Another year come and gone, and another year’s worth of games to love, games to hate, and games to make us scratch our heads and wonder who’s really running things at some of these companies. Sequels were spawned, new IPs introduced, and enough DLC to power a small nation was churned out on a daily basis. Now, as we get ready to see off the old year and usher in a new, it’s time for us at Spectacle Rock to look back at the months gone by and pick out our highlights and lowlights…

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The Nintendo DS has proven itself to be quite the repository for “old fashioned” turn-based JRPGs.  From remakes of old Final Fantasies to entirely new creations, a strong library has built up over the years, giving fans plenty to choose from.  With my DS as my trusty companion on my daily commute every day, I have ample time to play through such involved affairs, and I’ve sampled a pretty wide swath of those that are out there.

When I wrapped up Bowser’s Inside Story several weeks back, I sat down to take a look at what to tackle next.  Poking through Amazon’s DS listings, I spotted an upcoming title called Nostalgia.  The game was named such, as the marketing materials told me, both because of its setting and because of its “return” to old-fashioned JRPGs of days gone by.

Unfortunately, the only nostalgia that Nostalgia evokes is for the time before you started playing it.

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I recently sat down and started to play through New Super Mario Brothers Wii with the intent of putting up a review.  As I progressed through the game, however, it occurred to me that while the game is, in fact, excellent, and a great addition to anyone’s Wii library, it’s still “just a Mario Bros. game.”  There isn’t anything particularly innovative in the single-player version of the game that would warrant a full review.  With that in mind, I turned to the “new” in the title and decided to try out the “simultaneous multiplayer” that had been touted as one of the game’s main selling points.  I picked up the hotline and assembled a crack team of Mario players to tackle this game the way it was meant to be played.  I had, unfortunately, forgotten one key problem with my using my friends as a multiplayer “team”:

My friends are jerks.

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