Game & Watch Gallery is the first game in a delightful series which sees Game & Watch titles remade in ways which incorporate different characters like, Mario, Donkey Kong and Yoshi. I personally adore every installment and consider it one of the best ways to experience Game & Watch games. Not only do you get the remakes, but you also get recreations of the originals, so there’s no chance that you’ll miss out on anything. This first collection, sadly only includes four games, but it’s still very good and they’re all great fun to replay frequently to try and beat your high scores. What I’ll do is link to my reviews of the original games and then review each of the remakes.

Manhole (original review)
The original game had you playing as a regular person who had a single manhole cover and had to switch between four open manholes in order to stop people falling in as they walked by. In this version of the game, you play as Yoshi, who sits in the middle of the screen and uses his hands and long tongue to keep four separate manhole covers up. In this one, the manhole covers fall down after somebody walks over them and it’s you’re job to either hold them in place as people walk by or to put the covers back up after they fall down. It’s much more enjoyable over the original, as it’s a lot easier, the gameplay never feels slow and you have Mario, Toad and Donkey Kong Jr. filling the roles of the people who pass by.

Fire (original review)
Instead of playing as fireman helping people fleeing from a burning apartment building, you play as Mario and Luigi, who are helping out after what looks like Princess Peach’s castle has caught fire. Yoshis, Toads and various duplicates of Donkey Kong Jr. all jump from the building and Mario and Luigi must use a trampoline to bounce them into a nearby carriage. I have to admit that it bugs me a bit to see Donkey Kong Jr. used as if he is a generic Mushroom Kingdom species and not an individual (and Manhole does it slightly too) but this is still very fun. The different characters fall at different speeds and bounce to different heights, but other than that this isn’t all that much different to the original. Thankfully, the original is really good and I enjoy it even more with a splash of Super Mario paint. One thing I should point out is that if you play the original, a new animation has been added of people storming away after they hit the floor. Originally, you just got a picture of an angle near the top of the screen to indicate they had died, but I guess Nintendo wanted it to be more family friendly for this rerelease.

Octopus (original review)
In this game, Mario and Peach have sailed out in search of treasure (replacing the generic divers of the original.) You basically have to move around under the water to collect as much treasure as possible and bring it back up to the ship, while avoiding the dangerous reach of the octopus’s tentacles. It’s not too much different to the original, but it provides you with one disadvantage and one perk. The disadvantage is that the more treasure Mario takes, the slower he becomes, but the perk is that he can throw the treasure at the octopus to temporarily stun it. Of the four Game & Watch titles remade in this collection, this one is probably my least favourite, but I still have fun with it.

Oil Panic (original review)
Oil Panic has always seemed a little strange to me. I never really understood the scenario which was taking place and I don’t really understand it in the remake either. Mario is inside one of Bowser’s castles and there are a few fires on the ground. Oil drips through the ceiling and Mario needs to catch it in a bucket (he has one in each hand) to stop it hitting the floor. Bowser is standing on the roof and I don’t know he’s causing the oil to drip through the ceiling or what, but he is holding a bucket so I think he is supposed to be. Once the buckets are full, Mario needs to dispose of the oil and he does this by tossing it out of the window for Yoshi to eat. Yes, apparently Yoshi eats oil. He must feel kind of weird about it, since he is a dinosaur. But if Yoshi’s not there, you’ll toss the oil onto either Luigi or Donkey Kong Jr. who are just sitting around and minding their own business outside. This will lose you a life, just like if the oil touches the floor. Having two buckets (rather than one) makes the game much more enjoyable and easier. As does the ability to turn around and catch things in different buckets. Two huge improvements over the original.

Overall, this a game I enjoy very much and it would surely make a pleasant addition to the collection of any Nintendo fan. These games are all highly addictive and beating your old high scores can be very satisfying. There is a small gallery of Game & Watches to fill and you get rewarded with them for getting certain high scores in the game, which is a further incentive to replay, if one were needed.

These remakes all improve over the original in small or big ways, but even if you’d rather play the originals first, that option is available to you, since they are all included. As it can be downloaded so cheaply these days, it’s well worth a try.

Rating: 8.3/10

Buy it here.

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

Manhole is one of the earlier Game & Watch games and it’s not one of the ones which really gets acknowledged very often in more recent Nintendo games. You might think that this one’s a bit less good, since it doesn’t get referenced all that often and, sadly, you’re probably right. It’s not a particular favourite of mine.

In this game, there are two paths with two manholes in them. People walk along one path in one direction and the other path in the other direction. You play as a generic person (possibly Mr. Game & Watch) and you have a manhole cover – you move between the four different manholes and have to ensure that nobody falls into them. Left to their own devices, the people walking along the paths will walk right into the manholes. With so many people walking along both paths, you have to move quickly between the four holes, as you can only cover one hole at a time. You have three lives and you lose a life every time somebody falls in.

I found this to be a fair bit more harder than the average Game & Watch and it took me quite a while to master. The problem is, that it also feels very slow when you first start playing. There aren’t many people walking by and they don’t walk quickly at all. But then after spending a while playing at the slow and boring speed, it suddenly gets pretty hard. It’s not great.

Rating: 2.9/10

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

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Fire is one of the earlier Game & Watches and it is also one of the most iconic and the most fun. Quite significantly, the generic people in this game are what would be used as the basis for the character Mr. Game & Watch.

Like all Game & Watches, this is quite a simple game, but it’s pretty fun. In it, a block of flats are on fire and people are jumping out of the windows to escape the flames. You play as a pair of firemen who are holding a trampoline in order to break the falls of the jumpers. When somebody lands on the trampoline, they are launched back into the air and you have to get ready to catch them again. After the third bounce on the trampoline they land in an ambulance. At first only a small number of people jump out and they don’t go to fast, but over time the number and the speed goes up. Every time you let somebody hit the ground you lose a life and after this happens three times it’s game over.

It’s fun to play over and over again to see how high a score you can achieve. When you’re really into it and bouncing loads of people into the ambulance it feels really good. Like all Game & Watches, there’s also a hard mode where people jump from different levels of the building and don’t jump as soon as they appear. It’s fun to come back to quite often.

Overall, it’s a nice bit of Nintendo history and fun too. Worth a look. Rating: 7.3/10

(Here’s another blog post I wrote titled “Fire.”)

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

Rhythm Paradise for the Nintendo DS is actually the second game in the Rhythm Paradise series, though it was the first to be released outside of Japan. I was lucky enough to play the first game before I played this one and as that was a game I enjoyed very much, I was very excited for the sequel.

Sadly, I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed. The game is made up of various different tasks which are completed being doing things in tune to the music that’s playing. For example, you put robots together in a factory or harvest vegetables as a farmer. In the previous games, you had to press buttons in tune with the music, but this time you have to do different things on the touch screen. Perhaps it’s just a failing on my part, but this felt so much more inaccurate when compared to it’s Game Boy Advance prequel. So often I would tap the screen and it would think I was drawing a line, which then counted as me missing a beat. It was fine most of the time, but there were certain games where it came up a lot and I found it very frustrating.

But I don’t want to imply that this was a bad game. I enjoyed certain parts of it quite a lot and it left me with an overall positive impression. Like I mentioned above, Rhythm Paradise is made up of several smaller games/tasks and lacks an overall storyline. The games which I enjoyed the most were as follows: “Love Lab” which has you shaking up love potions in a science lab, “Shoot-‘Em-Up” which has you shooting down alien spaceships and “Karate Man” which returns from the previous game and has you punching items as they fly past you. That’s just three, but there were really quite a few that I enjoyed. It also includes the game “Glee Club” which wasn’t one of my favourites, but which introduced the Chorus Kids, who have been popular among fans. They’re basically a group of screaming children who you have to tap in time to make music from their screams.

On the whole, it’s a game which can be quite addicting and one which has a lot of humour. If you’re a perfectionist, you’ll enjoy replaying the games until you get a perfect ranking on them. Each time you get a good score on a game, you unlock another game and then you’ll be given remixes which put several of the games together. The music throughout the game is also fantastic and the fact that it sounds so good means that replaying harder levels never feels like much of a chore. It’s just a shame that it is occasionally let down by the touch controls.

Rating: 8.2/10

Buy it here.

Hyrule Warriors is a very interesting game in that it takes the characters and the setting of The Legend of Zelda series and combines it with the gameplay of Koei Tecmo’s Dynasty Warriors series. It’s interesting to see Nintendo handing one of their most popular franchises over to a third party developer like this and I hope that this kind of experimentation becomes more common in future.

So what is the gameplay of the Dynasty Warriors games? Well, you essentially have to slash your way through huge groups of soldiers on a large, open 3D map, capture certain bases and defeat especially strong leaders in the enemy army. Meanwhile, you have your own bases to keep safe and you have to protect the leaders in your own army too. It’s fairly simple and you’d think it might get repetitive, but with a selection of popular characters and locations from throughout the history of the series, it never happens. Since every character can level up and you use resources gained through battle in order to buy items and forge weapons to make you more powerful, it is honestly quite addictive and very satisfying to play.

The storyline officially does not take place within any part of the official Zelda timeline, which I find quite disappointing, but it is a story which will make fans very happy. It starts with Link has an average soldier in the Hyrulean army, when Hyrule Castle is attacked. Link joins Zelda and Impa in helping to defend the castle and before long they go off on a quest to find out who is attacking them and how to stop them. I wouldn’t like to spoil any details, but it involves a new villain, a new ally, lots of returning characters and even time travel. Excitingly, you’ll find yourself revisiting locations from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

The story isn’t all that long, but once you’ve completed it you can play through any of the levels again on extra difficulties to get more resources and you can try older levels with characters you’ve unlocked since your first play. There are also Golden Skulltulas which are a kind of spider which appear at certain times on certain maps and will earn you pieces of illustrations if you defeat them (fans will recognise them from previous games.) There’s also ‘Adventure Mode’ which gives you a different challenge for each section of the map from The Legend of Zelda for the NES – these challenges can gain you new weapons and even characters for completing them. I certainly played for a long time after finishing the story.

For me,  one of the biggest appeals was the cast of characters. You have Link, of course, who everybody loves, but then you also have Zelda (who fights with a rapier), a new (very interesting and likeable) magical character called Lana, Darunia (who uses the Megaton Hammer), Agitha (who comically uses her umbrella) and lots of other popular characters too. What’s quite refreshing about this selection of characters is that there are more females than males, which is quite uncommon for games like this. Or games in general.

You can pay to access additional characters too, who are also very appealing. Young Link, Twili Midna and Tingle can all be downloaded and I have to say that I was absolutely delighted by the inclusion of Tingle. You can also download extra costumes for your characters, plus new story chapters and challenges too. There is a lot of content in Hyrule Warriors. Additionally, you can also download the extra content added to the 3DS release Hyrule Warriors Legends, but I will talk about this in a separate review.

This is a very fun and addictive game and I would recommend it to anybody. While I do believe that the appeal of Hyrule Warriors is quite broad, it’s going to be especially appealing to huge Zelda fans as it was clearly made with them in mind and is full of lovely little connections and references. When you also factor in that this game has a fantastic soundtrack and looks very nice too, you’ll realise that this is definitely worth a try. Even if you’ve never played Zelda or Dynasty Warriors before, it could be the game to get you into either franchise. Very fun all round.

Rating: 9.4/10

Buy it here.

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Sonic Runners was a free to play Sonic game for smart devices. What makes this especially interesting is that it was developed by Sonic Team, who are the people who create all of the big new Sonic games, meaning that this app was essentially the next big Sonic game at the time. It just goes to show how large a part of the gaming world phones have become.

Sonic Runners was beautiful in its simplicity. You played as Sonic or one of his friends and they ran forward constantly. If you tapped them, they’d jump and if you double tapped them they’d double jump or do something else – each character was slightly different. The levels went on forever and you just had to see how far you could go and to collect as many rings and gems along the way as possible. It handled absolutely perfectly and it did a really good job of conveying the speed that Sonic games all try to reflect.

When I played, I was very addicted to it and I played every day. The more rings you collected, the more characters you could unlock. You had all the obvious ones like Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy and you also had pleasantly unexpected additions, like Big, Mephiles, Tikal and even Sticks from the Sonic Boom series. They were kind of hard to unlock (as they used up a lot of rings) but it was a good incentive to keep playing. Big was my favourite to play as. You could also collect these eggs which would hatch and give you buddies, which could be almost anything from the history of Sonic, from Chao to a magical floating Sonic the Hedgehog cartridge. The buddies would float along next to your player character and provided all kind of references to the past and were fun to collect – they also gave you handy bonuses while playing.

There was a story to progress through too, but it was really boring and always seemed to be about animals getting scared by Eggman robots. I didn’t play for the story, I played for the fun. Still, I appreciate that it was included and there are probably some people out there who enjoyed it.

You may wonder why I keep using past tense to refer to the game. Well, the sad reason for this is that it was all hosted online via special servers which Sega set up. Earlier this year, they took the servers down. Now there’s no official way to play this game. I was really upset about it because I enjoyed playing very much and I wish they had found a way to make it playable offline. This is really frustrating and a clear example of one of the problems with modern gaming. It sadly lowers my appreciation of the game as a whole, but it does bring up an interesting philosophical question on the value of art. Does the fact that it cannot be preserved mean that it was any less good? I suppose it’s a little like the stories told by ancient storytellers. Lost forever to the ages, but hear by a lucky few contemporaries.

Rating: 8.7/10

Mario Golf wasn’t the first game to feature the Super Mario cast playing a sport and it wasn’t even the first game to have them playing golf. What it was, was the first console game to make a big deal of having these characters playing a sport and it was the game which set the mold for all of the Mario sports games which came afterward.

The game has no story, it’s just Mario and his friends taking time out to play some golf. There’s even a delightful cutscene of Mario, Luigi, Peach and everyone having a bit of fun on the golf course. It gives us nice little moments of character interaction and development which you don’t get often enough from this series, so I appreciate it.

In terms of gameplay, it’s all a matter of adjusting the angle and power of your shot and tapping ‘A’ at the right time. There are several different courses to play and they all have random weather conditions. You can enter a tournament in order to win cups or you can go head to head with characters in order to make them playable. There are also other modes, such as miniature golf and one where you have to hit the ball through golden rings. In particular, I probably had the most fun with the game’s multiplayer mode, where you just play golf against other people to see who can clear a course in the smallest number of shots. No matter what game mode you’re playing though, this is a game that requires quite a degree of precision and skill. The later challenges in the game are extremely difficult.

The game’s a bit weird in terms of who is playable. In multiplayer mode, you start with several characters, including Mario, Luigi, Peach, Wario and Yoshi. But in single player mode, the only familiar faces you can play as are Baby Mario and Peach. This is the first time Baby Mario was playable alongside his adult counterpart and I like this little connection to Yoshi’s Island, but it seems bizarre that regular, adult Mario has to be unlocked in this game’s single player campaign. Characters like Donkey Kong and Bowser are also unlockable (which isn’t really a spoiler, considering the fact that they are on the title screen) but you have to do an awful lot of work to get them.

In both single and multiplayer mode, you also have a selection of generic human characters. This is a bit weird, but I like it. I don’t know how to describe them other than as “normal people” because they really aren’t weird or quirky like the people you usually get in Super Mario games. One or two of these I found genuinely boring, but on the other hand there was one named Harry and one named Sonny who I became enormously fond of. They’re really charming and I would be delighted if they one day made a return in another game. It’s also worth mentioning that you can connect to the Game Boy Colour Mario Golf in order to play as your human characters from that game (a feature which is sadly absent in the Wii U version.)

Overall, it’s a decent game which I had a fun time playing. One potential downside is that the game’s golf courses are often quite generic. You get some more outlandish ones later on, but most of them are the kind of places you could find in real life and not crazy Mushroom Kingdom locations. It’s a nice “comfortable” game really, and other than an odd character roster, is exactly what you would expect.

Rating: 8/10

Buy it here.