Category: Winter in Gaming

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Winter in Gaming – Day 21 // Animal Crossing (Series)

The Animal Crossing series has been offering up some fantastic choice gaming to play over Winter for over 10 years now.

If you’re unfamiliar with the franchise…  Animal Crossing is a laid back virtual life experience.  You do chores, fish, catch bugs, dig up treasures, interact with a plentiful of personalities, make friends, and in the process you earn money, items, and open up more options for what you can do, see, buy, etc.

You can then use the money in many ways to either improve your own highly customisable home, or make improvements to the town you’re surrounded in.

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Winter in Gaming – Day 20 // SSX (series)

For those of you following these daily posts as they come in you surely HAD to expect SSX to make the list, right?

For a good decade or so we used to live in an age were Snowboard games were a common sight.

The original PlayStation had it’s “Cool Boarders” series.  Nintendo had “1080 Snowboarding” both on Nintendo 64 and GameCube, and the XBOX had “Amped”.  Plus like with any popular game genre you had your fair share of ‘poor mans…’ attempts at some snowboard gaming recognition.

It wasn’t until “SSX” (for PlayStation 2) and it’s multi-platform (style over new substance) sequel “SSX Tricky” came along that the gaming world as a whole seemed to all agree it was favourable, similar to how the world as a whole fell in love with the Tony Hawks series a few years prior to this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnzRH35JOgQ

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Winter in Gaming – Day 19 // Banjo-Kazooie’s Freezeezy Peak

The majority of entries to this month long feature have understandably been more of a nod to the cold side of winter, with no real holiday attachment other than perhaps some musical cues that lead you to imagine it’s festively inspired.

Well today’s entry knows nothing of being subtle.  Freezeezy Peak in Banjo-Kazooie (for N64, and re-released on XBOX 360 and XBOX One).

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Winter in Gaming – Day 18 // Mario Party!

A week on since I suggested Mario Kart in general, but winter specifically for it’s Ice/ Snow tracks.  This week I submit Mario Party for the same reasons.

If you own Nintendo systems, and you have the luxury of having friends at your place a lot, then you owe it to yourself and your Nintendo console to have a Mario Party for it (unless the console is from a Pre-Mario Party era).

Playing it solo is pretty much always a sub par experience, but sat alongside friends the game can be a riot.  Temporary allegiances, cunning plans, constant betrayals, all common place.  The element of strategy you’re left with in Mario Party really puts the series as the number 1 party game when it comes to really testing the strength of friendship.

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Winter in Gaming – Day 17 // Sonic 3’s Ice Cap Zone

I’d like to think this level comes to mind for most video game fans when asked to think about iconic snow/ ice stages in games.  Unless you’re a naive child with no education in 16bit or prior.

Ice Cap Zone was the point in which most kids minds were blown when it came to playing through Sonic 3 (or Sonic 3 & Knuckles). Continue reading “Winter in Gaming – Day 17 // Sonic 3’s Ice Cap Zone”

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Winter in Gaming – Day 16 // Uncharted 2

When I covered Dead Rising 4 on Day 10 I mentioned the original Dead Rising as being one of those key releases that set my mind to NEED when it came to the XBOX 360.

Today I get to tell you about the game that caused my NEED to get myself a PlayStation 3!

Uncharted 2 was one of the PlayStation 3’s biggest games heading into the holiday season of 2009.  It was already looking great and raising excitement from the video’s coming out of Sony’s E3 conference earlier in the year.  Then once it released, the gaming press unanimously confirmed this game was worth all the hype people had created over it.  To this day it holds a metacritic score of 96.

Thankfully the online consensus made it clear that the original Uncharted game didn’t need to be played before jumping into the sequel, so I went into the series blind of any context and simply hoped to be wowed by all the things that critics based such high praise on.

Well I can wholeheartedly say the game delivered like no other did to that time.  Continue reading “Winter in Gaming – Day 16 // Uncharted 2”

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Winter in Gaming – Day 15 // Ice Type Pokémon

I still greatly remember the day after high school that my mum took me and my sister to get copies of Pokémon Red & Blue.  I’d been reading about it for ages through coverage in N64 magazine that covered things popular in Japan, and things relating to Game Boy.

The constant exposure to these strange interesting “Pocket Monsters” from Nintendo and the fact it was so seemingly infectious wherever it was to touch down made me adamant I wanted to day 1 be part of the craze when it came to England.

Comparatively Pokémon came so late to Europe, and given how awesome some of the games I had for PlayStation and Nintendo 64 were at the time it seems crazy to think such a primitive looking game captured so many in a world before cellphones.

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Winter in Gaming – Day 14 // This month in Video Game History!

You’re better off getting a trolley and not a basket for today’s post, as you can expect a whole heap of video game name drops for you to fondly remember, or better yet feel driven to go and play.

If you’re an avid follower of video game releases and the video game market in general, you’ll both know and presumably understand that we don’t tend to see quite as many games released in December as we used to.

Most big video game publishers know how the market works.  They’ll ensure they have their big games out between late-September and November to give their titles the headstart before the holiday buying rush.  Time to land themselves a charting position to impress casual buyers plus the advantage of shifting a good chunk of stock to the hardcore gamer who wants his or her new game the day it comes out and need not rely on Christmas lists. Continue reading “Winter in Gaming – Day 14 // This month in Video Game History!”

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Winter in Gaming – Day 13 // Shooting in the Snow!

Day 13 of this pursuit into Wintry related video games is a day to tip the scales towards the adult oriented crowd.  The crowd that probably would give me the Nelson point & “Ha, Ha” insult towards some of more ‘cute’ entries this month.

Today is a look at some of the great snow encumbered stages in history we’ve shot friends and foes alike on.  If you consider some glaring omissions to be going on then get back to me in the comments.  Tweet @enter_initials, hit up the article on the Facebook page, or speak up in the comments section at the bottom of the article.

Oh and before I begin listing some off, this is more directed at multi-player, you can feel free to tout single player snow campaigns that created memories for you.  If I revisit this winter feature in 2017 I’ll make sure to take your mentions on board…

[edit:  Consider this list part 1, as the post went on I knew I had too many for a singular post.  Expect a part 2 soon]

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Winter in Gaming – Day 12 – The Ghost of Christmas Past…

Technically today’s entry isn’t a game to play over winter recommendation, but bear with me because I’d actually like your feedback with this topic later…

Over the weekend I was putting pen to paper in my notepad for more ideas to ensure I could continue these daily posts all the way through to December 31st without having to pad it out with anything I’d consider to just be filler, or something I wasn’t sincerely a fan of to warrant talking about it.

Thankfully I’ve now got enough ideas to not only fill this month, but I have a basis to maybe even return to this idea in 2017 if it seems worthwhile.  One of those ideas that arose was my Christmas list items that didn’t come to be that I still vividly remember to this day, for better or for worse…

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