The way I feel about Metroid Zero Mission and the NES original is about the same way I feel about Mega Man 2 and its predecessor: Metroid is kind of a bad game that happens to contain some interesting decisions; Zero Mission keeps its flawed core, but is a well made piece of software that gives you about as much satisfaction as you could expect from a series of gear checks.

Metroid has never had the best platforming, neither in terms of its character control or level design. Zero Mission is not the most interesting platformer in the series (an honor which obviously would go to Super Metroid), but it is the tightest, most snappy. Still, you couldn't make a good linear platformer with this exact game-feel and these particular mechanics. Metroid has always relied more on rewarding intuition and exploration rather than skill.

Though to some degree, I see a greater appeal to the more naked sense of direction seen in post-Super Metroid entries: this game is decidedly non-linear, but with a clear goal marked by a waypoint you can generally assume that's where you'll find a new ability, which will open up new paths. The ol' stick and carrot makes the rather rote platforming more bearable. If it weren't for this, combined with the excellent sound design as Samus whips and clicks in and out of motion, the game would get a lot more stale.

In terms of its audiovisual qualities, this is more or less the quintessential 2D Metroid game. The pixel art has a particular look to it, vibrant, stark color contrast, an attempt at a kind of illustrative appearance that I much prefer over the somewhat chunky, noisy pixel art of Fusion.

After beating Mother Brain, I decided to go back to Metroid on NES to see how much of it I could stomach. Conclusion: I still don't like it at all. If I build Metroid's level layouts in Mario Maker and had my friends play the result, they would ask what was wrong with me. The only favorable comparison I could give it when placed next to Zero Mission is the slower, floaty platforming physics, though Super Metroid utilizes this element infinitely better.

Perhaps more than any other Metroid game I'm shocked that this gave me as much trouble as it did when I was younger. It is not a long game, most of the backtracking trips are negligible in both quantity and time spend doing so, and most of the enemies (bosses included) are surprisingly unthreatening. The final boss of the game goes down in little more than half a dozen super missiles, and only managed to take 75 of my 1199 hit points.

The new content after the original ending, the Space Pirate ship and Chozo Ruins, is probably the most memorable sequence of the game. For the entire game thus far, navigation followed by attaining a new power has served as a kind of tension and release. This long stealth segment stretches that to its absolute limit. This is mostly a linear level, and limits the player only to Samus' most basic abilities. As I said, you couldn't make this fun on its own, but the people who made this game knew that, and went out of their way to make you feel how useless you are. The area is made up of somewhat obtuse platforming challenges, which if failed trigger an alert state where enemies that far outclass the player will give chase; sometimes even successfully navigating the area will only reveal a hidden guard at the end. Not to mention the room with the bomb upgrade, where only a glimpse of it is caught before one of the pirates makes off with it.

At the end, another of the games cutscenes (which are tastefully cinematic in a way that makes little interruption), a fine boss battle, and the triple threat of getting the Gravity Suit, Plasma Beam, and Space Jump all at the same time. Once again, the game has changed, everything has flipped, the music has gone from haunting and mysterious to an even more bombastic variant of the main theme.

As much fun as it is to ostensibly be able to tear through everything the game could throw at you, and as cool as it is to revisit the main areas of the game to see the destroyed Tourian and pick up the last few (tricky!) collectables, backtracking all the way to the Space Pirates' ship is a terrible slog that really highlights the degree to which it was made with linearity in mind.

Right before the last boss, there is a room containing the final health upgrade, an extremely precise platforming challenge. I probably failed it fifty times. If this were a linear platforming game, or if such an obstacle were required, it would be almost unforgiveable. Compare that to the boss itself, which dies in just a few hits, and I think the point illustrates itself. Metroid Zero Mission (and most of the series in general) is not a platformer, it is a Rubik's Cube which you happen to control via a platformer character. Controlling the character is almost completely secondary to solving the game's riddles and learning how to execute those solutions fast enough to get the best ending screen. I think understanding this is the key to finding enjoyment in it.

Clear Time: 2:36:43

Completion Rate: 77%

See you next mission!

Kickstarter, am I right?

I haven't contributed to many Kickstart projects, and Yooka Laylee is not among those that I have, but I know what I'm getting into when I give money to these types of things. The end product always feels like something that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't pledged money years in advance, the corners are always cut wherever they possibly could have been. Kickstart a vinyl music release? Expect the disc to be paper thin. Kickstart a video game? Expect the finished product to feel like an over-polished beta release.

It's a little disappointing, but like many other high profile Kickstarter projects, Yooka Laylee is a spiritual successor to an established franchise spearheaded by industry veterans. I only decided to give this game another chance after years of considering it a total disappointment because I recently tried Donkey Kong 64 for the first time.

Compared to Donkey Kong 64 this is only slightly less directionless in its level design, though significantly less joyless in its character control. It isn't quite as utterly meritless as I once considered it, but this perspective only comes with the knowledge of just how bad it can get. The art direction is garish, the characters are terribly unappealing, the level design will have you questioning whether you're really taking the intended route (you probably are).

This doesn't feel like a throwback to late 90's platformers, this feels like a throwback to mid 00's direct-to-DVD 3D animated christian shows. I am the globglogabgalab. The schwabble dobble yeah, yeah, whatever, you get the idea. It's not very good, but it could be worse.

Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War is the first Call of Duty game I have bought and played in 5 years, so, what's new?

Noah Caldwell Gervais' videos on the Call of Duty series focus mostly (almost exclusively) on the single player modes, but those videos are probably the most comprehensive and clear look at the progression of the franchise. World War II first person shooting games started with the tonally bombastic, if mechanically thin, power fantasy of Wolfenstein 3D. Games like Medal of Honor subdued the power fantasy into something a bit more Hollywood, but it was still in the forefront. Call of Duty initially set itself apart from other shooters, and earned itself a place in the market, by being tonally distinct. When it had explored this, it then separated itself by being distinct in its setting with the original Modern Warfare.

Around the time that the Treyarch games began to develop a continuing narrative and Modern Warfare turned into a trilogy, Call of Duty began to set itself apart from the rest of the market by dominating it with advertising campaigns of unbelievable budget, and by fine tuning the games' sound design and reward structure. Plant the seed of potential transaction into as many people as possible, and deliver to those buyers the most viscerally satisfying first person skinner box that you possibly could.

The main complaint that I saw people have about Call of Duty around this time was that while the screeching guitar riffs that played during weapon unlocks were somewhat exciting, the game beneath the reward structure was neither tactically deep nor tactilely engaging. In the years that followed, making more interesting additions to player movement became the priority: sliding, double jumping, wall-running, grappling. I don't really know if I would say a ton has been done to improve tactics, but I suppose there are definitely maps with clear MOBA-esque lane layouts, so that's something.

To justify the more exaggerated movements of wall-running and double jumping, the series drifted into a more near-future science fiction setting, which recent entries like WWII and the Modern Warfare reboot seem to be distancing themselves from. Cold War continues this trend. While some fans of the series didn't particularly care for the sci-fi setting, and while remnants of the more tactile style of play still exist (crouch sliding is alive and well), I would guess that Activision had no problem backpedaling over the years from their decision to make the games' character controls more immediately engaging.

Playing Cold Wars multiplayer for the first time, I was shocked by how many of the maps I recognized from older Call of Duty games despite having not played in half a decade. Most of the gameplay changes are rather minor, Call of Duty is still more or less the same game that it has been for over a decade now.

The biggest change is obvious before the player even enters their first match. The UI of Call of Duty games from a decade ago was surprisingly minimal given the game's tone. Picking modes and customizing loadouts in the Modern Warfare trilogy in particular were done through menus that only rarely took up more than half of the screen, with most space dedicating to a simple smoke effect over a flat background. The main reason for this probably had less to do with artistic intent, and more to do with keeping the menus snappy to let PS3 and Xbox 360 players into matches as quickly as possible. Things are different now, one might say war has changed (I'm so freaking lord-darned funny for saying this).

Cold War's menu is overwhelmingly cumbersome and bloated. Most of the screenspace is initially dedicated to showing a 3D render of the player's avatar walking through a warzone. Older Call of Duty games didn't even really offer player customization aside from gun camouflage, but with the addition of paid cosmetic DLC, showing off the player's appearance has become a priority. The menu is split up into several horizontally oriented tabs, about half of which are mostly related to in-game purchases. I haven't really played an online shooter since I was in college, when I was really into CS:GO. I still didn't really know what a "battle pass" was until I played this game. The game never really explains enough about its menu design or jargon for me to feel like I truly grasp it. Initially its pretty unclear what costs real money and what doesn't, and I'm not convinced that this is anything other than intentional obfuscation.

The main way in which Call of Duty has changed in the past decade is that now that Call of Duty is a satisfying enough game to play, in terms of its base gameplay, reward structure, and cultural domination, each new game selling record numbers is basically a guarantee. How do you make more money than that? Part of the strategy is to offer a free option to the handful of people who were probably not buying in anyway in the form of Warzone. The other part is the paid microtransactions in the retail game, the battle pass possibly being the most interesting one.

The reward structure in older Call of Duty games had a clear limitation: eventually the player would run out of things to unlock. Players could "prestige" in order to reset their unlocks, but this was mostly just allowing them to superficially retrace their steps in order to hear the sound effects more often again. The battle pass and seasonal additions to new Call of Duty games do add new content, for a price.

In summary, Call of Duty now allows players to periodically reengage with the reward structure, for a fee. That's what's new.

This is only a review of the Switch version of Super Mario 3D World, my review of Bowser's Fury is posted on the separate page for that game (spoiler alert, Bowser's Fury is one of the best 3D Mario games ever).

In his review of Super Mario Galaxy, Tim Rogers bemoaned that the game was not a cultural event, it was just a video game. Super Mario 3D World, in my circle of friends and acquaintances, very much was indeed a cultural event. A friend of mine with whom I shared an interest in Atari 2600 games, who I don't even think owned a Wii U, could frequently be found listening to the game's soundtrack on Youtube. I first played the game at a friend's house, 3 player co-op on Grumblump Inferno. It would not be a complete exaggeration to say that Super Mario 3D World is the reason that I bought an HDTV.

Tevis Thompson's review of Fortnite laments that the game simply is no longer what it once was; the true cultural event of Fortnite has passed, the experiences of playing the game during that moment in history can never be recaptured. Miiverse is gone, even in the Wii U version the reason for stamp collecting has disappeared, leaving behind vestigial empty space. Separated from the apparent community engagement, the mood of the game has changed.

I didn't play Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury until about a month after it came out, and reading other people's thoughts about the game confused me. People kept comparing Bowser's Fury to 3D World. I saw the trailers, I saw let's plays, reviews, breakdowns. The smooth transitions into pipes, the increased movement speed, the dive, the increased jump height after a ground pound, these are all Super Mario Odyssey maneuvers. None of them were in the Super Mario 3D World that I played for the first time nearly 8 years ago. Then, as I watched more videos and eventually played the game myself, I realized what had happened. Mario's new moves had been brought over into the new Bowser's Fury scenario, and then retrofitted onto this new version of 3D World.

None of the changes here are huge, none of them are terrible or irredeemable on their own, but each of them is a piece of straw that piles together to undo the polish of the original. Every time I pick this game up, my thumb reaches for a D-pad that I can't use anymore; even while using the analogue stick, Mario can only move in 8 directions. This game may use 3D graphics but it was clearly designed with the mindset of 2D course-clear/flagpole Mario. Not even being given the option to use the D-pad is kind of unbelievable, especially since the Switch port of NSMBU gives players the option to use that game's original control scheme, albeit hidden behind what practically amounts to a cheat code.

Ever since the original Super Mario Bros. (arguably earlier) this series has stealthily contained within itself an element of rhythm. The speed that Mario moves, the length of his jumps, contrasted with the size of the blocks and the spaces between them, all amounts to scenery for an unmatched acrobatic digital dance performance. Changing the speed at which the player runs in a Mario game, even before factoring in the additions to the moveset itself, is on its own enough to completely change the characteristics of the game. In the Switch version, Mario often feels slippery in moments of precision platforming. His greater speed and extended jumping capability make it almost impossible not to reach the top of the flagpole on every stage.

Effort has been made to remove from the game the various gimmicks of the Wii U gamepad controller, to varying degrees of success. Level 2-2, Puffprod Peaks, features platforms that were once controlled using the Wii U gamepad's microphone; they now move automatically, which is frankly a welcome change. There is, however, a platform in the stage with half a dozen small goomba enemies on it, which in the Wii U version would be blown into the abyss below upon the player expelling their lung wind unto the controller's listening hole. There isn't any reason for this enemy placement in the Switch version, it should have been something else, a piranha plant or the galoombas seen earlier in the stage. It isn't terrible, I just wish they had put more thought into why these enemies were put there in the first place, that maybe if the mechanics of the level were being changed the enemies should be altered too.

The UI is all over the place. The empty space left behind by Miiverse's absence has not been filled, rather the design has been further gutted, made more minimal, sterile. The menu's characteristic chevron borders have been done away with in favor of a small list in front of a mostly blurred screen.

The last big family get-together I had before the Current Health Situation was inviting everyone over to my then new apartment for dinner. A handful of us played Super Mario 3D World on Wii U, we had enough controllers for it, the gamepad, 2 pro controllers, and a remote-nunchuk combo. Despite the Nintendo Switch's popularity in terms of sales figures, I don't actually know a single other person in real life who owns one. I could play this with 2 other people at most, and that's only if 2 of us used single joy-cons.

Ultimately the level design is largely unchanged, and the art direction is still the most cohesive the Mario series has ever had. Most people probably don't care about the minor changes, but I do. This might not in any objective sense be a worse version, but it isn't the same, and I don't like it as much.

I have played more Xenoblade 2 than I have played any other game for the Nintendo Switch.

It's almost impossible to talk about Xenoblade 2 without talking about multiple elements of the game's visuals. The better environments are some of my favorite in JRPGs, period. Gormott's port, the otherworldly islands of the Leftherian archipelago, these areas perfectly capture a look that few games seem to even try: specifically, this is the closest that a game has come to looking like pre-rendered PS1 JRPG backgrounds, but rendered in real-time. When the environments are bad, they feel unfinished. Much of my time with Xenoblade 2 was spent back to back with alpha and beta versions of the game Hellpoint. Xenoblade 2's more sci-fi or industrial areas, flat grey metallic surfaces, box shaped rooms, often look about as complete as Hellpoint did in alpha.

On a technical level things could certainly be better. I generally think resources were spent on the wrong things. The previous game, Xenoblade X, was not the best looking game and had short render distance for certain objects and NPCs, but it at least managed a consistent framerate and resolution. Xenoblade 2 tries to do much fancier animations and post-processing effects but the trade-off is slow-down and variable render resolution that tends to go embarrassingly low even when playing in docked mode. I only have a 1080p TV, so it isn't as ridiculous as it might look on some people's 4K displays, but it just doesn't look good during visually busy moments.

If there's anything that literally everyone familiar with this game knows about, it's the character designs. Certain groups of major characters were designed by different artists, most of the game's gacha-esque Rare Blade party members were all individually designed by completely different artists than any other character in the game. Put simply, even if you like the character designs (and I do like some of them), it's just a simple fact that the art direction here is not coming together. There's a particular scene in Tantal, where the heroes (designed by Masatsugu Saito) and a group of villains (designed by Tetsuya Nomura) stand face to face. As the camera cuts back and forth between the two groups, it genuinely looks like spliced footage from two completely different games with different art styles.

I don't think it's inherently wrong to have sexualized characters in media, but I'm not going to argue that the particularly eyebrow raising anime babes in Xenoblade 2 are anything other than tasteless. Pyra and Mythra being added to Super Smash Bros. has restarted the years-old conversation again, and I will repeat myself: I don't think Nintendo should "censor" these characters, because I think that they should have to live with whatever negative attention these characters receive. They changed the character designs for their appearances in other games because, simply put, a lot of these character designs are embarrassing, and Nintendo knows it. It would be embarrassing to have Mythra's normal appearance in Smash, it would be embarrassing to show that character to other people in your living room, and I say this as someone who has literally done just that.

Although, Pyra's character design did give us That One Greentext, so really it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.

Any attempt to shut down conversation around the game's depiction of women on the grounds that it's "political" to do so rings hollow when the game these characters are from is not remotely shy when it comes to political issues (though I think we all know what it really means when people say that): politics is literally the main thing that makes the world interesting. The "Xeno-" in the title of these games isn't just there because it sounds cool. One of the villains is a guy called Amalthus (one letter away from Malthus) who keeps a refugee camp in his front yard just to remind himself of how much he hates them. The main character is a child laborer who at one point rounds up a bunch of kids and basically sells them into slavery. The closest thing this world has to the concept of mixed race is only possible by way of literal cannibalism. Every fantastical element of this fiction seems to be aimed at making a world where reactionary thought is simple truth, and what the author sees as its idealistic protagonist is largely terminally liberal centrist "both sides" rhetoric with a hopeful coat of paint. Anyone trying to change the status quo, for any reason, really "just wants the same thing".

Here's the thing: I don't mind this setting as much as my conscience says maybe I should. I'm not sure if I could say for sure that the game presents one singular political outlook, if it does I certainly have trouble relating to it, but at the very least this world has something that a lot of recent games of this scale lack. Xenoblade 2 feels, clearly, like it was written by human beings with their own thoughts about the real world, like those thoughts clearly impacted the final product. It doesn't feel like themes or subtext were gutted to make it more approachable for general audiences, or that edges were whittled to make a Saturday morning cartoon plot of heroes and villains and nothing in between. The ideas that this game seems to play straight range from misguided to scary, but at least I can tell it's trying to say anything at all. I might disagree with what Xenoblade 2 seems to be trying to say, but with plenty of open world games and JRPGs I can't agree or disagree, because it doesn't seem to be saying anything at all. Even if I feel compelled to approach the game's themes interrogatively, at least I feel compelled by them at all.

Combat is top notch for JRPGs. Every weapon has a three hit combo, activating a skill the moment that the third hit makes contact will give a bonus. Activating another skill when the previous skill's final hit makes contact will give another, activating a special move in the same way will as well. Using different special moves of particular types in (relatively) quick succession will allow the player to do a combo, which if they pull off successfully will do significant damage, but the enemy will have an orb circling them to signify that they are now resistant to that combo finisher's element. The final goal of this system is to get as many of these orbs around the enemy as possible, and by expending a full party gauge (which usually serves as your revive system) you can put regular combat on standby and unleash a flurry of QTE based combo attacks; if you manage to get 5 orbs and successfully combo in this way, it's rare for victory to not be guaranteed.

If you think this sounds overcomplicated, you're right. However, I assure you, this is the most intuitive sense that any of the Xenoblade series' combat systems have ever made (outside of maybe the revamped combat in this game's expansion).

Exploring the world isn't as rewarding as in Xenoblade X but that just makes sense, this isn't even remotely as open a game as X was. There are far fewer quests than there were in previous games but they are generally better than the hundreds of "kill 5 goblins" style quests in the original Xenoblade. It's possible, at least, to tell what type of item something on the ground is going to be, unlike in previous games where literally every item is a nondescript glowing shape, but the gather points from which items are obtained still all look the same until the player interacts with it.

It's a bit difficult to say that I like much of the main cast, as individuals at least. Together they play off of one another's personalities pretty well, though the result is usually more humorous than it is charming. Most of the Blades who aren't one of the handful relevant to the main plot aren't particularly well-developed outside of their side quests, but even main characters like Pyra come across as underwritten to me (probably because the supposed main mission of the story, and Pyra's main motivation, is loosely dangled in front of the player until the very end of the game). Zeke and Nia are probably my favorites, Jin and Brighid are interesting.

Many people love the soundtrack, and I have a hard time disagreeing, but I do wonder sometimes how good it really is. It definitely isn't bad, but sometimes I see people say that one of the Xenoblade games has the best video game soundtrack of all time, and I start scratching my head. I really like Xenoblade X's soundtrack, I really, really like it. I like it enough that I wonder if the only reason I like these games' soundtracks so much is because these games take so long to beat. The entire soundtrack of one of these games is several hours long, but still only a fraction of the length of the actual game, meaning anyone who beats one of these games is going to be hearing a lot of these songs several times. Enough times to get theie melodies stuck in your head, enough times to start idly humming or whistling the town themes while you do things outside of the game.

And then I really start wondering, even further than the soundtrack, how good are these games as a whole? Is it just that the simple fact that these games take so long to beat means that the only people who play enough of the game to get an idea of whether they like it or not... are the people who like it enough to begin with to play that long? Or is the success of these games, and perhaps all open world games, dependent on their overlong play hours to inflict a kind of sunk-cost mindset, where the player simply must decide that the game must be good, that their hours with it must have been worthwhile, after the fact?

Maybe, maybe not. Even if Xenoblade 2 sucks, I still find myself liking it.

Superflight is almost perfect. The simplicity of the controls, only one joystick. The feeling of threading the needle and racking up points. Circling a mountain looking for a portal, entering a new level and immediately seeing something, somewhere, and think "yeah, that's where I'm going". The sound design, the mood, everything about the way this game feels when you play it is excellent.

Literally the only flaw is an obvious side effect of the game's procedural generation; while I'm near certain that some amount of the environment is made of prefabricated shapes, sometimes you'll see a gap, a space that beckons you to fly through it, only to find yourself flying face first into a dead end. This instills perhaps a greater degree of caution than what I think is intended, though perhaps without handcrafting a ludicrous number of cliffs, caves, and spires, there isn't really a good practical solution.

Halo, as a whole, is mediocre, if inoffensively so.

I remember watching a friend of mine from down the street play the first two Halo games on PC, he preferred to drive the tank with a flightstick. I remember playing the Halo 3 coop with my neighbor when I was in middle school, playing the multiplayer on a tiny CRT at an acquaintance's house in high school. While I was in college my friends and I would regularly gather at someone's house to play the maps he had made in various Halo games' Forge mode; he would draw these maps out on graph paper while we ate together at restaurants and mall food courts. For a long time, I only ever played Halo as a social activity, in short bursts, and never really got a feel for what any particular game in the series was like.

In 2015, I bought an Xbox One for the sole purpose of playing games with my friends who also had an Xbox. It came with Halo: MCC, a digital copy. My parents' internet at the time was so slow that I had to bring my console and a small TV to my aforementioned Forge friend's house to use his internet to download the game.

Since then I've tried time and time again to play these games and I always bounce off of them, hard.

Levels feel like copy and pasted pre-fabs, their structure feels completely directionless. Despite the game being a fairly linear, narrative driven sequence that often consists of literal hallways, I find myself getting lost about as often as the first time I played Doom. The purpose of objects and settings is never clear, nothing is interesting, everything is just sleek metal walls and plain grassy hills. Everything about the story and setting feels like it should be minimal set dressing to focus on action, but the serious tone of dialogue and the epic score make it all seem pretentious. Halo takes the plodding narrative focus of a game like Half Life, but goes one step further to interject cutscenes between the action, but the story is just plain boring, and the action isn't even any good.

Every enemy takes a ludicrous amount of time and shots to kill. Simple things like moving and shooting never feel satisfying. Master Chief never feels unstoppable, he feels pathetically slow and weak compared to nearly every other recognizable FPS player character I can think of. The gameplay additions in the sequels and the further expanding story are, past a certain point, often just different enough to disappoint some fans, though it never goes far enough to interest me.

Halo is, in every way, more shallow than its predecessors in the FPS genre, yet instead of giving an appropriately snappy rhythm, it slows to a crawl, demanding more time for less action. It blares Skyrim-esque chants and orchestral arrangements in your ear to let you know its all actually very important.

It's not quite accurate to say that I don't understand Halo's appeal, it's just that to me the things that draw people in seem like little more than cheap tricks.

I don't think I will ever spend the time to review any of these games individually.