Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars review

[Administrator]

There are wheels within wheels at Nintendo these days, and even before the company announced last week that it was moving into mobile games (as well as prepping a new console, codenamed NX), it was hard not to approach many of its releases like Trojan horses. Would this one be prototyping a free-to-play business model, or playing with the possibilities of Amiibo, or pushing the boundaries of franchising, or experimenting with cross-platform play, or dipping yet another tentative toe in the frothing waters of online gaming? The more modest the release, the more likely it seemed that it was smuggling some shareholder-friendly initiative by you - the recent Pokémon Shuffle being a case in point.
We needn't be too cynical. In its long history, Nintendo's experimental moods have been frequent - and frequently healthy and fruitful. Also, Nintendo's quality control being what it is, the games themselves are usually good. Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars, the sixth in a curious series of handheld puzzle-platformers (arguably the seventh, if you include their original inspiration, the marvellous Game Boy version of Donkey Kong) is just such a game. It's good enough for what it is but you suspect an ulterior motive in its creation.
In this case, that motive is cross-platform development - something Nintendo's president Satoru Iwata spoke about last year, and that there's reason to believe is at the heart of its plans for Nintendo NX. Tipping Stars began life as a demo for a new web-based development framework, and the challenge that seems to have been set its developer NST - Nintendo's in-house American studio - is to create a visually and functionally identical game for 3DS and Wii U. Well, they can put a tick in that box: mission accomplished. Appropriately, it's also Nintendo's first "cross-buy" game, giving you both versions for one purchase price - although Nintendo's clunky eShop predictably doesn't handle this as smoothly as Sony's PlayStation Store does with PS4, PS3 and Vita games (purchase either version and you're sent a download code for the other).
Read more…


More...