Update: please remember to vote, you have until midnight (UK time) Sunday to cast your vote.
Can you seriously believe it’s been a year since the 2017 Game of the Year awards? That’s right – it’s time for everyone to come together yet again and decide on their favourite games of 2018.
This year we’ll be doing things a little differently; instead of providing you with a limited shortlist we’ve opened things up so you can vote for any game in our database, which should include everything released in 2018. Remember, only games that were released in the UK or US first in 2018 are eligible. If you can’t find the game you want to vote for, please contact us so we can investigate.
Rules: You must be logged in to vote. You can only vote once per category but can vote for up to three games. Your first choice will receive 3 points, second choice 2 points and third choice 1 point. Votes will then be tallied and revealed on the 31st Dec. Voting will close at midnight, Sunday 30th Dec 2018.
Switch Retail Game Of The Year – 2018
Switch eShop Game Of The Year – 2018
3DS Game Of The Year – 2018
eShop Developer Of The Year – 2018
Please search for your favourite developer(s) by searching by the game title they released this year. Note this only includes non-retail games released on 3DS or Switch.
Art Style Game Of The Year – 2018
Multiplayer Game Of The Year – 2018
Overall Game Of The Year – 2018
If you have any issues voting for the game you want, simply contact us so we can investigate. Otherwise, get voting and let us know in the comments below your predictions on the results.
Japanese chart figures are now in for 17th December – 23rd December and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on the Switch continues to reign supreme.
The new entry in the long-running Smash series maintained its top spot, with an additional 452,617 retail sales – pushing it beyond the two million sales mark domestically and fending off Dragon Quest Builders 2 in the process, which just arrived on the Switch and PlayStation 4. In the previous week, Ultimate sold 406,617 copies.
During this busy time of year, Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee! shifted 144,770 copies and Super Mario Party did even better with 155,060 sales. Lastly, Katamari Damacy Reroll – new to the charts – rolled up 11,665 sales. There were many other notable Switch titles also in the charts this week. Here are the top 20 (first numbers are this week’s sales, followed by total sales in brackets):
[NSW] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Nintendo, 12/07/18) – 452,617 (2,079,769)
[NSW] Super Mario Party (Nintendo, 10/05/18) – 155,060 (742,355)
On the hardware front, Switch sales were slightly down from the previous week but managed to maintain momentum. PlayStation 4 sales also dropped, while the New 2DS LL, New 3DS LL and 2DS all had improved sales during this period. Here are this week’s figures, with last week’s in brackets:
Poor Alex, nobody gifted him a present this Christmas. Taking matters into his owns hands, our lovely video producer decided to order his own Switch-related gift online and even went to the trouble of wrapping it himself.
What is it, you ask? You should watch the above video to find out. Else, if you really can’t spare five minutes, we’ll be nice enough to tell you it’s a third-party Hycarus controller designed for the Nintendo Switch. For unknown reasons, it closely resembles the PlayStation DualShock 4 gamepad. We don’t want to spoil the video for you, but it’s really bad. This controller comes with poor button alignment, cheap plastic casing and RGB lights that make it look like a Christmas tree. Probably the best thing about it is the USB cable.
Alex has used a lot of control pads over the years and assures us this one is awful. It’s also the worst one he’s used with his Nintendo Switch – so yeah, avoid this at all costs. We hope no one here scored one of these in their stockings this Christmas.
Have you tried out this controller? Have you used any other third-party Switch controllers? Tell us below.
The new spirit event “Oh Yeah! Mario Time!” for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate begins on 28th December and will run until 1st January. During this period, three Super Mario Party spirits will appear on the spirit board.
The golden dash mushroom – featured in Mario Party, but also known from other titles such as Mario Kart – is a special ace spirit which can be obtained by defeating a powerful Mii Brawler. Apparently, none of the spirits will be available outside of this event. Below is the full description:
A huge collection of characters from the world of Mario are coming to your Spirit Board! Defeat them in battle to earn more gold than usual!
In this event, three spirits will appear for a limited time only: Golden Dash Mushroom, River Survival and Dice Block. They won’t be available outside of this event, so don’t miss out!
Have you been playing the spirit mode in Smash Bros. Ultimate? Will you be taking on the Mii Brawler to unlock the golden mushroom spirit? Let us know in the comments.
Since first appearing in the Super Mario Galaxy games on the Wii, Luma has been featured in many other Mario games. While the star-like creature is probably best known in recent times for fighting alongside Princess Rosalina in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, in the past Luma, has appeared as an unlockable character in the likes of Mario Tennis Open on the 3DS.
Nintendo’s new trailer for Mario Tennis Aces has now revealed Luma will make a return to the court at the start of January. All you’ll have to do is play the in-game tournament between the 1st and 31st day of the month to unlock this player, else you’ll be required to hold out until Feburary. In the brief clip above you can see the technical skills of this character. Luma was previously confirmed for Mario Tennis Aces in November alongside Pauline and Boom Boom.
Are you still working on your game in Mario Tennis Aces? Tell us below.
My aunt had fallen in love with an American chap and moved to the States to marry him and live there. And so, my family – including a 4-year-old me – flew out from Scotland to Parma, Ohio to visit them during the summer. That was when I saw it. The grey box that was about to shape my entire life.
Being four years of age, I don’t really remember a lot about that trip. I remember the shop across the road had a giant inflatable snowman on the roof. I remember seeing a McDonalds TV advert with Ronald McDonald lying on a moon. I remember my aunt teaching me to eat soup from the edge of the bowl because it was less hot. And I remember the Nintendo Entertainment System.
When I first saw Super Mario Bros., my tiny brain exploded. Not literally, of course; that would’ve been hard to recover from. But I’d never seen anything like it in my 50-odd months on the planet, and I was smitten from that very first second. The rest of the trip is a blur, but I’m reliably informed that I played a lot more Mario than was probably healthy for a young child.
When we got back home to Scotland, Mario was all I could think about. My parents still have a few children’s books from when I was a kid, its sentences covered in pen lines. I used to pretend my pen was Mario and the words were platforms. Tall letters like ‘t’, ‘h’ and ‘l’ were obstacles to jump over, hanging ones like ‘j’ and ‘g’ were pipes that let the pen drop down and travel underneath the words. The NES didn’t exist in the UK yet, so this was the best I had.
As luck would have it, Mattel released the console in Britain later that year, and so on Christmas Day 1987, I got my very own Nintendo Entertainment System, with Super Mario Bros and Mach Rider. Little did I know that 31 years later I would be writing about that very moment on a Nintendo website. I mean, I literally had no idea, because websites weren’t even a thing yet.
Christmas 1989 gave me Super Mario Bros. 2. Thanks, Santa!
Christmas has always been synonymous with video games for me, as I’m sure was the case with many of you. Christmas 1989 was Super Mario Bros. 2, for example. 1991 was my Mega Drive with Sonic The Hedgehog. 1993 was Super Mario All-Stars. 1997 was GoldenEye, while 1998 was Ocarina Of Time. Every single time, the excitement that came with opening that ‘big’ present was unlike anything else.
These days, publishers and gamers alike are increasingly keen to make sure the latest games are bought on day one. Sometimes you’re even able to download games in advance, so you can pump them into your eyes the very moment the clock’s second hand passes midnight. If you don’t get it at launch, you can hop on YouTube or Twitch and watch someone else playing it. But back then you had to wait until Christmas, and patience was a virtue: nothing beat that feeling of unwrapping that game you’d been waiting weeks, even months for, followed by that final little period of impatience as you realised you had to do the rest of the Christmas routine before you finally got to play it.
Had my parents not given me that NES for Christmas, I may have eventually forgotten about Mario and moved on with my life. I might have ended up being a teacher, which my mum thought I might have ended up doing. I might have become a footballer, because I was (and still am) a big Celtic supporter. Given the small town I lived in near Glasgow, I may very well have turned to petty crime. Instead, when I unwrapped that parcel and saw that Super Mario Bros. box, with a pixelated Mario staring back at me – well, staring off to the side a bit – the butterfly effect kicked in and my destiny whirred around to face a new direction. Now, bear with me here, I’m about to go off on a bit of a self-serving tangent, but there’s a point to it.
That NES started a passion for video games that remains strong more than three decades later. That NES nurtured my love of reading, as my dad constantly bought me all the games magazines of the time – Mean Machines, CVG, Nintendo Magazine System, Total! and the rest – and I devoured them all from cover to cover. That NES made me want to write for video games magazines one day, and encouraged me to work hard in school and do well at English to try and make it happen.
During my career, I’ve been able to interview some genuine stars. Oh, and Mel B from the Spice Girls.
That NES led me to university, where I got my honours degree in Journalism. It was four years of learning how to write for newspapers, even though deep down I knew I was never interested in that. While everyone else there wanted to write for The Guardian, I was thinking GamesMaster. And finally, in 2006, that NES made me decide to leave all my friends and family behind in Scotland and move to London, so I could start my career as a Staff Writer at the Official Nintendo Magazine: the role I’d spent my entire life preparing for.
In London, I met my future wife, we fell in love and we got married. My aunt came over from America for the wedding and gave me the ultimate wedding gift: her NES, the one that started me on this path in the first place. As my career progressed I became the Games Editor at ONM, Online Editor at Nintendo Gamer then Games Editor at CVG. I was then made redundant (blame Future Publishing, not me), we moved back to Scotland and I started my own site, Tired Old Hack. I started doing freelance work, writing for the likes of Official Xbox Magazine, Official PlayStation Magazine, GamesTM, Retro Gamer and, yes, GamesMaster.
I’ve now got my first book – the enormous 180,000-word NES Encyclopedia – coming out in March, and my wife and I have a gorgeous six-month-old daughter we’re about to spend our first Christmas with. Literally, none of this would have happened if, on Christmas Day 1987, I’d opened that box and there was a pair of football boots in it instead. All over the world, children will be getting their first video game systems this Christmas; many of these will be Switches (presumably with Pokémon: Let’s Go!). Maybe in 30 years’ time, those kids will be writing about how this Christmas shaped their lives, too.
On a personal note: this year, as you’ve hopefully noticed, I’ve started writing stuff for Nintendo Life. Let’s be blunt: when I was at ONM and Nintendo Gamer, it goes without saying that Nintendo Life was a rival (I’m sure the editorial staff here would say the same thing). But life’s too short for all that fussing and feuding, and I’ve been made to feel hugely welcome by Damien and the rest of the team here. You can expect to see plenty more of me around here next year, mostly in terms of reviews. I look forward to you all telling me I’m a fanboy when I score games highly, and saying I didn’t “get it” and the game was probably too hard for me when I score them low. Although some of you know me from my ONM days, many of you don’t, and I look forward to getting to know as many of you as possible over the coming months (usually by arguing with you in the comments under my reviews).
However you plan to celebrate this holiday season, from my own family to you lot – my new Nintendo Life family – I hope you have a fantastic one filled with love, warmth and plenty of gaming. As for me, I’m going to be enjoying Christmas at home with my wife, my gorgeous daughter and her new best friend. Nintendo has shaped my entire life to this point: here’s hoping it fills hers with happiness too.
Horror, when done right, can be a truly wonderful thing to behold – especially in the interactive realm of video games. Find the right mechanics, marry them to a setup that sells its dark heart, and find a balance that doesn’t undersell or dilute its scares and building sense of dread. Uncanny Valley comes close in so many ways to nailing this formula, but its nightmarish potential is often undone by some odd design decisions.
Things start off well. Too well, perhaps. You’re Tom, a man looking to put a little distance between himself and his past. With the added need to gather some much-needed cash, Tom decides to kill two pixel art birds with one pixel art stone by taking a security job looking after the site of a robotics firm in the middle of nowhere. But Tom is haunted by some rather eldritch dreams, where he explores a seemingly empty city while being shadowed by creatures of pure shadow.
These dreams help break up Cowardly Creations’ two-to-three hour-long survival horror, and for the first half of the game, it comes together with a real sense of palpable fear. As a night watchman, you’ll explore the 8-bit-style floors of Melior, and with only a few condensed in-game hours to do so, it soon becomes clear there’s more to this job than meets the eye. Why did all the employees suddenly clear out? What lies beneath the facility in the sublevels? And how does it tie into your increasingly unhinged nightmares?
Uncanny Valley clearly wants to rekindle the purity of an old school survival horror, mixing in the occasional puzzle and moment of action. You can see the DNA of Clock Tower and the original Resident Evil here, but it never lets either of these genres dilute the simple pleasure of exploring the silent halls of a facility as something terrible slowly unfurls itself. However, while the game is careful to avoid over-egging its own pudding, it still manages to undo much of its own hard work as a result.
The first half of the game keeps you on your toes by limiting the amount of time you can explore your new workplace while on your rounds – and you’ll even pass out from exhaustion if you snoop for too long without returning to bed. But then, for seemingly no reason, Uncanny Valley drops the time restraints and just lets you explore untethered as it rushes to reveal the true nature of its story. That shift in parameters would have been a much bigger issue had this been a much longer game, but it’s an odd choice nonetheless.
That compact length does serve a purpose, though. Each decision you make in the game – from which floors you explore first to how long you engage in conversations with the handful of NPCs you encounter – all coalesce to lead you down various (and almost always grisly) narrative paths. Non-linear stories can often lead to some interesting and systemic moments, but Uncanny Valley’s sense of freedom (especially later on when you’re not limited by time) too often leads you to rapidly advance the plot, with large chunks of story left unresolved.
That sense of consequence does bring a thrilling sense of reality to an otherwise fantastical premise. As you push further and further into Melior’s secrets, there’s a good chance you’ll end up injuring yourself. These maladies will affect how fast you can move, and how mobile you can ultimately be. Hurt yourself too much and you’ll either die or find yourself unable to guide Tom to the next objective. It’s in these moments you’ll appreciate the relatively short run time of each playthrough.
The problem is it isn’t very hard to work out the mystery behind Uncanny Valley’s horror – with so many cassette tapes to collect and PC terminals to read, even the most lackadaisical of investigators can piece together what’s to come. When paired with the non-linear approach to connecting plot points, you’re left with a game that squanders much of the dread it tries so hard to build.
Conclusion
Uncanny Valley’s desire to hark back to the simpler days of survival horror is commendable, especially in those early moments where you’re flitting between abstract nightmares and a security job that feels increasingly isolated. However, the sheer openness of its non-linear plot means it’s all too easy to jump large sections of the story as you stumble on one of the game’s secrets too early on. Still, with a strict consequence-based system that rewards and punishes you in equal measure, Uncanny Valley has a lot of potential. It’s just a shame it doesn’t fully live up to it.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a fantastic game – we said so, so it must be true – but that doesn’t mean that it comes without its faults. When we say “faults”, though, we actually mean glitches, and some of these turn out to be rather hilarious indeed.
YouTube channel A+Start has shared a new video which demonstrates a good handful of glitches that can be performed within the game. You can do all of these yourself at home should you have the patience, perhaps as little party tricks to show off in front of your friends over the holidays.
There are eight glitches presented in total, starting with some minor oddities which alter characters’ appearances in funny ways, and finishing with Isabelle’s infinite Assist Trophy glitch (which can rather ironicallyspawn infinite Waluigis) and the game-crashing glitch which we’ve reported on previously. If you’re interested, make sure to check out the video below.
Have you stumbled across any glitches in the game yourself? Will you be trying to perform some of these over the holidays? Let us know how you’ve been getting on with the game in the comments.
With the holiday season well and truly upon us, game developers big and small have been sharing festive messages with their peers in the gaming community. We’ve gathered a handful of these for you to check out below, hopefully getting you into the festive spirit should you need a little boost, and also reminding us of what a brilliant year of gaming 2018 provided.
We’ll kick things off with a message from Nintendo, one of the main reasons why many of us are reading this very website right now.
From Konami:
From CIRCLE/Flyhigh Works:
From PM Studios:
From XSEED:
From Natsume:
And finally, another holiday message from Nintendo.
Anthony started Nintendo Life way back in late 2005 and has remained at the helm ever since. He loves Nintendo but sometimes gets confused and starts telling everyone that F-Zero X is the best F-Zero game. We’ve tried getting him help, but alas…
