Author Profile
- Username
- JonWahlgren
- Articles
- 591 (178 reviews)
- First Article
- Mon 4th, May 2009
- Avg. Review Score
- 6.3
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Developer Interview Gaijin Games Gets Drunk with Wii U Power
WiiWare champs set their sights on the future and rhythm aliens
While plenty of developers have stepped up to take a swing at WiiWare, only a pinch have started from scratch and built good names strictly based on their output for the service. Perhaps the biggest success story in this realm is Gaijin Games: as a brand-new studio, the three-strong...
Review Paper Mario: Sticker Star (3DS)
Stuck on you
If there's one thing we can learn from its 3DS catalogue so far, it's that Nintendo is great at the safe sequel. Sure, there are out-there exceptions like Kid Icarus: Uprising, but by and large we've seen a whole lot of remakes or new entries in fan-favourite franchises that are more interested in paddling along leisurely than rocking...
Podcast NLFM Episode 23: Revenge of the Halloween Hootenanny
Best served as cold as a corpse
Grab your bluntest instruments and aim for the head because NLFM has risen from its grave for the third annual Halloween Hootenanny! More spooky, more sinister and more deathly, this episode is best listened to in a dark castle dungeon while eating raw pumpkins. Failing that, anywhere else will do. 1. Masanao...
Review Nurikabe by Nikoli (3DS eShop)
Blocked and loaded
The Nikoli puzzle factory is filled with evil geniuses. There really is no way else to explain their signature puzzle types sudoku, kakuro, hitori and the plethora of others that have hit the eShop by way of developer Hamster — the puzzles are simple in premise, seem easy enough to complete but then dropkick your brain when...
The "G" is for "garbage"
UFO Interactive's eShop releases seemed to be on a slow but steady progression towards quality, with Johnny Kung Fu almost breaking through this underwhelming barrier. But then along comes Samurai G to pee in everyone's cereal. Samurai G is like being presented with a spoon and a bowl full of live bees: just one look is...
Review Angry Birds Trilogy (3DS)
Fowl play
Something of a cultural phenomenon by now, Rovio's Angry Birds franchise is one of the few in gaming to capture the general public's eye, time, wallet and wardrobe, becoming the poster child for "the future" of the industry. It has been called quite a few things in its meteoric rise: Herald of the death of dedicated gaming handhelds...
Spelunker
Stop us if you've heard this one. A guy by the nom de plume of Pixel made a really great game all by himself and released it on PC for free in 2004. It's called... Oh, so you have heard it. We thought so. In 2012, Cave Story needs no introduction. It's not an unknown quantity. In fact, not counting this eShop release, publisher Nicalis...
Review Hitori by Nikoli (3DS eShop)
Brainy cells
Connoisseurs of the eShop should be well acquainted with Japanese puzzle maker Nikoli: Hamster has trickled out an assortment of its brand of logic puzzles for months now, with varying success. Hitori by Nikoli offers a clever inversion on typical puzzle design, a Jeopardy!-style twist to its approach by handing over a grid of answers...
News Fatten Mario's Wallet with New Super Mario Bros. 2 DLC
Drop some coin on new level packs. UPDATE: Pricing and pack info.
If you found the rather good New Super Mario Bros. 2 to be rather short, you may soon give its lifespan a 1-up with three new level packs. Announced in a seemingly spontaneous Nintendo Direct hosted by NCL boss Satoru Iwata, the packs, all due on 2nd October in Japan and costing 200...
Review Heavy Fire: Special Operations 3D (3DS eShop)
Fool us once...
Slowly but surely, Teyon is on its way towards a half-way decent entry in its Heavy Fire series of military pop shooters. After squeezing out two downloadable disasters and an inexplicable retail release, Teyon returns to the well with Heavy Fire: Special Operations 3D — a reloaded version of that first WiiWare gem, now with added...
Interview Tomorrow Corporation - Little Inferno
Burning down the house
When some of the folks behind WiiWare wonder World of Goo and the creator of DS darling Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure team up for a project, well, you best sit down and pay attention. Tomorrow Corporation is hoping to light up Wii U when their debut title Little Inferno hits this winter. We caught up with the men...
Review Petit Computer (DSiWare)
Massive potential, minor headache
There are few better places to learn programming than within the BASIC family — heck, it's in the name — which offers general-purpose, relatively simple environments in which to learn the ropes and concepts of coding. Petit Computer is a powerful BASIC coding environment, a type of homebrew application seldom...
Review Johnny Kung Fu (3DS eShop)
Like a punch to the Wang
We're on to you, UFO Interactive. You've released these side-scrolling action games every few months now and, we'll admit, each one has had a fairly interesting premise — a samurai slicer with RPG elements and a zombie-flavored rhythm game? We can dig it. Now you roll out what seems like an ode to LCD handheld games...
Review The Amazing Spider-Man (3DS)
Hyperbole, True Believers!
You've got to hand it to Beenox for its stewardship of Spider-Man's games. While each entry has had its share of problems, the studio has pushed the webslinger in fun and genuinely interesting new directions by tapping into the character's rich diversity and exploring comic book universes largely ignored in video games,...
Review Akari by Nikoli (3DS eShop)
Spark in the dark
Hamster is now at the halfway point of chopping up upcoming retail release Sudoku + 7 other Complex Puzzles by Nikoli and selling each puzzle type individually through the eShop. With Sudoku and Kakuro out of the way, the far more interesting chunks have started to hit as evidenced by last month's Slitherlink and now Akari.
Review Marvel Pinball 3D (3DS eShop)
Dat Mahvel
Unlike video games based on movies or popular comics, licensed pinball tables have a reputation of being pretty great — The Twilight Zone, The Addams Family, Indiana Jones and Monster Bash are but a sampling of the rich properties that have yielded some of the most popular pins of the past 20 years. Marvel Comic's iconic characters are...
Review Slitherlink by Nikoli (3DS eShop)
Voldemort's favourite puzzle
Hamster continues to roll out piecemeal the components of its forthcoming retail package Sudoku + 7 Other Complex Puzzles by Nikoli onto the eShop, now breaking out the brain-bender Slitherlink by Nikoli. Unlike past efforts Sudoku by Nikoli and Kakuro by Nikoli, Slitherlink offers a type of teaser seldom seen in digital...
Feature Nostalgia vs. Eternal Darkness
Jon celebrates the 10th anniversary of this cult horror classic by losing his mind, in more ways than one
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is one of those games whose cult status has snowballed since it hit in 2002, and with good reason. As a fairly innovative horror game from Silicon Knights and Nintendo, it kept players on their toes for its...
I got 99 problems but time ain't one
Tiny time-waster games like 99seconds really aren't all that dissimilar from the arcade games of old that we now look on so fondly as champions of game design: simplistic ideas with an execution engaging enough to keep the flow of quarters flowing. Here, the concept is a form of extreme keep-away with a slow-down...
Review Kakuro by Nikoli (3DS eShop)
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42
There's certainly no shortage of number puzzles lurking around the dark, damp corners of the eShop. Sudoku is a prime culprit, and we wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a degree of puzzle overlap between them all, however mathematically unlikely that may be. Kakuro, on the other hand, is much less of a bruised dead horse...
Review Sudoku by Nikoli (3DS eShop)
SuDDDoku
Given the volume of the genre found in the eShop, we expect a lot from new digital sudoku games. If someone is going to go ahead and plunk down some cash, a game really needs to bring the thunder compared to the free versions found online and on other devices, or even one of those end-all puzzle books down at the five and dime. Sudoku by...
Review Mario Tennis Open (3DS)
Open season
Camelot's revered Mario Tennis series has a split legacy: on home consoles as a primarily multiplayer-focused insane-o-thon, and on portables as a more solo-oriented sports RPG. Mario Tennis Open falls somewhere in between, trying to capture the best of both worlds in the most accessible way possible. In many ways Camelot succeeds in its...
Interview Peter Ong - Disney Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion
We have a chat with the game's director about Mickey's handheld odyssey
We're suckers for retro here at Nintendo Life, and we certainly found our interest piqued when Disney Interactive revealed that it's upcoming portable title Disney Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion was to be a 16-bit-style sequel to the Mega Drive's Castle of Illusion Starring...
News La-Mulana Canned for North America, Europe
Nicalis breaks the news via Twitter
Few WiiWare games have had as public a storied development process as Nicalis' retro-inspired adventure La-Mulana. Today that story seems to have come to a whimpering end for North American and European players, as Nicalis broke the news on Twitter earlier this evening that the game would not be published in those...
