It has just a couple of nips and tucks-with an ability to sail faster and a trimmed down late-game quest-which were enough to elevate it to a kind of Zelda nirvana.

This year's Twilight Princess HD remake was good (it's a great 30-hour game stuck in a 50-hour game), but Wind Waker HD is a prettier, improved version of one of the series' finest outings. The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker screen courtesy of NintendoĪnd there was a lot of Zelda on the Wii U. 2014 alone brought us Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros for Wii U, games that still enjoy heavy rotation in my house (and, I suspect, in many Wii Us around the world.) Pikmin 3 was an earlier Wii U game that seems to get little attention these days, but the puzzle-strategy series has never been better implemented than it was here, particularly in its multiplayer mode.

A 3D platformer with no jumping, Captain Toad was directly inspired by Super Mario 64's ' garden in a box' design ethos, which emphasizes surprises and challenges in a self-contained space.Ĭouch (and even, in a first for Nintendo, online) multiplayer games were especially strong on the system. Not only did the Wii U sport one of the best 2D platformers of the generation in Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, it also had one of the finest 3D(-ish!) platformers in Super Mario 3D World, a strong, creatively designed multiplayer-friendly title that I've played all the way through something like 3 times, with different people in each go-round.That game spawned the incredible Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze from Waypoint's launch stream

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