[dropcap]T[/dropcap]oday, a new game by the name of Tumbleseed graces the Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Steam. This downloadable title was made by a small dev team and they seem to have made something unique. This game is a roguelike and really prides in that arcadey feel that comes with it. The path to the top is randomly generated every time you play. This combined with the abnormal controls made for a real challenging experience. The question is if the game really has the substance to back up that difficulty or if it’s just a shameless rage fest. Let’s take a look at the game’s elements to help us decide.

Tumbleseed Gameplay

At the core of any great roguelike, the gameplay needs to really work on its own. If the gameplay isn’t any fun, the game will fall apart. Thankfully, we can attest that Tumbleseed’s gameplay really does hold up. The controls are somewhat awkward, which can make getting around a real challenge, even without hazards! As you play, you get used to that until you can even navigate some pretty crazy terrain without needing to worry about falling into holes, most of the time.

This is only level 2.

On the flipside, as roguelikes are, this game randomizes everything, including enemy placement. Most of the time, enemies stay stratified into their main biomes. Some, like the green serpents, won’t ever leave certain areas. Unfortunately, others can and will show up just about anywhere they please. This can occasionally lead to some really frustrating circumstances where it feels like we only lost because we got a really bad seed. Sometimes a purple flying monster will chase us and others, a red spider decides he liked the look of the forest. So he leaves the jungle in order to try and kill us before we can even really build up any defenses.

RNG was not on my side, that day.

Or that one…

In other words, yeah, this game is really hard. So hard that as of the time of this review, we still have yet to finish it! But no excuses, of course. It’s worth noting that despite the difficulty, we’re still playing and enjoying the game. It’s frustrating, and at times feels completely unfair, but it’s addictive. You tell yourself “I bet the next round, RNG will be in my favor” or “if I could’ve just made it a liiiittle farther…” While I think the crazy difficulty does work against the game, in some ways, I also think it helps solidify what the game does best. It keeps you playing.

Progression

This is where the game gets interesting for most players. So every time you die, you get returned to the starting village. That makes it seem too difficult to get anywhere, as you’ll always have to start over. Well, there’s a character in the starting village that gives you quests. These give you simple goals you can complete while you play the game. Eventually, these goals will ramp up until you reach the end of the game. As you complete them, you gain access to a teleporter, which will let you start higher up the mountain. Beware using this, though, as your score becomes invalid and you won’t get the benefits from the previous biome.

Aside from that, progression is very natural. It’s just a measure of how good you get at the game, and how unlucky you can be in one run. As you go, there will be power-ups you can gather, but there are four that you’ll always have. These are called seeds and they allow you to do all kinds of things. One of the four main abilities is planting checkpoints, in case you fall in a hole. Another allows you to sprout thorns that hover around you and hurt enemies they touch. A third allows you to sprout crystals from the ground to power your abilities. And the last one lets you regain one health for every four patches you plant it in.

These seeds use crystals, which are scattered on the ground, drop from killed enemies, and can be grown by one of your main abilities. Other seeds may be bought or found, as there are various secrets to be found all over.

You must choose…

Audio and Visuals

So the game uses a variety of colors, depending on what biome you’re in. In our experience, this has caused some problems when trying to play in tabletop mode or with a friend. Though, co-op in this game is probably unintentional and is honestly just making the game far more frustrating than it ever needed to be. Aside from that, the art style is cute and fairly unique and the visuals have never given me trouble in handheld mode or playing on a big screen.

The music in the game is cute and kind of accentuates the feeling of a small mountain tribe. The music, as far as we’ve seen, has very well matched the scenery anywhere we go. Honestly, for what it is and what it’s trying to do, the sound design in this game seems to be very much on point.

Conclusion

The content in Tumbleseed, while heavily varied, isn’t that expansive. A single playthrough could take a matter of minutes, rather than hours, but the game’s biggest strength is by far its replayability. You typically won’t get anywhere near the top, but even if you do, the main response is to yell in frustration and start over.

Maybe this game won’t appeal to the less-masochist members of our audience, but if you want a challenge, Tumbleseed will be more than happy to supply that challenge. The game’s design appears to be spot-on and the replayability puts it over the limit of what’s expected of most indie titles. While it may not be the greatest roguelike every or even a favorite, there’s no denying that it’s unique.

–Thanks to the developers for providing a review copy of Tumbleseed on the Nintendo Switch.

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]hythm game developer Harmonix has been bringing Rock Band back throughout this console generation. Rock Band 4 recently had an update called Rivals that allows players to team up and take on community-wide challenges. We’ve recently been informed that this Expansion will soon be getting an update.

While the current system allows for crews to compete every week for top spots on the leaderboards, Harmonix felt that Rivals was placing more emphasis on avoiding demotion and not enough on achieving higher tiers. So Harmonix has proposed several changes, listed out in their blog post.

The stage show behind the lanes.

Rivals Seasons

So to quickly sum up the updates being discussed, Harmonix wants to make the weekly challenges into part of a greater set of seasons. Each season will be eight weeks long. In order to compensate players for their hard work thus far, Harmonix is going to consider everything up to this point as “Season 0.” They’ll hand out rewards based on what tier each crew finishes in.

Rivals hub Tier List

From that point on, Harmonix will be changing the way moving through the tiers works. Crews can no longer be demoted and the percentage of crews getting promoted will change in order to balance this out. That could mean that it’ll be harder to get promoted so we have fewer crews in Bloodstone. It could also mean that it’ll be easier to get promoted so that the tiers are still changing about as much every week. The post seemed unclear on that.

Furthermore, rewards will be based on whichever tier you end in, but also how high in that tier you place. There’s no word on how exactly that will work, but we expect they’ll tell us more as the update approaches.

Glitched Leaderboard

Finally, Harmonix says they’ll be addressing the issue of glitched scores on the leaderboards. Some of the scores on Rock Band 4’s leaderboards use tricks that mess with the calibration or abuse Rivals’ pause mechanics. This makes those scores unbeatable and unmatchable when playing the game as intended.

In response to this, Harmonix is asking their community what they should do about it. One option presented was to ignore it and leave the scores as they are. They could also wipe the leaderboards, causing everyone to effectively start over. They could also target top scores that seem better than should be possible and lower them to compensate. At this time, the boards seem to favor the last option.

That covers everything Harmonix gave us on the Rivals Seasons update. We’ll be sure to cover more, should we receive any more information.

[dropcap]E[/dropcap]mily Rogers is well-known as an industry insider. She reports on information her sources give her, which has varying reliability just due to the nature of this info. That’s the case we ran into when Emily Rogers and some other insiders insisted that Ubisoft was working on an RPG that would crossover Mario with the Rabbids from the Rayman series. When no reveal appeared for the game, most people forgot about it, assuming it was another dud, but that remains to be seen. Emily Rogers replied to a question on her personal blog giving us just a little more info on the crossover.

Rabbids in all their awful glory.

Question: Can you give us more info on the Rabbids game?

I’ll throw you guys one LAST bone.

“Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle” has eight playable characters — including Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Yoshi — and they each have their own sci-fi weapons, laser guns, arm cannons, etc. But you don’t control the characters — you control Tuttorio, a small floating dish, to guide them through the worlds. There is also co-op multiplayer.

So this actually gives us ample room for speculation. First off, will this be something in the vein of Super Mario RPG? It’s starting to sound like it. Further, who could these other four characters be? Mario RPGs like making Bowser playable, so there’s one, but who else? That could be anyone’s guess.

Another question this gives us is how Tuttorio might work It sounds a bit like we’ll be able to select behavioral patterns for each character, but not give them direct orders, similar in some ways to Miitopia. As per usual, only time will tell how much of this information gets validated. At the very least, Emily isn’t alone. The guys at GameXplain claim to know such a game really does exist, though they won’t go into any further detail beyond what Emily has already said.

Source

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]intendo has been known for rereleasing games for any number of reasons. Perhaps they felt a game could be improved upon with the new system. Perhaps they wanted to reintroduce a popular game to both new and old audiences. In some cases, Nintendo rereleases a game because they started a pattern and plan to finish it or even just felt like it was received by an underwhelming audience. That last one may be the motivation behind Nintendo potentially re-releasing the Mario & Luigi RPG games. While the GBA wasn’t a bad system or a flop, it was arguably gimped in its potential by the release of the Nintendo DS.

So where does this rumor come from? Well, put simply, the Internet. But more specifically, from the Twitter of Michael, a reasonably established hacker and data miner that has been validated on his findings, in the past. While this isn’t by any means a fully reliable source (hence the RUMOR tag on this article), it is good enough to warrant discussion.

Pretty excited for 00040000001A4800 (Ever Oasis) and 00040000001B8F00 (Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga DX).

— Michael (@SciresM) April 29, 2017

We advise readers to take this with a grain of salt. Not only is the validity questionable, but Michael doesn’t even explain exactly what this message was intended to mean. Now, if this does happen to be accurate, it seems like a pretty safe bet that this rerelease is coming to the 3DS, given the similarity of numbers between Ever Oasis and Superstar Saga DX. Also, given the “DX” in the title, it seems likely that this will be an enhanced port. Finally, given that Ever Oasis releases on June 23rd for the North American and European regions, could this post also suggest that Mario & Luigi DX might be released in a similar timeframe?

This game’s a fan favorite.

All speculation aside, if this game is coming soon, we’ll probably have to wait until E3 to hear anything about it. Make sure to check back for any information regarding this rumor!

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]round Noon, Nintendo released a new Arms video on their YouTube channel. This video was a character trailer for a new fighter named “Helix.” This guy looks like Flubber put on a pai of boxing gloves and stole ROB’s eyes. He appears to be based off an Amoeba with the double-helix design of DNA being the basis for his arms.

How’s this any different, from the other fighters?

Well, simply put, Helix is going to play differently from the other fighters, as every character seems to always have a couple of unique traits. In this case, it’s clear that Helix is capable of stretching his body around so that he can dodge more effectively, and attack even from the sky, while maintaining full control of his movement and body position.

Aside from this, we get to see the underground lab where Helix was presumably made. This stage, like most Arms stages, appears to be no-nonsense. There are test tubes to use as environmental shielding–which we can see works to Helix’s advantage, in the trailer. There are stairs on each said to give some shape to the map, but this map is ultimately nothing all that new.

We also get a look at what appears to be a new type of fist you can equip your fighters with. These arms bounce off the ground and walls, meaning the punch is likely always out for full duration. This creates openings for the opponent, but also has potential to catch enemies off guard, if they expected the attack.

Ultimately, this is a good chunk of information, but it makes us hungry for more. What other characters may we see in the future? Arms is set to release on June 16th. You can watch the full character reveal below, and stick around, as we’ll be sure to cover any newly announced fighters as Nintendo rolls them out!