Max – The Curse of Brotherhood (360, Xbox One, PC)
One day after school, Max comes home to find his little brother Felix in his room playing with Max’s toys. Disgusted, Max does an Internet search on ‘Giggle’ to find a way to get rid of his brother. He finds a magic spell, but when he reads it aloud, to his surprise it actually works and a dimensional portal opens up and a monster grabs Felix and whisks him away. Realizing he had done something wrong, Max leaps into the portal to save his brother and winds up in a whole new world. Armed with only his wits and a special magic marker, Max must explore this new land and rescue his sibling. Max – The Curse of Brotherhood is a sequel to Max and the Magic Marker and is available to download on PC and Microsoft game consoles (reviewed on 360 here).
Luminux (iPad)
Luminux is a simple puzzle game for iOS devices and Google Play (reviewed on iPad here). In the game, you must slide squares around to line up three of the same color horizontally or vertically to make them disappear and earn points. You can slide squares around anywhere you like, just as long as you have room to move them. New squares will constantly appear, so you must be quick. If the screen fills with squares and you can’t move anymore, it’s Game Over.
Jungle Rumble (iPad)
A rival monkey tribe is snatching all of your tribes’ bananas and invading your space. It’s up to you to take control of your monkey tribe through music and fend off the invaders. But later you may have to team up to fight an even greater evil. Jungle Rumble is a downloadable game for iOS (reviewed on iPad here), and it’s a clever mix of strategy and music rhythm gameplay.
SQUIDS Odyssey (Wii U)
A group of squids out raiding treasures in undersea ruins come across a terror that plagued the ocean many years ago. Mysterious black ooze is covering the aquatic creatures and turning them evil. It’s up to the squids to escape and recruit an army to fight this menace. SQUIDS Odyssey is a downloadable WII U title with a unique mix of turn based strategy combined with…the classic game of marbles?!?
4444 (iPad)
This is a uniquely named puzzler (not sure if it’s pronounced “Four four four four,” or “four-thousand, four-hundred forty-four.” In the game you must make squares of the same color to make a bigger square, and the only rule is that you have to place a certain color square on a different color space. With this simple rule they’ve created nearly half a dozen gameplay modes in this downloadable game for iOS and Android devices (reviewed on iPad here).
Scram Kitty and his Buddy on Rails (Wii U)
Child of Light (360, Xbox One, Wii U, PC, PS3, PS4)
Young Princess Aurora happily lives with her father, the king. But one day she falls into a deep sleep and wakes in a strange, new magical land. She soon meets a talking firefly and is given the power of flight, and is tasked with the job of saving this world. She must return the moon and the stars to their rightful places, and thwart the evil plans of the dark queen Umbra. Along the way she’ll meet a colorful cast of characters who will fight alongside her, including a jester, a merchant mouse, and many more. Child of Light is a downloadable gem for nearly all current consoles that is one part 2-D platforming and one part tried-and-true turned based RPG gameplay, and it’s also one of the best games this year so far (Xbox 360 version reviewed here).
Blowfish Meets Meteor (iPad)
Under the ocean lives a bunch of mermaids and deep sea diver guys, and they’re all happy together. Until one day a meteor crashes nearby and somehow traps all the mermaid girls inside groups of blocks. Now you, as one of the diver guys, must leave the comforts of your underwater dome home and your loving mermaid wife, and bounce around a tiny meteor with a giant shell to break blocks and free all your mermaid daughters. Blowfish Meets Meteor is a unique take on the brick breaking, ball bouncing, BreakOut and Arkanoid style of gameplay, and you can download it for iOS devices (reviewed on iPad here).
Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return (3DS)
Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return is a new computer animated movie where Dorothy comes back to Oz to save her friends from an evil Jester. And now you can play a 3DS game based on the film’s adventures. So what kind of game is this? It’s a match-three puzzle game. Yup, really. But for what it is, it’s actually not that bad, even if the license it’s based on is.
Hyper Crazy Climber (PS3)
When I was a little kid in the early 80’s, I would love to go to arcades. They were some of my first experiences that shaped me as a gamer. Many of the games I played back then you can still find today if you look hard enough. These special games seemed to be in every arcade I visited, because they were so popular. Some of these include Pac-Man, Galaga, Dig Dug, Pole Position, Centipede, etc. But there were other arcade machines that I remember seeing in nearly every arcade back then, but you don’t hear so much about them now. One good example is Crazy Climber. I used to see it in nearly every arcade I went to, so it must’ve been popular back then. But you don’t see much about it now. However, in Japan, where the game originated, there have been some sequels, ports, and remakes of Crazy Climber since then, and one of them was Hyper Crazy Climber on the original PlayStation. Now you can download and play Hyper Crazy Climber on PSN thanks to MonkeyPaw Games (reviewed on PS3 here).


