You can pick up your Wii U games today...

Well maybe not Nintendoland or New Super Mario Bros. U, but it being the Tuesday before the Wii U finally launches many 3rd party titles such as Assassin's Creed III, Black Ops II & Scribblenauts Unlimited are hitting stores tomorrow so if you wanted to pick any of those up prior to launch it would be a good opportunity.

I'm now several hours into Paper Mario Sticker Star, and I can tell you that if you were expecting some sort of rpg you'll be at least mildly dissapointed. It's more like a classic adventure title with turn-based battles thrown in to mix things up. The good news is the majority of times it works quite well, but there are a few times when the design fall on its face to a frustrating degree. Mainly because the designers, rather than letting you be creative in how you solve puzzles (and boss fights, which are puzzles all on their own) have a very specific solution even when other objects would clearly get the job done just as well. Also at least to this point, sticker management is a pain as space at the beginning is pretty limited. It would be nice if I could just stack multiple stickers of the same type in one slot, but I do also see how that could really limit the challenge since most stickers respawn once you have left an area and at least the basic attack types are really cheap. Despite these minor annoyances like I said for the most part it works pretty brilliantly and add in the incredibly clever writing and you've easily have the best 3DS game of the year.

The final big multi-platform release of 2012 hits stores today in Call of Duty: Black Ops II. It changes up a lot of what I'd expect out of a shooter. Tons of MP content to be sure, but the single player, with it's jumping time periods and choices with consequences gameplay has me way more interested than I've been in recent history. The last shooter I probably seriously got into was the original Modern Warfare, which was probably the last major change-up to the COD series, so maybe Black Ops II offers a  drastic enough change that it'll get me invested in the series again. I would like to at least rent the Wii U version, so I'll certainly give my impressions if I get my hands on it.

-That's all for today, I will certainly do at least one more post before Sunday when the Wii U hits, but until then, here's your TRAILER OF THE WEEK: World War Z