It has to be appreciated for its historic value; this is not only the very first cartridge in video gaming history to include a battery save--a feature we take for granted nowadays--but it's also a phenomenal adventure game with a complex storyline and a captivating atmosphere, at least for 1986 standards. Let's just say we're light years ahead of Adventure on the Atari 2600 in that regard. Miyamoto indeed successfully managed to emulate the grandiose childlike feeling of natural exploration and it feels like you've never truly found everything that the map has to offer.

The screens perpetually get filled with challenging enemies that have some of the most complex battle styles and advanced AI I've seen in that era of video gaming. It requires a lot of strategy to just clear some of these screens. The frequent "fight or flight response" feelings that this game brings upon the player makes me see it as the first great shift away from traditional mindless fighting styles (shooter/jump on top of the enemy), and therefore, in a way, this game is the grandfather of all RPGs in the way that it brought upon complex enemies, numerous different items and weapons, as well as experimental battle styles.

However, despite how much we owe to this game, it goes without saying that it has aged considerably. Firstly, it's an excessively cryptic game. The Legend of Zelda is practically impossible to complete without some sort of strategy guide. The map that comes printed in the manual is practically useless in terms of progressing through the game. An authentic playthrough would at least require hours of scavenging every single screen in the map, of walking back and forth between screens with the horrendous candle that can only be used once per screen transition (who thought this was a good idea?) and wasting bombs, which are a very scarce commodity, trying to blow up unmarked walls. A game that requires further reading in a book or on the web to complete will inherently leave a sour feeling in my mouth. Titles like Castlevania II and Milon's Secret Castle are often harshly criticized for the very same type of cryptic secrets that are required to make progress through the story. Yet, Zelda, in all its praise, is guilty of the same crimes.

Furthermore, I was disappointed in how some of those dungeons are designed. Having to perpetually and arbitrarily light up some the rooms is tedious and redundant. Enemies like Darknuts and Wizzrobes are some of the most annoying I've ever had to deal with. If Like Likes touch you, they destroy your Magic Shield, which is one of the most expensive items in the game. This annoyed me to no end. Some of the rooms are so saturated with random enemies that there are framerate issues with the original NES. Bosses are reused between dungeons. A bit more thought could have been put in how these dungeons are designed.

So, is NES Zelda still worth playing? Most definitely if you have interest in retro gaming or video gaming history, but otherwise, you can probably skip that one. I got a fair bit of enjoyment out of it but it's most definitely an aging game. I might come back for the second quest at some point if I'm brave enough.

Obviously one of the SNES's most essential releases. Solid revisit of the original Mario tetralogy, with remastered sounds and visuals. A lot of the things that were annoying about the original games (i.e. no battery save, having to beat SMB2J 8 times to unlock worlds A-D) are corrected. However, gameplay wise, the games are very faithful to their original NES and FDS versions. Indeed the definitive way to play these games.

One of the finest arcade-style early NES games. Maybe it's just the nostalgia factor for me, having played it a lot as a kid with my dad, but I find this to be one of the most exciting turn-based 2 player games ever made. Standing tall as Satoru Iwata's very first work, the unconventional black box NES title tries to emulate a traditional pinball machine instead of creating fantasy worlds like other video games. Especially in the fast B-type, it's addicting and feels very similar to a real pinball machine. It has great charm and personality; before creating the DS and the Wii as the most beloved Nintendo CEO in history, a young Iwata created one of the most enjoyable early titles on the NES.

An excellent an often overlooked mainline Mario game (indeed, it was the last one I hadn't beaten—took me a while to even find the cartridge anywhere).

It's a very creative platformer, and a unique entry in the Mario franchise. The giant tree, the space levels and the giant toy levels make me feel like this game is a lot closer to Super Mario Galaxy than any other classic Mario game. If you are a fan of Galaxy's grandiose aesthetics and enjoy ambiance in Mario levels, this is a must-play for you. Indeed, I think a lot of latter Mario games, intentionally or not, took direct inspiration from this game.

We also must appreciate the fact that this was released on the very same hardware as the first Super Mario Land. Here, we have triple the amount of levels, more power ups, incredible graphics (almost on par with SMB3), saving and significant graphical differences between each level. For this era of short crunchy handheld games, it's really incredible. It's better than a vast majority of NES sidescrollers.

Also, this is the only mainline Mario game (other than SMB2, but that one's an outlier) that features another final boss than Bowser. It paved the way for everything Wario-related and has one of the coolest and most tense final boss battles I've seen in a Mario game.

This game deserves a whole lot more attention and it will likely get that attention thanks to its re-release on the Switch virtual GameBoy. I'm still of the opinion that it's better to play this on a GBA (which colorizes the game and gives it a whole new life) or on a big screen via a Super GameBoy, but playing this game through any means is essential for Mario fans. Check it out.

(Now that I've completed Mario, I'll have to move on to Zelda or smth...)

Short, weird and objectively bad game in terme of controls, game design and level design. I did however enjoy it quite a bit for its weird novelty concept and its obscureness. It's so bad and bizarre that it's mysterious and cute in a way. But maybe that's just me trying to justify myself paying way more than I should have on this stupid cartridge.

A short, cute and bizarre 2D Mario game, with unique scenery and artstyle. The game is short and very barebones, with wonky controls and bad hit boxes, but being one of the first handheld game cartridges released in the history of gaming, it fulfills its role very well. The shooter sections are amazing and turn Mario into a sort of Space Invaders type of game. There's only twelve easy levels and you get used to the weird controls very fast; try it out if you haven't.

This review contains spoilers

A few notes about this game:
- It is definitely one of the 3D platformers with the tightest control in its era, at least with Banjo and Kazooie's base move set. The tech in this game and its heavier platforming sections can be very complex and satisfying. Depsite that, it really lags behind SM64 in numerous aspects, particularly in what regards missed inputs. Some moves, such as backflips and talon trots have heavy cutscenes where the playable characters are stuck and can't do anything. This slows down platforming and makes you feel like you have less control than you should over the characters.
- It is an excellent collect-a-thon and, despite its very high amount of collectibles, has much less filler content than similar games in the genre, such as Donkey Kong 64 and Super Mario Odyssey. I appreciated the focus on exploration and level design rather than mini-games and overly hiden collectibles. This made the game feel very engaging and complete, without much filler.
- The implementation of lives, and the fact that you lose all your notes and Jinjos when you die, made some sections feel like a chore. Nothing's worse than backtracking where you've already been to find notes you had already found before. This makes it even worse when you consider that some notes require items such as gold feathers, which you must gear up on before entering a stage. If you enter a level without the required amount of feathers or eggs to get all of the notes, chances are you'll get stuck and you'll have to start the level all over again, at least to get the 100 notes. Furthermore, there is no easy way before the final boss (if you've already gotten almost all notes in the game) to completely easily fill up your eggs and feathers. You'll be farming these a lot if you're not conservative with them.
- Flying and swimming are two excruciatingly unresponsive move sets, especially when you consider that the air meter is very tight and that you require red feathers to fly. The B-attack when flying is particularly bad, and made the final boss fight especially frustrating, because there is no easy way to fill up your red feathers, only blue eggs and gold feathers. Swimming in Rusty Rocket Bay was awful, too.
- Like other Rareware titles from that era, it is very aesthetically pleasing and is very well written. It looks a whole generation ahead of SM64 graphically despite being released only two years after, and Grant Kirkhope's soundtrack is one of the most unforgettable I've heard. Its dialogue is hilarious and absurd for an E-rated game. I especially fell in love with Kazooie's deadpan disrespect of everything around her, and Brentilda's hilarious aunt energy when she shamelessly spills rumours about her sister. As always, Rareware makes incredible cutscenes and the game felt immensely cinematic because of that.

Despite obvious flaws by today's standards, Banjo-Kazooie is still a classic that is worth playing and has a lot of things going for it.

There are so many good reasons why this game is controversial, and I can easily get behind both the lovers and haters of the game.

Donkey Kong 64 was supposed to be the technical masterpiece of the console, and in that regard, it certainly succeeds. Indeed, its large open spaces give a sense of freedom unlike a vast majority of other games on the N64. The DK Isles feel as immense and dense as Delfino Plaza in Super Mario Sunshine, a game from the next generation of consoles. In some regards, the size of the map and the amount of things to do in each corner you go to is reminiscent of the Zelda series, and especially in the woody areas of the game, I sometimes felt like I was playing an unintended sequel to Ocarina of Time.

The sheer size of the map is accompanied with pure beauty, too. It is an incredibly cinematic game by all means, from its hilarious cutscenes to its colourful levels. If anything, it's worth playing through the entire game 101% just to get to watch all the cutscenes, including the special ending cutscene you get after getting everything.

Its music is great, too. It has one of the most iconic theme songs in all of gaming history and the actual game's soundtrack has some beautiful moments, with Jungle Japes, DK Isles and Hideout Helm being personal favourites of mine. It makes me wish Grant Kirkhope had composed soundtracks for some non-Rareware games, as he is definitely up there with Koji Kondo.

The dialogue and character design is also phenomenal. The strong but insecure Chunky as well as the goofy but reliable Lanky are beautiful new characters that I hope get some more love in future DK games. The existing characters' personalities are amplified: DK is stupid but determined, Diddy thinks and moves quick, and Tiny is a very smart logical thinker that brings a bit of logic to the family. Not to mention Cranky Kong which is as much of a grinch as he has ever been, Funky Kong who is an absolute gun maniac, Candy's weirdly flirty dialogue and King K. Rool who is the perfect evil antagonist who will keep you on your toes for the entirety of the game. Everything is charming and wonderfully written.

The cinematic, musical and theatrical aspects of the game makes it one of the most entertaining games to watch someone else play. This is indeed why in the prime of its speedrunning scene, streamers such as Connor75 managed to be very successful and why its 101% category makes it into so many marathons, such as the Rareware 301% marathon and the 1545 relay race. Having been introduced to this game in that form of gameplay, it made me very excited to play it and made me have high hopes for it.

Unfortunately, my hopes were likely too high.
This game basically has four different 'types' of challenges: collectibles, platforming, minigames and fighting.

The collectibles here have been talked about to death. Most people complain about the sheer amount of collectibles there are, especially regular bananas. It is however not what bothers me; the real problem with the collectibles in DK64 is the fragmentation and the character barrels, which were one of Rare's worst design mistakes ever. In order to change your character, you need to enter a character barrel, and there are only a handful in each stage. For instance, in Fungi Forest, there is a tunnel that you must go through, but there are two doors preventing you from going through it. In order to open these doors, you must shoot tags with two different characters, one for each door. There is also a banana for a third character in the room that this tunnel leads to. I don't remember what characters exactly, but you get the point, and the problem is that the barrel is relatively far away from the tunnel, so you waste minutes going back and forth over and over again just to get through this tiny section. The collectibles being so deeply linked with each character (you can only collect the bananas, coins and golden bananas that are assigned to the very character you're playing), and needing certain characters to unlock parts of the level leads to so much backtracking that you'll be spending more time walking in places you already know instead of discovering new places. This makes the game's length feel artificial, annoying and disingenuous. If the collectibles were actually arranged in a way that prevented excessive backtracking, then I would have much less problems with it, but when you consider that most bananas don't require you to do anything or require you to play a bad minigame (I'll get back to this later), I find the same problems in here that I did in Super Mario Odyssey's excessive ground pound moons and repetitive minigames. Very little of the game feels like you're actually playing something exciting, since maybe 95% of all of it is just getting tedious collectibles. Even for somebody who loves Rareware-style collect-o-thons, there is just too much backtracking for it to be enjoyable.

The platforming sections feel very weird and slippery, especially with the bigger characters. Donkey moves too much with the slight touch of the joystick, Chunky just doesn't move well in platforming sections, Lanky is way too slippery to control well, and Diddy is just hard to control especially in narrow places (that one bridge inside the temple in Angry Aztec...damn it). At least, Tiny is has a decent control scheme that makes her preferable for all the platforming she has to do in the game, which is really not enough. The characters' shadows are hard to make out, which really messes up the depth perception of platforming sections. The weird controls are often credited to this being still an era where 3D platformers were new and devs didn't know exactly what to do yet, but come on, this came 3 years after SM64 and a year after Banjo-Kazooie. Both of those games have great controls and their platforming is tight and skill-based. DK64's platforming sections feel more luck-based than anything. Tedious.

The mini-games, especially the God-forsaken barrel games, have been talked about to death. They're some of the most broken, glitchy, tedious and repetitive things I've ever seen in gaming and made 101% feel like more of a chore than a game. Some of those mini-games you have to beat up to five times without any difference except maybe how fast the characters move. It is pure hell, and these sections were some of the most infuriating experiences I've had in gaming. Rarely have I screamed out of pure anger into a pillow because of a video game, but damn, Beaver Bother did that to me and many other gamers. Comes directly from Hell. Two video game testing companies are credited in this game, yet it feels like the game, especially those sections, were never play tested at all. Were they that short on time that they had to fill the game with these abominations?

Happily, the bosses in the game are creative and have a lot of character, which makes the fighting sections (except for the battle crowns which were an absolute waste of time) really enjoyable. Each boss got better than the last, and the final boss fight is the ultimate test of everything you have learned in your journey.

I must also stress that the very last level is some some of the most tense I have felt while playing a video game and it is truly an incredible experience (except for the weird Lanky shooting minigame, but whatever). The beginning and the ending of the game is bliss, the rest is tedious.

Is it worth playing Donkey Kong 64 nowadays? If you like great cutscenes, love mindlessly moving around collecting items, and care more about the aesthetics of a game than the gameplay, then it is likely the game for you. If not, just watch a 101% playthrough on YouTube and save yourself the stress. I'm glad I played it, but I doubt I will be revisiting.

Pure art. An expressionist adventure that links the Mario and Yoshi franchises together by adding a phenomenal depth to their lore. The story is simple yet touching. The art style is some of the best I've seen by Nintendo; each frame looks like a Van Gogh painting. The levels have an excellent difficulty curve, starting off with simple levels and ending with platforming challenges of an unbeknownst complexity that will test the numerous skills you've acquired with Yoshi within the six worlds. The boss fights are likely the best I've seen in any 2D platformer. The experimental 2.5D sections work remarkably well and show the great capabilities of the SNES as a console. The greatest SNES game I've played thus far, the greatest prequel I've played thus far and possibly the greatest 2D platformer I've played thus far. Will be revisiting.

I'm a huge fan of platforming games, but I'm also a super artsy person. In this regard, Super Meat Boy only satisfied one of those factors: it's an incredible rage platformer with a difficulty that progresses well, but that unfortunately has an impenetrable atmosphere. The art style is very mundane and the music doesn't really always fit the mood, and that keeps me from really getting invested into sessions of the game. This being said, I only played through the main story so far, and I might keep playing this on the side to eventually get 100%, and maybe my opinion will change then.

If is certainly an accomplishment; at an era where developers were already deep into the SNES, leaving the original NES to slowly die, HAL Laboratory unleashed their ultimate flagship title on the now obsolete system. Indeed, having had well over half a decade to perfect their craft, the game studio understood the inner mechanisms of the NES better than pretty much anyone else. The result is a vibrant game with tons of content, and arguably the prettiest and most developed graphics in any NES game. Despite some repetitive and dull level design at times, the game is filled with fun gameplay surprises and challenges. It is, in many ways, the final essential NES achievement.

where does one even start a review about this game?

at the time of writing this review, i have over fifty hours of gameplay in this game, and i have just completed all the story missions. yet, according to the game, i'm only a little bit over halfway done with everything there is to do in this game. how the hell did they put so much content in a 2004 game?

GTA:SA is so many things at once
firstly, it's a driving simulator of 212 individual vehicles: various cars, bicycles, motorcycles, boats, aeroplanes, trucks with or without trailers, harvesters, tractors, tanks, helicopters, so on and so forth... each vehicle has its own personality and feel, and feels different to drive.

it's an excellent single-player FPS, which often feels very similar to games like Goldeneye 007. the firearms feel great and shoot out missions can be very challenging, requiring great strategy, practice and planning

it's an endless adventure game. the giant map has so much to see and discover that, even with dozens of hours in the game, you continuously find new stuff you've never seen before

it's an open-world game. you can do whatever the hell you want and you genuinely feel like you're even more than the main character.

it has phenomenal writing and some of the greatest cutscenes i've had the chance to watch in gaming. the game is written much like an extravagant hollywood action film, and with how self-aware it is, it succeeds at doing that much better than a vast majority of hollywood films. each character has an immense depth, sensibilities and the player gets attached. let me just say that the ending left me completely jawdropped.

it is such a perfect satire of everything that is wrong with american society, and while its absurdism gives it a certain step back from reality, now that i've visited some of the worst ghettos in the american south, and the more knowledgeable i get about american culture and politics, i feel like GTA:SA got a whole lot right about sociocultural issues in america.

it's truly a masterpiece. it's challenging, it makes you think, and it is phenomenally written. a must play. will definitely get through the rest of this game to 100% it.

Amongst the most fascinating video games I've played. Would have me tap, tap and tap whenever I had free time to try and get a higher score. It's simple, addicting, and it is beautiful how much it frustrates everybody. One of the greatest mobile games ever made. Unfortunate that it does not run well on newer devices.

Its controls are great, its levels are filled with beauty and the atmosphere is immaculate. What is there not to love (except the blue coins and that pachinko mission)? A near-impeccable Mario game.

once you get over the fact that this is clear DLC bait, and that you spend half your life savings on getting all those damn map DLCs, it's just about one of the best games I've ever played. drive through the day and through the night, from Cali to Texas and beyond, deliver eggs or other semi-trucks, roll your windows up and down, see the sequoias, the mountains and the deserts. go 90MPH on country roads carrying tens of thousands of dollars worth of explosive chemicals, or respect traffic laws perfectly. you're free. you're the king. the American dream.