Week: End Game: On 04.21.2012

The wait is finally over for the time to unwind, relax, and procrastinate with some alone time with just you and your favorite gaming system. Below you can check out what we have, and plan to, play this weekend in the gaming world. But, of course, it doesn’t end with us. Tell us what you, the all-important reader, plan on playing this weekend! Leveling up in Xenoblade? Fusing weapons in Kid Icarus? Or (gasp) playing a game on a non-Nintendo console? Sound off in the comments below!

Bradly Hale

And so begins Xenoblade Chronicles weekend round 3. After a chaotic five days at work, I’m finally getting to sit down with the game for more than thirty minutes at a time. At this stage, I’m a little over 35 hours in, and I think I’m on the last leg of the story. Fortunately, I’m still extremely captivated by the game’s stellar cast of characters and narrative, so I’m looking forward to seeing how everything wraps up.

Aside from Xeno, though, I plan on picking up Skylanders for 3DS. I have an affinity for anything that has a collectible element to it, and I’m even more infatuated by miniatures. So I’m not really sure why it took me this long to jump on the game’s bandwagon, but regardless, that’ll be happening at some point over the next two days.

Of course, Sunday will bring about another round of D&D with a few of my close friends. This is the first campaign I’ve GM’d, so needless to say it’s been a fun – and oft challenging – experience.

I should point out that somewhere amongst this gaming madness exists the consumption of more beer. I suspect a little Summer Shandy is in order to commemorate this fine weather.

Michael Contino

I already kicked off my weekend with my brand new 360. I played Crysis for the first time (Let us hope Crysis 3 comes to Wii U) and demos for Sonic Generations and Trials HD. On Wii I will be playing GoldenEye 007 along with the rest of my recent purchases: New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Rune Factory: Frontier, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars, and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.

Basically, it is a weekend of catching up with games and old friends. As for everyone’s favorite RPG, Xenoblade Chronicles, I have seen its awesomeness but I do not play many RPGs these days. I am holding out though for a game I have been interested in since before it was revealed: The Last Story. Allons-y!

Maurice Tyler

I just finished Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and the whole time I was playing it, I couldn’t help but think of how much good graphics can impact the immersiveness of a game. I found myself trying to imagine Link traversing a near photorealistic landscape like those often found in this title. Oh well, maybe someday…

Later, I was feeling a little nostalgic so I plopped in my old GameCube disc version of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time into my Wii. I had forgotten how truly impressive this game is. It’s beautiful, has full, well integrated narration, and renders a fairly decent gameplay experience. Being able to run along walls and kill baddies using the coolest of moves seems to never get boring. I only wish the sequels lived up to the high standards set by the original.

Andrew Hsieh

Another fantastic puzzler hits the eShop.

I may or may not be currently trying to max out my levels in all five heroes of the Diablo III open beta this weekend. Yeah, yeah, the game comes out in twenty-four days, but that’s twenty-four days. If you think I should be doing something else, say, something productive– well, you’ve got another think coming. Go Wizard go!

Of course, I’ll need a break, which means I’ll probably be playing Ketzal’s Corridors, which I reviewed this past week. It’s an amazing game, if a difficult one– I just can’t rotate these pieces quickly enough, and I almost never rotate them the right way the first time. This is probably also why I’m very bad at Tetris, or those puzzles in Brain Age where I have to count how many blocks there are in a structure. I’m just not that big on visual stuff, which is funny, because I totally bought Colors 3D last week, too. I guess I’m just wasting money over and over again.

Oh well. I’ll get plenty of gold in Diablo III! Right, everyone? Right?

Katharine Byrne

I’ll be playing some more Pandora’s Tower this weekend. I haven’t actually been able to play very much of it so far– in between work and proof-reading my brother’s dissertation on ancient runes, it’s been a bit tricky finding enough free time this week– but from what I have played it’s been an…interesting experience to say the least. I won’t give too much away, but if you hate Metroidvanias, this is definitely not a game for you. The first tower wasn’t too bad– thanks to me misreading my “Elena’s about to turn into an almighty slug monster” timer, I actually did a lot more backtracking than was really necessary– but if I’m going to keep up Aeron’s bond with Elena and thereby get a better ending, I have a bad feeling that there’s going to be a hefty amount of unnecessary backtracking involved. I just hope later towers have more short-cuts than the first one… Keep an eye out for my full review later this week.

In the mean time, I’ve also been fitting in a few more rounds of Kid Icarus: Uprising and Bit.Trip Runner, but I’ve also dug out Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2: Battle in preparation for an upcoming editorial. It’s been a very strange coming back to those two GameCube games after such a long time, and I’m actually quite surprised by how much I’ve left unfinished, but I’ll save my thoughts on those for next week!

Nicolas Vestre

Because of the insane time it takes to move in an entire family’s stuff, I’ve only been able to log about five minutes of gaming this past week, with Jumping Flash! 2. That’s it. Once everything has settled down, however, I’ll be hooking up my Xbox 360 for the first time in almost two years. I really want to finish Braid, but the real reason to connect power back to it is to download Fez. It just looks completely up my alley.

Since one of our two TVs hasn’t arrived yet, my TV has the privilege of getting used by everyone, and not just for gaming as it usually is. That means I might finally be able to clock some more time in Mario Kart 7, Donkey Kong GB and eventually Mutant Mudds, because I can play them whenever I want.

Man, moving is hectic…