amphibious_ReViews

  Mario Kart Tour marks the series' smartphone debut, making it one of the most accessible games in the franchise. Looking at Nintendo 's other mobile titles, one may expect this game to be a shallow implementation of the core mechanics fans have come to expect from mainline entries in the series. In a way, that assumption is accurate. However, Tour does an incredible job of hiding it. Thanks to the beautiful courses and the largely faithful racing gameplay, this feels exactly like a modern Mario Kart should, at least at the start. My first reaction to playing this game was awe. It felt like a full Mario Kart experience on my phone, which is definitely not what I was expecting when it was first teased. The races are fast paced, steering and drifting feel smooth and responsive, and winning races is more dependant on skill than financial investments. However, it quickly became apparent that the goal of this game wasn't really to win races. As you play, the game pushes you

As the first Cube Escape title following the premium game, Rusty Lake Hotel , Cube Escape: Birthday wastes no time in showing players the previous title's importance. As characters introduced or developed in Hotel fill important roles in this entry, I think I would have been really confused if I skipped it. However, the gameplay is exactly what I have come to expect from the series, and with Dale Vandermeer in the spotlight again, I felt right at home with this game. The developers seemed to have upgraded their engine in this title, which made the gameplay a little smoother and the puzzles a little more unique. I got stuck a couple times in this adventure through Dale's past, but the addition of in-game hints definitely helped me out. The story was just as supernatural and strange as I'm used to, but very few questions were answered here, making this a little less satisfying to beat than some of the other entries in the series. As another quick but exciting entry in the

I originally got Car Quest for a few cents alongside a few other massively-discounted Switch titles just for the fun of trying them all out with a friend. This game was the only one we played for more than five minutes that day. Maybe it was the smooth gameplay, the nostalgic PS2 vibes, or the addictive simplicity of the objectives, but I was hooked. With a backlog like mine, I normally don't give non-mainstream indie games a second thought, so this title   is definitely something special in my eyes. Car Quest  feels a lot like a PS2 -era 3d platformer if your player character was a little car rather than a costumed anthropomorphic animal. The structure is somewhat similar to that of Super Mario 64  or Banjo-Kazooie , where you travel from a small-but-expanding overworld to unique self-contained levels where the bulk of the game takes place. However, Car Quest  forgoes the standard of scattering enemies throughout the levels in order to keep the players' focus on the puzzles.

  Before Breath of the Wild , Ocarina of Time was arguable the definitive 3d Zelda adventure, and honestly, it might still be. It was a remarkable feat in video game development that Nintendo was able to translate the item-collecting, dungeon-exploring, world-saving structure to three dimensions almost perfectly on their first try. A Link to the Past set the series standards for decades to come, but Ocarina of Time showed, without a doubt, that those standards worked just as well outside of two dimensions. The game definitely had areas for improvement upon its first release, but practically everything I had an issue with on the N64 was fixed in the 3DS remake. Quality-of-life improvements, such as making the boots an item, or displaying the map on the screen at all times, made this adventure largely seamless. Plus, the graphics are leagues better than before, which is always a win. The story in Ocarina of Time is nothing exceptional, but it got the job done. Starting as a young boy,