Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD is, incredibly, the first Super Monkey Ball game to use a full-size analog stick since the GameCube era. The 3DS and Vita games in the series were beholden to smaller, less precise sticks, but playing with a DualShock 4 is like a homecoming. The original Super Monkey Ball felt designed to take advantage of the precision and range of motion, which the Gamecube controller offered, but only now has the series returned to the purity of the original game's design.

Because of this, the opening moments of Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD, a remake of a Wii launch title with the motion controls ripped out, are lovely. Guiding your monkey through those first few goals is immediately familiar if you've played either of the series' GameCube outings, but even if you're not, there's an inherent pleasure to the precision of the controls here. By tilting the stick you shift the level itself, rather than controlling the ball directly, and having analog control allows for a greater level of finesse than has been possible for a long time--at least at first. At its best, Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD feels like the series' latest love letter to the analog stick--you need to be sensitive and subtle with your movements, and being able to make tiny adjustments on the move is satisfying on a level that you might not expect from a game about rolling monkeys around in balls.

Unfortunately, Banana Blitz HD retains some of the original Wii game's problems--terrible boss fights, unimaginative level designs, the questionable addition of a jump button--and adds in a few of its own. It makes for a Monkey Ball game that shows the promise of the series, and reminds you of just how much control an analog stick can give you, but fails to live up to it.

Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD gives you 100 levels to roll your monkey through--the same 100 featured in the original, updated with a half-hearted graphical upgrade that still makes the game look a little dated. After choosing your preferred primate (each of which have different stats that impact how fast they go and how high they can jump), you're tasked with tackling all 10 worlds, made up of 10 levels each, in order. In each level, you need to roll and jump your way through a treacherous stage to the goal at the end without falling off the edge, and the first 60 or so are easy. This was a game originally designed with motion controls in mind, and it's clear, playing with an analog stick, where concessions were made.

The extra precision afforded in this version makes the game more enjoyable to control, but it also means that I was able to blaze through these stages quickly. Super Monkey Ball was a series praised for its challenge back in the day, and it's hard not to feel disappointed at how easily you can rush through so much of it. There are worse things for a game to be than easy, of course, and I still had some fun with a few of the more imaginative levels, but there's little incentive to go back and try to collect more of the bananas scattered around each level or record a better time. The time trial leaderboards are bizarrely split so that you can't simply go back and record your best time on a single world except for the first, so there's little reason to really become an expert.

But then, for a brief, shining run--around the game's sixth 10-level world--Banana Blitz HD's difficulty curve hits a sweet spot. It's trickier without being obscene or seeming unfair, and the level designs start to get more inventive. You find yourself navigating your monkey through huge rolling wheels, up towers, through moderate maze-like levels, and across other stages that feel like they have a clear sense of purpose and design. The best levels in the series are literal and metaphorical balancing acts--you need to be very careful with your movements, and the level needs to be designed so that you'll keep playing, believing that you can right your own mistakes. Banana Blitz briefly hits that balance and feels like a proper classic Monkey Ball experience, one that pushes your skills and patience but rewards your efforts with the satisfaction of having mastered a difficult task. Unfortunately, the fun doesn't last.

Changes made for this version, and the ease of breezing through the less challenging levels, result in a severe difficulty spike in the game's final third. In the original Wii release, several levels featured parallel rails that you could slot your monkey into and roll along. This meant that while you had to make subtle movements and adjustments to ensure that you didn't fall off, there was some protection from plummeting. This design helped to compensate for the added difficulty of motion controls; the HD version replaces these rails with thin beams to roll across, which beefs up the challenge dramatically.

There were a few stages that stopped me dead in my tracks and forced me to retry repeatedly, and it was often levels that had been redesigned since the original Wii release. While I prefer stick controls to motion controls for this series, the fact that these levels were originally meant to be played with motion controls in mind makes for a less satisfying experience--the Wii version had a more refined difficulty curve. Early on the game doesn't beef up its challenges enough for the change in controls, whereas later it feels like it has overcorrected, and it also means that the difficulty can fluctuate--some later levels still feel very simple and a lot easier with stick controls. In other instances, levels simply feel like they lack finesse in their design or clear lines through them, especially the ones where making jumps is a necessity.

It also becomes clear in the later levels just how much of a burden the jump button is. In the Wii version you could control the camera with the Wii Nunchuk stick, since you weren't using it to steer; this option has been excised from the HD release. Jumping in a 3D space without total camera control leads to headaches, especially since you're not actually controlling the monkey, but rather the level below them. Jumping feels like an imprecise act in a game that is all about the pleasures of precise movement, and it makes the game far more frustrating than other, comparably difficult entries in the series.

Every 10 levels you hit a boss fight, which feel uniformly out of place. Boss fights usually take place in small arenas and pit your monkey against an enemy with a glaring weak spot that you need to jump into. The difficulty curve is, again, way off here; the second boss is much more difficult than most that follow, as it fires rockets that you must hop on top of to redirect, which is an extremely fiddly process. Tellingly, the best boss fight plays like a standard level with a "weak point" at the end of it instead of a goal; otherwise, these fights feel completely at odds with what Monkey Ball is all about.

The multiplayer mini-games have been cut back, too. Part of the Wii version's appeal was that the 50 mini-games included showed off the many things the Wii remote was capable of. Banana Blitz HD trims the collection down to 10 games that are all mapped to a controller, and they range from okay to atrocious. The best ones are Dangerous Route (an okay three-level top-down reinterpretation of the series' standard rolling gameplay) and Monkey Target, a hang-gliding game that tasks you with landing on a distant target (which was perfected in the original GameCube Super Monkey Ball and is greatly simplified here, but still enjoyable). None of them are particularly deep, and much of the control mapping from a Wii remote to a controller is terrible. You can compete in the single-player 'Decathlon' mode, which strings all ten games together and lets you place on an online leaderboard, but personally, I never want to play the awful Hovercraft Race or Whack-A-Mole events--both of which control horribly--again.

It's lovely to have Super Monkey Ball back, but Banana Blitz HD is not a good showcase of what made the series work. It's a remake of a game that was originally designed for a very different, specific purpose and control scheme, and the efforts made to update it for 2019 have made for a lesser game. It's a shame, because a glimmer of what made the series great remains, and it's enough to make us hope that someday we get a new entry that properly returns the series to its roots.

A little over a year ago Xbox announced it was going to introduce a gaming streaming service called Project xCloud that could run on your smartphone, tablet, laptop, and virtually any device you own. A few weeks ago, Microsoft finally revealed xCloud to the world with a pubic preview and after a long while with it, I’ve come away impressed.

Now when I say impressed, I’m only speaking towards its performance. As a public preview, xCloud still fairly limited right now to only working on Android devices and offering four first-party games: Halo 5: Guardians, Gears 5, Killer Instinct, and Sea of Thieves.

Continue reading…

Former President of Nintendo of America,  Reggie Fils-Aimé will collect the Andrew Yoon Legend Award at the 9th annual New York Game Awards.

The Andrew Yoon prize is awarded to those who "exhibit a significant, sustained body of work that shows exceptional achievement and innovation". Speaking to IGN via email, Fils-Aimé said:

"It’s an honor to be recognized by the New York Game Awards for my work in an industry that I’ve committed so many years to. But, it’s not just about the time I’ve committed to the gaming industry and specifically to Nintendo, it’s about the people along the way I’ve had the opportunity to lead, influence and inspire. Receiving this honor is a great reminder that my goal of being (and remaining) a strategic and leading force in the industry is recognized by my peers."

Continue reading…

I think probably the easiest way to sum up Reggie’s legacy for Nintendo is the very fact that we all call him by his first name. In 2004, as the games industry morphed into the often faceless fiscal behemoth it is today, Nintendo – itself on the verge of releasing one of the most successful consoles of all time in the Wii – appointed an American company spokesman that wanted us to treat him more like a friend than a corporate overseer. And we did. There are thousands of Reggies in the world but, in the context of games, there’s really only one.

15 years later, we’re still calling him Reggie, and he still feels like some far-flung friend. His retirement from Nintendo in April led to outpourings of woe, bittersweet tributes, and a tidal wave of meme compilations. This was not a normal response to a company president leaving his job. That sheer approachability, exemplified by us being on first name terms, is so much a part of his success that it’s one of the stated reasons that he’ll be presented with the Andrew Yoon Legend Award at next year’s New York Game Awards.

Continue reading…

As a remaster of the 1998 puzzle-platformer of the same name, MediEvil holds up reasonably well. Its cartoonishly charming characters and varied, if relatively simplistic, level design both stands the test of time and looks better than ever thanks to a complete graphical overhaul. But as much as MediEvil can feel like a warm blanket of nostalgia--especially for those of us who played the game 21 years ago--it also feels incredibly dated, with jittery controls and camera issues that regularly get in the way of progress.

You play as Sir Daniel Fortesque, a dead knight who is returned to life when the sorcerer Zarok makes an unexpected return to Gallowmere, bringing with him hordes of monsters. Fortesque remains every bit as charming a character as he was; his gnarled teeth, warbly voice, and single, rolling eyeball lose none of their charisma in the remastering process. Zarok's design hasn't aged well, though, and the new visuals leave him looking like a plastic doll who’s been left out in the sun too long. Enemy designs are otherwise just as fun as ever, with many tying in closely to their given map’s visual themes.

Challenging puzzles, light platforming, and hack-and-slash combat make up the bulk of what you do in MediEvil. The land of Gallowmere feels stuck in a perpetual state of Halloween, with each level brandishing its own delightfully spooky artistic twist to it. The diverse range of locations makes for some wonderful variety in the look and feel of each level; a graveyard, a pumpkin patch, a large hedge maze, and a floating town in the middle of a lake are a small selection of the good choice of maps to slash your way through.

Combat is reliant on simple hack-and-slash controls, and this feels underwhelming in the beginning--not only do you feel initially weak, but one of your two main attacks is so slow and unwieldy that it's borderline useless. Most frays are chaotic at best, rarely involving anything more than mashing the attack button while running around to avoid damage, so having one of your main attacks feel pointless is a real bummer. A handful of new abilities that you gradually learn spice things up a touch but also feel awkward to use, like a charge attack that lets you force enemies off platforms by charging into them with your shield up.

However, combat gradually improves as you earn more powerful weapons and start to deal a more satisfying amount of damage. You earn new weapons by killing enough of the enemies wandering around a level, which will fill and reveal a hidden chalice. This grants you entrance to the Hall of Heroes--an in-between level where characters from Daniel’s past offer up new weapons. Filling and finding each chalice isn’t essential for progression, but the extra effort it takes to do so is very much worth it.

Because it's a straightforward remake, a big issue with MediEvil are the aspects that feel dated by modern standards. Progression often relies on some variety of fetch-quest, like collecting the right runestones to unlock the next door or gathering a few items to encourage some help from a new character. This encourages exploration around hidden corners or through smashing boulders blocking a new path, which can be rewarding when you find a stash of gold or a health-extending life bottle, it can also lead to much annoyance as you grapple with the game’s occasionally nonsensical camera.

When in an open area, the camera acts like any other third-person camera and can be controlled with relative ease, only rarely getting caught in the world geometry. But when inside a cave or a building the camera switches to a fixed view, doing so regularly and without warning. Not only does it look and feel clumsy, but it also switches the movement to tank controls for as long as the camera is stuck in place, which is a tremendous hassle. The result is often jerky and awkward movement, which can be a killer during combat, and these controls are even worse when trying to navigate puzzles and platforming sections.

Adding to these frustrations is the fact that mid-level checkpoints are non-existent, so when you die, you go back to the beginning, which becomes a problem when combined with MediEvil’s annoying movement and another one of its aging design concepts: watery death. It can be so easy to fall foul of some bad geometry and slip to your death that any surface around water will become instantly anxiety-inducing, such is the consistency with which I found myself in this situation.

Furthermore, character health is continuous across the game--finish a level with low health and you’ll either have to tackle the next one with what you’ve got and hope for the best, or backtrack to a previous one and try to find as much health as you can before attempting to move forward. Stack that on the ever-growing pile of issues, and MediEvil becomes the kind of grind that makes you want to put it down and never come back to it.

MediEvil does have some nostalgic charm, but due to its bevy of issues, it feels not just old, but undeniably outdated. For every part that helps us look back fondly on a time when games were made differently, there’s another that reminds us of how far we’ve come in those years since. MediEvil's delightful level and character design mostly still stands tall, but its combat and controls largely fall well short of what feels tolerable by modern standards, and it left me feeling wholly ambivalent to its existence.

As a remaster of the 1998 puzzle-platformer of the same name, MediEvil holds up reasonably well. Its cartoonishly charming characters and varied, if relatively simplistic, level design both stands the test of time and looks better than ever thanks to a complete graphical overhaul. But as much as MediEvil can feel like a warm blanket of nostalgia--especially for those of us who played the game 21 years ago--it also feels incredibly dated, with jittery controls and camera issues that regularly get in the way of progress.

You play as Sir Daniel Fortesque, a dead knight who is returned to life when the sorcerer Zarok makes an unexpected return to Gallowmere, bringing with him hordes of monsters. Fortesque remains every bit as charming a character as he was; his gnarled teeth, warbly voice, and single, rolling eyeball lose none of their charisma in the remastering process. Zarok's design hasn't aged well, though, and the new visuals leave him looking like a plastic doll who’s been left out in the sun too long. Enemy designs are otherwise just as fun as ever, with many tying in closely to their given map’s visual themes.

Challenging puzzles, light platforming, and hack-and-slash combat make up the bulk of what you do in MediEvil. The land of Gallowmere feels stuck in a perpetual state of Halloween, with each level brandishing its own delightfully spooky artistic twist to it. The diverse range of locations makes for some wonderful variety in the look and feel of each level; a graveyard, a pumpkin patch, a large hedge maze, and a floating town in the middle of a lake are a small selection of the good choice of maps to slash your way through.

Combat is reliant on simple hack-and-slash controls, and this feels underwhelming in the beginning--not only do you feel initially weak, but one of your two main attacks is so slow and unwieldy that it's borderline useless. Most frays are chaotic at best, rarely involving anything more than mashing the attack button while running around to avoid damage, so having one of your main attacks feel pointless is a real bummer. A handful of new abilities that you gradually learn spice things up a touch but also feel awkward to use, like a charge attack that lets you force enemies off platforms by charging into them with your shield up.

However, combat gradually improves as you earn more powerful weapons and start to deal a more satisfying amount of damage. You earn new weapons by killing enough of the enemies wandering around a level, which will fill and reveal a hidden chalice. This grants you entrance to the Hall of Heroes--an in-between level where characters from Daniel’s past offer up new weapons. Filling and finding each chalice isn’t essential for progression, but the extra effort it takes to do so is very much worth it.

Because it's a straightforward remake, a big issue with MediEvil are the aspects that feel dated by modern standards. Progression often relies on some variety of fetch-quest, like collecting the right runestones to unlock the next door or gathering a few items to encourage some help from a new character. This encourages exploration around hidden corners or through smashing boulders blocking a new path, which can be rewarding when you find a stash of gold or a health-extending life bottle, it can also lead to much annoyance as you grapple with the game’s occasionally nonsensical camera.

When in an open area, the camera acts like any other third-person camera and can be controlled with relative ease, only rarely getting caught in the world geometry. But when inside a cave or a building the camera switches to a fixed view, doing so regularly and without warning. Not only does it look and feel clumsy, but it also switches the movement to tank controls for as long as the camera is stuck in place, which is a tremendous hassle. The result is often jerky and awkward movement, which can be a killer during combat, and these controls are even worse when trying to navigate puzzles and platforming sections.

Adding to these frustrations is the fact that mid-level checkpoints are non-existent, so when you die, you go back to the beginning, which becomes a problem when combined with MediEvil’s annoying movement and another one of its aging design concepts: watery death. It can be so easy to fall foul of some bad geometry and slip to your death that any surface around water will become instantly anxiety-inducing, such is the consistency with which I found myself in this situation.

Furthermore, character health is continuous across the game--finish a level with low health and you’ll either have to tackle the next one with what you’ve got and hope for the best, or backtrack to a previous one and try to find as much health as you can before attempting to move forward. Stack that on the ever-growing pile of issues, and MediEvil becomes the kind of grind that makes you want to put it down and never come back to it.

MediEvil does have some nostalgic charm, but due to its bevy of issues, it feels not just old, but undeniably outdated. For every part that helps us look back fondly on a time when games were made differently, there’s another that reminds us of how far we’ve come in those years since. MediEvil's delightful level and character design mostly still stands tall, but its combat and controls largely fall well short of what feels tolerable by modern standards, and it left me feeling wholly ambivalent to its existence.

Lucifer star Tom Ellis has confirmed that the fifth and final season of Netflix's supernatural drama will be split into two parts when it hits the streamer.

During a recent episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show, the singer-talk show host invited her family to visit the set of Lucifer for a guided tour compered by Ellis, who later announces that season five will be released in two separate batches of eight episodes.

"Season 5 of Lucifer is going to be split into two halves," he explains in the clip. "Netflix is going to drop eight episodes, there's going to be a little break, and then they're going to drop another eight more episodes."

Continue reading…

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for the latest deals and follow our very own IGN UK Deals Amazon storefront for IGN's curated lists of best games, tech and accessories.

Xbox One X 1TB Gears 5 Limited Edition Bundle for £369

Continue reading…

Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are no longer working on a new Star Wars trilogy.

As reported by Deadline, Benioff and Weiss "cited their historic deal with Netflix" and explained that "their enthusiasm for Star Wars remains boundless but, regrettably, their schedule is full up."

“We love Star Wars,” Benioff and Weiss said. “When George Lucas built it, he built us too. Getting to talk about Star Wars with him and the current Star Wars team was the thrill of a lifetime, and we will always be indebted to the saga that changed everything. There are only so many hours in the day, and we felt we could not do justice to both Star Wars and our Netflix projects, so we are regretfully stepping away.”

Continue reading…

The Mandalorian received a brand new trailer today and it was filled with Star Wars goodness and hints of what is to come in the new series headed to Disney+.

We've gathered together 37 of the best images from the trailer and put them in a gallery with a bit more information on each each one. The images include everything from Pedro Pascal's Mandalorian, Gina Carano's Cara Dune, aliens in carbonite, Trandoshans and Quarrens, the Razor Crest ship, a cantina, IG-11, and even Bill Burr.

You can see all the best images from The Mandalorian's new trailer below!

The Mandalorian will begin streaming on Disney+ on November 12, 2019, and the first impressions of this new Star Wars series are very positive.

Continue reading…