2023’s games: fun to play, great to wander around in

By Jack Dusenbury-Dalto | Manor Ink

What a great year for gaming! While there were a few stinkers released in 2023 (see Jameson’s review below), the majority of new issues were fun and eminently playable. Here are my five best.

No. 5: “Diablo IV” – “Diablo IV” is an online action role-playing game developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth main installment in the Diablo series. The game was released on June 5, 2023, for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X and S, and Microsoft Windows.

No. 4: “Hogwarts Legacy” – This game is an action role-playing game developed by Avalanche Software. It is part of the Wizarding World franchise, taking place a century prior to the events in the “Harry Potter” novels.

No. 3: “Pikmin 4” – “Pikmin 4” is a real-time-strategy video game co-developed by Nintendo and Eighting. It is the fourth main installment of the “Pikmin” series, following “Pikmin 3” (released in 2013), and the sixth overall installment. It was released in July on the Nintendo Switch

No. 2: “Starfield” – “Starfield” is an action role-playing game developed by Bethesda Game Studios. In the game, the player joins a group of space explorers traveling through various corners of the galaxy while acquiring mysterious artifacts. The game’s open world comprises an area within the Milky Way galaxy containing fictional and non-fictional planetary systems. The surface environments for most of “Starfield’s” planets are procedurally generated by the game.

No. 1: “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” – This game is an amazing sequel to “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” and well worth the six-plus year wait since the release of that earlier edition. “Tears of the Kingdom” is a fully open-world action-adventure game developed by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch. You will find yourself playing for hours, often just looking around terrain, given how absolutely huge the game’s world map is and how much there is to it.

‘Sticker Star’ doesn’t stack up

By Jameson Barrera | Manor Ink

“Paper Mario Sticker Star” is a disappointment to everyone who has played it, so I have a question, dear reader. Do you have the time to hear me whine about nothing and everything at the same time? This is the story of a game so terrible, it took away the joy a once-beloved franchise created.

OK, you ask, so what’s so bad about it? Well, it’s simply the main mechanics of the game. The “Paper Mario” games are built on two things – their story and their turn-based battles. But, for whatever reason, there is absolutely no story, and the battle system, which is fundamental to the action, limits space for the items collected during play by not “stacking” them, and instead assigning each to a single slot.

Also, the game’s battle spinner gives you the privilege of attacking more than once per turn – oh, but you can’t choose who you’re attacking very easily. Then there are the bosses. Bosses work like this: use a “Thing Sticker” and win in one turn, or don’t use a Thing Sticker and waste hours of your life!

What are Thing Stickers, you wonder? Well, they are the second functional aspect of the game, and are objects found in the environment that you take to a store called Sling-a-Thing in either Decalburg or World 3-6 Outlook Point. The problem is they are inconsistent in size. They will kill every enemy in one hit, dispatch bosses and solve puzzles, but you never know which of the 64 – count ’em, 64 Thing Stickers – you might need without warning at any given point in the game.

In a normal game, when you battle enemies, you level up your abilities. In “Sticker Star,” you only get coins from battling, and they can only buy stickers. So what’s even the point of fighting? You can upgrade your health via Health Pieces in various places throughout the game, but an increase in health also leads to an increase in damage!

So, when it comes to “Paper Mario Sticker Star,” I have only one question. Nintendo, what were you on when you were making this game?