On this, the one-hundred and fifty-seventh episode of Barrel Roll, Jonah and Jesse are on their own. It’s up to the two of them to talk about video games and attempt to keep you edutained.

The Portal 2 authoring tools dropped, and both the guys have been playing around with them. They go into the good and bad of using it with no prior design experience. On the board game front, Jonah picked up a copy of Tetris Link, which is kind of broken but has the potential to be really fun. Jonah also finally got his own copy of Kid Icarus Uprising, which leads to talk of multiplayer, and leads Jesse down a dark path of discussing the original Kid Icarus, which he was playing via the 3D Classics edition.

Since there hadn’t been nearly enough wizard talk in a while, Jonah brings up the Civ V styled wizard strategy game Warlock – Master of the Arcane, and the obscure end of the world, flashlight based Wii game Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon.

All this and more on Barrel Roll #157, “Is that Snake Coming on to Me?”

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I do not like the original Kid Icarus. I didn’t like it in its heyday and I didn’t like it when I played the recent 3D Classics downloadable version. So make no mistake that when I say I absolutely adore Kid Icarus Uprising on the 3DS, it is in no way related to nostalgia.

That said, I adore this game.

Like the original’s mix of Ice Climbers-esque platforming, Metroid-like exploration, and shmup style final stage, Kid Icarus Uprising divides its time between a few game types. For the most part, stages start with you flying around as Pit in a third person rail shooter that plays like Sin & Punishment: Star Successor practically verbatim. These sections never waste a moment of your time. Every second is a roller-coaster of arcade action.

The sky stages are tuned to the nth degree. Between the highly deliberate camera work, the huge variety of environments, the comedic dialogue, and the non-looping music (perfectly matching the onscreen action), each and every moment won’t rest until it makes sure you’re entertained on multiple levels.

With so many aspects manufactured to play out in a precise way, it’s an impressive feat that multiple playthroughs are not only encouraged, but incredibly satisfying. No, they’re not mandatory. But with a highly scalable difficulty system tied to an addicting risk/reward loot system, I found myself voluntarily replaying stages before I had even finished the game.

Ground stages shed the shmup-like nature of their rail-oriented counterparts allowing freedom to explore. While the individual ideas feel familiar, their combination is unlike any game I can think of. The immediacy of rail-shooter aiming is retained, but within the free camera, open level structure of a traditional action game.

This strange amalgam of gameplay styles admittedly takes some getting use to. But after about two or three stages, I was able to shoot, melee, and dodge roll around with relative ease. After a bit of practice, I was even able to maneuver the camera to any point almost instantaneously with the momentum based stylus controls. Of course, with such an atypical control scheme to match this fairly unique style of play, it will take some longer than others to master.

Difficulty can be set anywhere between 1.0 and 9.0 (decimals!). Setting it above 2.0 will force you to gamble hearts (the game’s currency). Win a stage without dying and you’ll reap huge rewards. Die and you’ll lose a portion of the hearts you bet along with the shame of having the difficulty set back down a level before dropping you off at the checkpoint.

"Boss battles are short, but fun while they last."

Playing at higher difficulties not only awards more hearts, but also lets you access more secret areas in the ground stages and gives you access to more loot. You can customize Pit with a Tetris grid of items and an absurd arsenal of weapons divided into nine classes including gunblades, cannons, bows, giant clubs, and Gradius-like options. You can even fuse weapons together while retaining passive skills from each, meaning even two of the exact same weapon can have different abilities (which you can share with your friends over street pass). We’re talking Sin & Punishment meets Borderlands here.

Aside from better loot motivating you to play stages on higher difficulties, they also come in handy during multiplayer. Free for all is a bit too chaotic, but the team mode titled “Light vs. Dark” is actually rather clever and quite fun. To level the playing field, each weapon is given a numerical value. The stronger the weapon you have, the more health your team will lose when you die. Once your team’s health is depleted, one member will turn into Pit (or Dark Pit) and attempt to wreak havoc. Once the powered up hero/villain dies, their team loses.

But in addition to just being incredibly fun, Kid Icarus Uprising is also bursting at the seams with personality. Like Star Fox before it, there’s constant chatter as you progress through each stage. The twist, though, is that it’s an over-the-top, fourth-wall-breaking comedy hell bent on making you smile at every turn.

"Sometimes you have a motorcycle that shoots lasers because why the hell not?"

It also never relies too much on its origins. Sure, you’ll take on Medusa and her minions at first, but that’s merely a prologue (which, despite the familiar faces, is also filled with imaginative new locales). Within a short time, you’ll be flying into moon bases, crossing dimensions, and fighting a boss while simultaneously racing unicorns in space. And during it all, you’ll hear the amazing score of Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Trigger), Yuzo Koshiro (Streets of Rage), and other game music legends.

If it sounds like this is a big game, that’s because it is. To give you a frame of reference, Sin & Punishment: Star Successor featured a meaty seven stages. Kid Icarus Uprising has twenty-five, nearly all of which consist of both a sky stage and ground stage, making it feel closer to fifty. Frankly, with the amount of content the genre has trained me to expect over the years, this feels like two or three games worth of material.

With Kid Icarus Uprising, Nintendo has created something that feels new and fresh despite using an old brand to do it. It’s full of old-school, arcade action combined with modern ideas and polish. I hold it along side favorites like Star Fox 64 knowing full well that I’ll go back and play it over and over instead of shelving it indefinitely like so many other modern games. The learning curve of the ground combat will pose a challenge for some, but Kid Icarus Uprising is worth it and easily the best the 3DS has to offer so far.

This review is based on a copy of Kid Icarus Uprising for the 3DS purchased by the reviewer.

Confession time: I prefer Robert Kirkman’s Invincible to The Walking Dead. While both works have their merit, I’m much more interested in aliens & superheroes than zombies & human drama. Please don’t mistake my opening statement as an attempt to come off as Mr. Hater of Popular Things; I just wanted you all to know where my head was that as I launched Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead: A New Day for the first time.

Rather than playing as someone previously introduced in the series, Telltale’s game drops you into the shoes of an alleged murderer named Lee Everett (though some familiar faces do cross your path occasionally). In the game’s opening scene, you are being escorted to prison by a Georgia lawman. This occurs on opening day of the zombie apocalypse so, as you might have guessed, you and the lawman are unable to complete your journey.

The police cruiser ends up in a ditch, the lawman ends up turning into a zombie, and you end up running for your life. You encounter a young, parentless girl named Carmen shortly after your crash and offer to take her under your care until her parents return.

The first new gameplay mechanic you’ll encounter is a timed-response dialog system. You are presented with a handful of responses and given only a few seconds to pick one; if you run out of time, you stay silent, which can affect how a character feels about you. Their opinions of you also change based on the many life-and-death decisions you’re forced to make throughout episode one. A New Day is the first Telltale project in which decisions matter; I’m very excited to see how my actions play out over the next four episodes.

Telltale’s last attempt to shake up their model, Jurassic Park: The Game, drew much ire from fans & critics. Thankfully, they retired the quick time events of their previous effort and replaced them with streamlined versions of traditional point-and-click mechanics. When your cursor touches an item of interest, a dot appears that you may click  to interact with or select the appropriate inventory item to use on it. Not having a cluttered inventory to sort through is quite wonderful. The sparse action sequences in “A New Day” are the only things that harken back to Jurassic Park: The Game. However, in their current modified form, they are much more enjoyable.

Every other aspect of the game – voice acting, art style, pacing – is top notch. As only a casual fan of The Walking Dead, I’m quite surprised that I enjoyed the game so much. It, unlike the television series, has piqued my interest in revisiting Kirkman’s books, if only to kill time until the game’s next episode releases. Who, outside of indie developers with sweet beards, knew human drama could make for engaging gameplay?

This review is based on the PC version of The Walking Dead: A New Day provided to the reviewer by Telltale Games.

Now that I’m a parent, my time for gaming has dwindled, which is to be expected. When I am looking at new releases, I try to find games that provide a fun and unique experience. I definitely found what I was looking for in Journey.

If you were going to break down Journey to its basic mechanics, you could say that it is a 3D platformer. The problem with that categorization is that it sells the game short. Journey is about your own sense of discovery and your personal experiences on the way to the top of a distant mountain.

It doesn’t accomplish this in the way that I would have thought. It isn’t an open world game, which generally lend themselves to the kind of spontaneous, crazy experiences you tell your friends about. Journey provides levels to explore, but it also does something incredibly clever with its multiplayer component. As you make your way toward the mountain, you will encounter other people playing the game on their own journeys. What keeps this from devolving into the standard internet name-calling and hate speak from your random partner is that you can’t actually speak to each other, but you can communicate.

Your only communication comes in the form of a musical chirping sound that you can tap to give the other player an idea of what you are trying to accomplish. This lead to an interesting phenomenon when I was playing. Usually when I’ve played with random other people in games, nearly all of them try to take the roll of the leader. There are plenty of “over here’s” and “this way, stupid” (only not always in as nice of language). This keeps my interest level in playing with random strangers in most games from minimum to non-existent.

My experience in Journey was quite different. As I was exploring, my random companions would often chirp to show me where a hidden room was. Rather than trying to forcefully make other players do what you want to do, it quickly became a collaborative process to explore and show your new friend interesting things you have found. It also helped me communicate back when farther into the game my companion was stuck on how to progress up the frozen mountain peaks.

I am of the opinion that graphics aren’t everything, but Journey does its best to prove me wrong. It showed me that having HD graphics and beautifully rendered landscapes can be a huge factor in a game’s enjoyment. thatgamecompany used the power of the PS3 to show off a world of endless deserts, snowy mountain peaks, and a sunken city that gives the impression of being underwater. Your robed character encounters other creatures that appear to be made of cloth that flutter on the wind. You and your creature friends can help each other fly around the landscapes in ways I was not expecting. The sense of movement you feel when flying around Journey‘s landscapes or sliding down its many dunes gives you a sense of freedom and exploration that you don’t often get. It made for a sense of wonder and scale that I hadn’t felt since playing Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.

Journey looks great and plays great. It is a unique experience and, while brief, is one that gamers should have. Even after completing it, I find myself thinking about the game often. If you are a PS3 owner, you owe it to yourself to give Journey a try.

This review is based on the PlayStation 3 version of Journey purchased by the reviewer.

On this, the one-hundred and fifty-sixth excursion into Barrel Roll country, Jesse and Jonah are joined by the internet’s own Michael Bachmann. While Mike was off playing the Diablo III open beta, Jonah and Jesse spent time with the Dragon’s Dogma demo and character creator. Jesse has also finished up Kid Icarus: Uprising while Jonah played through Journey.

There is discussion of Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, as well as Bizarro Shenmue, which isn’t a real game, but probably should be.

Getting back to games we actually played, Jesse breaks down Ridge Racer Unbounded and it’s strange drifting mechanics. Jonah started in on The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition on the Xbox 360 while Mike completed the first chapter of The Walking Dead adventure game from Telltale. All this and more on Barrel Roll #156, “Bizarro Shenmue”.

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Have you been enjoying the latest Ubiktune albums we’ve posted about? In just a few days, there will be another. May 3rd marks the release of tracer, the solo debut of yogurtbox’s coda. But before its release, you can hear the pay-what-you-want album in the Noise Channel listening party. Check out the Facebook event page for details.

Source: Ubiktune

While the overall focus leans more toward jazz, Yamane’s contributions are distinctly reminiscent of her previous works. “The Fish Man’s Dance” sounds like it could have been pulled straight from Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin while tracks like “The Lives We Left Behind” and “Skull Heart Arrhythmia” trigger other memories of her work on the series (in the best possible way).

But it wouldn’t be fair to talk about the Skullgirls soundtrack without mentioning the score’s other contributors. You’ll also hear music from Vincent Diamante (Flower), Blaine McGurty, and Brenton Kossak. Diamante’s “Shenanigans and Goings-Ons” in particular is a short, but sweet track that has an upbeat, swing feel to it.

You can find the Skullgirls soundtrack on both Amazon ($8.99) and iTunes ($9.99).

Buy the Soundtrack: Amazon MP3 / iTunes

Some people would like to believe I record this podcast up in a tree fort with a cardboard sign on the door that reads, “No vocals allowed.” To them I present the sixth episode of the game music podcast, Sound in Action. 100% vocals. 100% awesome.

In this episode I take a look at vocal tracks from games as obscure as the cancelled version of Ragnarok Online 2 to as publicly appreciated as the indie darling, Bastion. There’s an unintentional consistency in style between many of the tracks, but music from Gravity Rush, Xenosaga II, and NieR come to the rescue with their wonderfully unusual sound.

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This episode features:

1. Intro Theme from Ragnarok Online 2: The Gate of the World Buy
2. Douse Shinundakara from Gravity Rush Buy
3. Grandma from NieR Buy
4. fatal fight (Jin & Margulis) from Xenosaga II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse Buy
5. Sound of the Wind from Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles Buy
6. Setting Sail, Coming Home from Bastion Buy
7. Everlasting Words from Monster Hunter Tri Buy
8. Tragic Marionette from Makai Senki Disgaea Arrange Soundtrack Buy
9. The Best is Yet to Come from Metal Gear Solid Buy

This week on show, Jonah and Jesse are joined by two returning champions of guest hosting, Adam Milecki, who may or may not be a robot, and Wesley Johnson. After shooting the breeze about remix contest and albums you should definitely go check out, they get right into the video games discussion.

First up is Skullgirls, the indie fighting game from Autumn Games that dropped on XBLA and PSN last week. Then Adam and Jesse have an in-depth discussion on Kid Icarus: Uprising. After the break we unfortunately lose Adam due to his suddenly getting down with the sickness. But the show must go on and Jesse gives his thoughts on Asura’s Wrath and how much he wishes there was a game there. Jonah has actually played a new game, Legend of Grimrock, even though it plays like an old game. He also finally gave in and bought the Rock Band 3 keyboard bundle he has been putting off since the game’s initial release nearly two years ago. Before he falls asleep (it was approaching 2am on his end), Wes gives us his thoughts on Fallout: New Vegas.

All this and more random banter on Barrel Roll #155 – “Adam is (Probably) A Robot”.

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Who is responsible for unleashing this funky bombshell? Not one, but sixteen different artists from around the world. There’s even some names you’ve undoubtedly heard on this site before including Joshua Morse (Castlevania: Sonata of the Damned), C-jeff (Preschtale), Shnabubula (Game Genie), and virt (Mighty Switch Force, Bloodrayne Betrayal).

But even the names that didn’t ring a bell caught my eyes (and ears) as SOUNDSHOCK 2 is bliss from beginning to end. Moot Boxie’s “Chomp” gave me flashbacks to ToeJam & Earl. The vocal work of Aya Futatsuki on “Machine Wave” reminded me of a funky opening to an early 90′s anime series. Bomb Boy’s “Back Alley Clash” took me on a six and a half minute aural adventure with its constantly building pace. And don’t get me started on coda’s “Megabits per Second” whose hooks are so catchy they only took a single listen to burrow into my brain for permanent residence.

Oh, and it’s free. You could be listening right now. You should be listening right now. Why are you still here? Make it happen.

Source: Ubiktune