It's been a while since I last visited my Retro Games Bucket List. I swear I didn't push off the last entry to coincide with some sort of arbitrary milestone (my 500th review if Backloggd's metrics can be trusted), but it was either this or Sonic Origins Plus. No, I just find it very difficult to discuss Super Mario 64 and have struggled for a while with how I want to approach it.

My apprehension doesn't come from the fact that Mario 64 and its legacy have been so thoroughly discussed, at least not necessarily. That certainly does pose a challenge, after all it is one of the most influential and historically significant games in the medium, and it's been documented to death for good reason. All I can really add is my own personal experiences with it, but that's where the real difficulty comes in, because I've so deeply linked the game to my late grandfather, and framing a whole review for a Mario game around parsing his death just sounds a little bit silly.

I could instead talk about how my first exposure to Super Mario 64 didn't actually come from my grandpa despite how much I tie it to him. When the Nintendo 64 came out, the arcade I used to hang out in had one hooked up to a big TV and roped off with velvet. Ten bucks for ten minutes with Mario, a damn good racket. The save already had all 120 stars unlocked, and the very first thing I did was jump into the cannon outside Princess Peach's castle, which takes you to the castle's roof and face-to-face with Yoshi. The next day I kept insisting to all my friends that Yoshi was in Mario 64. I was called a liar and relentlessly mocked. I knew what I saw, damnit! There's a Yoshi up there! He's gave me 100 lives!!

Anyway, I really hate Yoshi games for some reason.........

It's snowing out, and there are elk roaming in my grandpa's backyard - his house is large and remote, the massive fenced off satellite dish he gets TV from is bordered by miles and miles of pure nature. I'm playing Dire Dire Docks, and by that, I mean I'm mostly drowning to death over and over again, but the music and atmosphere is serene. Grandpa laughs warmly when I die, then he offers some advice, but mostly he just watches and lets me figure it out, as he did whenever we played games together. I don't know it at the time, but I would never be there again.

Ah, yeah, that sounds kinda dumb. But the most insightful thing I have to share about Mario 64 isn't some hot nugget of development history, or a unique perspective on its mechanics, how Mario handles or the way its levels are designed. As much as I would love to tear into it as I would any other game, I can't. Every time I try to write about how important the game was for establishing analog controls or the way it shaped the next several years of 3D platformers, I just get lost in a nostalgic haze, thinking about how much fun I had on the title screen alone, molding Mario's face like that scene from The Hundred Days of the Dragon. Mom walking in, asking "what the hell are you playing," and grandpa answering very curtly, "Mary-oh." I'd correct him. He'd never get it right. To the grave, it was "Mary-oh."

Nowadays, the scene around Super Mario 64 is still lively, though its greatest contributions are so codified in the medium that you'll likely take them for granted. Instead, it lives on more fervently through trite analog horror and speedruns which may or may not be influenced by stray cosmic particles. It occupies such a weird space; one I would've been far more fascinated by as a child. "L is real" captivated me, if you told me back then that every cart was personalized, my eyes would be as wide as saucers. I'm pretty dumb, but I was straight stupid in the 90s.

Super Mario 64 felt like an impossibly huge game to me. Peach's castle was large and full of secrets, and though I eventually got a Nintendo 64 of my own, I could only explore Mario 64 when visiting my grandpa. It was a strange omission from my collection, yet that always left me excited to play more when I visited his house. How much further had he gotten? What cool new things could he show me? What new games did he have, did he get any more promo tapes? The last one had a couple of guys put Mario's head in a damn vice, that was pretty fucked up!

There's a reason Mario 64 was the last game I wanted to get to in my bucket list, as the whole impetus behind making one in the first place was a form of retreat. It felt somehow appropriate to close the whole thing out with it. I really appreciate everyone who stuck with me as I went through my list, reviewing classics like Contra Hard Corps and hot liquid shit like Aero the Acro-Bat. I promise I'll get back to reviews like that soon.

Super Mario 64 is a great game. Bad camera, and it's gotten trendy to write off other parts of it that are antiquated, even despite the fact that for what it doesn't get right, it was still one of the first to do it. But I can't go in on that, even if I see a lot of those rough edges, too. I'm just too emotionally invested in it.

I often confuse The Adventures of Batman & Robin for being a Traveller's Tales game, and not because Gamehut did an excellent video explaining how many of the it's graphical tricks work. Rather, like Traveller's Tales' games often are, Batman & Robin looks very impressive but is a total chore to play.

This is a run-and-gun, because Batman famously only does battle with his rogue's gallery by chucking a hundred and fifty thousand batarangs at their faces. This isn't really a bad thing, but levels drag on and on and on, often inundating you with ceaseless waves of spongy enemies. Your batarang can be upgraded by picking up power-ups similar to your typical shot upgrades in a shoot-em-up, and much like an average shoot-em-up, starting from a game over on a particularly hard stage with your piddly basic shot is abject misery, though far worse here give how resilient enemies become towards the middle to later half of the game.

There's also several levels that straight up are shoot-em-ups, with Batman gliding around in an overhead view taking on waves of attack helicopters and battleships, and these feel like total trash. Your sluggish movement coupled with how often enemies want to ram into you or fire bullet-hell barrages pointblank makes these incredibly irritating. Your best strategy to carry you through these levels is to pause the game and tap B, A, down, B, A down, left, up, C and just skip the god damn stage. Consider that code a Christmas gift from me to you.

Damn good looking game, though. There's some really impressive parallax scrolling to give the illusion of 3D, and the title cards before each chapter are incredibly detailed and faithful in style to those of the 90s cartoon. I feel that moreso than any other game in my Genesis collection, Batman & Robin is best experienced on a CRT. It's not too surprising to see a 1995 Genesis game swinging for the bleachers with its graphics, the tail-end of the system's library is full of titles that are more preoccupied with making an immediate impression with their visuals, often at the expense of good gameplay.

I decided to add this to my yuletide shortlist alongside holiday favorites like Clockwork Knight and Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams, and I guess nothing says "Christmas" more than sitting hunched forward, glaring at the TV, controller in a death grip while constantly sighing and muttering "Jesus..." under my breath. Happy holidays!

Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate TaleSpin for the Sega Genesis since I began to live.

As nostalgic as I am for the games of my youth, I will concede that in terms of overall quality, gaming is currently at its peak. Budgets have ballooned to astronomical heights, and studios simply aren't willing to take a risk anymore. While this means there's very little innovation happening from the major studios today, you can at least expect a new title to be good enough that the publisher will recoup their investment. Another way of putting this is that they don't make games like TaleSpin anymore, because it would result in the immediate closure of a studio and the construction of gallows outside their hollowed out offices.

Bad games today are simply boring. Bad games in the 90s were a feast for the senses, so offensive in their mere existence that it was hard not to have a real visceral reaction to them. And in the 90s, it really didn't matter if you put out a stinker. You could recover from that, then pinch out ten more like it's nothing. Oh sure, you might see old photographs of Toys R' Us shelves packed with all the classics, the big names that will make you wistful for times long past, but the reality was that you were walking a minefield every time you went to buy or rent a new game. For every Mario World there was 15 TaleSpins waiting in the wings ready to fan the flames of violence in your adolescent heart.

And that's how it was for me. I'd go with my mom to Wal-Mart one month and pick up Sonic 2 and I'd be the happiest boy alive. I'd go in there the next month and BOOM, my leg is blown off and sitting next to a copy of this piece of trash.

You take control of Baloo or Kit Cloudkicker. It doesn't matter who you pick, they both control like garbage. You'll slip and slide around levels with really tight platforming, never quite feeling in control of your character. There's a few levels that are confusing to navigate, but all of them lack any sort of forethought to their design and are completely unenjoyable to explore. Every now and then you're given a respite in the form of an aerial combat stage, and these are maybe the least offensive part of the game, but still squirrely and bad. The lowest point the game sinks to are its boss battles. The feedback on hits is really poor and the bosses are complete sponges. They also just go completely ham on you, and with the controls being as bad as they are, I found it very difficult to dodge their projectiles.

TaleSpin is up there with Flying Edge's Addam's Family in the pantheon of terrible Sega Genesis games. Both beat me as a kid, so ruthlessly and with such emotional shock that my very brain chemistry was altered. I have a compulsion now to beat every game I own, no matter how much I might dislike some of them. I can't let the game win, you see. Over time, these two titles twisted in my mind, becoming tumors that I had to excise. Well, I did it. Was it worth it? Hell no. But the deed is done, and there is perhaps some comfort in knowing I have absolutely no reason to ever touch TaleSpin ever again.

this game is 35 dollars on ebay

Exactly what it says on the tin: more Spider-Man done extremely well. A few of the systems are fighting against the overall power fantasy of Spider-Man - most of the mini-games are completely unnecessary and bring the action to a halt when they're merely trying to slow it down; the wing suit feels amazing but pulls you away from web-slinging. The story also feels a bit uneven, as Miles' story is far more compelling than Peter's and story beats that have more bathos than pathos. Despite all of this, the game feels incredible and looks great, the environments feel even more vibrant and lively, and when it all comes together you forget all of the things that work less well.

text based adventure game about funny vegetable people, sure alright. Has a lot of charm to it that makes it a bit memorable though if you aren't into the genre this isn't gonna convince you. The english version of the game definitely got hit by nintendo censors making the game more kid friendly by changing any drug and alcohol references the JP version had. There's a retranslation that puts all that stuff back in so you can honestly pick either and probably have a good time. The fact that they officially localized this back in the day in general is insane as most text heavy games weren't back then. shoutouts to the salad kingdom i guess.

Basically, this is the best version to play the original King's Quest I, one of the most important adventure games of all time.

A fun point-and-click adventure game that still holds up well today and has influenced many adventure games over the decades.

I honestly don't have much to complain about in this fan-made remake.

The presentation of the game is better, the story is better explained, the gameplay is slightly better than the original game (you don't need to write every time the actions of the game to do the actions of the game), there are better graphics, a better soundtrack, and a new option to help new players.

What little I would complain about the original game, this remake has already corrected; that is, if you have any interest in this game, go after it and play the remake.

The remake has an option to remove the dead ends if you want, so if you want to play without stress, use that option.

Overall, I recommend giving this game a shot. Still remains a respected classic.

Play this game with a guide.

I played this game with my baby cousin, who's father had bought this game intentionally as one of their first digital romps. Sure, her constantly wanting to be in the lead got old fast, but seeing her excitement whenever she told me her favourite parts, what excited her, what scared her, and what amused her were some of the memories I knew she would cherish. She loved showing me every little thing, and having had over 50 hours on her save file just from replaying levels alone, I knew she was having the time of her life playing this game.

I got what I wanted during my 5-hour marathon for this game, but I know deep in my heart, my baby cousin is still getting everything she ever needs from just this little Kirby game, and I'm forever grateful for that.