My Nintendo presents Nindie Game Gold Point Rewards: Summer 2018 Edition
Beat the heat this summer with some cool Nindie games!
As July heats up, My Nintendo users can redeem their Gold Points for some of the great indie games on Nintendo platforms.
Get it with Gold Points!
Runbow Pocket (New Nintendo 3DS) Developer: 13AM Studios – 110 Gold Points Runbow Pocket is a fast, frantic game where you can conquer over 145 levels in Adventure and The Bowhemoth, or go head to head in Run, Arena, and King of the Hill online. The world changes with each swipe of colour, so you’ll have to stay on your toes as platforms and obstacles disappear.
Use Parental Controls to restrict 3D mode for children 6 and under.
Noitu Love: Devolution (Nintendo 3DS) Developer: MP2 Games– 80 Gold Points ”Noitu Love: Devolution” stars Xoda Rap – the new Peacekeepers prodigy – who has to protect the city from the onslaught of the evil Darn horde, thought to have been vanquished a hundred years ago! But this time, they bring with them more than just their grins, as the city is bending and deforming into different times and places! What could be going on? Use Parental Controls to restrict 3D mode for children 6 and under.
Severed (Nintendo 3DS) Developer: Drinkbox– 110 Gold Points Take control of a one-armed warrior named Sasha, wielding a living sword on her journey through a nightmare world in search of her family. Swipe-based touch controls will let you solve puzzles, find secrets, and do battle with a host of disturbing monsters. As the journey goes on, you’ll unlock abilities, ascend an RPG-style upgrade tree, and tease apart the mysteries of the dark fantasy universe Sasha finds herself in.
Use Parental Controls to restrict 3D mode for children 6 and under.
Freedom Planet (Wii U) Developer: Galaxy Trail – 110 Gold Points Fight your way across the celestial world of Avalice where cats are green, motorcycles drive up walls and monster girls do most of the buttkicking! Freedom Planet is a cartoony, combat-based platform adventure that pits a spunky dragonoid and her friends against an alien attack force.
You can find even more #Nindie games at the here on Nintendo.com and earn more Gold Points when you buy games digitally.
There’s nothing quite like a peaceful bike ride through the local park. The sun is shining. The birds are singing in the trees. The buzzsaws are whirring. Wait? Buzzsaws?! Oh dear, you’ve just been decapitated and delimbed by a series of deadly blades bouncing down a hill. Maybe not so peaceful, then…
This is the world of Guts and Glory, a physics-based pain simulator that tasks you with guiding a hapless character (or duo) through a variety of seemingly peaceful settings that just happen to be laden with arrow-flinging turrets, saws and landmines. It’s crude, it’s gory and it’s totally throw-away in its ultraviolent slapstick, but that’s just part of its low-rent charm.
Much like Getting Over It (the PC-based hit that did the rounds on Twitch for a while, inducing rage with its physics-driven ‘man climbing a mountain while a sledgehammer’ premise), Guts and Glory is all about seeking that satisfying sweet spot between avoiding obstacles, staying on your vehicle and pulling off a leaderboard-topping time. You’ll almost certainly mess up, and almost certainly turn the air seven shades of blue, but you’ll still be having a laugh in between all those involuntary swears.
The bloody fun is broken up into nine sets of challenges, each tied together by one or more of the game’s hapless characters. These victims range from Jack and Jill (an old man riding a BMX with a lady riding passenger in a cart tied to the back, obviously) to the quad-bike-toting Mick and his love for all things camo. Each comes with their own strengths and weaknesses, making them better suited to certain challenges than others.
The Yang Family, with their open-top sedan, offer a more stable vehicle, but it’s unwieldy to control, especially when cornering. John and Debra (a couple on a bicycle, with the letter member of the duo strapped into a baby seat on the back) offer the most all-around setup, but it’s easy to lose your balance and feels back-heavy when making jumps. If you’re expecting the balanced two-wheeled rides of the Trials series – a franchise that’s clearly had a big impact on Guts and Glory’s obstacle-course nature – you’re in for a rude awakening.
Let’s be honest, this game isn’t going to win any awards for its looks – but you soon realise that’s kind of the point. The ugly character models and environments that look like they’re straight out of a crude mid-’90s foray into 3D animation are part of the game’s purposeful low-fi aesthetic. However, when your poor character gets diced by a set of buzzsaws and their blood turns into giant, solid shards of red, you know there’s clearly a few glitches that need patching out as well.
There are some technical issues that are hard to chalk up to conscious design choices, though. There’s a little too much slowdown at times, which can really impact on the more complicated challenges where you’re dodging landmines and leaping off ramps one after another. It doesn’t impact every run, but it’s frustrating enough when it does happen – the drop in frames can really affect your enjoyment.
The loading times between retries is also another issue. It simply takes far too long to refresh the game. It’s likely an issue to do with the size of each map – you can explore each one in real time, but we’d much rather have smaller, more linear maps (and have shorter loading times as a result) than sandbox designs that lead to protracted loading times. It’s an issue that takes you out of the moment-to-moment fun that makes Guts and Glory such a great little indie outing.
The Switch version is also missing one of the best features found on PC – the map editor. It’s this omission that makes the handheld iteration such a hard sell over the one found on Steam, because it doesn’t boast the kind of mode that will keep you coming back for more. Being able to construct insanely difficult challenges would tie right into that same sense of community-driven longevity that’s made the likes of Super Mario Maker so timeless, but without it (and the 1,000-plus fan-made tracks you can currently play on PC) Guts and Glory remains a diminished and hollow version of itself.
Which is a shame, because there’s so much to love about Guts and Glory’s combination of slapstick silliness and physics-driven gore. HakJak Productions has promised it’s working on a solution to the frame rate issues and texture issues, but considering Switch’s technical limitations almost certainly led to the removal of the map editor, you’re probably better off picking this up on PC for the foreseeable future.
Conclusion
Guts and Glory is a really fun little indie that’s burst out of the gates and onto Nintendo Switch, but the porting process has taken its toll. The basic rinse and repeat nature of its challenges and the madcap bloodbath of its physics are a laugh-out-loud combination while they last, but without the long-term appeal of the map editor and its library of user-generated content, the Switch version suffers as a result.
Octopath Traveler is a hit, I don’t think anyone’s going to be denying that any time soon, but now all the dust has settled with the reviews and the like, we felt it was about time to look at some of the finer, more obtuse details that lie in wait just waiting to be put into a Nintendo Life video.
We look at why they chose the name, difficulties in China, and even a loose connection to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, so make sure you check it out. It’s just up there, go on, watch it.
Bigben Interactive and Kylotonn Racing Games have shared another trailer for V-Rally 4, giving us a tease of two new racing modes coming to the game.
We’ve already heard about the ‘V-Rally Cross’ and ‘Buggy’ modes, but now it’s the turn of ‘Rally’ and ‘Hillclimb’. Here are the details you need to know, provided by the game’s publisher:
Rally: Modern and historical cars…Africa, Siberia, the American desert…in V-Rally 4, the rally challengesare real, technical challenges, on all surfaces, that only the most skillful drivers can hope to win.
Hillclimb: Phenomenal power and endurance are in store for you when you take on a mountain in Hillclimb. You’ll be in control of race cars sporting over 1,000 horsepower, specially designed for this discipline, which you must expertly control on tracks running along cliff faces.
The fifth and final racing mode is called Extreme-Khana, in which you must master drifting and combine speed and precision in these trap-packed courses. Hopefully we’ll see a new trailer and information for this mode in the future, too.
The game is still scheduled to launch on Switch some time after other platforms; PS4, Xbox One, and PC players can expect to start their engines this September.
Ska Studios’ hand-drawn 2D platformer Salt and Sanctuary is headed to the Nintendo Switch next week with a little bit of help from porting specialist, BlitWorks.
Described as a “soulslike” game, referring to the brutal nature of – you guessed it – Dark Souls, Salt and Sanctuary sees a calamitous encounter wreck the player’s ship, resulting in an immediate journey to broker peace on a treacherous island rife with the undead.
The game can be played either alone, or via local co-op, with hidden platforming abilities including air-dashing and wall-jumping on offer to help the Saltborn find and eradicate more than twenty horrifying bosses. You’ll be able to make use of sixteen weapon types and more than fifty sets of armour, as well as a skill tree that provides further options for progression.
Michelle and James Silva, co-creators at Ska Studios, have said the following:
“The two of us wanted to create a Soulslike game that we wanted to play, and finding that so many others who wanted it too warmed our dark little hearts. Bringing Salt and Sanctuary to the Nintendo Switch means more people who like dismal, satisfying games can play our very dismal, satisfying game.”
The game arrives on Switch on 2nd August, available directly from the Nintendo eShop for $17.99, and a ‘Salt and Sanctuary: Drowned Tome Edition‘ will be hitting retail stores “this holiday”. More details on that one to come.
So, what do you think? Share your initial thoughts with us below.
GameMill Entertainment has today announced Nickelodeon Kart Racers, an all-new game that will be available on Switch later this year.
Nickelodeon Kart Racers is a multi-player console racing game that features iconic Nickelodeon animated characters from the likes ofSpongeBob SquarePants, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Rugrats, Hey Arnold! and more, as they race on 24 different Slime-themed tracks to become the champion of children’s TV. Tracks include Bikini Bottom, NYC sewers, Tommy Pickle’s house, Arnold’s school and more.
The game allows players to compete as their favourite characters in four-player local multiplayer or a single-player battle mode to win cups and Kart upgrades. Mark Meadows, Partner of GameMill Entertainment has said the following about the release:
“We are thrilled to be partnering with Nickelodeon to bring all of these amazing characters into one fun, competitive video game for fans of all ages to enjoy. Nickelodeon has created characters and stories that are loved around the world and we specialise in transforming treasured characters and stories into playable entertainment for the die-hard fans and casual gamers alike.”
The game is currently scheduled to arrive on Switch on 23rd October with a recommended retail price of $39.99.
Does this one take your fancy? Do you know any little ones who would be all over this? Let us know with a comment.
The names Bud Spencer and Terence Hill probably won’t mean a great deal to most English-speaking movie fans, but in Italy, these two guys tore up the silver screen with a range of movies from the late ’70s and early ’80s, including Pari edispari, Chi trova un amico trova un tesoro and Double Trouble.
Spencer and Hill (real names: Carlo Pedersoli and Mario Girotti) were famous for their fight scenes, so it’s only fitting that they’ve got their own side-scrolling beat ’em up.
Bud Spencer & Terence Hill – Slaps and Beans arrived on Steam in 2017, where it has received quite a warm reception. It’s just been released on consoles, and that includes the Switch.
The game includes pixel art graphics, co-op multiplayer, mini-games and – perhaps most importantly of all – “Bud Spencer & Terence Hill style fighting system”. It’s also playable in English, Italian, German, Hungarian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Danish, Czech, Russian, Chinese and Japanese.
You can download the game for $19,99 / €19.99 / £15.49. Don’t forget your beans (and slaps).
Sonic Mania Plus has had a pretty stellar launch, instantly becoming the highest-rated Sonic game for 25 years among critics. It had a pretty decent week in terms of sales, too, jumping straight into the fifth-place spot in the UK charts, and it turns out that most of those sales were on Switch.
Figures show that the Nintendo Switch accounted for 52% of the game’s initial sales, with PS4 making up 34% and Xbox One on just 15%. Sonic games have historically performed well on Nintendo consoles since making the jump, but this shows that the blue blur is still fostering a large audience on Nintendo’s latest platform, especially considering that this is in a region where the two rival systems have much larger consumer bases.
To give you an idea of how much these sales figures impact chart standings, the individual formats charts show that the Switch version managed to nab seventh spot, with the PS4 and Xbox One versions sitting at 16th and 38th respectively.
Did you pick up a copy of Sonic Mania Plus on Switch? Let us know with a comment below.
Artifex Mundi has pulled back the curtain – ahem – on Irony Curtain, a satirical point-and-click adventure headed to Switch next year.
As you can see from the trailer above, the game takes a dig at the world of politics with a comical – yet strangely and scarily familiar – view on current affairs in its fictional world. The game takes place in the country of Matryoskha, with players needing to solve puzzles and minigames to learn more about the ins and outs of the nation’s government.
With the current release date scheduled for sometime in 2019, further details are still pretty few and far between. We’d expect to hear more about the title as we edge closer to its eventual launch.
Are you a fan of point-and-click games? Will you be keeping an eye out for this one? As ever, let us know with a comment below.
The hugely popular, first-person hero shooter Paladins is now available to download for free on Nintendo Switch.
Until now, Paladins has only been available on the console through purchasing the Founder’s Pack, a digital bundle which gives players early access to the game, immediately unlocking all Champions and their voice packs, and even rewards you with some exclusive cosmetics. The game already has a free-to-play system in place, with purchases only being available for cosmetic additions, but this new release gets rid of the need to buy your way in to start playing.
Alongside today’s free-to-play transition, Paladins has released its newest Champion: The deadly ninja Koga. Koga wields both dual SMGs and claws, climbing behind enemy lines before reigning destruction. Koga is the first champion with no cooldowns on his abilities; instead, he spends energy to use abilities whenever he sees an opportunity to strike.
We’ll soon be hosting a livestream to celebrate the occasion, too, giving you the chance to take on our lovely video master Alex Olney – you might even be able to get your hands on some fantastic prizes in the process. More details can be found in the video below.
If you haven’t yet jumped into the fun, this would be an ideal time to see what Paladins is all about for yourself. We really enjoyed the game in our review, noting the £25 Founder’s Pack charge as one of the relatively few drawbacks surrounding the game’s Switch release.
Let us know if you’ll be giving this free-to-play hit a spin with a comment below.
