While the PLATO RPGs of its time seek to replicate thr systems of Dungeons and Dragons, Colossal Cave Adventure seeks to preserve its humanity. It is a proto-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. It is a DnD one-shot wherein the DM is infinitely patient, but barely speaks your language. It is one of the most important video games ever made. Beside the adventure sits a parallel game... one of communication. Accept that relaying your intentions to this robot can be a fun challenge in itself, and find yourself enjoying two games at once.

Colossal Cave Adventure is, at least in my opinion, the first game that is actually about exploring a place. Not just mapping out a level, but searching its crannies and understanding its inner workings. As you can imagine, some of the puzzles in Colossal Cave Adventure are stupid. There are a great number of passageways that only SOMETIMES randomly work, and the "solution" is literally just to try them over and over. In this original text adventure, that means typing a command over and over, not just holding down a button to walk in a direction.

Despite the clunk, this is an admirable first outing with many interesting little twists and turns, and if a slow-paced, dry-witty, more-exploratory, historically-essential version of Kirby Superstar's Great Cave Offensive sounds interesting to you, I'd say you'll probably have a good time!

But I'd also say that you should definitely play the 2023 graphical remake Colossal Cave over the original though, because we live in a society.

While it's far from my personal favorite Nintendo franchise, I consider Punch-Out to be the first of the greats. Donkey Kong and Mario's first outings in the arcades are serviceable, and the Game and Watch games are what they are, and Duck Hunt is a fine enough light gun game, but Punch-Out feels like the first quintessential work of true Nintendo polish and vision. It looks great for the time, and as a well-considered, elaborate, one-on-one boss-rush fighting game, it was something new and visionary. Super Mario Bros might still be a year away, but The Real Nintendo starts right here.

The thing is uhhh... you've played the NES one right? You know that these guys have like, really specific tells and gimmicks that you kind of have to figure out through trial and error or from somebody telling you? Yeah that's a pretty dirty thing to tie to a quarter-munching arcade machine. Good thing none of that's really here yet! I guess?

I grew up playing Smash TV on, of all things, my PS1 (via Arcade Party Pak) and little did I know that almost everything I liked about it was already on full display in the arcade a decade before I was born.

Robotron is overwhelmingly brutal. I cannot imagine it was actually popular in the arcade, when it is so easy to put in that first quarter, INSTANTLY die before you even comprehend what is happening, and judge the second quarter to be an unwise investment. Getting good at Robotron is a daunting endeavor, even without the literal cost.

With the luxury of free-play in a modern environment though, it's easy to call Robotron the most frantically addicting game of its time.

If you've ever wondered what it takes for a game to become a sport, the answer you were looking for was Street Fighter II.

Video games had been competitive since they day they were born. Literally Space War is a one-on-one PVP multiplayer game. Pong is based on (stolen from) the Magnavox Odyssey's Table Tennis, which is based directly on an existing competitive sport. Arcades were leaderboard galleries, and almost every game in them revolved around the comparing of scores, and yet Street Fighter II was able to change everything.

Before Street Fighter II, if it was deep it was about scoremongering, and if it was actually about two people in direct, contemporaneous competition, it was a shallow thing that one or both contestants could master in no time at all.

Street Fighter II is a game that you and a friend could play every day for months on end and still develop new and interesting techniques. It was something you could study, and your rivals would constantly redefine what mastery means. Even with its many rereleases shifting its meta and smoothing over its cracks, the original release of SF2 is solid enough to remain unbroken, even in current year. It is a genre's bedrock, even if it's not so terribly exciting anymore in this world so populated by its progeny.

Doom is bountiful beyond all reason. It is truly the gift that never stops giving. Its base campaign is enough as it is, and the pursuit of its mastery was a crucial element in speedrunning's infancy, but with WADs it can simply never end. Doom harbors a level editor robust enough that it has never stopped seeing heavy use. It's not even just a level editor, that's what Wolfenstein has. Doom has full-on mod support, something that was totally unheard of. Equally unheard of is deathmatch, an ONLINE PVP multiplayer mode the likes of which no shooter had seen before.

It's a fast, frenetic, inventive embarrassment of riches, the likes of which we never truly deserved.

It's far past time that we all admitted it. Inti Creates has ALWAYS been better at Megaman than Capcom ever was.

The common sentiment that I've heard is that Megaman 9 is "the best one" and while I'm not quite willing to commit to such a claim, it's absolutely in the highest tier of Classic Megaman. The only things holding it back are things consciously done to assume parity with the old games. I would rather just not repeat what I consider to be mistakes, but it does complicate the criticism somewhat when everything I can complain about is clearly intentional.

I don't think we needed to get rid of the charged shot or the slide. I don't think that there needed to be (admittedly hilarious) player traps sprinkled throughout, and I don't think the game needed to be tuned Too Hard on purpose. There are some screens in Megaman 9's Wily stages that are more satanic than anything else in the whole franchise. They are things that an experienced player CAN respond to, but even if you know what you're doing, certain things just feel like too much to ask from a player who is trying to have any kind of good time. The shop is back, which is something I've never been terribly fond of, but it's very inobtrusive here. It's mostly just a way to pile up consumable E-tanks and lives.

Megaman 9 also has a somewhat surprising amount of content, with a bunch of challenges included, some of which are... rude to even SUGGEST to the player if I'm being honest. Suggesting that somebody beat the hardest Megaman game without ever once taking damage is either going to get you laughed out of the room or make you an enabler of someone's complete self-destruction.

The Best One.

Difficulty on normal feels just about right, though most of the robot masters go down too easy when you're using their weakness, something that is admittedly prevalent through most of the series. 10 relies far less on ambush traps. It's very much still "Nintendo Hard" but I can't think of a single situation where something felt cheap. Mean, perhaps, but not cheap. Protoman is playable from the start which is great, though have fun taking double damage if you want to be the cool guy.

The weapons are mediocre, but frankly, if it were up to me I'd probably just remove weapons as a concept from this entire series, so I couldn't care less. The same flaw did not dampen my appreciation for 5, and I don't count it against 10 either.

To be honest with you, I knew within the first minute that I was going to like 10 more than 9 just because you can save from the level select screen. The levels have meaningfully branching paths in them! Bass is really fun to play as! They don't make you fight three Wily forms in a row without any sort of checkpoint! Try to catch me giving a shit that there's some unoriginality in the weapons that I don't like using anyway.

Auto-battle nonsense game which, like all of these, draws out a fairly unnecessary story over an excruciating amount of time. You can tell exactly when the decision came down to stop supporting KH:UX because suddenly the pace accelerates to a somewhat acceptable level.

Even as a KH fan trying to keep track of all this shit, seriously, you just do not need this. It's more of a Coded than a Union Cross. Even if these characters show up later, they will be strangers to Sora and you will be introduced to them. You can just read about them on a wiki if you're that curious.