Nintendo Land
I thought this would basically be another Wii Sports and that it'd get really boring really fast and not really do anything of interest or note. Nintendo Land is a really well made game and the ways the Gamepad is put to use in it are simple but effective at creating some unique little games and there's plenty of stuff in it to keep you entertained for a long while. As a multiplayer game it's easily one of the best I have played since it's just based entirely around having a laugh. Even the competetive games are light-hearted and just for fun and they're simple enough for anyone to understand how to play them. When we had the extended family around at Christmas everyone was having a go on Mario Chase and Luigi's Ghost Mansion and kids and adults were having just as much fun as each other. It was a great game to introduce people to the Wii U and what it has to offer and now I feel a little foolish for rolling my eyes when it was first announced at E3 several years ago.
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Nerd rant coming up so if you don't give a toss about Resident Evil then skip this.
Resident Evil: Revelations. I didn't get it till after 6 came out. Who really expected a franchise that abandons it entire purpose (Survival Horror) for garbage have such an amazing installment; on a handheld no less.
That game surprised me too. It had its flaws, but I wasn't expecting it to be more of a retro Resident Evil game, especially since it came out in between Resident Evil 5 and 6.
This is something that bugs me more than it probably should but I really just do not understand how people can slate RE6 and then praise Revelations in the same breath. Revelations is so similar to RE6 and so far removed from everything that came before RE4 that it just boggles my mind.
First off, the "entire purpose" of Resident Evil is to make money. By the time you get to RE0 and the REmake on GameCube the franchise wasn't doing that. In fact, Capcom even described making RE4 a GameCube exclusive as "throwing money down a black hole". Not even one year after it's initial release, RE4 was ported to PS2 and it made the franchise popular again. As famous as the name Resident Evil is, the games hadn't sold well since RE3 on the original PlayStation. RE4 changed that (but only when it was released on PS2). RE5 was the best selling installment in the entire franchise and RE6 is just shy of 5 million worlwide sales itself. This rise in sales happened because Resident Evil abandoned survival-horror and that's really the issue I see at work here.
Everyone seems to expect Resident Evil to be a survival-horror franchise but it hasn't been since 2005 and it hasn't tried to be since. RE4, RE5, RE6, and Revelations are not survival-horror and were not intended to be. The problem is people keep on judging them by that standard. If you go into RE6 expecting a survival-horror game you will be disappointed because that's not what it is and it doesn't even try to be. Revelations doesn't try to be either. I don't see how it can be described as "more of a retro Resident Evil" when it takes RE5's gameplay and builds on it, setting the stage for the further additions RE6 made. The game coming out between 5 and 6 makes perfect sense because it is a gameplay bridge between those two titles. Revelations has ammo in abundance, the story is told through cut-scenes and switches between multiple charcaters in various settings. You are expected to fight your enemies rather than avoid them and the game is littered with action set-pieces. This was the first game in the series to let you move while shooting, it brought back the dodge maneouver that had been fiddled with in RE3 and then abandoned afterwards, and it removed herb mixing and let us heal on the move which made the healing system more convenint for a faster-paced action game. RE6 takes a few more steps in the action direction, gameplay-wise and in terms of presentation. Revelations fits so perfectly into what modern Resident Evil is that when people say it was "more like the older games" or was "true to its roots" I have to wonder if they even really played the game at all because it just isn't; it was the first of the modern games to develop the new gameplay style further.
The only way in which it is more like the older games is that it's scarier than RE5 and RE6. Revelations was certainly the scariest game in the franchise since RE4 and it seems to me that a lot of people say these fallacious things about it based largely, or perhaps entirely, off that alone. The thing is though, survival-horror does not mean scary. Survival-horror is a term used to catagorise a set of conventions and a certain type of gameplay that Resident Evil hasn't had for 8 years. Just because the early games were survival-horror doesn't mean they all are. Darkside Chronicles isn't survival-horror, and neither is Operation Raccoon City. Nobody actually calls those games survival-horror, and rightly so, but they do insist on labelling the main series games as such for no reason.
You don't have to like RE6 if you liked Revelations and liking Revelations shouldn't make you go easier on RE6 or anything like that. My point is just that I see people say Revelations is more of a survival-horror game, truer to the series' roots, than the likes of RE5 and RE6 and it just isn't true. Revelations abandoned the series' roots more than RE4 or RE5 did. It's not a game which shows how much better classic Resident Evil used to be; it's a game which shows how good modern Resident Evil can be.
