Most of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3’s story chapters are lengthy affairs filled with enemies to fight, puzzles to solve, characters to recruit, and multiple boss battles. Chapter seven, set in the moon-based Inhuman city of Attilan, is a ten-minute trip to the most boring place in the Marvel universe. Of all of Marvel’s properties, the Inhumans have had the hardest time breaking out of comic books into more mainstream media. The Inhumans movie was announced in 2014, then canned. It became a 2017 television series, which was laughably bad. The only time the Inhumans have been entertaining outside of comics is in ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series, and that’s because the show never went Attilan to hang out with the Inhuman royal family. Chapter seven of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 sees our assembled heroes doing just that: stopping by Attilan to hang out with the Inhuman royal family. At the urging of Crystal, an Inhuman who joins the team earlier in the game, the alliance seeks Attilan’s...
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A lot of the Mario Maker levels that go viral are pretty universally deranged. They’re usually levels made in the “kaizo” style, impossibly hard courses for expert-level Mario players to speedrun. It’s easy to see why these are widely shared online: We like spectacle. Mario games are easy to parse—a tiny plumber is running from left to right, and wow, all this stuff is sure trying to kill him! “Master Negotiator” is nothing like that. Its description, by creator Nick Fox, reads: “Negotiate with the goomba, be patient.” As far as viral Mario Maker levels go, it’s not terribly exciting. You start in front of two doors. One’s locked and leads to your goal, the other is open and leads into a house. Inside the house, there’s a Goomba shuffling back and forth on one end of a makeshift table. “Sit down” with the Goomba long enough, and he’ll eventually give you the key you need to finish. I love “Master Negotiator,” not because it’s terribly fun to play—you just sit there for a little less th...
I’ve been playing Super Mario games since the first Super Mario Bros. came out on the NES. I think I’m pretty good at them. However, whenever I see masters like GrandPOOBear playing demonically difficult Super Mario Maker courses, I question the richness of my childhood. In the interest of officially kicking off my midlife crisis, I beseeched GrandPOOBear to coach me in the ways of Mario. He agreed. Welcome to my Super Mario Makeover. Were this to become a series, the idea is simple: in each episode, GrandPOOBear presents me a custom-made Super Mario Maker 2 level precision-engineered to drill my skills in one particularly tricky speedrun technique. He will coach me until I beg for mercy. When the video ends, my pain continues: in my spare time, I’ll practice the technique. In the following episode, I’ll show GrandPOOBear my progress, bask in his approval, and then immediately suffer his next challenge. If somehow this process continues for 10 years, I will have become GrandPOOBear. Fo...
Platforms: Xbox One, PS4, PC Reviewed On: PC Developer: Fatshark Publisher: Fatshark Singleplayer: Yes Multiplayer: Yes Review code supplied free of charge by the publisher. Let me preface this review by stating that I didn’t play the first Vermintide game. I had a few chums slicing and dicing the Skaven hordes, but I never found the time to pick up the Left 4 Dead style game set in the Warhammer universe for myself, so this review of the sequel is coming from the perspective of a new player wondering what all the fuss is about. Thankfully you don’t need to have played the first game to have an absolute blast with Vermintide 2; all you need is a desire to shatter some skulls. So here’s the general idea; you pick from one of five characters and then team up with three other folks to scoot through levels that are positively overflowing with rat creatures known as the Skaven and humans who have been corrupted by the forces of Chaos. You work together, you kill a lot of stuff, you...
Platforms: PC Reviewed On: PC Developer: Microlith Games Publisher: Microlith Games Singleplayer: Yes Multiplayer: No Review code provided free of charge by the developers Ah, zombies. When in doubt zombies are the answer to a developer’s lack of creativity. Whenever you can’t come up with something unique or even just a fun spin on the standard zombie theme you can simply pile a bunch of generic shamblers into a level, give the player a gun and call it a day. That honestly feels like what happened to Microlith Games, the developers of Dead Purge: Outbreak. The first thing I noticed when firing up Dead Purge was LCD screens emblazoned with the words, “Office Pack.” Yes, Dead Purge uses a number of assets bought directly from various stores, and the developers seemingly didn’t even bother to alter the screens scattered around the Police Station level. However, to the developer’s credit they have at least been upfront about their use of purchased assets on the Steam forums, thei...
Super Mario Maker 2 has been out more than enough time for the most prolific creators to create tons of strange story missions, Kaizo deathtraps, and classic homages. It’s also been out for enough time to reach the course creation limit. Super Mario Maker 2 is doubling that limit, allowing players to make more courses. As heard through Eurogamer and confirmed by a quick peek into Super Mario Maker 2's notifications tab, the number of courses that players can upload has been increased from 32 to 64 levels. That’s twice the fun and twice the chances to have some fancy livestreamer stumble upon your level. The notification also states that there are plans to raise that upload limit one more time. Will that mean 128 total courses? Hopefully it’s not just 65 or some other super strange number. Still, this increase is good news for dedicated Mario makers who want to entertain and frustrate the masses with their levels.