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Nintendo’s Design Fu is Strong

Wii U hardwareI have been using my Wii U a lot recently. It has pushed me into finally finishing a few games that I have been meaning to beat for a while; Golden Sun, Earthbound, and Super Mario Galaxy. The Wii U also has me playing new games. I never play “new” games! I usually wait until the games are at least 20% off and even then I don’t actually play the games until 5 or 6 years later. But, one game got me back into dat new shit.

Mario Kart 8 got me to buy a full priced, sixty dollar game – my eternal resting place is experiencing a cold front, I believe. I have been having a lot of fun with MK8. Today, after getting home from work, I downloaded the Mercedes DLC pack and have been having fun with those new additions to the game – some new tires and 3 Mercedes cars. Even though I haven’t been that excited for this free content, it’s a good decision to have this kind of alliance for NIntendo. I would like to see more collaborations like this for Nintendo.

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What Does Watch Dogs Mean to Ubisoft?

Watch Dogs gameplay trailerWith a little over a month until Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs launches for everything under the sun except the Wii U, Ubisoft has been out pimping their game on anybody who plays games. Megan Farokhmanesh had a write-up today concerning the multiplayer features of the soon to be released game.

Farokhmanesh confirmed the 8 person multiplayer, which can be turned on or off, which will allow the player to infiltrate another players world and using “encryption based PVP.” The player will impact the notoriety or fame of other player through hacking; your notoriety will go up with successful hacks and go down if you are hacked. (Could this just be a glorified Rush mode?) The Polygon video above has renewed my interest in the game.

Great White Hope From the gameplay footage that I have seen and through the information in the Farokhmanesh article and the Brian Crecente article that appeared earlier this month, I think that Ubisofts ” The Great Watch Dog Hope” looks like a mix of Naughty Dog action (Uncharted and The Last of Us came to mind when I watched the action in the video.) and, hopefully, Syndicate style cyberpunk hacking. Although, Ubisoft doesn’t want their game to end up like EA’s Syndicate sales-wise.

I am much more excited to play Watch Dogs now after seeing the Polygon video and reading the two Polygon articles, so I guess that part of their marketing worked; for me, at least. The biggest question I have though is: What does this game mean to Ubisoft?

I know that Ubisoft is a big company and it is built to take a flop. But, can it take a flop like this? In this down economy no developer can risk losing money. Will this be Ubisoft’s uDraw

A girl playing uDraw
uDraw kicks ass! Thanks Mom!

If Ubisoft is going out to places like Polygon right now, before the game comes out, are they really trying to be honest with the media? You can excuse me if I am skeptical that a publisher isn’t shoveling shit into my mouth and calling it chocolate. With the financial commitment that Ubisoft has put into Watch Dogs they would not shelve it at this stage of the game, but they just might get out there and try to convince the media and the public that they spent their extra time making their game into the new “be-all-end-all” of gaming.

Denis Dyack memeI bought Too Human. I bought into all of that bullshit that Denis Dyack fed to me because I wanted to believe Too Human was good. That was my fault and I have learned from my bad decisions. But, you will excuse me if I am less than convinced that Watch Dogs is going to be anything more than a GTA style action game that had serious problems with development up until a few months ago.