Zera

Why are Mega Man fans so desperate for this when they can just pay $2 for Gunman Clive?

Bangai-O HD: Missile Fury has an incredibly elegant HUD. - The range of firing x2 size missiles - The range of firing x3 size missiles - The range of lock-on for homing missiles - The range of lock-on for bounce missiles - The range of bouncing for bounce missiles - The range of break missiles - The invincibility gauge - The number of dash points - The range of freeze attacks - The range for counting enemies in counter attacks - The range for counting missiles in counter attacks - Bangai-O's location ALL of this information is contained within TWO CIRCLES surrounding Bangai-O. Treasure got REALLY smart when they designed this.

I thought it was pretty obvious that the scope of the poll was Serenes Forest Forum members.

Waveshining and dash dancing is normal behavior for foxes. Your spirit animal is really the chihuahua.

Poll results - Two thirds of voters have played Xenoblade. - No voter played Xenoblade X exclusively. I presume the Metascore and cheaper price of Xenoblade 3D is why. - Most haven't played both versions of Xenoblade, so version preference is undetermined. - Of those that played both games, more prefer Xenoblade than Xenoblade X. - Assuming Integrity and maybe were troll votes, the average rating here is 8.6 out of 10. (The Metacritic scores are 92 and 8.9) Thank you for participating. Tryhard, shinpichu, I am curious as to why you rated it a 6.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8u8Z3bUQfs Do not eat if you don't want a heart attack.

Ah, but for Pikmin I was talking about relative scores. Regardless, Sticker Star is indeed the lowest rated Paper Mario game, which fits right into my claims. The critics aren't always right or always wrong.

Is 25 votes a good time to start analyzing results?

A quick look at Metacritic gives a different opinion... On average, both critics and players rate Pikmin 2 higher than Pikmin 1 and 3. Pikmin 2 has WAY more content than Pikmin 1 and has better graphics and smoother gameplay.

With the exception of the final boss, I never got a Game Over. There were three days I restarted... and each one was to preemptively strike a megagrock that I couldn't reach fast enough. I'd say it's a challenging game, but probably not unplayable for less skilled players. If you get a Game Over, you are allowed to restart the stage with double the original starting funds, which is a nice concession. Also, one thing I didn't mention is that you actually get better item drops with longer combos. This applies to rock piles and grocks, and gives mining and combat more depth. If you equip weak boots and spikes, you can perform very long combos in the third treasure-hunting cave to earn big profits easily. Likewise, I usually attack the weak enemies surrounding bossgrocks and diregrocks to get a combo boost. At some point they start dropping 100-coins, which makes it much more profitable to than using your towers.

Dillon’s Rolling Western is essentially “the Pikmin of tower defense”. You defend villages from invading rock monsters called grocks and build towers to gun them down. However, you don’t have the god-perspective of most tower defense games. Instead you control an armadillo guy on the map and roll around to do things (like building towers). Moving takes time, and time is a resource, so this creates new decisions. This review is for Dillon's Rolling Western: The Last Ranger, a sequel to the original. As I haven't played the original, I will not take it into account for this review. While building gun towers in Rolling Western games is important, they can never stop all the grocks, so you have to cover the holes in your defense by fighting grocks in action-based combat as well. This means you need to plan a strategy ahead of time. In addition, you spend time between raids exploring the land to collect resources and strengthen your defenses. Each stage contains a village that must be defended for three days, and each day is split into three parts. Part 1: Prep Time Part 2: Grock Raid Part 3: Free Time After three days, you are given a 1-5 star rating depending on how quickly you finished the raids (non-raid time doesn't count) and whether or not you completed all the sidequests. Should you replay a stage, you are allowed to start with any amount of money from your savings, and you can hit the “Camp” button to skip straight to the raid without waiting for it. Protip: Don't bother going for 5-star ratings until you've beaten the game and are extremely wealthy. The game has 8 main stages and 6 side stages. The main stages have a train on Day 3 that must be protected in addition to the village. The side stages have ally rangers that you can pay to hire. You can make them collect specific resources, and battle grocks in specific areas. Once the side stage is over, you can add them to your party permanently - but only if you win a Samurai Kirby-esque reflex battle. Truth be told, the side stages are just as big and important as the main ones, so you really shouldn't skip them. Now that I've discussed the structure of the game, let's talk about the things that I liked... I like how the game rewards both your strategy and your skill. Having grocks marching toward your village in real time gives battles a tension they would otherwise lack, and forces you to decide whether you want to use weak attacks for resource drops, or strong attacks to end battles quicker. This "damage versus resources" tradeoff also applies to the gear you buy (or don't). Meanwhile, knowing how you can move around the field (and limitations imposed by terrain) will affect your tower-building strategy. And so, the genres are combined in a way that is beneficial to both. The game gets a lot more exciting as it goes on, because every stage introduces some new terrain or level gimmick, and one or two new grock types. Ramgrocks that destroy towers, motogrocks that drive fast cars and tear down gates, springgrocks that jump over gates, boomgrocks that roll down railways to blow up your train... the game has a lot of surprises. And I like that. I also like the core mechanics and controls, which are satisfying and well designed. A lot of critics complained about the touch controls, and I have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. This game controls about as well as the DS Zelda titles. I've played games with legitimately inferior controls like Kid Icarus: Uprising and Metroid: Other M, and this is not one of those games. With that said, there is A LOT of touch screen swiping, so you may want to consider getting a screen protector if you're concerned about scratches. The combat is surprisingly deep. Dillon's basic roll attack can transition into a grind attack or claw attacks. The grind attack is good for "grinding" resources out of enemies, and claw attacks are good for dealing heavy damage to one enemy or chain-killing a group of weak enemies. Dillon jumps back if you end an attack, and stays in the air during claw attacks. Transitioning between offense and defense - on the ground or in the air - is easy, and gives the combat a great flow. I only wish the enemy types mixed up more often to create new combat scenarios. Perhaps an arena mode in a sequel? The presentation is quite nice. Most of the graphics are in full 3D, and the characters are cel-shaded anthropomorphic animals in a "Wild West" theme. The music is good, even if it gets repeated a lot, and the art direction is really solid. This is also a very long game, especially for an eShop title. With 14 large stages and at least a couple dozen hours of gameplay, this is the most retail-length $11 game I've ever played. Now… let’s talk about the things that I didn’t entirely like... The lack of numbers on grocks and guns makes it hard to figure out how much damage gun types and levels do relative to each other. Is a cannon blast at long range more effective than a shotgun blast at close range? Does the Gatling gun have a higher DPS than the shotgun? Does a level 2 weapon deal twice as much damage as its level 1 counterpart? Without time consuming experimentation, you're not going to figure any of this out. If the game is well-balanced, there is no reason not to disclose this information. The guns are pretty restrictive. You can’t decide what directions they face, which affect what areas they target. And you can’t preview these areas from the map screen – you have to visit the tower. And you can’t preview them at all unless the tower is already built. This is a lot of hassle to get what is arguably the most important information in the game. When fighting multiple enemies in combat, enemies below you can be hidden by the camera angle. Several times I wiped out a group of grocks and waited for the battle to end, quickly realizing there was one left off-screen. This is an inconsequential issue, but hopefully it gets fixed in a sequel. You know that feeling when you spend an entire 30 seconds mashing the touchscreen to sell 15 different kinds of rock, because the developer couldn’t be bothered to include a “Sell All” button? Yeah, I don’t like that feeling either. In fact, this is literally why we invented the "Sell All" button. GAME DESIGN 101 If I'm expected to sell dozens of varieties of rock, whose only purpose is to be sold, INCLUDE A "SELL ALL" BUTTON! >:( There’s an expansive mining minigame with unique enemies and treasures that can be fun... but the caves have random dead ends that kick you out. And because the caves are randomly generated every time you visit them, you can’t even map them out. How are you supposed to get to the bottom floor other than by insane luck? I bet whoever designed this is the same person that created the Destination Wheel in Chibi-Robo: Zip Lash. Finally, I think the game's more mundane activities - scruffle collecting and clearing mines - could use more variety. The developer did add some wrinkles - some scruffles are grocks in disguise, and mines occasionally contain a basic grock or two, but this isn't enough. Maybe if there were a rarer scruffle that moved around a bit, or more enemy types in the mines... this alone would significantly enhance the least exciting moments of the game. Conclusion: Dillon's Rolling Western: The Last Ranger is a nice eShop game. As both a tower defense and action game, it is competent, but it also combines them in a cohesive way. The mechanics are polished, the aesthetic is compelling, and the cost-value ratio is excellent. If you like strategy and action games, or unique games like Pikmin and Chibi-Robo, I think you'll like this one. I would love to see improvements and additions in a Wii U sequel, but The Last Ranger is fine as a standalone title. 7.5 out of 10 (Very Good!) If you're wondering why this game has a 68 on Metacriitc, it mostly boils down to "It's too similar to the original." I didn't play the original, so I don't care.

Pikmin 2 wasn't really easy, without an overarching time limit it was closer to a straight action game and had many more challenging enemies and bosses. I love Pikmin 2, and I thought I was a hardcore player... it's like, I don't fit in or you're over-generalizing...

How do games get added to the Bundle? Shouldn't they all be there to begin with? I'm interested in Nano Assault Neo...

All Star Rest Area - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB7j0RxJ1kU File Select - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ghz9j39ew&list=PLC-qn8gNLc3GGt4UJCPoURn9_QF6tnpZq&index=2 Float Islands - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-76kXxeWkEE&index=7&list=PLC-qn8gNLc3GGt4UJCPoURn9_QF6tnpZq "All Star Rest Area" is a remix of "File Select", not "Float Islands".

Have you read the complete Piklopedia and Treasure Hoard in Pikmin 2? There's TONS of lore, and it's really good. That's why it's so confusing when Miyamoto slashes story elements in other games.

maybe didn't have an avatar for a long time... then he got murder-stare Elise.

Integ, what's wrong with Xenoblade Chronicles that you'd rate it a 1/10?

Stylistically, yes, but not in a concrete way. I can't think of an actual object or sound effect or anything like that.

http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/splatoon/0/0 Notice that this "Iwata Asks" for Splatoon doesn't really mention Miyamoto at all. The game has two directors, and neither of them are Miyamoto. I don't think he had anything to do with this game at all besides being producer.

Actually Sticker Star was received well, with a Metascore of 75 and "generally positive reviews", which just goes to show that professional critics have no idea what they're talking about. Presentation and writing alone are not enough to make a good game - it needs an original aesthetic and deep gameplay, both areas where Sticker Star falters. In any case, Miyamoto is more of a producer than anything else nowadays. There are plenty of Nintendo games that have almost little influence from him, so I can't say he's a detriment to the company.

I fixed the poll. I could've sworn you could skip questions...

I'd like to add a couple more recommendations. Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume and Code Name S.T.E.A.M.

I've currently got a Xenoblade poll in my topic, so please give it a go. http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=59817&mode=show&page=28

My votes go to to the Advance Wars series... and Dillon's Rolling Western series, which is not an SRPG but I still think you'll like it.

Here is a poll about Xenoblade Chronicles. It sure doesn't look like a Nintendo game... but it is one... somehow. What are your thoughts on the series?