Christmas means new games, and new players for old games.

I don't think I've quite managed to completely straighten out my living room from all of the Christmas chaos yet. My kids haven't noticed, though. They're too busy being Batman and Bumblebee. The two biggest hits of Christmas so far have been Batman: Arkham Knight, which has been out since the summer, and Transformers:Devastation, which was released in October.

Batman:Arkham Knight is another pitch-perfect Batman game from the team at Rocksteady games, and they even brought Kevin Conroy (Batman) and Mark Hamil (The Joker) back in to do some voice acting after having given them the last game (Arkham Origins) off. It's all of the things that you liked from the previous Arkham games plus a substantial amout of driving the Batmobile. Nightwing, Robin, the Riddler, Catwoman, the Penguin, Two-Face, and a few surprise bad guys show up for the fun.

Transformers:Devastation is strangely like Bayonetta. Not strange because it's Platinum Games at the helm, but strange that the Transformers fit so easily into the formula of a stylish beat-em-up game. There's more playable characters than Bayonetta, there's a lot more weapon modification than Bayonetta, but it's no mistake that my nine-year-old refers to the Focus attack as Witch Time. The focus attack, triggered by dodging out of the way at the last second (exactly how Witch Time is triggered in Bayonetta), allows for a few seconds of moving faster than everything else on the board and dishing out a rather serious beatdown. Some barriers to parts of a level have to be opened like this as well. Of what we've seen, the formula for the game is Giant Robots + Stylish Action = Awesomesauce! The only thing that my younger son hasn't liked about the game so far is that Grimlock is a bit sluggish and you need to repeatedly press the circle button to make him go faster. Bumblebee is his favorite character so far, as he easily outperforms his smaller size.

The other thing that is probably happening now is that a lot of people are playing Splatoon on WiiU for the first time.  While we have made some suggestions before, here's a few reminders.

1. Regular mode is just making sure you have inked more territory than the other team. Use your map (it's on the GamePad!) to find out if there are places that really need ink.

2. In the Ranked mode Splat Zone mode on maps that have two splat zones, have two people cover each one.

3. In the Ranked mode Tower Control, it doesn’t do much good to just run around and paint stuff without a plan.Get the tower, hold the tower, make a path for the tower. Use the dotted line to figure out where the tower is headed. You can’t just run around the tower shooting at it – at some point someone on your team has to get on the tower.

4. If you’re using any of the Nozzlenose weapons in Tower Control, you may find it rather difficult unless you’re extremely accurate. If you’re used to that weapon in regular mode, you may find it easier to use one of the Sloshers for Tower Control.

5. In Rainmaker mode – have the Rainmaker before you push forward through the map, and make sure the person with the Rainmaker is safe. If you have the Rainmaker and no teammates nearby, use the “C’mon” call by pressing up on the D-Pad to call them.

6. In Rainmaker mode – No lounging around! You can only use the weapon for a limited time.

7. It's a team game, play it like one. Nobody cares how many frags you get if your team loses.

Let's be careful out there and play nice, and I hope everybody had a great Christmas.

Things to be thankful for...

So, it's Black Friday weekend, and all of us have been trying as hard as we can to get screen time. Everybody was on their DS on Thursday since we spent a lot of it in the car. My older son is working on Pokemon Alpha Sapphire on his Nintendo 3DS, and my younger son was playing more Scribblenauts and some Desktop Tower Defense on his 2DS. About the only thing that I bring to play on DS is my Korg DS cartridge, and I had fun figuring out how to make some drum noises that don't really sound like drums.

My older son and I are still trying to unlock all of the characters on Hyrule Warriors, and it seems like we've had to do a lot of repeated boards to get our characters leveled up enough to face the later challenges. I still have a long way to go on the WiiU version of Bayonetta and the new Bayonetta 2. I was in Gamestop the other day and my regular cashier asked me if I had started the new Smash Bros. game for WiiU, and my exasperated answer was that I still had a long way to go on the last two games that I got! We haven't even talked about the new LEGO Batman 3 game, since my older son and I are casually pretending that the game's not out yet so we're not inundated for requests from my younger son to pick up the game some weekend with Christmas on the way.

The first add-on pack for Mario Kart 8 came out a couple of weeks ago, and the playable Link character and the Hyrule Castle board are both nice additions to the game. I haven't played with the Tanooki Mario or Cat Peach characters yet, but I did see that some of the other courses make for some multiplayer insanity.  The Excitebike course has super-long straightaways leading to lots of shell-flinging shenanigans. Ice Ice Outpost is full of multiple paths most of which require rather precision driving or you will easily find yourself taking an ice bath.

So, even though I haven't picked up either of the newest systems, the PS4 or the XBox One, it still seems like there are plenty of games to play. There are still games coming out for the PS3, and the WiiU seems to have a steady stream of new releases coming out soon to be bolstered by the presence of the newest addition to the WiiU system, the amiibo.  Similar to their Skylanders and Disney Infinity counterparts, an amiibo is a plastic representation of one of the Nintendo characters with some electronics inside that will identify it to the WiiU. Unlike the Skylanders and Disney Infinity characters which each require their own portal, the Amiibo can talk directly to the WiiU gamepad. There is a newer model of the 3DS that has not been released yet that will also be able to read the amiibo information. For the 3DS and 2DS units that are already out, there will be an external  peripheral that will be released next year. Even more curiously, the amiibos do different things in different games. In Smash Bros., they become a specific character that you work on leveling up, in a very similar fashion to how they work in Skylanders and Disney Infinity. In Hyrule Warriors, different amiibos interact with the game in different ways. Some amiibos of the Zelda series characters give you weapons, and from the in-game description it sounds like some of the other ones give you random gifts (which I can only presume are materials to craft upgrades from). In Mario Kart 8, you can customize your Mii racer with an outfit based on the character that your amiibo is based on. I hope that they find other interesting ways to utilize these.

I am also looking forward to Street Fighter IV's upcoming Omega Mode patch, which will add a different version of each of the World Warriors to the line up, with different special moves and inputs. While the existing version of Ultra allows you to play as any previous Street Fighter IV version of any of the characters, the differences between those four versions are rather subtle and are just adjustments to the nuances of the game's balance. The Omega Mode versions are rather different, as you can see here.

So, what am I thankful for (as a gamer) this holiday season? I am thankful for the fact that there are more games out than I have time to play. That reminds me. I need to get ready for band practice.

Bayonetta 2 Demo for WiiU, part 2 - Touch(y) Controls

In my previous post I briefly mentioned that the Bayonetta 2 demo for WiiU offers an option for touch controls that I had not tried. I have tried them, and I'm not convinced that they're useful, but I think I might understand why they were available.

The most important buttons for Bayonetta are dodge, jump, punch, and kick. In the default control configuration, all of these are mapped to right hand buttons that are easy to get to - ZR, B, X, and A. If you're unfamiliar with the layout, have a look. Movement is handled with the left analog stick, which is fairly standard.

With the touch controls, Bayonetta turns to face the location of where you tap on the screen. I think that if you tap and hold, Bayonetta is supposed to run to that location but there are very few opportunities to test this in the demo as the battle is constantly in motion. If you tap on an enemy, you move towards them and attack them. However, I have no idea (and the demo of the game does not say) how it decides whether any given attack is a kick or a punch. Jumping is done by double tapping, which I did not find difficult to do with either hand. Dodging is done with a swipe, which was easy enough. No individual motion was too difficult to perform, but fluidly doing exactly what I intended seemed difficult. Stylish action games usually demand precision, although Bayonetta is forgiving in this way by offering a wider range of difficulties than most of the other games in this style.

Since the release of this game had been in question until Nintendo became involved, I wonder if Platinum had been considering a way to put Bayonetta on a tablet or a phone platform as a way to recoup having developed a significant chunk of the game already. Certainly another possibility is that the touch controls were added after Nintendo's involvement at Nintendo's request. Bayonetta 2 was initially being developed for SEGA by Platinum, but when SEGA felt they had other priorities and back-burnered Bayonetta 2 Platinum had to talk to other producers and the console companies because they wanted to see if they could still manage to release a game after all the work they had already put into it. Thankfully, Nintendo stepped in to help, but that posed a different problem. Since the original Bayonetta was not on a Nintendo platform, there were many people resistant to the idea of buying a second game without having played the first one. Platinum has fixed this by including a beautiful port of the original Bayonetta along with the purchase of Bayonetta 2, making it a fantastic value. On top of this, Platinum and Nintendo have created extra costumes for Bayonetta to wear in the style of Samus from the Metroid series, Princess Peach from the Mario series, and Link from the Legend of Zelda series. (I thought I also saw something about Star Fox as well but I can't be sure  Not only are there Nintendo-themed costumes available in both the original Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2, but each costume includes a unique weapon to add to the already varied gameplay.

Having spent enough time playing the first Bayonetta on a PlayStation 3 controller, I don't think I'll be taking the step backwards to touch controls. Perhaps some people new to the game will be able to start purely with the touch controls and do something amazing with them. It can't be any crazier than trying to play Soul Calibur with a SEGA fishing controller...