General gaming

General gaming

Review: Kirby Treads Familiar Ground in His Return to Dreamland

Posted: 24 Oct 2011 12:03 AM PDT

Kirby games come in two flavors: Simple, saccharine platformers, and wildly innovative (and saccharine) experiments in any number of genres. The latest chapter of the series, Return to Dreamland, falls squarely into the former category. It's a perfectly decent little platformer, but coming hot on the heels of the brilliantly inventive Mass Attack and visually imaginative Epic Yarn, it feels decidedly mundane.

The title "Return to Dreamland" is strictly an invention of the Western localization, but it's fitting enough; the game is more than slightly reminiscent of Kirby's Dreamland 3, with absolutely beautiful graphics and a heavy emphasis on Kirby's companions. The main difference between this adventure and that Super NES classic is that the companions this time around aren't adorable animals (though those guys do show up in a random blink-and-you'll-miss-it visual reference); instead, they've been supplanted by other players thanks to a drop-in/drop-out multiplayer format that can totally transform the play experience.

PC Review: Battlefield 3's 64-Player Matches Make Up for Lackluster Single-Player

Posted: 24 Oct 2011 12:01 AM PDT

Battlefield is back. After a lengthy detour with two console-exclusive titles, a trip to the future, two Bad Company games, and two free-to-play releases, the game hailed as the true successor to Battlefield 2 has finally arrived. This is no Call of Duty clone; it genuinely deserves the title Battlefield 3.

Before diving into the heart of Battlefield 3, I should address the window dressing: Namely its single-player campaign. As I mentioned in a preview several weeks ago, this portion of the game really is a round of terrorist whack-a-mole, just like Call of Duty. You'll face an unending wave of brain-dead suicidal terrorists until you manage to inch your way up to whatever checkpoint controls enemy spawning, take a few seconds' break, and do the whole thing all over again. It's not bad, but it is frankly uninspired. The gameplay itself is indistinguishable from COD, though the narrative trappings are a bit more down-to-earth. While this works well (in the sense that it's one of the few elements of the campaign that distinguishes itself from the game's competition), BF3's reach exceeds its grasp near the end of the campaign when the story takes a sharp left turn into crazy town. The campaign trades in its pseudo-realistic credentials for a finale straight out of an '80s action movie, with giant plot holes to match. The schizophrenic nature of the single-player is disappointing in light of the campaigns in the Bad Company spin-offs, which also take cues from COD but manage to maintain their own narrative voice.

An Interview With Diablo 3's Game Design Team at BlizzCon 2011

Posted: 23 Oct 2011 12:40 PM PDT

The Diablo series is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year (I can't believe it has been that long) and it seems everyone has some story to share, including what they're most looking forward to with Diablo 3. At BlizzCon this year I had a chance to sit down with two members of the game's team: Wyatt Cheng, senior technical game designer, and Andrew Chambers, senior game designer to talk about these topics as well as their thoughts on working on a project that has this much staying power in this industry.

1UP: So how long have you worked for Blizzard?

Posted by Shri Krishna

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