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.

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

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.

Kameo: Elements of Power is a high fantasy adventure game created by my favourite video game developer, Rare. They always manage to add a little bit of magic to any game they make, and this is no exception. Having said that, this game was originally due for release on the GameCube, then it got changed to the original Xbox and then finally changed to Xbox 360 and I think that this hectic development cycle could have had a negative effect on the game, but I’ll get into that later.

In this game you play as a young elf woman named Kameo who is exploring the world to find ten Elemental Warriors to help her to defeat an army of trolls lead by the troll king and (in a cruel twist of fate) her evil sister who are threatening the Enchanted Kingdom in which she lives. It probably sounds like a fairly basic fantasy story line, and it is, but you may wonder what those “Elemental Warriors” which I mentioned are. This is where the game becomes rather interesting. The Elemental Warriors are small creatures which Kameo can merge with in order to become a big and powerful creature herself. This means she can transform whenever she wants.

The Elemental Warriors help to keep the game interesting as they’re all quite fun to be and they can help you to do different things and to reach different areas. Personally, I spent a lot more time as Elementals than I did in Kameo’s default form and I imagine most players will do the same. I wouldn’t like to spoil them all (as part of the fun comes from finding out what you’re going to get next) but two of my favourites were Ash (a big red dragon) and Deep Blue (a weird ocean creature.) All of them are quite cool but still manage to maintain that quirky feeling that almost anything designed by Rare manages to give off.

The game has a big open 3D world for you to explore as you please. You need to go to certain places in certain orders, but exploring always helps you to find nice beneficial secrets. What makes exploring all the more appealing, is the fact that the world is very beautiful. There are enchanting forests to explore, ocean caves full of pirate’s loot and lots of other alluring locations too. I feel like the fact that the game was so beautiful helped to make it easier to overlook some of its faults, which I’ll go into now.

Between doing tasks on the over world, you’ll find yourself doing certain levels. These levels have you getting from point A to point B while fighting any enemies you come across in between. This is fine, but it doesn’t seem to me that the combat system is very polished. It can often be hard to hit enemies properly and it sometimes feels like you’re getting hit (or even killed) just because Kameo won’t do what you want her to. I would be having loads of fun doing something in the over world, only to roll my eyes as I realised I was going into a new level and would have more fighting to do. The fighting really is the only downside with the game, it’s just a shame that it comes up so often. This is what I meant when I said somethings might have suffered due to the constant changing of hardware.

Overall, I liked this game. It’s not bad by any means and even though the combat can be occasionally frustrating, it still ultimately works and so isn’t too bad. It could be improved, that’s for sure, but those improvements would be turning a good game into an absolutely fantastic game, not a bad game into a good game. Rare fans will love it especially as there are several little references to their other games scattered throughout (a downloadable skin can make the Pummleweed Elemental look like Mumbo Jumbo and you can get Joanna Dark’s outfit for Kameo.) It’s definitely worth a try.

Rating: 8/10

Buy it here.

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

The Nintendo Letter Box is a free to download feature for Nintendo 3DS consoles and while it isn’t very much of a “game” as such, it has enough charm that I would like to review it. For big Nintendo fans like me, there’s enough unique content to warrant giving it a look.

Nintendo Letter Box (or Swapnote, as it is also known) gives you a handy little way to send electronic letters to people you have on your 3DS friends’ list. You can draw pictures or you can write messages, but either way you use the stylus for it. It’s quite cute, really, because if somebody sends you a message, then their Mii delivers it to you when you open the game up and you get to watch them writing and/or drawing whatever was in their letter and you get to see it done in exactly the same way that they wrote it. Likewise, it’s your own Mii who will deliver the letters to your friends and you watch them sitting there happily as you write.

What’s also especially noteworthy about this game is that it introduced us to Nikki, who has gone on to become a minor Nintendo mascot. Nikki writes you a series of letters which provide a sort of tutorial. If you were lucky enough to play this between 2011 and 2013, you’d be treated to pleasant messages from Nikki every time there was a special occasion, like Christmas. Nikki is a very pleasant character and it’s easy to see why she was so popular.

If you’ve got a 3DS and you have other friends who also have a 3DS, you should make good use of the Nintendo Letter Box. I honestly only used it once or twice, but I have the letters saved and it makes me feel very nostalgic every time I launch it. If you have friends to use it with, you might really enjoy using it. If you don’t, there’s no real reason to ever use it, other than to see the introduction of Nikki.

Rating: 6/10 (though I have to admit that rating this seems rather arbitrary. I’m only really doing it for the sake of consistency.)

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