Games of 2016: Avril et Mai

The spring here in Seattle was off to a warm start in early April; lots of those distracting sunny days and wonderful-smelling flowers got me to abandon games for a full 2 days. Luckily, May brought a few gifts; a very anticipated game launch, and some chilling indoor weather.

April: Rollers of the Realm (PS4), DeadStar (PS4), StarFox Zero (Wii U), more Zelda: Wind Waker HD.

DeadStar: Your actual view is much more zoomed into one sector.

The blue carrier is in over its head with the base and alien ship on the left.

One of the free April PSN titles is DeadStar, a twin-stick space shooter that goes a little deeper than its contemporaries Geometry Wars and Super Stardust HD. Each map has two teams and a number of zones, with a base in the middle. Blue team and Red team both have their own bases, and there is a neutral AI that needs to be defeated to capture the other sector. Between fighting the AI or player-controlled enemy team, you can collect resources to upgrade your outposts in each 8-20 minute battle. The short soundtrack is great, and the game has been another hit in latest free PS+ titles!

Rollers of the Realm is a bizarre blend of pinball in a medieval setting, where the balls are characters with dialogue in pretty generic fantasy story. After bouncing around the board and collecting enough mana, each character gets a special attack, like the hunter summoning his eagles, which are smaller pinballs that do a little damage. The Knight's ability blocks the fall pits, and the healer allows you to resurrect lost balls (fallen allies.)

The Arwing transforms into this walker, which isn't bad...

Controlling the hover and attached robot is stupid, though.

StarFox Zero looks like an updated StarFox 64 if you're just looking at the main tv screen. There, you'll see that typical 3rd-person, behind-the-aircraft view as cool stuff flies by you. Then, your controller starts talking to you because your aiming sucks, and you look down...holy shit, what? This game has a very unique layout: you have a cockpit view through the Wii U gamepad, and the dynamic view shifting from tv to pad is disorienting at first, with a very high learning curve. Lots of people complain about this control scheme, and it seems that the currently-unintuitive cursor re-centering is the only tweak that the game needs. I say: Nintendo, keep your control scheme and don't give in!

May: Uncharted 4 (PS4)

Last shot. The plot of the Uncharted games usually only have a childish counterpart, like The Mummy movies or National Treasure. In UC4, Nathan Drake goes on a search for pirate treasure, finding clues and solving puzzles, dodging traps and climbing along the way. Nate's best friend, Sully, and his wife Elena have sizable roles in this game, but the newest character is Nate's brother Sam. Basically, Sam got in with the wrong people and you have to find $400m of buried treasure to bail him out. Until the latest 2 Tomb Raider games, Uncharted is always set apart by its technical features.

At first glance, the graphics aren't the absolute highest resolution available on the console, but after playing, you'll start to notice the motion capture, environment physics, and backgrounds are the best in the business. Each realtime cutscene is performed in earnest, without having to suffer Nicholas Cage, but you get the benefits of animated mayhem with the important parts of realism. That means the character gets thrown through walls and things blow up, but the stunts still look authentic. The gameplay : cutscene ratio feels like 50:50 in the first half of the game, but there are so many ohh shit! moments that action junkies will get their fill. I completed the story on medium in under 20 hours, and am now combing through a second time for collectibles. Since I plan on going for the platinum trophy, I have a 6-hour speedrun and a hardest-difficulty play-through waiting for me. Uncharted games are always worth the wait and price, though Amazon helped me out at $47.99 preorder.

Safari, mother@#$^, SA-FARRR-RI!