What We're Playing: Ori and the L.A. Cops Edition

After getting an F from the Better Business Bureau, Valve is rethinking how it handles customer service. Cities: Skylines fights piracy with free content. And Nintendo is finally (finally!) joining the smartphone game.

What are you playing this weekend?

Russell Archey, Staff Writer, @NeoScyther
I'll probably be spending a lot of the weekend playing Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars on the Wii U to get ready for my review. It's pretty good for the most part, though it'd be nice if more people put some actual thought into their custom levels, as opposed to just, "Start level, do nothing, earn stars, please tip me some stars." I haven't tried creating a stage myself yet, so I'll likely give that a try. Playing Mario vs. Donkey Kong finally forced me to find my Wii U's stylus that I somehow had misplaced, so I might also finally check out Kirby and the Rainbow Curse. As a fan of the series, I really enjoyed Canvas Curse and was glad they made a sequel. My main worry is that, similar to Mario vs. DK, I'll be looking at the game pad the entire time; but if the game's good enough, I can somewhat get past that.

Sean Cahill, Staff Writer, @GN_Punk
After thoroughly enjoying my time with Ori and the Blind Forest, I'm doing a second playthrough in an attempt to 100% clear it. In between that, I'm working on a review piece for L.A. Cops. These two games should take up most of my time.

Sean Colleli, Staff Writer, @scolleli
I finished replaying BioShock earlier this week, or, as I'm calling it now, Pipe Mania: Under the Sea. I forgot just how often you have to do that bloody stupid pipe-hacking minigame. It brings the moody, if heavy-handed, underwater dystopia momentum to a crashing halt like every five minutes. Don't get me wrong, Ken Levine is a brilliant guy, but how did Irrational go from the elegant hacking interface in System Shock 2 to Pipe Mania? Anyway, I'm moving on to the criminally underrated BioShock 2, which I have always considered superior to the original, because I'm a heretic or something. The gameplay is tighter, the story is more personal, the multiple endings (six of them!) are more satisfying, and the hacking minigame is ingeniously straightforward. And hey, with the remote darts, you can hack something from across the room.

Randy Kalista, Staff Writer, @RandyKalista
Joel and Ellie's odyssey has trekked its way outside Pittsburgh now, so I figure I'm somewhere's around chapter six of 12 in The Last of Us. I'm continually stunned by Naughty Dog's master craftsmanship. They must hire film students and cinema afficionados, not just video game developers. Otherwise, I'm turning pages through EVE Universe, an artbook for EVE Online that goes back to the series' roots; like, some of this stuff looks scribbled onto bar napkins—it's great.