One of the best games ever made, for reasons that everyone has already said, and yet I will repeat anyway.

This game's design just holds up so well. The way it rewards exploration is timeless, and makes the game downright cathartic to revisit. The game somehow manages to give you no guidance while simultaneously avoiding being outright cryptic (with some exceptions which I'll get to) and letting the player figure out solutions for themselves. That is a groundbreaking achievement in exploration-based game design and it's no wonder that this game essentially spawned a genre. When you find a solution in Super Metroid, it truly feels like you earned it, and the game completely understands how good that feeling is. Environmental clues and experimenting with your abilities are the keys to finding your way through (and if not, just use the X-Ray visor), and it is just as satisfying a gameplay loop today as I'm sure it was in 1994. The game is not very lengthy, but it's just long enough that I feel the game gets the most out of its gameplay structure and locations, without going on for so long that it starts getting monotonous. I feel I must stress this game's lack of monotony; each of the game's locations are very distinct from both a visual standpoint and design standpoint. They're all just the right size, with no repeated rooms, and some notable landmarks to help you remember the layout, which is a huge improvement from the first two Metroid games. I also appreciate how the game starts small before opening up. The compact beginning area where you get the morph ball and missiles is a great way to ease new players into the structure of Metroid games before letting them out in the deep end. And of course, this game wouldn't be nearly as fun to play if it didn't have that map.

That's not even mentioning the game's incredible presentation. The visuals are fantastic, with great attention to detail and subtle but impactful visual effects bringing the world of Zebes to life. And of course, the atmosphere is unparalleled. Between the creepy and the serene, every tone is executed perfectly in Zebes' compelling mixture of sci-fi and nature. Gorgeous environments matched with an ambient yet melodic soundtrack really does go far. I love Crateria, the moody rain and damp grassy caves is such an appealing aesthetic to me and it would be recaptured with Prime's equally breathtaking Tallon Overworld. And that moment when you go down the elevator and the energetic upper Brinstar theme gradually fades in is just... wow. It's so subtle but it really feels like the game kicks into gear in that moment. It's a perfect demonstration of how this game excels in atmosphere and tying its audiovisual design with its world design. It's an all-time great moment for me, and this is a game filled with all-time great moments. The opening in the space station is an immediate hook, the previously mentioned beginning area serving as a recreation of certain Metroid 1 rooms is a great bit of continuity (something games of the era almost never had), Ridley's Lair isn't very long but the music and visuals make it feel like the epic last stand that it is, and the story comes full circle with an absolutely legendary final boss and ending that still ranks among the most memorable in any video game. It's mindboggling how cinematic this game feels considering the time it came out, and it does so without speaking a single word outside of the opening!

I don't think this game is a 10/10 though. It just has too many flaws that hold it back. My first issue is the occasional lack of clarity. While the vast majority of this game can be solved with good intuition, there are a few moments in the game that outright require a guide, which is a huge no-no for a game like this. Some stupid moments that come to mind are: that bridge in Brinstar that requires you to run across, breaking the glass tube with a super bomb to enter Maridia, being able to go through lava with the Gravity Suit, and exiting Ridley's Lair through a completely normal looking wall which the X-Ray visor doesn't work on for some godforsaken reason. None of these are ever told or indicated to the player. I thought putting players in a situation where they have absolutely zero way to know what to do without a guide was Zelda's job, not Metroid's! It would also be nice if doors were indicated on the map; I think that's the main quality of life feature this game is missing. Side note, but I also found the Maridia area generally frustrating and unfun to traverse, but it's immediately followed up by Ridley's Lair and that is peak Metroid so I'll forgive it.

My other main criticism is the controls and movement, which I find downright unenjoyable. The jump has too much vertical momentum and not enough horizontal momentum. Pressing L to aim diagonally downwards and R to aim diagonally upwards is archaic. Why is there even a run button? And wall jumps are the biggest offender. You all know what I mean. Screw that one pit. What I'm saying is, if you got MercurySteam to remake this game in Dread's engine, add a few QoL features, and make a few small alterations to the world design, you'd probably have the perfect game. Some food for thought.

Basically, Super Metroid is a masterpiece, a must-play for literally everyone, the single best action game on the SNES, yadda yadda yadda. You get the idea. PLAY IT.

And yes, I saved the animals.

This had to be my first log on this website. My favourite video game of all time. To this day, this is the only mainline Mario game that truly feels like an "experience". This is the game where all of Nintendo's signature ideologies came together to produce arguably the most complete package they have ever made. Honestly, I still can't believe a game this well-made even exists, let alone one as absurdly creative as this.

It's easy to take it for granted now, but the game's central concept is simultaneously so innovative, so ambitious, and so stupid that it's utterly mind boggling that it worked out so perfectly in execution. And the game still managed to fire on all cylinders in every other aspect too! This game is an utter miracle and I don't understand it.

One of the greatest technological achievements on the SNES. You'd think the idea of making a game on the SNES with NSMB DS sprites and pre-rendered models (including custom-made models) would make for a visual mess, but the visuals are actually quite appealing and mostly stylistically consistent, and the game runs well in most circumstances. It really makes me wish an official SNES Mario game actually looked like this; it would've been groundbreaking in the 90s. Giving the ugliest and most boring mainline Mario game this new visual style makes the game so much more enjoyable, and unlike the original Mario Land I was actually able to bring myself to complete it in one sitting. Hell, it even made me realize that the level design in Mario Land is actually not half bad. Also, wall jumps are here too for some reason. That's pretty nifty.

It pains me to give this a mediocre score, but it's still pretty clear that there's a lot of work to be done. The physics were completely redone from the original game, but they still don't feel right. It's consistent enough, but it just isn't very satisfying to move around, nor is it fit for precise platforming (namely level 3-2, which also sucked in the original). Mario's animations look stilted, and there's a clear lack of polish with enemy and object hitboxes. I somehow died by jumping over the goal post. And the remastered soundtrack also could've been a lot better. It's surprisingly lackluster and loses most of the charm of the original music. It's also... still Super Mario Land, meaning it's done in like half an hour and doesn't offer much you haven't seen elsewhere.

This is a great proof of concept, and it has the potential to become great in general if it's given further attention and improvements. I'd love to see Mario Land 2 remade in this style.

Generally, video game mods are the epitome of passion projects and labors of love. CTGP Revolution is the antithesis to that.

On paper, CTGP should've been a masterstroke. And in some ways, it is. Adding over 200 new fan-made tracks and reviving the online server has completely revitalized Mario Kart Wii and kept its legacy alive. And for what it's worth, I've sunk hundreds of very enjoyable hours into it as a result. However, despite its innovative and impressive concept, CTGP is shockingly less than the sum of its parts, and is an overhanging cloud of negativity in the MKWii modding community. Years of playing CTGP have caused its cracks to show, making it impossible for me to appreciate this mod to the extent that I once did. Here I'll express just a handful of my many problems with CTGP. This will be a longer review than the others I've made because this is a topic that I feel passionate about.

I'll start with a smaller problem before getting to my two big issues. While many of the new features such as 200cc are appreciated, the Countdown mode is incredibly underbaked, and does not serve as a worthwhile replacement for battle mode, which should've never been replaced in the first place. The fact that this mode affects your VR instead of your BR is just baffling. All the more reason to not play it.

Now for my biggest complaints. For starters, the selection of custom tracks is abysmal. While most of the custom tracks here are great and extremely creative (In particular, Sniki's absolutely astonishing New Moon Manor is better than any track Nintendo has created for a Mario Kart game), CTGP is also littered with unpolished, decade-old custom tracks, that bring down the overall quality of the pack, alienating newcomers and frustrating everyone else. It's utterly hilarious that they have the audacity to frequently remove tracks from the pack to make room for new ones, but keep these broken messes in on the basis of how frequently they're picked online (a statistic the CTGP team perplexingly calls "popularity"), even though that metric has absolutely nothing to do with quality. This problem is exacerbated further by the fact that many of the worst offenders, particularly Mushroom Peaks, were made by the creator of CTGP himself, MrBean35000vr, who not only refuses to remove his tracks, but refuses to even update them to acceptable standards. It makes the situation feel all the more tone deaf, as if this entire thing is nothing more than a vanity project. With these issues with the track selection, among other things, the CTGP team has made it abundantly clear that they only care about catering towards the desires of the OG members of the community who have been around since the beginning (a group that I would describe as nostalgia-blind, who will defend crappy design just because they're used to it) and absolutely no one else. A project like CTGP needs to accommodate various different types of players for it to work, and it fails massively in that regard.

Addendum to above paragraph: While CTGP has been making strides in the last couple of years to clean up its custom track lineup and remove outdated tracks, as long as it continues using this nonsensical """popularity""" system to determine removals instead of... y'know... just using an opinion poll, it will never reach its full potential. With the current system, the only tracks that get removed are the ones that the least people care about, undoubtedly in an attempt to upset the least amount of people possible. But when so many people are upset by the tracks that are actually in the pack to the point of being turned away entirely, what's the point in trying to cater to a vocal minority who really likes to pick these crappy tracks online just to farm VR? But even if a better system was implemented, it still wouldn't fix the CTGP team's nostalgia-pandering and self-pleasing ideology. Some tracks currently in CTGP, like 3DS Rainbow Road and Haunted Gardens, were recently even "updated" to be reverted back to how they were as custom tracks a decade ago, for no reason other than nostalgia. How progressive.

And the worst problem, that completely tanks the integrity of CTGP, is the lack of respect paid towards the creators of the 200+ custom tracks CTGP prides itself for. Actually, "lack of respect" is putting it lightly. I mean straight up not valuing their efforts whatsoever. Track creators aren't credited for their work. There are literally no credits in CTGP. This is absolutely mind boggling. It is madly disrespectful to both the community as a whole and the modders who generously pitched in their talents to make CTGP possible in the first place, undervaluing their hard work as if it doesn't matter. Hell, I occasionally see people who literally believe that MrBean created every single track in CTGP. It's just... depressing. Additionally, from what I've learned, there is a system in place when it comes to submitting a track to CTGP, a process that can be best described as long and arduous. The CTGP team demands that creators polish their tracks to near-perfection to have any chance of it being added to the pack at all (which is rich coming from the people who continue to make excuses to justify keeping Mushroom Peaks in the pack), without any guarantee of the track actually being added. I've seen instances where creators continuously update their tracks, bringing it through the entire lengthy testing process, just for it to be rejected at the last minute. Considering all of that, in addition to the lack of any form of credits, you may ask what's even the point? Why do creators even try to get their tracks into CTGP at all when it's a completely thankless job, especially in relation to how much work it requires? Simply put, at this point in time, being added to CTGP is the only way for specific custom tracks to gain attention from a wider audience. It is also the only way to gain a level of prestige that CTGP has built up for itself and its tracks. As such, tracks that aren't in the pack will most likely never be noticed. Because of this, several track creators feel stressed or pressured to get their tracks into the pack, regardless of the fact that they won't get anything for their work. So it's kind of an endless cycle. However, a few track creators have broken this cycle by leaving the community entirely, because they don't enjoy making custom tracks anymore. Great job, CTGP!

While CTGP was an incredible feat when it came out, it is now vastly outdated, mostly because the CTGP team (aka MrBean and his yes-men) are wildly out of touch with their audience, devaluing both players and modders. It has lost sight of its original purpose as a definitive update to Mario Kart Wii and a celebration of the game's modding scene as a result of its sheer self-indulgence and a desire to please its own echo chamber. Despite this, it remains the center of the custom track community, and it continues to be a source of stress and elitism in said community. I can only hope that a new custom track pack with a more respectful and positive outlook towards the community and a clear passion for modding (such as Mario Kart Midnight) eclipses this in popularity in the future... as many years as that may take.