Yes, you definitely read that correctly. PQube and two-person indie developer slampunks have announced that Muddledash, an upcoming competitive party game featuring squiggly, squashy octopuses, will be racing its way onto Nintendo Switch this spring.
The game challenges players to race against one another, squabbling over the possession of a present along the way, until you eventually arrive at a nearby party. The octopus who manages to get to the party first – while holding the present, of course – wins!
Along the way you’ll be flailing your tentacles all over the place, grabbing the present whenever possible and taking any opportunity to hit your friends in the face. All is fair in adorable octopus racing.
Muddledash Features
Get to the party – race against your friends in 4-player local multiplayer! Dress to impress – express yourself by donning a range of delightful hats! Squid Fights – kick, boop, slap and jump your way to be the king of the party! Infinite variety – levels generate dynamically each round, you’ll never play the same race twice!
Does this seem like the crazy sort of party game you could imagine yourself playing? Let us know your initial thoughts down below.
Good Shepherd Entertainment has announced that Milanoir, a pixel-packed action game developed by Italian studio Italo Games, is expected to launch on Nintendo Switch in early 2018.
Inspired by the wave of Italian crime movies released in the 1970s, Milanoir tasks you with sneaking, choking and shooting your way through a violent criminal underworld, hunting for the man who framed you, surviving breathtaking vehicle chases, and taking out anyone who stands in your way.
The game has been designed with the unique capabilities of the Nintendo Switch in mind, allowing two players to explore this bloody and pixelated rendition of Milan together in a co-op campaign using a single Joy-Con each.
Will you be playing this one with your very own partner in crime?
During the last Nintendo Direct Mini, it was announced that Super Mario Odyssey would be receiving some free DLC in a future update that would be adding a new asynchronous multiplayer mode. Called Luigi’s Balloon World, this new mode allows challenges players to hide or find balloons in a thirty second window, with coins being distributed as a reward.
Nintendo just confirmed that the update for Luigi’s Balloon World is now available, so be sure to give it a download and try it out. The new update also adds three new costumes for Mario to purchase in the store, and adds two additional filters to the in-game photo mode. Not bad for a free update, eh?
What do you think? Would you like to see Odyssey receive more updates? Do you think Nintendo will continue making content for it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
In 1980, Pac-Man took the world by storm, introducing arcade players to an entirely new kind of gameplay style. The titulad pill muncher went on to become a universally recognised icon of gaming, while also spawning numerous sequels and spinoffs to the inaugural debut over the decades that followed. Now, Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 Plus aims to continue that legacy set by the original, iterating on the classic formula in notable ways, but still leaving the core of it intact. The end result is what could be seen as one of the very best versions of Pac-Man available
Gameplay in PCE2 aims to go back to the roots of the franchise and recapture that simple, yet addictive arcade gameplay where you guide Pac-Man through mazes in a never-ending quest to eat more dots, all the while being pursued by four ghosts. The key difference here is that this game is fast, taking that simple concept and elevating it to a heart pounding, adrenaline pumping sugar rush of pure arcade bliss. It takes some getting used to, but once you’ve worked out the rhythm of careening around corners and consuming countless ghosts, this becomes a Pac-Man experience like no other, perfecting the idea that its predecessor introduced.
PCE2 mainly revolves around its Score Attack mode, which challenges you to blast your way through as many boards as you possibly can within a five-minute window. Pac-Man drops into a maze and usually can follow a linear dot path that traces around the stage, with each dot contributing to a gauge at the bottom of the screen. Once filled, a bonus fruit appears, and grabbing this sends Pac-Man and his ghost assailants to a new board with a different layout, filled with more dots. All of this happens in the span of about ten seconds (or less), and repeats until you run out of time.
Every few boards, a power pellet will spawn instead of a fruit, and this is where things get really interesting. See, each board has ‘sleeping’ ghosts scattered about, and going near them causes them to wake up and fly to the nearest ghost chasing you. This creates a ghost train that extends in front of the ghost, telegraphing where it will turn next. As you move through boards, the ghost trains continue to grow, but they’re sharply cut down in size when you get to a power pellet board. Once the pellet is grabbed, the ghost trains run away at blazing speeds, but lines will appear on the maze that indicate the paths the ghosts are taking. Once you intercept a train, Pac-Man tears through all the ghosts, racking up a massive score boost in the process.
This all combines to make an experience that’s hard to look away from and hard to put down. Every element of the Pac-Man formula has been examined and retooled to flow seamlessly together, capturing everything great about that unique gameplay. Touching ghosts would prove to be a problem at the speeds you’re playing at, so you’re allowed to bump into them a couple times before they get ‘angry’ and actually do you harm. Scouring every maze for every dot would slow things down, so an easily followed path of dots is usually in place that ensures you’ll fill the gauge as quickly as possible.
Most boards don’t even require you to clear out all the dots, and in many cases, it’s in your best interests to get to the next board as soon as possible. Both Pac-Man and the ghosts gain speed with each successive board, so the last minute or so of each run is a white-knuckle battle for survival and glory, as you chomp your way to a hopefully higher score. This is Pac-Man at his most kinetic and frantic, but it’s also Pac-Man at his most exciting.
There’s plenty of diversity to maze designs, too, and this helps to keep things fresh and interesting. A menu screen gives you several options where you can choose a difficulty level and design, with some mazes having gimmicks such as jump pads that send you between parts of the screen or significantly more tight corridors that lead to intense chase sequences. They’re not different enough that they feel like unique game modes, but the different mazes help to fend off any notions of stagnation.
On top of this, you’re given a plethora of cosmetic options, which can be tweaked to your liking at the start of each run. There are ‘sets’ of options that are used by default across the different mazes, but you’re allowed to mix and match them as much as you’d like. If you’d prefer playing as Dig-Dug on a neon maze with the music from Pac-Land playing in the background, you can set that up with just a few tweaks. This is clearly designed to be a flexible game that players can adjust according to their tastes, from difficulty to cosmetics.
If climbing the leaderboards or achieving that coveted ‘S’ rank on stages isn’t your thing, then there’s also an Adventure mode that offers up a slightly more linear challenge. Here, you move through a series of 10 challenges, each of which will task you with collecting a certain amount of fruit under the time limit on a fixed set of boards. Upon completing a level, you’re given one to three stars depending on which difficulty setting you picked, and collecting enough of these will eventually unlock the boss fight for that world. These are basically the same thing as the other challenges, with the caveat being that a giant ghost in the background occasionally sends all four ghosts on the board into their angry state.
While Adventure mode doesn’t really have much in the way of unique gameplay to differentiate it from Score Attack, the focus on achieving an objective instead of just going for a high score makes for a nice slight change of pace, offering a different kind of challenge. Though it doesn’t take very long to reach the end of the ‘campaign’, achieving three stars on every challenge is no mean feat, one that will keep even the most skilled players busy for some time. It’s a nice inclusion that ensures players that aren’t crazy about chasing scores will have a goal that’s a bit more tangible than simply getting a better score; there’s a coveted 100% completion rate to be pursued here.
Score Attack and Adventure mode are just half the game, though, with the other half being devoted entirely to co-op play. This is largely the same as a two player Score Attack, but there’s a few notable differences here. For one, there’s no bumping into ghosts here, one touch will lead to certain death. In place of the bumping, however, is a bullet time effect that triggers when a ghost is dangerously close to you, giving you extra time to react and dodge. If you still manage to get caught, there’s a window of a few seconds where your partner can come and save you if they’re quick enough. Another change is that most elements of the game are adjusted to require both players’ participation.
When all the dots have been eaten, the two players must ‘kiss’ in order to receive the bonus fruit to send them to the next board. When somebody grabs a power pellet, individual ghosts can only be ‘dribbled’ in front of one player, requiring the other player to come from the opposite direction and sandwich the ghosts. If there’s a board featuring a ghost train, one player must first attack from the front while the other has to attack from the back before a gauge runs out.
Another notable difference is the inclusion of actual boss battles, which involve you and your partner attacking a giant, voxelated ghost. Here, you move about in arenas that wouldn’t be out of place in a 2D platformer, climbing up the walls and jumping to disconnected platforms in pursuit of all the dots, all while being followed by a massive, slow-moving ghost. Once the dots are clear, the power pellet drops and you can attack the boss by holding down the jump button and repeatedly bouncing into it like a pinball, with each strike sending smaller ghosts flying out which can be eaten for extra points. It’s the biggest departure form the standard Pac-Man gameplay in the game, yet it plays quite similarly and feels like a good fit. Though the controls here can be a little tough to get to grips with, these boss battles provide some of the most intense moments to be found in PCE2, mixing up the gameplay in a memorable way.
It may sound like adding another player into the madness of PCE2 needlessly complicates things, but the rapid-fire flow of jumping between boards isn’t lost here at all. If anything, it’s even enhanced. Having a friend on hand helps you clear out boards far faster than doing so alone, and the even more chaotic pace that results leads to plenty of laughter and shouting as you two struggle to survive together. Couple this with the interesting boss battles, and you have a mode that can provide loads of replay value and intense action while changing just a few things about the standard mode. Best of all, this co-op mode can be played solo with an AI partner, too, and we found that it is more than capable of holding its own and supporting you. Any way you cut it, the additional co-op content that comes with the Switch version is a great inclusion, building on what came before in new and interesting ways.
All this gameplay is wrapped up in a similarly exciting presentation that’s just bursting with life. A high-tempo dubstep and electronic soundtrack helps to keep the excitement of gameplay high, with pounding drums and satisfying hooks keeping your ears just as tuned into the action as your eyes. There’s plenty of catchy beats here that will be bouncing around in your head for some time, and the inclusion of classic sounds and samples from the arcade games pay the perfect homage to the past. The visuals are similarly attractive, opting for a colorful, neon art artstyle that feels like the perfect fit for an arcade game, while the other optional cosmetic changes can make the game look completely different if you so choose. Little details, like sleeping ghosts and dots that change color and bounce to the beat of the music, help to make the visuals and music mingle seamlessly together, putting on a show that’s pleasing to the eyes and ears.
In Detective Pikachu™, a new game coming on March 23rd for the Nintendo 3DS family of systems, you must team up with the self-proclaimed “great detective” Pikachu to solve a puzzling case involving oddly behaving Pokémon, discover a possible connection to the mysterious Mewtwo and encounter many characters in Ryme City.
Trouble in Ryme City!: Ryme City is a place where people and Pokémon live together. But recently, many friendly Pokémon are behaving oddly for no apparent reason. While Pikachu and his friend Tim search for Tim’s father, Harry, they unwittingly stumble into the mysterious case of the problematic Pokémon. Can they solve the mystery and also find Tim’s father? Cue the dramatic music…
The Mysterious Mewtwo: While many different Pokémon appear in Detective Pikachu, the one who seems to hold the biggest connection to the overall mystery is Mewtwo. How is Mewtwo connected to everything? And why does Mewtwo seem to know Pikachu?
A Colorful Cast of Characters: Many charming characters roam the streets of Ryme City. These include Pablo Millan, owner of Pikachu’s favorite café; Frank Holliday, an inspector at the Ryme City Police Department; and Meiko Okamoto, a camera operator for the local TV studio. Meeting and interrogating all of these characters throughout the game is part of the fun.
Along the way, experience over 150 fun-filled animated cutscenes starring this unique, wise-cracking Pikachu and a charming cast of curious characters who may help you on your investigation.
You can also tap the new, extra-large Detective Pikachu amiibo™ figure to access all cutscenes up until the current chapter played. But that’s not all! Fans can now play Detective Pikachu on a New Nintendo 2DS XL system that features Pikachu’s iconic face, now available in stores at a suggested retail price of $159.99.
The New Nintendo 2DS XL Pikachu Edition system is just as electric as the Pokémon itself, with an eye-catching yellow design featuring a stylized close-up of Pikachu’s face.
As with all Nintendo 2DS systems, the New Nintendo 2DS XL Pikachu Edition system plays Nintendo 3DS games in 2D. (Note: The Detective Pikachu game, the Detective Pikachu amiibo™ figure, and the New Nintendo 2DS XL Pikachu Edition system are sold separately.)
For a limited time, players who purchase the Detective Pikachu™ game will receive a bonus download code for a Detective Pikachu theme for the HOME Menu on the Nintendo 3DS family of systems, including Nintendo 2DS and New Nintendo 2DS XL. Starting 3/8 at 9:00am PST, pre-purchase the digital version of the Detective Pikachu game on Nintendo eShop or Nintendo.com, or starting 3/23 purchase the digital or packaged version of the game on Nintendo eShop, Nintendo.com, or select retailers to get your bonus code, and enjoy this cool yet cute Detective Pikachu theme!* Offer ends April 22, 2018.
Nintendo Switch is not short of one-on-one fighting games, but here’s another ACA Neo Geo release anyway. Fatal Fury 3: Road To The Final Victory again provides the typical best of three rounds fighting action as you beat up a variety of people en route to an ending. Compared to previous instalment Fatal Fury Special there’s been a reduction in playable characters with just 10 fighters available. Series constants Terry, Andy and Joe return along with Mai and the always up-to-no-good Geese Howard. Newcomers include the popular Blue Mary, kickboxer Franco Bash and nunchaku-swinging detective Hon Fu.
After choosing your character you can pick your starting opponent (from a selection of four), with fights afterward proceeding in a set order, ending with a showdown against Geese. There’s then potentially three additional fights against new boss characters Yamazaki (who you also fight in a single round earlier in the game) and siblings Chonsu and Chonrei – the latter requiring you to have played well during your playthrough. As an indication of how well you’re playing each successful round now grades your performance based on time taken and points scored.
Fights feature the usual variety of regular moves and special attacks, either for an odd hit when possible or strung together in a combo. As with all ACA Neo Geo releases an electronic manual can be brought up to check the input commands for the special moves, but you’ll have to look elsewhere for information on how to pull off desperation (and hidden desperation) moves. Desperation moves (available when your health bar is nearing full depletion) are tough to perform, but can quickly turn things around in a fight.
Unsurprisingly, the various Fatal Fury games have similarities to one another, but across the series there are differences in their use of buttons and the multi-plane fighting system. Like Fatal Fury 2/Special four buttons (two strengths of punch/kick) are used for your attacks, but this time around there are three planes. As before you can move into the background, but as in Real Bout Fatal Fury (which followed this game), you can move into the foreground as well.
For this game, button combinations (helpfully mapped to Switch’s Z buttons) are used to move between planes. Where previously you could stay there until you chose to move (or were knocked) back, here you will automatically return to the middle lane after a moment. Basic punches and kicks can be thrown from the other planes, but moving there is now primarily for avoiding attacks. The short time spent there speeds up fights as you avoid getting into situations where fighters move back and forth trying to get on the same plane to continue brawling.
The game is well presented with some catchy music, sometimes quite rocking or jazzy, other times quite mysterious. Visually, there’s a similar style to before, but with redrawn sprites and more detailed stages. The highlight is Hon Fu’s stage where the action takes place on a platform that’s carried through the air, with a city visible in the background. A new fun feature to stages is the way the end of match blow can send someone flying into the foreground or background to hit against something or maybe to unceremoniously land in a body of water. Characters chat pre and post battle and these tend to be amusing such as, “Call me Jin Chon Shu. Why? Cause that’s my name, fool!” or a defeated Geese (surrounded by flames) asking Joe the important question: “Just where did you buy those shorts?”
Later games would introduce a power gauge and up the character count, but Fatal Fury 3 still entertains as you find ways to utilise your various skills in pursuit of victory and your chosen character’s ending. The usual eight difficulty settings are available to adjust the challenge to your liking, although while it is no pushover the fights against the CPU are not as tough as before. HAMSTER’s usual Hi Score mode is available if you’d like to try and beat the game (default settings) on one credit, or you could try and score as many points as possible in the five-minute Caravan mode. As always these (and the arcade mode) include online leaderboards for you to try and move up, but being a fighting game more replay value is naturally found from two-player versus matches; a second player can buy into the regular arcade mode at any time to challenge you to a fight.
Conclusion
Fatal Fury 3: Road to the Final Victory is an entertaining game with a good presentation and the new lane system gives a slightly different feel to fights (mainly used for short-term evasion) that works well. There’s been a reduction in characters, but there’s a good range leading to plenty of enjoyable fights. The Real Bout games that followed would build on this however, so although Fatal Fury 3 is a competent enough fighter, it’s not a must download title.
Horror has found a new home, and it’s got Joy-Cons, HD Rumble and a penchant for carrying scary games around in handheld mode. Yes, games that make you leap out of your skin are all headed to Nintendo Switch and Those That Remain looks to keep that fear-inducing trend on track.
Set in the fictional US town of Dormont, you’ll find the sleepy setting is gripped by a supernatural darkness and stalked by creatures that kill anything that walks in shadow. You’ll need to stay in the light to survive, while using a series of portals that will help you step through into a twisted alternate dimension. Decisions made in one will affect the other, so there’s a survival horror aspect at play mixed in with consequence-based decisions and environmental puzzling.
It’s certainly an intriguing little curio with a vibe that’s really shooting for a Silent Hill/Stranger Things vibe. Check out the announcement trailer below and let us know what you think…
With the great news about Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 and 2 coming to Switch being announced recently, we’ve got another slice of Blue Bomber-related news – this time going all the way back to the first NES game.
In the world of games, a lot of minuscule things get dug up, discovered and passed around. Rumours, urban legends and gossip go hand in hand with games. Does a game have a secret code? Was a game radically changed before release for various reasons? Did a game have a secret, uncredited programmer? They are often fun to discover and talk about; sometimes they are easily proved or debunked. Others just kind of hang around without ever being fully solved.
One such example that has been around for a long time is the alleged similarities in the stage theme from Elec Man from Mega Man 1 and the song “Faithfully” by the rock band Journey. Both songs start off with four distinctive notes that are very memorable, and while the songs don’t sound the same all the way through to the end, there have been many discussions about the similarities over the years.
Elec Man is not the only song which has been compared to Faithfully. A obscure R.E.M. song called “All The Right Friends” was included on a soundtrack some years back, and again, they share a lot of same characteristics. Super Mario Bros. and Sonic The Hedgehog 3 have triggered their own discussions regarding musical influences over the years, as well.
So, What about Journey and Elec Man? Was it an homage or not? I reached out to Mega Man composer Manami Matsumae – AKA Chanchakorin – and in the video below, she gave me a very direct answer. To see what she said and compare all three songs, check it out.
If you are a fan of Manami Matsumae’s work – which includes recent titles like Shovel Knight and Mighty No. 9 – you might want to check out her debut album. “Three Movements” was released on 17th of December last year, the 30th anniversary of the release of the first Mega Man game.
If you liked this video be sure to check out GTV for more things retro, Nintendo and Japan.
Mad Gear Games has announced that A Hole New World will be arriving on Nintendo Switch on 1st March.
The game, which was originally intended to be released on Wii U following a successful Kickstarter campaign, is a 2D, arcade-inspired adventure that sees players jumping, shooting, and taking on giant bosses to acquire their powers in a world that has been invaded by monsters.
A Hole New World throws you right into the fray; with no tutorials or ‘easy mode’ options, and consisting of a simple two-button approach used to jump and shoot, you’ll instantly find yourself neck deep in the nostalgic action, relying on your companion and potions to help you. The game has received generally positive reviews on other platforms, and could well be a nice little addition to the Switch’s eShop.
Will you be exploring A Hole New World when it launches on 1st March? Let us know your thoughts below.
For your consideration, the common housefly (Musca Domestica). For as long as mankind began to build houses, these tiny winged insects somehow always manage to find the tiniest openings to invade the peace of our homes. The genesis of Membrane is a story about such a home invasion. With an aforementioned flying tiny pest now sitting on his arm, will you be able to help this dude bro chilling in the sofa, making him flap his arm to insect freedom in the definitive Man versus housefly victory?
Our sofa hero spies said fly landing on his arm and, as you do, summons a pixelated tiny avatar with a pyramid-shaped head. We’re fairly certain that this is not how the human nervous system works (we double-checked, indeed it is not), but it certainly is a rather original video game premise. Membrane comes from Perfect Hat, a two-person studio that’s been producing art, music and video games for the past decade. The game started as a thesis project for one of the developer’s graduation but it now evolved into a full product.
The game consists of several single screen platforming/physics puzzle rooms that simulate the path your pixel avatar must take from the dudebro’s brain to his hand. As good video game design etiquette demands, the first few rooms are made to introduce your character’s abilities. That pyramid-shaped head is actually a pointer, you can use L and R to rotate 360-degrees around your avatar with a guiding line showing the expect trajectory of your ‘building blocks’. By holding the Y button you send a burst of tiny cubes (with some elasticity properties to them) that stick to surfaces and each other, quickly creating makeshift pathways, bridges, trampolines, even catapults when the need arises.
A clever technique used to reach the top of the screen is simply to aim straight down and let loose with the fire button, quickly elevating your avatar to new heights. With the power to build also comes the power to destroy; hit X and you will fire a bullet of sorts that, when in contact with your building blocks, will turn them back to yellow, effectively making them lose their sticky and elastic properties. This then enables you to recollect them for reuse (because yes, they are limited). ‘B’ enables you to perform the most classic of platformers actions: the jump.
Each room in the game contains two orbs; one is usually straightforward to collect while the second one will require a little more to grasp. You should always strive to collect them both before reaching the room exit because the game will reward with three bonus unlocks for the avid collector. The game difficulty arch increases the further you travel away from the brain towards the hand, with rooms introducing enemies that hold the orbs, great big green spheres you can use to smash impenetrable walls of green goo and even buttons that activate bumpers or rotating squares that can be used in combination to your blocks for all sort of antics.
While these are certainly very odd innards to a human being, they certainly are very cleverly designed playgrounds for experimentation. And just as the developer likes to emphasise, there is no single solution for each room. The player is free to explore alternatives within the game rules to reach the orbs and the exit successfully and even in utter failure (a quick press of ZL and ZR will thankfully reset the room with no penalty) it was very infrequent not to have a smile in our faces while we tackled this strange epic journey.
Still, pictures sadly do not do justice to just how incredible and trippy the visuals of the game are in motion. The use of primary, 8-bit colours and pixelated, purposely rudimentary 2D graphics out of MS Paint would fool anyone into believing this game was made in 1988 instead of 2018. But the smooth animations, precise control and physics engine would quickly snap you back to the current generation. As we mentioned early in this review both members of Perfect Hat are also music producers and the fantastic minimalist chiptune soundtrack is just as clever as the game graphics; you hardly notice it is there but it very much a part of the whole aesthetics.
Conclusion
Membrane is a polished, tight and smartly designed single-room physics puzzle platformer wrapped around a unique audio/visual retro bubble. We haven’t been so pleasantly surprised with a game of the genre since the initial Wii release of World Of Goo. Despite failing hard to educate anyone on the human nervous system, in either portable mode or sitting in the sofa like the plot’s protagonist playing in on the big screen TV, this game is a surreal trip very much worth embarking. Just remember to humbly thank the next housefly that invades your home for this whole experience… at least before reaching for the daily newspaper or fly swatter.
