It almost hurts to write that it’s been 13 years since Sega released Banana Blitz back on the Wii. At the time, I know I couldn’t have been more excited that we were about to see a Monkey Ball game that leveraged the motion capabilities of Nintendo’s hit system. However, when it finally released, I wasn’t thrilled with the results. Rather than leveraging the Wii remote in its horizontal orientation, like many other motion-centric games had, it forced you to point forward and contort your arm in awkward ways to tilt the stage. I quickly shelved the game and wrote it off as a failure. I suspect I wasn’t the only one, because after all these years Sega has released an HD remaster of the game leveraging more standard console controls using the analog stick. Unfortunately, the transition has introduced level design changes that bring things to a degree of difficulty that I’ve found to be insurmountable.

I suppose this October has been okay with the release of Super Smash Bros and the new theme settings for the main menu (got myself that nifty blue Rosalina theme), but then of course something outright wrong had to happen at work: some guest actually died in the lobby today. I have no actual details on it since I had to be in the back to keep business going but I guess it’s no Halloween season without a corpse. Seriously out of all the places it had to be where I work, just right out of the blue.

Small independent Swedish game developer Oxeye released Cobalt last week, their new 2D action/shooter platformer. Currently the game is in Alpha, but Oxeye looks to mimic their partner Mojang’s (the makers of MineCraft) release method. Players who pre-order Cobalt in the alpha will be granted full access to the Beta and full version of the game as they become available.