a mutated psycho on the moon of a distant world. But not an AK-47 in a real looking game. Get the idea? It’s a dissonance that I can’t reconcile and it ruins a core mechanic of the game for me.

The last thing to touch on is The Dark Zone. This is the PvP area of the game, and is probably the only bit of credit I would give the game in terms of new ideas or originality. Once in the Dark Zone you and other players can team up or duke it out over loot that you can scavenge from NPCs and objectives in the zone. All of this loot is contaminated though and must be airlifted out via helicopter. Once this is done, it will be decontaminated and you can then equip it. This is a cool idea that is utterly ruined by the asinine restriction that you can only place four packs on the helicopter’s line at a time. Of course, it drives emergent stories by having players turn on one another in order to make sure their loot get out at all costs. But the other thing it does is punish you for someone else being an asshole, which is not good game design. Of course killing too many other players will mark you on the zone map and incentivize other players to take you down, something very similar to DayZ’s bandit system. I find the idea of these emergent stories to be probably the most interesting part of The Division, and especially of the Dark Zone.

I’m sure there are plenty of elements of The Division that will be discovered after launch that I didn’t get to experience yet. The problem is that what I did experience was bland enough, dull enough, cookie cutter enough and just plain not fun enough that I don’t care to experience those other moments. For me, The Division is a generic military third person shooter with some RPG elements shoehorned in that doesn’t really do anything new. I’ll pass. Maybe one day they’ll put Destiny on PC. At least it has Star Wars style speeder bikes..

ArtemissBow (aka Ranger)

Admit it, everyone saw the recent open beta for The Division, and at least considered downloading it. I was the one refreshing the page awaiting the open access. When I first saw the announcement trailers and teasers for the game, I nearly jumped out of my skin with excitement. Having interactable objects in the world you don’t just glitch around, even some of the mobile aspects had be interested. I’m sure I was one of many who were mostly disappointed after seeing a much more recent E3 example of the game and gameplay, sporting a not-so-beautiful looking New York landscape and strange shooter mechanics.

My experience with the beta refreshed my view significantly. I was able to quickly forgive any graphical broken promises when I was immersed in the semi-apocalyptic Manhattan landscape. There was nothing glaringly terrible about the game graphically, and despite the fact the game presented was in beta, I encountered very few glitches. Granted, usually games that are released on console as a ‘beta’ are mostly finished so it was pretty unlikely that I would have seen too many.

The gameplay is solid, as long as you like 3rd person, cover based shooters. I do think that the game was rather standard as far as the in-game play, but I was thrilled with how the RPG elements were incorporated. It was a little disappointing to see, while my character was low level, enemies eat half a clip of damage from my assault rifle. That feeling was short-lived though, as progression was fast and I started to feel up to pace after only an hour or so of play. I am excited to see what they do with the game as far as the story is concerned, as the setup that we were exposed to, my inner science nerd is drooling. The story we were exposed to did also hint at some base building and crafting elements. These are things I was not expecting, but was happy to see! I had friends that hated the fact games like Fallout 4 had base building, and I have to believe that if you are one of those people, you might not like this aspect of The Division as well.

Another major element definitely worth mentioning is the Dark Zone. I will need to address the Dark Zone separately as the meta develops after the game releases, but aside from the dissertation I could write of speculation regarding the mechanics, I’ll use a single word: potential. The Dark Zone is absolutely brimming over with potential. Let me preface this by saying, I am generally NOT a PvP player. I have several hours into games like Destiny, DayZ, Elder Scrolls Online, and Guild Wars 2; but it is a rare occurrence that I venture/engage in the PvP zones of these games. I am just the type of player that enjoys PvE elements more. I have never been so happy to be wrong. I love that the zone is persistent, you do not end the PvP experience until you decide to walk back out of the door. Gamers that are sick of games like Destiny where the load screens between matches is a huge time sink for your gaming hours will love this. All you do is walk in the door, and it’s all PvP all the time.

That being said, there is little to NO motivation for aggressive players to camp the doors. When you have sweet DZ loot, you get the fashionable, gigantic yellow butt-pack that indicates you have gear that might be worth stealing. People who just walked in the door have no butt-pack and so aggressive players have no motivation just to kill you, as they won’t get anything from it other than being tagged as ‘Rogue’ which is not necessarily favorable as the whole server can then see your exact position on the map. Speaking of being announced to the server, I even liked the extraction setup for the DZ loot. It’s exciting and thrilling to try and get your precious loot out when the extraction location and time is announced to the whole server. Extraction is where you will be finding the aggressive players, so it’s treacherous. Extraction is why I really want to wait for a full impression until the meta develops, as I saw something incredible while I was playing the beta. There were high ranked/level/DPS players….actually protecting the extraction zones from aggressive players so that normal scrubs like me could get my sweet loot out of the DZ.
Long story short, The Division is an absolute yes from me. I don’t know if it will be able to replace the more flashy titles like Destiny, but it’s going to be a real contender. I will absolutely be playing this one on release.

So there you have it. What do you think about The Division so far?

Tap Heroes was released in the middle of last year to Steam. It’s an indie adventure clicker from VaragtP.

The game is simply that you are a ‘god hand’ trying to get your Heroes as far as possible through the various locations by fighting past enough monsters or creatures in a particular level before you can advance. Beating creatures gives your coins which you can then use to upgrade the abilities of both your Heroes and your ‘god hand’; which you use to more quickly beat creatures, heal quicker or just be able to endure the power of greater monsters. You can also acquire a rarer currency, the blue gem, which you can use to buy non-stat upgrades, such as a familiar pet or initially to recruit new Heroes into your party.

Your ‘god hand’ itself can be used to click upon enemies to attack them quicker than your Heroes generally can (but with less power) or to heal your Heroes by clicking upon any of them, again quicker than your Heroes can but with less power. It also has chances to get critical hits upon your enemies and all three aspects (attack, heal and critical chance) are the upgradeables for your ‘god hand’ along with a range of temporarily applied powers that you have the chance to unlock later on in the game.

At £1.99 UK or $2.99 US the game is cheap and that’s a good thing. The game looks lovely, plays well and is smooth to run on a computer – the setting seems to be a puppet theatre in which the characters and creatures are paper cutouts on sticks. While the environments passed through are of the sort you’d expect to find in an adventure game, the monsters themselves vary up quite a bit. You only need to beat 10 creatures or one boss per level so there’s not really going to be the feeling you’re fighting just the same thing unless you choose not to advance to the next level and instead grind out coins before you head on.

However, there’s a reason this game has a low price tag and that’s because quite simply… it’s a clicker game. It isn’t really made for its gameplay, rather as something to fill the time in. It won’t surprise you to find out that Tap Heroes is also available on mobile platforms as well, albeit with in-app purchases that were removed from this PC version. That is the sort of platform this game was really made for, being able to play a little bit then put away and return to later and collect the coins your heroes made for you while you were away. And the fact that you will gain a sizeable number of coins when you come back if you leave it long enough does mean that you will have more than enough for stat upgrades – which takes the challenge out of it.

Tap Heroes is not a bad game by any means. It runs well, does manage to be challenging and really is delightful to look at. The problem is, it’s not a very engaging game either purely because it is a game that suits a mobile platform better. But as a PC game, that’s a bit of a downside.

5/10

Microsoft may start releasing optional hardware upgrades for Xbox One rather than rolling out all-new consoles, according to Xbox boss Phil Spencer. Polygon reports that the executive’s presentation at the Xbox Spring Showcase event teased out a surprising new direction for the system.

“We see on other platforms whether it be mobile or PC that you get a continuous innovation that you rarely see on console,” Spencer said. “Consoles lock the hardware and the software platforms together at the beginning of the generation. Then you ride the generation out for seven or so years, while other ecosystems are getting better, faster, stronger.”

Spencer said Microsoft could break out of this cycle by selling optional hardware upgrades, allowing players to keep up with new tech that they previously would need to wait years – or buy a pricey gaming PC – to enjoy. The system would continue to be “backward and forward compatible” with past and future games, thanks in part to Xbox One using the Universal windows Platform for all of its applications.

“We can effectively feel a little bit more like we see on PC, where I can still go back and run my old Doom and Quake games that I used to play years ago but I can still see the best 4K games come out and my library is always with me. Hardware innovation continues while the software innovation is able to take advantage and I don’t have to jump a generation and lose everything that I played on before.”

Spencer didn’t specify how these optional hardware upgrades would work – whether it would be something you drop into your old system, like a good ol’ N64 expansion pack, or an all-new Xbox One that you’d buy off the shelf – but he hopes people see this as a signal of Microsoft’s continued commitment to the system.