After 10 years, i finally conquer a childhood demon of mine. I played Super Metroid as a kid and i got stuck early on because my dumb dumb kid brain didn't figure out that enemies dropped items so i just assumed that i got softlocked and never went back to it.....until now.

Super Metroid is a great game. I don't have any experience with other Metroid games so i don't know how this compares to the rest of the series but this is a damn good first impression. The gameplay is simple yet engaging thanks to the perfect controls (unless it's Space Jumping, then it can be a bit of a pain) and although backtracking is a staple of the Metroidvania genre, it never felt like it was tedious. The maps essentially get smaller the more powerups you get and i like this, because you'll be revisiting areas a few times. Keeping it from feeling tedious in a game without skip travel was a good decision on Nintendo's part.

However, perhaps because this was the 90s but Super Metroid has some dumb cryptic shit in it. Breaking the tube in Maridia with the Power Bomb (no indication that this would work) and that wall in Lower Norfair that is not visible with the x-ray genuinely had me question how the fuck anybody was supposed to figure this out. I know part of the appeal of Metroidvanias is exploring and don't get me wrong, i love exploring in games (when it's done right) but i think there's a difference between exploring and just finding out by pure chance.

Now the biggest conflict i have with this game is the music. See, on one hand, the music fits this game perfectly. Exploring a hostile planet by yourself, not knowing what dangers await? Yeah, music fits. And yet, the music for this game is actually pretty unmemorable. Samus' theme, Vs Ridley, Brinstar Overgrown and Lower Norfair are like the only memorable songs in this game. The rest of the soundtrack works but i don't know, i feel like i've already forgotten the songs.

Super Metroid is a fantastic game. I could do without the cryptic-ness and i do wish the soundtrack was more memorable but as i said earlier, this game was a damn good first impression to someone who had never played a Metroid game before.

Now as of this review, the only 2D Metroid i have yet to play is Samus Returns (and Dread but that ain't out yet lol), but, i think Zero Mission might actually be peak 2D Metroid. This game is exquisite, it is sublime. Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion were already fantastic games but this one just refines the Metroid gameplay absolutely perfectly. Everything feels exactly right and it's all packaged in one of the best-looking games of the GBA.

For the first time, i feel that a Metroid game had a stellar soundtrack. This may be a hot take but while i wouldn't call Super Metroid and Fusion's soundtracks bad, i can't really call them memorable. But Zero Mission? chef's kiss.

I love the decision to show the player where to go but still letting them figure it out on their own. I love that the game can show you a nearly completed map of the area but only when you find a map room, as opposed to Fusion, which showed you most of the area at the start. And it's all done in a way that avoids the "what the fuck do i do" moments that plague Super and to a lesser extent, Fusion.

And then there's the Zero Suit stealth segment. I will admit, i was concerned at first because stealth segments usually aren't great. But not here. Zero Mission's stealth segment works wonderfully while also being perfectly tense in the times you get spotted. And then when you finally get your full-powered Power Suit back and that remix of the Brinstar theme (the theme that plays in the starting area), it's all just so fucking good.

The only real complaints i have here are that the two bosses that in tiny-ass rooms are just really annoying to deal with. Most of the bosses being in large rooms does make them much easier to fight but easy boss fights do work in favor of such a short game like this.

Metroid: Zero Mission is a masterpiece.

Been chipping away this for the past couple months, but all the hulabaloo around Quake's 25th anniversary pushed me to finally polish off the remaining maps today... I really wanna give some of these new Quake birthday projects a go!

'Arcane' feels like the perfect descriptor for this game, in every sense of the word;

'Arcane' in the sense that it feels like dark software engineering magic that should be sealed away in an ancient vault - how did they get Quake to do all this?! Modders rule!

'Arcane' in the sense that it's crammed with classic unimaginable Quake bullshit. I love that the mappers all worked really hard to recreate (and enhance) the feel of classic Quake, but HUP HUP HUPing around empty cathedral halls to find the hidden ledge holding the Skull Key of the Unmaker that I need to insert into The Runepillar of Eekum Bokum on the other end of the map quite often just kills the flow and atmosphere - Trent's tracks work best as five-minute moods, not half-hour loops. I respect the hell out of the map-makers who decided to make their contributions into sagas that span the length of an episode from the original game, but I really do wish the game warned you if the slipgate you're about to pass through is a 5-minute romp or a quest across six pillars of eternity. Ironically, I think I enjoyed the maps that homaged DOOM and Quake 2 the most...

'Arcane' in the sense that this is a work of genuine quality and wonder that will never make it into the hands of most players because it requires such an esoteric computer-touching methodolgy to play. If Bethesda and Zenimax knew what was really up, they'd have a Quake sourceport and official mod support on the go for the big 2-5. This mod alone could shift some serious units! I don't need Quake Eternal - I just need more people to try this game!

Hollow Knight has ended up being one of my favourite games of all time. I'm a big insect guy, I mean I studied them for my master's thesis. I'm also a big action adventure guy. This game has both :)

It's an ABSURD amount of game for the price. I think I paid £15 for it and I clocked in 47 hours. That's beating the real boss but not beating Grimm. The latter im determined to get back to.

The animation, character designs, level design are all top notch. The last stag is the coolest mofo on the planet. The soundtrack is also fantastic, especially when tied with boss title cards.

Let's be real it is a little slow to start, as you don't have a lot of abilities. But very quickly it adds charm upon charm and then you'll be hooked.

Play this game

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest (or Diddy Kong’s Quest, as I and many other illiterate 8 year olds knew it) was a game that held a powerful lustre for me as a kid. As a rascal raised on Diddy Kong Racing and attitudinal promotional artwork from Nintendo Official Magazine, I found that Diddy Kong projected untold levels of Cool that could be matched only by the almighty-90s Bart Simpson himself. Something about a baseball cap with Nintendo written on it was just so insanely Cool to me. My undeveloped baby brain could barely handle it! And he wore the cap backwards! And played the guitar while wearing his cap backwards! Oh, I wanted to be Diddy Kong so badly.

Despite being a prime child of the SNES era, I never owned a SNES. When my brother and I asked for a SNES for my birthday, my dad got us a NES by way of an honest money-saving mistake - he didn’t know the NES and the SNES were two entirely separate and incompatible computer game machines, which was a totally forgivable thing to believe in 1996. This was a long time ago, back in the days when “the Nintendo” really was just “the Nintendo” to almost everyone on the planet. Diddy Kong remained eternally out of reach.

Our friend up the road’s big brother did have a SNES though, and sometimes he let us all play it when he wasn’t calling us f#cking r#tards for not knowing about the 1-1 shortcut to Birdo in Super Mario Bros 2. He’d never let us play the good games, though - for some sadistic unknown big brother reason, we were always stuck with the Mickey Mouse platformers and Clayfighter and Mortal Kombat on the Super Game Boy. Diddy Kong’s Quest remained on the high shelves with the sticky magazines and the empty bottles of Jack Daniels that Big Brother had found in the bushes at the park, and I never plucked up the courage to take the cartridge down and replace Rocky Rodent with a game that Nintendo Official Magazine had once declared to be Certified: Awesome. All this ritual and ceremony for a video game about a monkey who played the guitar with his hat on the wrong way round only gave it more power. Diddy Kong’s Quest took up way more than 4MB of space in my soft little brain.

A few years later, I got on the internet. While scouring video game message boards in a vain attempt to find out when Super Mario 128 was coming to the Nintendo Dolphin, I found out about emulators and ROMs. A few weeks later, after workshopping a convincing story to tell the FBI when they raided my house for illegally downloading a video game, I got my first emulator and ROM - ZSNES, and my very own copy of donkey_kong_country_2_diddy_kongs_quest.zip. I played it for a couple of minutes, but was too afraid of a life spent in jail to really appreciate the momentousness of the occasion. A few days later, while looking for Bloody Roar: Primal Rage cheat codes, I discovered you could look up pictures of naked ladies on the internet. And I forgot about Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest.

A few years later, after many Youtube-watching 12 year olds harassed @NintendoAmerica about it every day on Twitter, Nintendo released Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest on the Nintendo Switch Online service, and a man in his thirties decided to play it for the first time. Properly, mind you. Without save states, or that really awkward rewind function - the one that’s not as useful as the rewind function that the man remembered using on ZSNES while drenched in guilt-ridden sweat during an illegal gaming session some decades prior.

Turns out that playing games properly is a fucking stupid idea. This game is a really fucking annoying piece of shit and I hate it. Diddy Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong Quest came out on the Nintendo Switch a year ago, and I’ve only just beaten it today. After much SHITting and FUCKing about how brutally unfair it is, I crawled the stupid backwards-capped guitar-playing prick Diddy Kong to a measly 40%ish completion stat. Fuck you and your game, Diddy Kong. Never meet your heroes, because you’ll only get your dick crushed by falling platforms.

It may be an annoying piece of shit, but it’s also a beautiful work of art. Beautiful in ways I probably wouldn’t have appreciated had I got it for my 9th birthday or snuck it into someone else’s SNES or tried to play it on a Compaq Presario 95’s keyboard. Elegant rotosprite work comes together with the best music that the SNES chip and David Wise were capable of to create a really unique dream-ape gamefeel. I don’t need to say much more than that about the game’s presentation - presumably most people on here have read that one Onion article that’s all like “Man Tasked With Making Score for a Monkey Riding a Swordfish Underwater Creates Transcendent Piece of Music” or whatever. Just don’t play it past the first few worlds if you want to preserve the crystalline beauty of the memory of your past. Some games are better played on your mind’s eye than a SNES.

When I started this, a friend described it as a great game, but a bad Metroid. An absolutely bang-on description.

It runs at a good clip with straightforward linear progression and is just very satisfying. Creepy as shit being pursued almost by the spectre of how you're perceived. Suddenly powerless before yourself with no option but taking flight.

I can totally understand why this is many folks' fave entry, as the usual exploration and backtracking the series is known for isn't to everyone's taste. Just a tight few areas that you can plow through in no time. Where the other games kinda force you to tread carefully, this really feels like it's running behind you with its hands on your back, propelling you forward and screaming "YES! YES! YES!".

Great game. Samus owns.

Beat this while sipping coffee on a sunny Sunday morning and life couldn't be better. The platonic ideal of a Sega arcade title. Luscious spring and summer sound effects complementing an ear-grooving and slap-bassing OST that features narration from an earnest announcer-man who will helpfully guide you through a core gameplay hook that's simple enough to pick up in the first twenty seconds but will still challenge you enough that you'll wanna slip another virtual 50p into the slot to hear the coin jingle noise each time you miss out on TIME BONUS! (+5 sec).

The final boss is straight out of Dragon Quest and proves cheeky little Sega AM1 knew exactly what they were cooking up with this game. The credits are... surprisingly beautiful! Heading over to YouTube after the game to cop some more Bass Beats and finding out that there are young fisherman out there playing the soundtrack while they go out and catch real fish was the icing on the cake.

This game is a certified classic! And it's 89p on Steam right now! No excuse! That's basically the price you'd have paid for a single play of this in the arcades back in 1997!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_SUODbCgb8

I would have a hard time coming up with a solid list of games I would consider to have absolute perfect game design, but I know for sure Katamari Damacy would be on there. Despite how antithetical Katamari Damacy may feel to our collective perceived notions of videogame conventions and norms, Keita Takahashi still managed to tap into that same escapism primeval soup that characterizes so many of our favorite games, abstracting its violence to a family friendly degree while maintaining its appeal and utilizing it to create one of the most cathartic power fantasies in the medium.

What’s truly brilliant about KD is how much of its chaotic and free form nature ends up dictating its narrow and tightly focused design by default without resorting to any hand holding or pushing the player in any particular direction beyond the main premise of rolling a ball over stuff to make it bigger. Its progression naturally unfolds before you, as you increase the scope of your katamari and more things become available to be consumed by it, immediately a consequence of every choice the player makes in their unconscious toddler rampage. And whatever frustration that might arise from its more clunky mechanics and physics is quickly subverted when you finally get big enough to roll over that annoying bear that would always stop you on your tracks.

Funny then how that stroke of incredible originality and genius seems to have sparked by mere accident from just approaching video games from an outside perspective and being dissatisfied with the industry’s modus operandi and never taking itself too seriously. The final stage that beautifully represents the apex of the experience unveils the artifice of the game in its final moments, showing that you have been playing in a playground all along, and that recess time is over, the self indulgence was fun. Pardon my boomer-ism, but it’s a major bummer that we probably will never return to an age like the PS2 gen where people like Keita Takahashi get the opportunity to take the wheel and produce a unique title like this one that sits nicely next to its big budget pals.

It might come across as corny or histrionic of me, but the feeling I get while playing Katamari Damacy is one of love. This is a labor of love, a life affirming appreciation of all things that encompasses our planet, and while it does have something to say about consumerism or capitalism, it does it in a humorous and non condemning way in the same vein as Jacques Tati would with his films and without ever sacrificing the joy of rolling up everything on sight as people scream and a cheerful jazzy song plays in the background. Katamari Damacy is above analysis or interpretation, it is an achievement of ludology, up there with the likes of Tetris, and you don’t have to question where the art is because you can see it right in front of you, and you can play it. Truly a lonely rolling star in a sky filled with static dust.