With the holiday season in full effect, we are looking at a popular gift for high school aged kids, video games. Today’s focus is on the Nintendo platform system. Here is a top ten Nintendo game list:

1. Bayonetta – the Bayonetta series fuses together compelling (and different) character design with memorable boss battles, seemingly endless waves of Monsters, and a smart fighting system.

2. Celeste – has a wide range. It’s a great platformer,  it’s a puzzle game, it’s extremely punishing, but it’s also very accessible. With top notch game play and compelling story it’s a beautiful, moving, and memorable contradiction of a game created by Matt Makes games, the indie studio behind the excellent game, Town Fall.

3. Cup Head – is a run and gun game where you go world to world and beat bosses as a way to repay your debt to the devil. 

4. Fire Emblem: Three Houses – gamers with dual personalities will enjoy in a meaningful and satisfying way. You’ll spend half your time as a master tactician, commanding troops around varied and enjoyable battlefields. The other half of the time you will be teaching students and building relationship as a professor at the finest school in the land.

5. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – pulls the long-running series into modern gaming, with a perfectly pitched difficulty curve and an incredible open world to play with. There’s crafting, weapons that degrade, almost too much to collect and do, and a gentle story hidden away for the players to discover for themselves.

6. Mario kart 8 Deluxe – race around the track with more races and characters. Now there are also four engine classes, 50cc, 100cc, 150cc, and 200cc. 

7. Super Mario Odyssey – a great Mario game that has been refined across the last two decades. New modern improvements, new maps with fast travel, and the new power-stealing cappy is a true fun addition to Mario’s usual tricks. However, that core joy of Mario, figuring out the puzzles, racing to collect items and exploring land marks, is here, in abundance.

8. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – fighting game for up to 8 players in which players from Nintendo games and other franchises battle to knock one another out of the arena. 

9. Rocket League – a soccer like sports game that has super powered cars battling in place of people. 

10. Stardew Valley – a farming simulation game where you are given a small plot of land to shape as you see fit with crops and livestock. If you get tired of that, explore the nearby pelican town, get to know you neighbors and hopefully woo one lucky one into marriage.