Nintendo 3DS Game Recommendations | mariteaux

[#] HarmoKnight (Nintendo, 2013)

Runs, jumps, and occasionally stumbles.

Game Freak is known for making kinda sorta the same game over and over but worse, so I suppose I should credit them for the occasional experiment. HarmoKnight is a rhythm-runner-platformer, which might bring eerie visions of Vib-Ribbon to the front of some of your minds, and that's not a terrible point of reference. You play Tempo, a boy with a staff tasked with jumping, dodging, and attacking through brief stages set to music. Enemies will spawn on-beat. You'll navigate obstacles on beat. Each stage is graded on how many musical notes you can collect, and friends will swap with Tempo occasionally to do, well, mostly those same things.

Getting the gripes out of the way, HarmoKnight is more indebted to the music than most rhythm games. Unlike Vib, there's few visual cues, and when the timing can be unforgiving and the game adds more buttons into the mix and you really need to hit at just the right time to be rewarded with a note or to not get hit, you don't feel like HarmoKnight is helping you out much. The bosses require literal perfection to get gold on their stages, and I just don't have the patience for that. Also, whoever made the A button attack and the B button jump is an actual gimp. Literal decades of muscle memory have established that one as "jump" and that one as "attack", and when you need to have impulse-level timing, yes, it can get very irritating!

On the better end of things, HarmoKnight is cute, the 3D effect well-executed, and controls aside, thoughtfully put together. I really like the background instrument flowers you can smack for extra notes and how they act as ghost notes to keep you on beat. Stages are short and breezy if you're not aiming for perfection, and it saves after each one, so it's really easy to pick up for twenty minutes when you're bored. There is a story about saving the world from "Noizoids", but it's not very unique, nor are any of the characters all that noteworthy (ha). I wouldn't call the music super memorable either, but it's upbeat and easy enough to follow for gameplay purposes. It's not perfect, but if you're not aiming for perfection, give it a good spin.

[#] Ultimate NES Remix (Nintendo, 2013)

You can't get kids to eat asparagus by putting it in a cake.

You'd think Ultimate NES Remix would be my favorite game on the 3DS. I like retro games; this is all about retro games. I'm allergic to long games; this breaks games up into 30 second chunks. I like Dr. Mario; you can play Dr. Mario. Shit, I've spent other reviews on here evangelizing RetroAchievements, where the goal is similar in rewarding you for deep diving into and getting good at old-school vidya. That's only taking on one game at a time, though. To be completely fair to Ultimate NES Remix, I definitely have gotten lots of on-and-off play with it since installing it to my system NAND, and it's a cool idea with good execution. It's more of my own blind spot for the games of this era that keeps me muted on it.

Ultimate, like the NES Remix games that preceded it on the Wii U, train you in various NES games through short missions—completing stages in Super Mario, defeating enemies in Kid Icarus, boxing your wiry ass off in Punch Out!!. Your completion time gives you stars, which in enough numbers grant access to Remix stages where these games get shaken up in bizarre fashion. Mario now lives in a slippery ice world, or the stage is invisible. Link rescues Pauline from Donkey Kong instead of Jumpman and still can't jump. Kirby can't exhale. It's quirky, it's clever, the emulation is spot-on, and provided you like the game you're playing already, like I did with Dr. Mario and Balloon Fight, you'll go through all the stages quick.

"Provided you like the game you're playing" is the load-bearing phrase there. If you think Donkey Kong is a clunky mess where the game is only difficult because of the asshole jumping mechanics, NES Remix will not change your mind. If you find Zelda II dull as shit, NES Remix won't make it sparkle. This all might sound obvious, but when a game you already don't like goes from "dogshit unfair physics and enemies" to "dogshit unfair physics and enemies but now you can only see what's directly around you", you'll be skipping over large chunks of content (and the reward for completing everything isn't all that great anyway). NES diehards will be a pig in shit with this, but everyone else might be better off sticking with the Virtual Console releases of their favorites.