Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows (2015, Wii U/PS4) - Nerds in Love

When Yacht Club Games announced its Kickstarter for Shovel Knight, three of the stretch goals involved playable boss characters who would later be added to the game as free updates. Would these new characters get entirely new campaigns, or just a couple of challenge rooms? Would they have their own stories, or would they fall victim to the all too common "new character, same story, who cares" method seen even in quality games like Bayonetta and Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition?

Thankfully, Yacht Club went the extra mile and, though it reuses much of the original game's stages, the new Plague of Shadows expansion is practically a new, complete game of its own, with its own story, collectibles, achievements, and game play. They really went above and beyond my expectations for a free update, and the new campaign is as good, and at times better than, the original Shovel Knight.

Let's Make a Mario!

Super Mario Maker's finally out, and it's wonderful. Sure, a lot of fan made stages are "flag pole immediately next to the start" junk or stuff that's absolutely ridiculously hard, but there's lots of good stuff out there, and there's plenty of Nintendo-made courses to play! If you're makin' Marios, how about sharing some of your stages? Unfortunately you need to use kind of a clunky code system instead of being able to search by user name, tags, or stage name or anything like that. Making progress, Nintendo, but you're still kind of weird about this whole internet thing. 

Here are my first stages. I haven't unlocked most of the stage maker elements yet, so they're pretty minimalist! If you've got a Wii U, give them a shot and post your own stage IDs. Let's stomp on everything! 

Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (Wii U, 2015) - The Goodness of Gluttony

Nintendo's puffy marshmallow hero Kirby alternates between two types of games: Traditional platformers, like the Kirby's Dreamland series, Kirby's Adventure, and Return to Dreamland, and experimental spinoffs like Kirby's Dream Course, Kirby Mass Attack, and one of my personal favorites, Kirby's Canvas Curse. Canvas Curse, released on the DS in 2005, is one of the many Kirby spinoffs that turn the hero into a rolling ball. In this one, players guide his course using the touchscreen. Ten years later (an amount of time that feels staggering now; Canvas Curse doesn't feel like it was that long ago), Nintendo has released a sequel on the Wii U that offers more of the same, but when that content's this good there's nothing wrong with that.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (2014, Wii U) - The Trouble with Turnips

 
In 2013's spectacular Super Mario 3D World, Nintendo introduced a series of short puzzle levels starring Captain Toad, a mushroom-man who made his debut in Super Mario Galaxy in 2007. While the main game focused on platforming and bouncing off of enemies, the Captain Toad stages featured a hero without any means to fight back and with a backpack so heavy he couldn't even jump. In each of these levels, players would collect a series of stars while navigating small, cubic stages. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker takes the concept behind these mini-stages and expands them into a bigger, prettier adventure with a few little frustrations.

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (2014, Wii U) - High Dededefiniton Fighting

With the fourth incarnation of their Super Smash Bros. party fighting series, Nintendo decided to release both a console and handheld version. The 3DS version, released October 3rd, is a decent but barren game with pretty terrible online play and, depending on your comfort with the 3DS itself, awkward controls. The Wii U version, released November 21st, takes everything good about the 3DS game and makes it better. Graphics, sound, and control options are obviously improved, but there's also far more content for both single and multiplayer fights and an online system that, while still lacking, is much more stable. This is the definitive version of the game.

Click here for more Smash Bros. U screen shots.

Bayonetta 2 (2014, Wii U) - Queen of Brawlers Retakes her Throne

When Hideki Kamiya's Devil May Cry launched on the PS2 in 2001, it brought with it new blood that the third person brawler genre sorely needed. Looking back on it today, the original Devil May Cry is kind of rough, but there's no debating its impact, as it ushered in a new era of demanding, combo-heavy action that often times hits players with a brick wall instead of a smooth difficulty curve. The Devil May Cry series had its highs and horrible lows, but remained the best of its genre until Platinum Games' Bayonetta hit the PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2010, with Kamiya taking the director's seat once again.

Shovel Knight (2014, Wii U) - Vintage Jumping with Pun Frogs and Apple Whales

Three years ago, Sean Velasco of WayForward Technologies founded Yacht Club Games, a new gaming start up that earned a great deal of attention through a massively successful Kickstarter campaign for its first title, Shovel Knight. Released June 2014, Shovel Knight is a retro 8-bit style platformer that captures the spirit of classic gaming with some modern quality of life improvements, and does so with plenty of personality.

NES Remix 2 (2014, Wii U) - Wart and Dedede, Together at Last

NES Remix, Nintendo and indieszero's bite-sized tribute to classic NES games, was a surprise Wii U release that represented exactly the kind of thing Nintendo should be doing with the system's e-shop: Using its strong (and some not so strong) old properties in new, small scale projects for a low price but with plenty of content. The game is a hybrid of the microgames style play of the Wario Ware series and the hyper-retro revival style of titles like Pac-Man Championship Edition, Galaga Legions, and Frogger Hyper Edition. Four months later, Nintendo released a sequel that includes an overall much more enjoyable set of games.

Super Mario 3D World (2013, Wii U) - Catnip for Nintendo Fans

Super Mario 3D Land, released on the 3DS in 2011, offered an interesting new style of gameplay: It took the three dimensional exploration found in Mario games such as Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy and combined it with the more linear stage progression of the 2D Mario titles. The result is a game that feels simpler than Galaxy, but far more open than the increasingly inappropriately named New Super Mario Bros series. I prefer the straightforward, reach-the-end-of-the-stage objective found in the 2D titles, but the New Super Mario Bros games were feeling rather stale to me. By incorporating elements from the 3D titles, 3D Land offered a fresh new take and grew to become my favorite of the 3D Mario titles. Two years later, Nintendo would release a sequel on the Wii U that effectively makes 3D Land feel like a proof of concept project for the great things to come.

Mario Kart 8 (2014, Wii U) - Low Gravity, High Class Racing

A good way to feel old: Looking at Mario Kart, Nintendo's mascot-based go kart racing series, and realizing I've been hyped for each new release for over 20 years. I'm probably wrong, but it may be the only long running series in gaming history where I've played every single installment, and for the most part I've greatly enjoyed each one (my least favorite, possibly controversially, is Mario Kart 64, which is still a decent game.) It's not an innovation-rich series, but that doesn't matter when every game has been so good, and Mario Kart 8 is one of the best.

NES Remix (2013, Wii U) - Nintendo's Best and Worst, Alive Again

 

In 2003, Nintendo launched the first game in the WarioWare series on the Game Boy Advance. This series, which would see six sequels across consoles and handheld systems, is a collection of "micro games" with extremely simple controls that each last a matter of seconds, with the appeal being the random, frantic nature of anticipating what to do next. Ten years later, NES Remix launched as a sort of spiritual successor. This title takes 16 classic NES games and trims them down to bite sized bits, with each round lasting anywhere from five seconds to a couple of minutes.

Dr. Luigi (2014, Wii U) - Neurotic Doctor Battles Space Flu

From early 2013 to early 2014, Nintendo spent a good amount of time and money on The Year of Luigi, a marketing promotion focused on Mario's greener, goofier brother. From games focused on him to hiding his NES sprite in various places to causing trouble on a train in Chicago, Nintendo's plan was a weird one that was often funny but of questionable value to the company, since 2013 ended up being a year of financial losses. Closing out the Year was Dr. Luigi, a Dr. Mario sequel that took a man who can barely walk safely and stuck him in a hospital to fend off alien viruses.

Brief Words of Mouth - New WiiU Owner Thoughts: One Day Later

The Wii U had an unofficial price drop when bought directly through Nintendo ($200 for the Deluxe unit versus $300 in stores) so with Mario Kart out now and Smash out later this year, I figured I'd pick one up.

Some brief thoughts:

-Hardware and OS are pretty terrible. I couldn't log in to my Nintendo Network account until after I ran a system update, it just kept giving me an error message until then.

-Downloading and installing the system update and transferring save files/old games from my old Wii took a total of about four hours. The transfer process was not intuitive, but it had a great Pikmin animation.

-You have to switch to Wii Mode when you want to run or buy old games. The system should just be designed to switch for you when you select a game, but instead there's a whole second layer here.

-As far as I can tell, like the PS4 there's no way to organize games into folders, so the start screen gets very messy.

-The tablet looks really nice and it's fun to play on it while the TV's doing something else, but neither of the games I've spent time on (NES Remix and Dr. Luigi, still waiting for Kart to come in the mail) make it feel essential.

-I was hoping its effective range would be a little better so I could use the tablet in my bedroom, but it doesn't seem to work at all past 20-30 feet from the system.

-The eShop is pretty barren. Having to pay to upgrade your old Virtual Console games to use the new WiiU features (save states and being able to control using the tablet) is unfortunate, but not as unfortunate as the fact that there are less than 1/4 as many VC games available here as there are on the original Wii. NES, SNES, and Game Byo Advance are represented; Genesis, Master System, Turbografx, and arcade titles are totally absent this time around.

-Miiverse is great. It's basically Twitter plus MS-Paint with a little posting community for each game. It's great on the 3DS and great here, I love seeing all the hideous drawings people post.

-Hardware and OS issues aside: The two games I've played are very, very good, I still haven't tried Nintendoland, and I know I'll love Mario Kart 8. Nintendo's good at game software, but they still bumble their way through everything else.

-Dr. Luigi contains three play modes: A standard Dr. Mario game, a version of Virus Buster (a game first introduced in Brain Age on the DS), and a version of Dr. Mario that uses L-shaped capsules instead. This new mode makes the game a lot harder!

-NES Remix is a spiritual successor to Wario Ware, more so than the system's actual Wario Ware title. Players go through 2-60 second long mini missions in various NES games ranging from "defeat 15 enemies in Mario 1 under the time limit" or "play through stage 1 of Donkey Kong with a spotlight to guide your way and the rest of the stage darkened." Its interface is clunky, but it's a pretty wonderful game.

-As of E3 2014, there's finally enough interesting games coming out to make the system worthwhile, but it's still probably worth waiting until 2015. This system should not have launched when it did or at the price it did, but they're slowly moving in the right direction. I'm hoping they ever release a game that makes including the tablet seem like a good idea.