Review: Assassin's Creed Pirates (iPad)

Review by Matt S.

I'm not sure why, but the big publishers seem to struggle with coming up with compelling ways to bring their important franchises to the iPad. EA has both hits and misses in equal measure, and Activision has only made token efforts with its Call of Duty franchise.

On the other end of the spectrum is 2K Games, which is more interested in releasing premium-priced and full featured itirations of its games. Good on the producers over at 2K for that decision; it's good to see some publishers understand that there are genuine fans of gaming with iPads. Somewhere in the middle sits Ubisoft. It doesn't exactly produce AAA-games on the iPad, but what it does do is take its popular franchises and produce "mobile" titles that far exceed the normal quality of such things. Exhibit A - Rayman Jungle Run and its sequel. Not a "full" Rayman game, but a darned fine runner with all the Rayman charm packed into a small download.

Read More

Review: Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics (Wii U)

Review by Matt S.

With each new release, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic (or Winter Olympic) Games takes one more step towards becoming a generic and soulless minigame compilation. There's still fun to be had from these games, but it's easy to tell that budgets are getting smaller and ideas are running thin.

I still remember the Mario & Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games on the DS from the last Games. That one was a lot of fun with minigames that had a measure of depth to them. But then the last Summer Olympics game on the 3DS featured very few games that were worth playing more than once. Having not played one of these games on the home console before I'm happy to say the Wii U game is better than the 3DS Summer Olympics release, but can't match that DS game that I enjoyed so much as a single player experience.

But that being said the great difference between the handheld versions of these games, and the console versions, is that the console versions are that much better for multiplayer, and that makes all the difference.

Read More