I'm stuck on Area 3

It's like Metroid. Amazing music, nice atmosphere for NES standards, it's a technical marvel...

But the exploration platformer genre was simply not there yet in terms of its game design mentality branching out from the action platformer in the right ways, and in terms of its now laser-focused awareness on what quality of life features the genre needs, or at least benefits heavily from.

I want to play Blaster Master Zero one day, though. It looks like good fun!

It's still not really New and definitely not Super Mario Bros., but at least it's better than Wii.

The smaller screen resolution and single player design makes for more focused, compact level design; the stages don't rely on party-esque jank as much; hidden paths like in Wii are completely absent, and the coin scoring genuinely adds some interesting metagame functions, like adding importance to not dying, revisiting levels with flying gold blocks and gold flowers to maximize your score... it can get really interesting once you try playing it that way.

I just wish they'd gone all in with this mentality. Many levels simply don't work with this idea (eg: basically every ghost house); the traditional structure of the game doesn't lend itself as well as a more score attack-focused structure like the Pac-Man Championship Edition games might have; and perhaps most crucially, there's no online leaderboards for coin records that I can find.

It's a very interesting idea that could seriously be elaborated on further - but sadly, 2 inherited Wii's half-baked, newbie-training mentality, and gave up all kinds of iteration and elaboration in the process.

I can definitely see why this is many people's favorite Shovel Knight campaign. It's easily the most streamlined: it eliminates Shovel Knight's map and encounters, and simplifies the hub to a single location while keeping all the character found in these locations in the other games; it's not standing alongside Joustus or weapon management like King and Plague Knights' campaigns.

Specter Knight's kit manages to make for interesting, unique platforming that demands the player think about their positioning and how it impacts their movement options constantly. The stages are built near perfectly for his moveset, being challenging without ever being tedious in the way I found some moments in Plague Knight's run to be. Every stage is reasonably fair and approachable for Specter Knight at any point of the game...

...But I think that does make it a little flat, too. There's not as much of a difficulty curve in Specter of Torment as there is in the other games, and honestly, it almost feels too easy, between the main stages and the true final boss. I liked getting wrecked by Cardia and gradually getting the hang of Joustus in King of Cards, and just barely surviving my first bout against the final boss in Plague of Shadows - and I think this game doesn't have enough of those kinds of moments.

It's consistent, and compelling. The story's engaging (although it makes me wonder if Reize's creator bankrolled Yacht Club for it) and shows a gradual decline in redeemability for each of the Shovel Knight protagonists; I liked getting to see Shield Knight in her prime, although I think Yacht Club are better at making a plot than they are at telling a story, and the presentation suffers for it.

It's very, very polished, and very, very solid, but I don't know if I love it the way I love the other three Shovel Knight games. It's easily one of the best platformers I've played, right?

So why don't I find it as dear to my heart as the rest?

okay, it must have been because platformers were becoming less common in this era
sonic started being a bit janky, mario was stepping away from pure platforming with sunshine, rare was nowhere to be seen, spyro and crash were slipping in quality

but i just can't understand why this game gets glorified as much as it does today.

it's just. a platformer? like, i can't think of anything this game particularly excels at aside from the music

It's a fantastic game, especially considering how much of an innovation it was and how influential it became for so many games that followed it.

The problem with having played it for the first time in 2020, though, is that there's so many games that are cut from its cloth that it's hard to really get an appreciation for how distinct and amazing Super Metroid really was - especially when there are games that are just "Super Metroid, but X" that fill in niches and shortcomings that the game can't fill on its own.

For example, Rabi-Ribi - my go-to Metroid-like fills the problem I have with Metroid's combat. Aiming missiles is clunky; too many bosses have specific weaknesses and vulnerabilities and gimmicky attack patterns; and Samus' hitbox is simply too big with too clumsy movement controls - Rabi-Ribi solves all these problems by basically being Kirby meets Touhou in boss battles.

But I don't really want to spend this... review? gushing about Rabi-Ribi. What Super Metroid does get right, even moreso than other games like it, is atmosphere and storytelling through sheer intrigue and its world. The brief glimpse at what looks like a Metroid in the drop in Maridia, the menacing statues of the four bosses encountered early in Crateria, the Chozo statues and so much more...

And honestly, this and Zero Mission combined really do absolve the sins of the first game, huh.

It's strange. I don't really think Kirby's Star Stacker is a particularly good game.
It doesn't really have the thoughtful kind of design that better puzzle games like Puyo and Tetris have; Star Stacker relies on a weird mix of pre-scripted levels (in Round Clear) and RNG, as well as excessive game speed and janky movement and rotation controls to be difficult, mostly for the sake of being difficult.

But seeing a combo I thought would be pretty simple turn into 5 or 6-chain combos and basically wiping my entire screen as the 1-UP and then Kirby Dance jingles play in celebration is... it's nice, I won't lie.

I still don't think it's particularly good. Maybe the SFC game will change my mind. I'm pretty curious about getting to play it on hardware one day, so... we'll see.

But it's like Squeak Squad: the fact that this is one of the franchise's lower points speaks volumes as to how consistently good the series has been throughout its runtime.

I've completed Episode 3 on Hey, Not Too Rough. Overall, I was impressed with how the game eventually conveys to me how it works, and how combat and dealing with enemies eventually became manageable, especially when I made liberal use of saving. I watched as my playtime per episode started gradually decreasing, my first episode taking me a few hours and everything going much more smoothly after that.

I think the levels are far too labyrinthine to get fun out of them in a single first playthrough, though. Doom seems best enjoyed at a high(er) difficulty, knowing where everything is and how to effectively maul through everything, and that's not honestly something I'm particularly interested in doing, especially when there's another two games in the series that I want to look at.

Maybe I'm too spoiled by what I've seen from the newer Doom games? Eternal in particular seems to have really fun, interesting looking movement and its game design is balanced around defeating enemies, sometimes in specific ways. When I look at that and I look at this game, I see something that was the start of a really good idea, but not much beyond that.

I've enjoyed my time through overall, though. It's made for a lot of fun Discord calls of me screaming from getting blindsided from a Cacodemon and other things like that.

...and i'm not even going to try beat episode 4.

I think it shows pretty obviously that Newer DS benefits from years of additional insight when it comes to level design, and the NSMB DS engine (and how much mileage the Newer team gets out of it) lends itself better to these kinds of traditional-with-a-twist levels than what Wii had.

Simply put? It's a pretty good Mario game! Just like the last one, some of its strongest levels are genuinely clever.
But it's also an amateur one still - star coins often don't know how to run a happy medium between painfully formulaic and excruciatingly obtuse, for example.

I imagine this would be what it'd be like if I tried to create a Mario game after a few months, maybe a few years of studying the series' levels. Decently thought out in theory, but a bit by-the-book in areas where I probably would deviate from the norm would I know exactly how to.

It's still better than Super Mario Maker.

Crucified, buried, forgotten

for the sin of not having been Pac-Man World 2 2

perhaps rightly so.

I used to joke that Ristar was Sonic Team's best platformer on the Genesis, but not anymore.

I'm serious.

The slower paced of the game compared to Sonic makes the game feel more relaxed, something you can take in as a feel-good game like the Yoshi games, and by focusing less on momentum, also further simplifies the thinking you constantly have to make about movement.

Instead, Ristar excels by making the most of its unique grabbing mechanic. It's Miyamoto's adage of the stone that hits two birds at full display, surprisingly enough: with one mechanic Ristar can not only attack enemies from afar, but also latch onto handles - which allows for more interesting and challenging vertical traversal - and interact with objects in a very tactile way.
Indeed, Ristar feels everything with his hands; it's no surprise that the working title for the game was what it was.

Ristar handles vertically tiered level design and ascension - or really, its level design in general - in a very organic way that's rivalled by few in the entire 2D platforming genre. Yoshi's Island, Sonic Mania and Kirby Super Star are perhaps the few standout exceptions, which perhaps have the slight edge over Ristar at the end of the day by not having the intense difficulty curve that it has.

The game starts easy enough to grasp and understand, but the difficulty spikes hard, with bosses taking far more hits to defeat and the timing necessary to hit them becoming impossibly narrow. I cannot recommend taking your time to explore the first handful of Rounds enough; stocking up on lives and continues as early as possible will be a necessity in order to survive what the game eventually throws at you.

Prior to Sonic Mania, I probably would have said that this was SEGA's finest 2D platformer. On a personal level, it's not exactly my favorite, but its quality shines just as brightly; as do the fantastic soundtrack and graphics that give Sonic 3 & Knuckles a run for its money.

I can't say I liked the US version's changes, though - so I'd recommend the Japanese version, if only because Ristar isn't frowning all the time in it.

By 1992, Final Fantasy IV was already two years old. While it was definitely far from perfect, it to me represents an important step forwards for the JRPG genre, with more attempts to properly tell stories through combat, innovations in turn-based gameplay and more.

With this in mind, Arcana is dated, somewhat off-balance, and honestly? It's a bit tedious. With navigation in a tile-based first-person perspective with awful draw distance and framerate, and Return Rings and the Home spell having so little consequence, dungeon crawling becomes a matter of trial-and-error, warping back to town when resources run low, naturally Getting Stronger in the process, and trying again until you happen to find the right path forward and survive on your way there.
It gets even more trivial once money becomes less of a concern and you can just stockpile Tents from the shop, which fully restores the party's HP and MP.

But... I don't know! It's really not particularly more compelling than something like the NES Final Fantasies, but... it's a HAL Laboratories JRPG. It's got a Jun Ishikawa and Hirokazu Ando soundtrack! You know those more JRPG-ish tracks that Ishikawa did for Kirby Triple Deluxe? He's got some serious chops for this kind of genre! I would have loved to see more of this!

To me specifically, Arcana is just such an aesthetic game. It's brilliant to see and hear and experience, to keep wondering "was this song written by Ishikawa or Ando?", to listen to little motifs and melodic fragments come in and out in a way that foreshadows how Ando would handle future Kirby soundtracks, to finally get to the credits and see Masahiro Sakurai and Satoru Iwata's names.

And it's wonderful to experience these things that lead up to the legacy of that pink puff that means so much to me.