About a week has passed since I finally got to try out the machine that marks the dawn of the eighth video game console generation: the Wii U. Along with the N64, the Wii and the 3DS, this is the fourth time that I got my hands on a console on day one, and while nothing blew my little mind quite like venturing into the third dimension for the very first time with Super Mario 64, I have to say that I've never been this satisfied with a console launch before. The 3DS didn't have any games worth drooling over, and though the Wii did deliver the extremely awesome Twilight Princess, in all fairness it was just a Gamecube port. With the Wii U, I've got Nintendo Land, New Super Mario Bros. U and ZombiU. Two weeks ago, I claimed that none of these were system sellers, and while that can be argued over, after playing them all for several hours each, I'd at least go as far as to say that if you do happen to own a Wii U, they're all absolute must-have titles.

The reason why I'd like to get this game out of the way first is that it's the only one of the three whose use of the new Gamepad is anything but spectacular. It's still an amazing game, make no mistake—hell, it's Mario, and in glorious high definition to boot. Unless you're one of those people who for some reason are upset over getting dealt the same card over and over again with every new Mario game, you're getting more than your money's worth here. I've finished the first two worlds thus far, so I assume there's lots of nifty little things yet to discover for me, but the levels I've played are laid out wonderfully and are as much fun as ever. New Super Mario Bros. Wii is my all-time favourite 2D Mario game (yes, I like it even better than beloved Super Mario World!), and this game might just take the crown. The inclusion of the acorn item is a stroke of genius (it allows you to float for a while and execute some sort of double jump—it controls beautifully). And there actually is something new in this iteration: the challenges! The concept feels so natural to a Mario game that it's beyond comprehension why something like this is only now seeing the light of day in the Mushroom Kingdom. Those challenges range from traditional speed runs to dodging obstacles and collecting a certain number of coins. I've played perhaps a dozen of them and am anxious to see what else there is.

If you play this game on your own, the Gamepad mirrors what you see on the screen. This serves to showcase Nintendo's grand idea that if you're sitting in the living room occupying the TV and your mom or spouse or hamster enters and insists on engorging themselves on random casting show number umpteen, you can be like "chillax, I got this", hand over the remote and keep playing on your Gamepad. The idea is good for those unfortunate souls who have to share their TV, I guess, but then again, New Super Mario Bros. U seems to be one of very few games making use of this feature, as far as I'm aware. Since, you know, you can do so much cooler stuff with the hardware, so why would you waste the potential on something as mundane as this? The touchscreen's other use lies in the game's multiplayer: Mario, Luigi and the Toads are controlled with Wii remotes, and the player with the Gamepad takes the role of some benevolent God and can assist the others by creating additional platforms to jump on or blocks to keep enemies at bay. Or you can be a total dick and screw everything up for the others. It's up to you! I for my part much rather enjoy being part of the action.

Behind what seems to be the most uninspired and agonizingly stupid video game title I have heard in recent years hides what has got to be one of the greatest zombie-themed games of all time. About three hours into the game, the story seems all but negligible—it's your off-the-shelf zombie virus catastrophe fare, nothing out of the ordinary—but that's okay, because that's part of a pretty ingenious design decision. The game is set in post-apocalypse London, and you assume the role of a terrified survivor who's trying his or her very best to cope with the dire situation. The gist is that if you fail and get killed—and you will get killed often—you don't respawn at the nearest checkpoint. No, you will be dead for good and become a new inductee in the honourable band of zombie gentlemen. You continue the game as a whole new randomly generated survivor waking up at the safe house and preparing to set out into the dangers outside to complete tasks given to you by a disembodied voice talking to you over radio comms. Your old guy, meanwhile, carves out its sorry existence as a zombie right where it died and can be tracked down to retrieve the lost items. If you fail to do that, they're gone.

While the action commences on the big screen, your Gamepad serves various different awesome purposes, the predominant one being a map of the area. This appears to be the prime use case for the new hardware, since most of the launch titles that are ports of older games are doing this, but then again, why wouldn't they? It feels really cool to hold an interactive map in your hands. Beside that, there is a small icon that momentarily makes a radar appear around your position on the map, revealing the location of anything that's currently moving nearby in the form of a red dot, be it a zombie, a rat, a crow or something else. This feature is a double-edged sword because you're never sure whether a fight is ahead of you or you're worrying for nothing. Then there's your backpack. You open it by sliding down the respective symbol on your touchscreen, and when you do that, the map is replaced with the contents of your backpack and the big screen shows your character rummaging inside it. This means that you can now see only a small area around you, making you extremely vulnerable to zombie attacks. Listening to their groans drawing inexorably nearer is one of many ways ZombiU forces your adrenaline floodgates open. You really don't want to be fumbling with your backpack while you're being chased.

In Yoshi's Fruit Cart, you take control of a wooden Yoshi-shaped trolley. On the big screen, you see your start and finish position as well as some fruit and obstacles. On your Gamepad, however, only the start and finish are visible. With your stylus, you have to trace a path through the level and draw it over all the fruit while avoiding the obstacles. It's simple at first, but becomes quite a mental challenge as soon as everything on the screen starts moving around madly. The idea is neat, but I must admit I find it a bit bland.

Octopus Dance is a rhythm game in which you have to copy the dance moves of a porthole-headed instructor—with the left stick, you control your left arm, and with the right stick your right arm. Tilting the Gamepad to the left makes you stand on your left leg, tilting it to the right makes you stand on your right. You get the idea. So yeah, it's simple enough: Do what the instructor does and don't screw up. I screw up all the time, but I still find it very fun!

Donkey Kong's Crash Course simply drives you insane. You're transformed into a little cart with two wheels and a head. You can move it by tilting the Gamepad to the left or right, effectively making this one of those marble mazes stood up on its side. The controls are quite sensitive, so a single abrupt movement might send your cart careening into a wall or toppling over, and you'll be sent back to the last checkpoint. Better bring some serious fine motor skills, or this game will beat you up worse than a schoolyard bully.

In Takamaru's Ninja Castle, you slide your stylus across the touchscreen to throw shuriken at little cardboard ninja. It's as simple as that. With more and more ninja occupying the screen, you'll soon just be poking madly at the screen and provoking typist's neuritis to get out of this butchery alive. It's kind of fun, but a little monotonous.

Captain Falcon's Twister Race is very cool. The big screen shows your regular old F-Zero-esque futuristic racer, while on your Gamepad you can view the action from above. Again, the vehicle is controlled via tilting. The idea is that sometimes it makes more sense to look at the Gamepad to make avoiding traps easier, and other times you'll be concentrating on the big screen to see where the boosts are on long stretches of straight roads or to peek inside tunnels. Extremely responsive controls and some fun track design make me like this game a lot.

Another one of my favourites, Balloon Trip Breeze is very similar to the game it is based upon. You fly with your two balloons from island to island, dodge obstacles, collect more balloons and try to get as high a score as possible. The controls have been altered so that you don't use directional buttons to navigate the skies, but rather you employ your stylus to produce gusts of wind and push your little balloon guy around with them. This works beautifully and is huge fun.

With the Wii, we were spoiled with a launch-day Zelda game, and it was glorious indeed. This time around, there's not even one near the horizon yet, so we have to make do with its representation in Nintendo Land in the shape of The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest. Of course that's kind of like settling for a puny crumbling meatball in place of a juicy T-bone steak, but it still tastes nice and hearty enough! The objective of this game is to make your way through a number of levels, dispose of all enemies along the road and solve a couple of lightweight puzzles. Walking happens automatically, you only have to take care of the attacking and defending. The Gamepad player can see the world on his screen and use the right stick to draw arrows and fire them at opponents. The Wii remote, on the other hand, represents a sword and can be swung about to make the Mii on screen mimic the movements. The latter feels a bit arbitrary, until you come upon foes that can only be hit from a certain side. But the bow really is a blast, particularly because you have that same virtual reality effect as in ZombiU. I love standing in the middle of the room and spinning around like a drunk ballet dancer.

A game that has been strangely absent on the Wii (apart from the re-releases of the original two games with motion controls tacked on), the Pikmin return in Nintendo Land as the attraction Pikmin Adventure. Gamepad guy plays Captain Olimar and uses the stylus to tap the touchscreen and throw Pikmin at foes and breakable boxes. Wii remote guy plays a slightly larger Pikmin and can walk around on his own pummeling and jumping at anything that moves or doesn't. With this setup, you battle your way through increasingly difficult levels, and it's awesome. The competitive mode, however, is a convoluted mess of small things being collected, dropped, exploded or thrown around, and you don't really have the slightest clue what's happening. The winner seems to be determined randomly. Skip this and stick to the coop mode or pick one of the following games.

So. Good. More virtual reality splendour. In Metroid Blast, you can sit your behind in a comfy little spaceship and use the Gamepad to view everything around you. I have said often enough how much I love this, but Metroid Blast does it best. It feels so natural and satisfying to look around with your Gamepad as a window and use the analog sticks only to move your spaceship through the air. The campaign consists of missions where you have to destroy waves of enemies, collect a couple of items without dying or the time running out, and there's also a few great boss battles. Wii remote players can assist you on foot in ground combat, which is quite cool as well, but not as amazing as the spaceship. The competitive mode ditches the alien opponents and pits spaceship against ground troops in a fight for glory. I liked that gameplay quite a bit, though the others seemed not to enjoy it too much for some reason.

This is the one that's not executed too well. Mario Chase is basically a simple game of tag. One player runs away, the others try to catch him. The fugitive can see the position of every player on a map and attempt to keep away, while the others each have a distance meter on their portion of the screen, so they have an idea if they're running in the right direction. Teamwork is required to drive Mario into a corner, and on paper that idea is a rather good one, but there's hardly any replay value here. There's nothing here to spice things up, you're always just running after Mario or away from the Toads and that's that. I suppose some power-ups would have helped to keep things interesting (there is a power star that makes Mario temporarily invincible, but that only creates an unfair and unnecessary advantage). So yeah, this game can be enjoyed now and then, but I much prefer the following two.

Luigis's Ghost Mansion follows a similar principle, but it's infinitely better. Here, the entire map can be observed at once, but the ghost player is invisible. The ghost hunters have to timidly shuffle around the place and occassionally shine their flashlight and try to discover the ghost with their beams of light. Doing so will drain the ghost's energy, but only for a short time—after that, the ghost will speed up momentarily and get the chance to hide again. Great touch: The Wii remote will vibrate more strongly the closer you get to the ghost; this causes a little panic attack every so often along with shouts of "Here! He's here somewhere! I'm the green guy, get over here!" All the other players come over as quickly as they can and try to corner the ghost, and it feels awesome when this kind of teamwork succeeds. The ghost player, meanwhile, can see everything on his Gamepad and is supposed to grab the other players from behind without them noticing him first. When that happens, that player is down and can be revived by the others by having light shone on him, which of course is very risky but often a necessary strategy. The different maps each have unique extra features, which makes things even more varied. This is the game I like second best in this collection, and my absolute favourite is coming up now.

My neighbours must have thought us crazy, the way we've been laughing our asses off. So this is how Animal Crossing: Sweet Day goes: The Wii remote players team up and try to collect a certain number of sweets. These sweets happen to be growing on trees and miraculously plop off if you step on switches near them. Trees with a single switch can be harvested alone, but with more of them, you'll need to team up. You can gather sweets with the press of one button and drop them again with the other. Why would you want to drop them? Well, every collected sweet makes you a little bit slower, and that's where the Gamepad player comes in. He controls two little guys, one with a giant fork, one with a giant knife. Each analog stick controls one of them, and each is assigned one shoulder button to make an abrupt lunge forward. The fact you can control both of them separately is both totally awesome and confusing. It's extremely difficult to coordinate them effectively, but it's a damn cool concept. Usually you're a bit slower than the sweet collectors, but if they're carrying a lot of them, the tides are turned quickly and the treats have to be let go to get away and not lose a collective health point. Dropped sweets lie around indefinitely and can be collected again later. There's ample room for strategy here, and that along with the hysterical air makes the game utterly enjoyable.

Two years ago, there was a game that drove me insane in a way that no game has ever done before. There were those that annoyed the hell out of me with long stretches of boring gameplay, forcing me to waste my time on these aggravatingly dull sequences over and over until I was finally allowed to do the awesome stuff again (I'm looking at you, Spirit Tracks). There have been specimen that made me feel not quite unlike the unfortunate fellow depicted in this strikingly accurate comic here. And then there was this. A game so utterly shit I am completely unable to put my finger on why the hell I made myself play through its 20-hour entirety in the first place. Other than because it's totally awesome. And nope, last time I checked I was not bipolar!

That said, my first encounter with a foe in this game was actually quite impressive. The cutscene felt like it was ripped straight out of The Grudge, and the monster—or shadow, as the game insists on calling these things—was genuinely creepy. The moment you gain control over the situation, however, any sense of horror goes down the drain by courtesy of those sounds they make. Well, maybe not any, the way they raggedly move toward you can be disturbing on occasion, particularly if you only see them out of the corner of your eye and didn't expect them to be upon you so suddenly. The combat scenarios in Deadly Premonition feel like anything but action sequences; you move from point A to point B, solve a couple of lightweight puzzles and carefully pick off a shadow every once in a while. Even with the awkward controls, this is no challenge whatsoever, up until the point when those bastards suddenly seem to be wearing Kevlar vests and start to gang up on you.

When you're not busy being chased by preternatural creatures in poorly lit places and collecting items that might help uncover bits and pieces of the mystery shrouding Greenvale, the small town in Washington the game is set in, you go about your day and can move around the place pretty much as you please. The townspeople all follow their daily schedules; they hang out at home, have lunch at the local diner, go to work and all that average joe stuff, and you can hook up with them, get to know them and make up your mind on how they fit in with what is going on. To move through town and its woody surroundings, you grab a car. I only wish it was as simple as that, but unfortunately the atrocious driving controls will only leave you hoping for mercifully long and straight roads round the next bend so you can stop wrestling that analog stick with your poor blistered thumb.

I would like to point out a little gem of video game history today. At its core, it is a top-down shooter in the vein of Alien Breed or maybe Shadowgrounds, to name a more modern title. It was released by Human Entertainment on the Super Nintendo back in 1994 and completely sticks out among its genre brethren by having an unusual premise: You're a firefighter and your weapon is a hose. This may sound somewhat unspectacular—sure, it's kinda cool; along with astronauts and vets, firemen are right on top of our children's future occupation wishlist after all—but what do you do in this game, run around and extinguish fire? Yeah, you do. Except it's not just fire, but what appears to be an army of tortured souls set ablaze by Satan himself and sent straight from hell to mercilessly chase you down until there's nothing left of you but a sad little pile of ashes and whiffs of wasted opportunities.

So you're a dude that makes fire go away. Anything else? Yup! There's one thing that I particularly like: the setting. It's refreshingly simplistic and personal. You're not some random nameless superhero tasked to save an entire civilization from the all-encompassing domination of the evil überfire, you're Pete, a run-of-the-mill firefighter captain with family, subordinates and—most importantly—a personality and a voice. There's a lot of engaging dialogue going on, and while there aren't any literary awards being won here, it definitely matches the atmosphere, and best of all: it's very rarely distracting. The story is charmingly plain: It is Christmas time, and a fire has broken out in the headquarters of a company producing chemical agents. Pete and his team set out to take care of it, and this is all there is to it.

Looking at the screens I've provided, you'll notice that the graphics are pretty damn amazing for its time. The entire game is a joy to look at, so if—in the middle of all that stuff out to kill you—you find the time to take in your surroundings, you'll be rewarded with some very impressive work of pixel art. The musical accompaniment is solid but none too special. The sound effects, on the other hand, the whooshing of fire erupting and the blast of your water launcher constitute an entire beautiful melody of their own. But in the end, the awesome shoot 'em up gameplay is what shines most brightly, so I strongly advise you to go grab this game and give it a whirl. It's really tough to find a reasonable price for The Firemen, as it's a bit of a collector's item, but nobody's gonna slap your fingers too hard if you go ahead and enjoy it on an emulator. It's an old game after all.

Earlier this year, I was enthralled by the rebirth of iconic video game legend Rayman as a near perfectly executed 2D platformer: Rayman Origins. It's arguably the first real Rayman game since its 3D predecessor Hoodlum Havoc, which was first released back in 2003—and it rocks. So much, in fact, that I'm going to be grabbing its sequel Rayman Legends on day one without a moment's hesitation. What I was oblivious of for quite a while is that DotEmu had released a spinoff of the game on Android and iOS, using the same aesthetics and pretty much the same kind of gameplay, only toned down a notch to adjust to the inferior input method of a buttonless touch device. The amazing thing is that while it's a very different game and obviously lacking many of the features that made its big brother awesome, it's still great fun, challenging and absolutely rewarding.

Rayman Jungle Run circumvents all these issues by not bothering with the whole button emulating business. The entire touch screen is your button and the only button you need (technically, this is not entirely correct, since in later stages an icon is displayed that allows you to punch, but other than that it's true!). How do you make Rayman run? A more appropriate question would be how to make him stop. The moment you start the level, Rayman breaks into a dash as if the conflagrations of hell are about to seize hold of him (which, incidentally, in a couple of levels it seems like that's exactly what's happening). So as you watch Rayman go like a Lemming on fire, you have to quickly react to whatever the level designers are throwing at you. Be it bottomless gaps, bloodthirsty foes, spiky tentacles or these insane blue flying one-armed blobs that keep groping for you and let you reach otherwise unreachable spots, you just plant your thumb on the touchscreen to jump at or away from all that. It really is as simple as that, but give it a couple of levels, and it'll be anything but an easy affair.

Every level contains one hundred yellow Lums that you have the option to collect, 40 normal ones and the rest in the form of three large golden coins. Ditching them makes most of the game tritely easy, the challenge of collecting them all is what it's really about. Particularly since there's this little extra: If you happen to grab all the Lums in half the levels of any given world, you gain access to a bonus level in the Land of the Dead, where an oddly inappropriate yet awesome Western-style tune is playing. These are bloody tough and take me easily more than 30 tries each, but the way finishing them makes you go Phew! and utter an anxious chuckle is amazing. I love that.

When compared to the past couple of generations, the Wii U launch line-up is quite impressive. While there don't seem to be any jaw-dropping must-have system sellers like Super Mario 64 back in the day, there is a rather diverse array of high quality games to pick from. Many of them are re-releases of games already available on other consoles, with a couple of additional features tacked on that utilize the Wii U's innovative tablet GamePad more or less successfully. That's nice enough, but I don't much care for those, either because I already own them on another system or simply because they can be had on another system. If I happen to grab myself a console on day one, I'm usually in for the exclusives. In this case: New Super Mario Bros. U and ZombiU. Consider my mouth watering.

So what is the secret formula for making a game this much fun to play? Polish, of course. Super Mario Galaxy has been polished so masterfully, you'd be hard-pressed to find a dent in there capable of catching your fingernail. First and foremost: the controls. It's hard enough to have a game work in a way that at once feels intuitive and keeps you in perfect control, and even harder to actually make every completed manœuvre feel satisfying. Super Mario Galaxy almost fully succeeds in this regard, and where it doesn't, it's because of the infinitely more difficult challenge of having Mario walk on walls and ceilings and of switching around the direction of gravity all the bloody time. The fact that this works so well and only rarely makes you lose control is nothing short of mind-boggling. It also opens up so many possibilities for brilliant game designers to shine, and what they've created here is so diversified and clever that every new collected star makes you muster ample motivation to keep the controller in your hands and go for the next one. Again and again.

What else do I like? Pull stars! It's a mechanic that really only works with a pointing device, such as the Wii Remote. You point at one of those little blue star thingies, grab them with A, and then Mario starts to slowly drift toward it, becoming progressively faster. In an entire plane full of these pull stars and with enough skill at your disposal, you can quickly pull yourself from star to star and thereby establish the exact path you want to travel along and how fast to do it. This sort of lazy slinging feels extremely rewarding, particularly if you manage to flawlessly direct Mario through a small opening, avoiding all obstacles. One of the levels I've recently finished involves racing a boastful ghost with a helmet through a course of pull stars, and the speed and fluidity with which I flung Mario along it caused a wonderful pang of exhilaration.