Magic And Whimsy With A Bunny

Very rarely do games get released with an air of enchantment and charm. However, sometimes one will simply cross your path and transport you to a world you'll never wish to escape. Brace yourselves for a spectacular adventure that will seduce you with wit, simplicity and a fantasy realm that may as well rival Lewis Caroll's imagination. I courteously ask you to follow along as we hop through the looking glass that is The Night of the Rabbit.

I am overjoyed to get a chance to write even a slither about The Night of the Rabbit. This point and click adventure is a first for me. Never have I ever found myself enticed by the genre as much as I was with this game. Upon viewing several screenshots, you may find yourself swept away by the colorful and creative artwork used in this 2D realm. The colors alone will leap out from your screen and bind you to your seat, unable to gaze away. Simply put, the game is a work of art.

The plot delivers with a hint of nostalgia when games aimed to be simple and yet peppers itself with quite a few layers. At first glance, The Night of the Rabbit seems too simple be about a young boy named Jeremy Hazelnut who strikes out into the world in hopes of being a magician. He then comes across Marquis De Hoto, an anthropomorphic white rabbit who just so happens to be a magician. Your whimsical tale then begins as you shrink down and complete chores for the woodland villagers of Mousewood. It proves to be a pretty straightforward trek into the woods. However, it is quickly revealed that there are some seriously dark undertones that seep through your fantastic journey. Mysterious masked figures begin to appear in and around Mousewood. These unveiled shadows preach some encroaching darkness. They're not pleasant at the very least and will send a shiver down your spine filled with nothing but distrust. The fairytale world that has enveloped you with a carefree sense of playfulness has suddenly beckoned your aid in defending it from would-be antagonists. It's a wonderful sense of purpose that is jolted within you and truly drives you to continue through the narrative.

Additionally, the voice acting compliments the artistic style superbly. All the natives of the vast (yet actually mouse sized) world deliver their lines with top-notch quality and an appropriate array of emotions. The creepy folk sound deluded and sinister, while the happier denizens have you reminisce of the days you watched Arthur on PBS. The selling point is the characterization of the cast. Jeremy is a curious young lad and charming enough that you won't mind playing a twelve year-old. The star however is Marquis De Hoto. He is an excellent character, be it because of aesthetic design, voice casting or his role as a mentor. I find myself anxiously awaiting my next encounter with him when I had just finished the previous one. Kudos to the designer(s) of this beautifully realized character.

The game is solid gold in terms of appearance and the gameplay is what you would expect from a member of the point and click genre. I must say that some of the puzzles are pretty taxing. Perhaps it's the fact that this is my first venture into a game of this nature but I definitely had to pull out a walkthrough here and there. There's a plethora of items in the game to find and combine and some of these combinations are far from obvious. This all adds to the enjoyment of course. There's nothing that will truly impede your journey as you become the greatest magician that ever lived.

The only statement I could possibly add is that you should simply spend the couple bucks to get The Night of the Rabbit and allow yourself to get lost in its lore. It's a beautiful, enchanting experience that will take your breath away at times and, have you seek the layers of dark secrets at any other given moment. This game was brought to my attention by a dear friend and now I pass that gift on to you. Do not miss out on this wonderful little gem.

Read more »

Attack Of The Knack

I decided to take a step back from Destinythis week; not that it isn't the only thing I've been playing recently. I really had a hankering to play some co-op Knack, so I thought this would be my best opportunity to talk about this PS4 launch title.

When the PS4 launched, I had saved up quite a bit of cash and ended up with 4-5 launch titles; easily the most I've ever had at launch. Surprisingly enough, Knack was actually the game I put the most time into—that's right, not Killzone or Battlefield 4, but Knack. It was a cute little action-platformer from the brain child that brought us the original Crash Bandicoot, so why wouldn't it be fun? And let me tell you, fun it was!

Knack, unfortunately, got horribly unfavorable reviews when it was released—The Metacritic is currently sitting at 54, which considering this isn't school means the game is rather mediocre—and because of this, I feel as though many people over looked it, when in reality it was an entertaining experience. Many of the complaints stemmed from a lack of variety in the combat, something which I wholeheartedly disagree with. In terms of Knacks abilities, yes, he has his basic combo and not too much else...But what do you expect? This isn’t Ninja Gaiden or God of War. This is something in line with Crash Bandicoot. The reason I disagree with other peoples' “lack of variety” comment is because the enemies are what bring the variety. There was a large cast of enemies, and even when they started repeating, they always threw different combinations of enemies at you forcing you to approach each situation differently.

My ranting aside, I also played this game to 100% completion: That is to say I did not just beat the game, but also got a platinum trophy for it. At the time I was streaming games and Knack brought in the views so I kept playing it. On the road to the platinum, I beat Knack about 4 times, give or take (can't really remember) and considering this was a platformer, the game had some length to it. Normally you would expect something like 6-10 hours on a first go, but the fact that it clocked in around 12-15 was rather surprising. Of course around my 3rd and 4th time beating the game, I was able to complete it in about 6-7 hours since I was so familiar with it.

Graphically, the game might not have pushed the PS4 to its limits—no launch title ever does—but the models were crisp and clean. Personally I thought they were fantastic. They were highly stylized and it reminded me of a Pixar movie. What did push the system, and the reason they claimed Knack could not have been made on the PS3, were the visual effects. The main character was essentially one gigantic physics simulation, and when he used special moves, all the little pieces he was made out of went ballistic. It was a wonder to see.

Boosting this game even further is the fact that you can play it with 2 players. Originally I touched upon this briefly with a few friends just to test it out. It was fun and it makes Knack a lot more manageable on the harder difficulties (not that it was overly difficult for me, but some people online complained about the difficulty). If you have someone that doesn't normally play video games, 2-player Knack is definitely something to help them get started.

At the time when I was streaming this, everyone would come into the stream and ask me if Knack was worth a purchase. My reply was and still is: Yes! but not at the price it was at launch. Fortunately when I bought it, I had a coupon for EB games that saved me 20 bucks. So instead of paying $60 for it, I only had to dish out $40—math! At$40 Knack is very much worth it. The game is fun, challenging and has a lengthy campaign with great visuals that you can enjoy with a friend. Personally I think anyone that owns a PS4 should at least try it out. Borrow it from a friend, I don't care. It's worth the time!

Read more »

TBT - It's Turtle Time

I will always have fond memories of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT), in any format really. But when I think about some of their video games, two come most readily to mind: The original TMNT game for the NES, and Turtles in Timeon the SNES—the former being hard as balls, and the latter being an absolutely amazing arcade game.

A Turtle Who Couldn't Swim

When the original TMNT game was out and about on the Nintendo Entertainment System, I was a mere child, easily under 10. Of course like any kid my age growing up in the 90's, the Turtles were all over TV and I loved them to no end (I probably would still be interested if the entertainment industry didn't butcher the series to high hell). I was compelled to play this game, but man, did I need help.

The first zone was never actually that hard: you go through a few sewers, which were all 2D platforming sections with some combat, until you hit the bosses who were Bebop and Rock Steady—such awesome names, if I only got the reference when I was a kid haha.

Now the hard part came immediately after this during an underwater scene. The Turtles had to disarm all these bombs set to go off and destroy...a dam, I think? Who cares, it was soooooo god damn hard. All the walls had these, like, electrical barbs attached to them, and they all did quite a bit of damage. Suffice to say my experience with games at the time was not sufficient enough for me to beat it, so I always passed it off to one of my cousins.

Fortunately after this horrible segment, you got to drive around in the sweet ass Turtle Van and shoot rockets at things. Best part of the game. Shortly after this I would run out of lives and have to restart, never really getting any further than this, but whatever, I was young, I had fun.

Time After Time

That said, Turtles in Time was a king among games, especially at the time. The controls were tight and the game had support for two players, which was the way to play no doubt. As far as the gameplay goes it was a standard arcade beat em' up: you choose a character and traverse the stages one at a time, pounding enemies and destroying a boss at the end of each zone.

I have two solid memories of this game. The first happens to be the very first stage: The location was a construction site, and you were walking along the top of these girders of an unfinished building. The boss was this weird mutant fly-man...it was messed up haha.

The second memory goes right to the ability to throw enemies into the screen! The game never really had any instructions, so you had to figure out how to do this move on your own, but it was paramount that you did. See shortly into the game you go up against Shredder who is safely tucked away inside this massive mech and the only way to get at him was to throw Footmen at him. I think it was a pretty iconic moment in the game, easily a strong memory for all who had the pleasure of trying out Turtles in Time.

It’s Pizza Time

Both games were a lot of fun, even if I never got very far in the NES version. One day the series may return to its former glory; maybe it won’t. In any case I will always have memories of the games as they were. And who knows, maybe someone will do the same for TMNT like what Rocksteady did for Batman?

Read more »

Link-ing My Worlds

Hello, my name is Alex. I am actually the younger brother of Adam and long time friend of everyone on the Basement Gamer. A little bit about me: I've been playing games from a very young age, as long as I can remember, really. The NES we had was hooked up in my parents' bedroom, so my brother and I couldn't play it 100% of the time. Then we got a SNES and I was only a 5 year old little kid or so, without the dexterity to complete any game on my own.

2 Years later when N64 was made available, I remember the day we got that from our local store, I think we bought it from Blockbuster at the time. I couldn't even tell you honestly. But oh! It wasa glorious day when we went home and popped in Super Smash Brothers. Holy hell did we pump hours upon hours into that console, much like everybody else in the late '90s. Not to mention Mario Kart and then... The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and 007 Goldeneye. Fast forward over 15 years of gaming and here we are today.

But I'm not here to talk about the good ol' days. No no! Not today. Today I'm here to talk to you about The Legend of Zelda, but not Ocarina...sadly. On this day I'll talk about the most recent addition to the franchise. Nintendo originally started developing it as a remake for one of the most iconic Super NES games of all time, A Link to the Past, which was later decided to be made into a completely new game, with fresh mechanics never before seen in the franchise, labeled "A Link Between Worlds".

My first thoughts while playing this game were, "Alright, so they're mixing A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time". That is to say they took the best aspects of the bird's eye view Zelda games and the Third Person Zelda games, both of which have been blended absolutely amazingly. Where the other DS Zelda titles had you doing these gimmicky touch screen commands—such as drawing the path of the boomerang, etc—the developers instead made the touch screen your User Interface, where you change your items, look at your map, so on and so forth. All of which can be done in real time or by pausing the game as is customary in Zelda games. Then we come to the actual gameplay which is executed as you'd expect: everything is smooth and fantastic.

A couple of things I welcomed with open arms, much to my eventual dismay. Firstly, being that they added the possibility to play on a harder difficulty. This is where my frustration began. The first 8 hours of playtime was just me dying over and over again in every single situation. Previously, I very rarely died playing any Zelda game. Most of my deaths in previous titles were attributed to not paying any attention to my health or simply dying strictly during boss fights. This is no longer the case on the harder difficulty, and it's not because of smarter enemies, more difficult enemies, or even just more enemies. No; the harder difficulty was simply Link taking more damage. But not just more damage, no, thatwould be too simple. It is a ridiculous amount of damage. Simply put, a basic octorok deals about 4 hearts of damage, something a little bit stronger like a Crab would do about 8 hearts of damage. So any dungeon monster deals about 8 hearts of damage give or take 4. The only time you can ever take less than 4 hearts of damage is when you accidentally hurt yourself. So until you're 4 or 5 dungeons in, when you get 9 hearts, everything kills you in one hit. This wouldn't be such an awful and frustrating thing if the other new mechanic introduced didn't exist.

The other mechanic is the fact that you no longer get important items in the dungeon and therefore keep your items after you acquire them. No, this installment introduces a merchant who basically steals your home and turns it into his store, then allows you to rent any item of your choosing. You choose whichever items are your favorite and run with those until you die and the merchant takes them back. So couple that with dying at every corner, and you get the time consuming and annoying lap race that is: Rent your items at your house, walk to a dungeon trying not to die along the way, enter the dungeon and try to progress to the boss, try to defeat the boss, but probably die along the way, respawn at your house and repeat.

Luckily this isn't actually as bad as I'm making it out to be for one reason. That being said, you meet a witch early on in the game who allows you to fast travel to certain statues that you can activate, which also act as save points. These statues are excellently placed directly in front of almost every single dungeon as well as all over the world map. This made my trips back to the dungeons much faster after dying. However, once you unlock the ability to purchase and keep items even beyond death, the entire problem dissipates and the game becomes even more amazing.

All in all, A Link Between Worlds is fantastic and I am enjoying every minute of it . I'm finding myself unable to put down my 3DS, even as I write this I have my trusty Link Between Worlds box in my pocket ready to be taken out and continue my quest. Like a good book, it is always at my side. 

Read more »

The Calm Before The Storm

I'm in a sort of a lull at the moment, which was bound to happen sooner or later. Being an early adopter of the PS4, there eventually just isn't any games to play, Brandon even talked about it a couple of weeks ago...on the bright side at least I've actually beaten the games I bought, which is a little unprecedented for me.

If you want to compare launch window games (the window being the first 6 months within a console’s release) of the PS4 with the PS3, well the considerable edge goes right to the PS4. I can't even remember what I played on the PS3 outside of Virtua Fighter 5, Resistance: Fall of Man and Motorstorm...oh and Gundam: Cross Fire (haha, gotta get one of those Gundam games in there). Meanwhile on the PS4 I've already beaten games like: Knack, Thief, Assassin's Creed IV, inFamous and Tomb Raider. On top of those games, there were indie titles like Outlast, Resogun—which reminds me, I played a ton of Super Stardust on the PS3—and Don't Starve. That isn't all though. Games I didn't beat yet include the likes of Killzone and Battlefield 4.

Suffice to say the launch of the PS4 was pretty satisfying for me. The only problem now is that it's May and nothing gets released around now. I was looking at the upcoming releases for the next month or so and its slim pickings.

MayWe Have Games?

Here are a few of the more notable games releasing in the coming weeks:

A new Wolfenstein game is releasing on the 20th of May, and it does actually look pretty fun, but then I noticed it has no multiplayer...who in their right mind releases an arcade first person shooter(FPS) with no multiplayer? I don't care so much when 3rd person shooters come out with no multiplayer (they tend to be more story-driven then FPS's anyway), but Tomb Raider still had multiplayer, even if it was a load of crap. Some may argue that removing the multiplayer and focusing on the single player is the way to go, and in some cases yes, but I just can't see it in an FPS. Maybe developers have hard wired it out of me, but unless this game is like 15-20 hours, I can't really justify paying $60-70 for it when I don't have the added luxury of a multiplayer mode to extend my stay—even if it was crap, I could still sink 5-10 hours into it. I'll probably pick it up cheap next year sometime.

Also releasing on the 20th, Transistor is probably the most note worthy game coming out in this dismal time period. Developed by Supergiant Games, who are of Bastion fame, Transistor is easily the most buzz-worthy indie title to be coming to the PS4 since the console’s release, at least in my opinion. Simply put, Transistor is an action-RPG, with 2D graphics that look fantastic. And if the soundtrack follows what was heard in the launch trailer, it's going to be a hit. At the moment, Supergiant Games has a proven track record (I'm sure they can continue it).

Watch Dogs is actually releasing on the 27th of May, which easily has the biggest budget this month, but I feel as though the hype train has left the station with this one. I can't really put my finger on it, but last year this game had tons of momentum. Then it got delayed as a launch title and poof, haven't really heard much. I'll still pick it up, but I'm not really sure what to expect.

Last up, Square-Enix is publishing this really weird/interesting action-adventure mystery game on June 3rd. It's called Murdered: Soul Suspect. In it, you control Detective Ronan O'Connor who gets brutally killed right off the bat. Ronan then returns as a ghost and now you must help him try to solve his own murder so he may continue his journey to the afterlife. To be honest, I'm going off a gut feeling here. I've looked at a trailer or two, not sure what the gameplay is like either, but it sounds interesting and is different to say the least. I'll probably pick it up barring it gets horrendous reviews—it very well could considering the people behind Dark Void are developing it.

In E3 We Trust

The only real saving grace about this time period is that E3 is just around the corner! In a mere three weeks time, we will be like kids in a candy store...or at least the fat kids salivating on the windows outside.

I can't wait to see what the press conferences bring this year. Sony and Microsoft always go toe to toe and it's pretty entertaining to see how the internet reacts to it all. If either of them can get Rockstar to divulge something on stage, everyone will go nuts. Nintendo doesn't really join in on E3 anymore; at least not over the last few years. Instead what they opt to do is host their own little event where they pretty much do the same thing...apparently E3 was too expensive and loud for them. Whatever, as long as we get to hear about some new games, who cares how they do it! They just better actually bring something to the table *cough* Pokemon RPG on the Wii U, or at least something interesting for that damn console. I hate having to feign interest in it all the time, just give me something to care about!

I won't really make any predictions per say, but what I really want is to hear about the new Kingdom Hearts game, and Final Fantasy XV from Square-Enix. I've always been a huge fan of Square's games, and both of these games are being made by the same development team, which I love, so I have high hopes!

Outside of that, there are still an excess of games I want to get some news on: Star Wars Battlefront 3, Tom Clancy's The Divison, that Sci Fi Call of Duty game, Destiny, Halo 5 and Sony even has that new virtual reality head set to show off. The build up to E3 is usually unbearably long and I don't see it being any shorter this year.

Read more »