Justice for All is widely agreed on to be the weakest of the Ace Attorney trilogy, for reasons I can understand. It only contains four cases out of the typical five, for one. The first case being a tutorial and the third, infamously, being brought down by the pedophile love triangle plotline. For all of that though, it still introduces incredibly important developments for the series; premiering Fransizka and finishing with the much revered Farewell, my Turnabout

As a child this was easily the least influential game for me, I absolutely could not STAND Fransizka and none of the cases stood out to me much. Now though, I definitely feel more positive about it. I still dont have much attraction for the 1st and 3rd cases but I'm pretty impressed by the overall implications the events in this game have over the rest of the series. In a way, some of it feels partly like a set up for T&T, especially the happenings with Morgan and Pearl. But heres where we start getting smarter and more thoroughly crafted cases, psyche locks also being an intresting way to interact with and progress characters outside of court. As a kid I think I preferred Maya, but honestly Pearl is very endearing and a delight to have as an assistant. Her being more "mature" than her cousin despite her age introduces a lot of funny situations and also reinforces my belief that 9 year old girls are the greatest force on the planet. Mimi Miney and Acro are two of my favorite killers in the trilogy, and I thought Mimi's situation in the 2nd case specifically was very cleverly thought out.

Unfortunately this game (all of the trilogy, really) has some bad habits which annoyed me in JFA particularly. One is just straight up showing you who the killer is- if not in the opening cutscene then just at a random point throughout the case. The other is withholding all developement until you present a random item/profile to a character- despite the fact that you may have already discussed said item with said character 2 or 3 times but you havent ACTUALLY unlocked the conversation topic for it until you show them. And it is very easy go forget what you should be showing whom as theres no way to keep track of dialouge, so that can be a tad frustrating.

Farewell, my Turnabout is a huge bombshell in terms of the logic of the series and opens up a lot of questions that it is still answering. Mainly, what it means to be a defense lawyer and what the search for truth actually looks like, if the law can even uphold that standard, and how to make the right decision within that confinement. Watching Phoenix grow throughout the game from being an anxious rookie to a genuine attorney is important, but it's really only evident through the developments in this case as his and Miles' relationship is reestablished. Miles himself has grown into the character we more or less remember him as, and in a world where prosecutors hate your guts, it is very refreshing to watch a dynamic where the two work together and mesh with each other so easily. Because of the game's length, Fransizka tended to be sidelined a great deal of the time (being the only prosecutor to not even have her own theme), but she did get her moments throughout case 4 that made my heart hurt a little. Especially the post credits scene which had me tearing up a bit at the end, it is a huge shame we dont really see more of her throughout JFA and T&T because I adore her and she should be treated better.

Overall I'm kind of just happy to finally be playing T&T now, and while I wouldnt risk it all dying on the hill of defending JFA- it IS still a very good and important game to the Ace Attorney series regardless of how much you may want to hang Trilo upsidedown by his feet and force feed him milk till he pukes.

umm, like... how do I close out a review? I kind of, like, forgot. Sorry.

On the surface, Alan Wake is the more conventional of the two RE4 inspired Peaks-type horror games released in 2010 (Deadly Premonition being the first true Peaks-type game), but once it gets into the weeds of its meta narrative it morphs into a decidedly unique action game story. The plot is also able to carry the relatively simple gameplay loop after it eventually becomes rote.

Said loop being: holding your flashlight until the Elite Beat Agents circles close and then hitting fire a couple of times.

Those repetitive encounters and environments are my only major knock against Alan Wake. Still, it’s got that diegetic flashlight reticle and y’all know that design element is a Conman-core situation.

One thing this game has in spades is the ever illusive thing I call soul. I always like to have the term soul in my back pocket just in case I’m too lazy to describe aesthetics. Alan Wake has a thought-out, serious story, but Remedy does a great job of not letting pretentious self-seriousness consume everything. The in-game tv shows, the radio, the manuscripts… come to think of it, this is one of the only times I’ve sought out audio logs to experience the audio logs themselves. That is some of the highest praise I can give a game’s collectibles.

Also, thinking about how Swery claims he’s never seen Twin Peaks never ceases to make me smile. As another side note, my almost 8-month-old son did NOT like this game or Condemned: Criminal Origins. “Boo hoo it’s scary” so what stop being a baby.

Shout out to small rural towns overtaken by an evil or dark presence that corrupts them or brings hellish creatures. Gotta be one of my favorite genders.




Deemon, the incompetent reviewer, started off his write-off with one of his usual jokes, so unfunny that one might wonder if he was doing it on purpose or if he really has such poor comedy taste. He was trying to hide the fact that he really didn’t know where to start; the path to take might seem clear, but like the streets and forest of Bright Falls, it’s more deceiving than it may look at first, like a maze that’s also a downward spiral.

Deemon pondered, searching for a way to salvage the review, desperately trying to find out which step he should take, what words he should use. He sighed. He decided to let the words write themselves, to let out all the thoughts that had formed while the darkness and light of the town surrounded Alan Wake. He surrendered himself to the unknown, one that might be already written after all… Though he knows he had to talk about the music for sure, that selection of bangers had to be celebrated somehow.




Ambition almost killed Alan Wake, in more ways than one. I mean, I may not know much about Remedy Studios, in fact, it is the very first game of theirs I have ever played and beaten, but I do know the story of Bright Falls and how it was initially going to be something else, an open world of sorts, something that didn’t quite work, as it seems. Translating an already crafted open world into a linear style of game is such a monumental task that if I were in that predicament, I’d have considered outright scrapping everything and starting from zero, but that probably wasn’t even a realistic option for the team to begin with.

But that’s not even what I’m specifically referring to. Alan Wake, the game, the package, the copy made out of code and specific sections, is riddled with hiccups and bumps; it’s filled with padding, sections of trees and mist than don’t offer much aside from one or two manuscripts pages and combat sections that can feel overbearing at times, the remnants of its troubled production remain in aspects such as the barren areas and driving sections that don’t have much of a place and are so frustrating to playthrough even if you ignore any cars I just wish they were taken out —tho it’s kind of cute how it also uses the same light mechanic as the rest of the game—,  the encounters with the Taken or the groups of mad crows often lack imagination and enemy variety or don’t jam very well with how the camera works in the case of the camera, and at one point I just kept thinking how much the experience would have benefited if some sections were repurposed in different ways or outright removed.

The imperfections of Alan Wake mostly come from this, factors outside of the game itself, of its story, but they still impact it negatively; I can’t scratch off the feeling of something being lost a bit when all of the boss enemies behave the exact same, the only thing that changes being the creepy lines they spat out and the character model. If the game wasn’t anything more than a series of levels where you shoot at things, then these issues would have rotted its pages…

…luckily, it has a dragon.

Wouldn’t it be funny if I started to praise the actual combat itself after spending two paragraphs criticizing some gameplay sections? Yeah, it would be hilarious! ... ANYWAYyeah I fucking adore the way Al controls. It occupies that same space as Simon from Castlevania, where how slow and imprecise it feels actually benefits the gameplay. You truly get the feeling Alan has never picked a gun in his life in any major capacity; he’s slow, clunky, imprecise, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. The tense dance of using light to weaken the Taken and gen emptying the chambers of them, or hell, simply using a flare and trying to activate the closest generator, it’s a super straight-forward system, and I love it. It’s incredibly satisfying to come out of encounters on top, because even if there isn’t much scarcity in resources (even if you start off each chapter with nothing each time), they are still somewhat limited, especially the most powerful weapons, and little things like mashing X to reload faster or the camera panning out to warn you of nearby enemies are things I didn’t know I needed until now.

It would be a far cry to call it a survival horror, but it’s tense; it’s tense to try to manage the purge while a bulldozer is charging full speed at you; it’s tense to try to outspeed a force you cannot do nothing against; and Alan gets progressively more and more tired. I can make the argument that there should be less of it or at least more variety in what it offers enemy-wise, but nothing will take away from the fact that the core itself is some fantastic shit.

Like… there’s something about fighting against waves of enemies on stage while the sickest rock tune ever plays in the background and the lights and flames fill your eyes that I can only call ‘’fucking awesome’’.




Deemon knew that wasn’t just it. He could talk about flaws and shooting Taken all he wanted, but something else lied within the light. He ran into it.

‘’But there’s something else’’, he said




But there’s something else.

A story already written, touched by the darkness. Written already as a part of it before birth, its muse trying to corrupt it. An ending yet to be typed out.

I have never seen a videogame story that trusts so much that the player will be intrigued enough by it to stick with it and engage with it all the way through. The tale Alan Wake, Alice, Barry, Sarah, and the whole town get tangled into is not intriguing; it is fascinating. I have never felt such closure from getting answers to questions I never realized where there in the first place. From being pretty disappointed about how Nightingale and Mott had such a poor presence as antagonists to being in awe of how their actions fell into place after the truth of this unfortunate series of events was revealed. Alan Wake offers a hell of a mystery. Alan Wake solves it.

The pages of the manuscript are as essential as the cinematics and interactions, so many pieces of the puzzle fit, it’s almost like getting spoiled before something happens, which in a way is exactly what’s happening. At first, I felt pretty disappointed that this would be a jarring light vs darkness story mixed with a thriller. Then it ended up being a meta-narrative within its own meta-narrative. The fact they did that without it feeling overcomplicated or screwing it up is ovation worthy.

But I also feel a huge sense of admiration for the micro-stories at play; hearing and talking to the inhabitants of Bright Falls, listening to Maine’s night radio, the echoes of the Taken and stellar ambience sounds ringing through my ears, the fucking incredible Night Springs shorts that had me HOOKED... It was the little things scattered in the trees and buildings and the small talk that gave this spiraling world even more meaning.

It ends with the darkness hungry for more, just like me. I’ve seen people call Alan Wake ‘’the most 6/7 out of ten game I’ve ever played’’, and even though I do not sympathize with that statement at all because it feels reductive in any context, I kind of get what people mean by it. Alan Wake is profoundly flawed, but most of them do not come from the game itself, but rather from the complicated production it had to go through.  In the face of such adversity, I’ve never seen such confidence, such talent, or such a desire to tell a tale like this. Alan Wake isn’t just *a* story, there’s more to be written and read, but at the end of the day, it’s also its own story. And what a story it is.

Maybe this isn’t what the champion of light could have been if the circumstances were different, but the hardships cannot be avoided, and even after going through them, they really sold me on this novel.

There are of course some pretty obvious inspirations here in the form of Twin Peaks and Silent Hill, but Alan Wake manages to standalone well enough to be its own thing. Some of the foresty areas, while nice, can get a little samey but Bright Falls feels like a lived in location, helped by the menagerie of characters you find along the way and the story really did manage to hook me.

I wouldn't call them bad, but the enemy encounters can get a bit clunky and repetitive, especially with a pretty narrow selection of tools at your disposal, but these elements are actually surprisingly easy to look over thanks to the overall presentation and story. The conceit of finding manuscript pages for a book that's been written for events that are yet to occur as collectibles is very well done, allowing them to not feel like pointless trinkets.

When I was a kid, around fall my family would always plan big camping trips up north. After a decade and a half, the exact locales blur, all dirt campsites and sleepy towns, cut by endless drives down quiet backroads. Connecting every single trip, however, is the same singular image: laying in the backseat, staring to the sky as the pine, beech and maple trees ebbed and flowed with the breeze, a shimmer of greens, golds and reds against a still, cloudless ether.

Despite its northwestern setting, Alan Wake is a game that feels like home. Beyond the woodsy vibes, the spirit of the game keeps that same autumnal energy I associate with those countless trips, down to the same Halloween haunts that filled hours of my life. Alan Wake is read through the lens of Steven King and The Twilight Zone, a sort of contemporary / old school horror fusion, and the game makes it's infatuation with these influences blatant, to the point of embarrassment.

Horror molds the story and setting, leaning into a gun-toting Twin Peaks atmosphere, but the mold is not the full experience. Despite billing itself as a horror game, it feels more aligned with being an acknowledgement of horror's influence. In a sense, Alan Wake isn't a horror game; it's a game about horror, where horror itself is light and breezy.

Alan Wake is a beautiful game, a picturesque capturing of the woods and towns I spent much of my childhood in. To imply the game is mechanical deep or systematically unique would be disingenuous, but as a reflection of some of the most calming, perfect moments of my life, it's flawless. I love this game.

(vague non contextual spoilers)

i think this might be the most disquieted i've felt playing any sort of game whatsoever. trauma gazing descent into delusion stressfest. wide eyed depravity.

contrary to general criticism i see floating around here, i quite enjoyed the way it seemed to keep going after its supposed "peak" to keep it brief, suspending the anxiety to an agonisingly slow pace and wondering where it could possibly go from here; somewhere bad, evidently. i can also see why the ending might be divisive, but while my wound of finishing this title is fresh i find it to be devastatingly powerful.

haunting voice performances, higurashi's typical superstitions grounded in a filthy reality. mouth agape staring at my monitor at 1am-core. onto the next.

A person's tolerance for Harold Halibut is going to depend on how much mileage they get out of slower games where inhabiting the space and conversations are the key focus, rather than anything resembling moment to moment gameplay.

I don't blame anyone who doesn't get on with that or think that any single approach is objectively better or worse, but I was drawn in by the game's beautiful handcrafted aesthetic and its hold on me never really faltered throughout the runtime. The ship you live on is full of memorable characters with their own unique idiosyncrasies, all helped along by a strong voice work - for Harold specifically there's a great balance between goofy ignorance and sentimentality, and that personality is probably one of the major factors that kept me going.

But I must emphasise again that this is a very slow game and there are quirks that come with that - sometimes your movement speed is slowed to a crawl as you'e made to follow another character, sometimes the dialogue goes on a little longer than expected, and this will put some people off. Thankfully for me, I used that time to take in the absolutely gorgeous world, animation and the small details dotted around all the locations you visit.

Before this review starts, I would like to preface that this is by no means an actual, in-depth critical review of Max Payne 3. I won’t be touching the story or gameplay AT ALL in this, so let that be warned. This is purely about how I feel about Max Payne 3’s portrayal of my region of Brazil and how it affected my enjoyment of it to the point where I just can’t really stand it and think it is one of the most racist video games ever made. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that Resident Evil 5 is frequently cited as a super racist video game when Max Payne 3 is literally right there and does the exact same things that game does!

The average person who played Max Payne 3 will probably not bother to do an inch of research on the country of Brazil, probably thinks Rio is the capital, and believes that it is an absolute warzone hellhole where people get shot on the street constantly. This is the kind of audience Rockstar was trying to appeal to with this game. I do not believe, even for a second, that they made this game out of respect for Brazil. They simply wanted a 3rd world country to throw their white American hero into so he could shoot and kill without a care in the world, because the 3rd world is so lawless, right? They wanted to portray their weird, twisted view of Brazil so much that they even went so far as to scan a thousand residents of the favela of Paraisópolis into the game, acting as backdrop NPCs in the chapters that do take place in the favela. You can kill actual residents of São Paulo in Max Payne 3, which is crazy once you consider how the rest of the game handles this stuff. You can sit there in your little house just outside Little Rock, Arkansas, and get your greasy hands on the controller and shoot at people who were probably paid less than a penny for their faces to be plastered onto enemies. It's the most pure depiction of the average 40-something-year-old American going to a country that doesn't belong to you and killing brown people for fun!

There is so much arrogance in Rockstar's approach to developing Max Payne 3. A huge inspiration for the game was the 2007 Brazilian movie “Tropa de Elite," which is very funny once you learn what that movie is about. It's like Rockstar saw that movie as just an average cool awesome shooter romp through a favela and not as a critique of Brazil’s problems and struggle with violence. I think taking a movie that presents a very thoughtful critique of violence and using it for their little American power fantasy video game is insanely disrespectful. But it’s not like it really matters to the audience for this game. The audience doesn’t know what "Tropa de Elite" is; most of them couldn’t even tell what language Brazil speaks, and most of them probably don’t even know Portuguese is a language. It appeals to the naive, the Americans, who think going to Brazil to shoot at some mixed-race thugs is the coolest thing in the world because they can live out their little soldier hero fantasy.

The depiction of lawful Brazilian citizens, who all seem to hate gringos and be aggressive on sight despite Brazil frequently being cited as one of the most friendly countries to foreigners, is an objectively wrong, offensive depiction. Brazilians do not hate gringos; I, being one myself and being friends with a lot of gringos and foreigners, can personally attest to this. I have been around a lot of São Paulo because I live fairly close to it and there are always gringos around, and no one minds, and in fact, most Brazilians really enjoy helping out gringos or foreigners in any way they can!  Rockstar seems to have this weird, twisted idea that since it's a favela and not the clean, corporate building of the Brancos, the people are totally different. The people from the favelas are wonderful people, despite the bad hand most of them have been dealt in life: stuck in poverty, living in run-down buildings on top of other buildings, stacked up so high. They have a resilient spirit; they, to me, represent the Brazilian spirit more than any other group of people in this world, and I respect them deeply for it. I think choosing to depict these people as inherently hostile to Max, the American hero, is so disrespectful to them and their home and the culture they were raised around, and it paints a picture that is absolutely not true. I believe Rockstar chose to depict the favelas like that because it would sell. The depiction of the favelas as lawless wastelands with gangsters and thugs at every corner is the most pure evidence you could find of the ignorance of the average American writer. You can visit a country and study it, see how it is, then go home to your little flat in your little apartment and depict it in a way that would make sense to your audience, which is the American, the one you want to please because they at the end of the day give you money; the citizens of São Paulo don’t really matter in the end much at all, and their input was never needed.

Brazil already gets misrepresented by the world at large, and I am a firm believer that media can affect and alter reality and how people perceive things in significant ways. Rockstar seemed to be drawn in by the allure of Brazil that exists in the minds of only foreigners and not the actual experience of the average Brazilian. The funk, the favela, the scorching sun, the people, the beaches, the drinking, the soccer—everything that people stereotype Brazilians as is present in this game! I don’t feel proud saying this is THE game that takes place where I live, that this is THE game that is supposed to “represent” São Paulo. I personally struggled with my Brazilian identity for a long time because of certain notions and preconceptions people held and still hold against Brazilians, particularly online, which tends to get very very nasty and racist. And I cannot sit here and pretend like I am fine with the way these Americans wrote about my country and my people.

Even when you get to the real villains of the game, the Brazilian UFE and Victor Branco, the game never changes from its weird attitude towards Brazilians. Chapter 12 is literally named “The Great American Savior of the Poor,” and as ironic as Rockstar’s intent may have been while writing that, they characterize Max and Brazilians in such a way that that is actually the case! He stops the Comando Sombra, he stops the UFE, he stops political corruption, and he saves a bunch of favela citizens from getting their organs harvested. He, a white American man, really does become the savior of the poor through this game's absolutely naive and frankly stupidly racist writing. And the critique itself towards the Brazilian police and political world is absolutely shallow and warped. I mean, Victor Branco is kind of a silly caricature of a stereotypical corrupt Brazilian politician, but the game doesn’t really delve any deeper than that, and it frankly makes me quite sad. Just a few years after this game came out, Operation Car Wash started, and honestly, I wish this game had come out during that time frame so they could have developed that plot point further. But then I also worry they would’ve handled it in the worst way possible and made the most Brazilian right-wing propaganda piece video game of all time, and that thought alone sends shivers down my spine. Like Imagine in your head right now a game so right-wing Bolsonaro would probably use clips of it in his 2018 campaign. I already think the game is inherently right-leaning simply because of the way it handles a lot of the subject matter, and I honestly fear what a 2017 Max Payne 3 taking place in Brazil during the Temer era would look like...

If it seems like I have gotten emotional or angry while writing this, it is because I have! I do not live in the city of São Paulo proper; I live on the coast. But I have been to São Paulo quite often in my life due to a few of my relatives living there, and those relatives live in the parts that Max Payne 3 chose specifically to depict. It makes me sad that this is the product that was made; this is what Rockstar chose to depict of my family, my friends, and my country. To the people that live here, to the people that know and love people that live in the world Max Payne 3 chose to take place in, it is a very painful experience to go through again and again. São Paulo is really a beautiful state, and most will never ever get to experience it; only the people that have lived here would really understand how amazing and beautiful it truly can be. But to the average audience that loves Rockstar, all of this is alright and fine by them; they’re never going to feel offended, and they’re never going to have a problem with it. They’re never going to feel their blood pressure rise when the game says something so insanely racist you have to take a step back. They’re never going to wonder how their friends and family are viewed due to the negative connotations being from a favela already carried, made worse by a totally inept and ignorant development team. Because they don’t care. To the average American consumer, it is just another game set in a "shithole," a "warzone," where they get to escape their privileged realities and pretend they’re some sort of hero. Rockstar manages to reinforce every single negative stereotype about Brazil for these people. And they’re going to eat it up; they’ll believe it because they are inherently ignorant. It is a game made for Americans, not for the Brazilian people, and there is nothing more American than pretending to be a badass hero in some “shithole” where the only goal is to kill as many brown people as possible.

I have gone on a few tangents here and there, but I have stated my case. Max Payne 3 is a racist video game, plain and simple. It's not going to beat around the bush and pretend it's because Rockstar is doing it by accident because it honestly feels very deliberate. They had writers approve a lot of this stuff, and it baffles me that at no point a writer went and said how kind of messed up it all is. I will leave a single quote here that I feel perfectly illustrates what I mean by all of this:

“We’d half destroyed São Paulo’s most hallowed place of worship.” A stadium.

Half-Century Challenge Series: https://www.backloggd.com/u/C_F/list/half-century-challenge/

HCC #2 = Oregon Trail (1971)

Anybody remember playing video games in your school's computer lab? I was a tech savvy kid who always finished work early, so I had quite a few things I would put on to pass the time. Showing off cheat codes to my classmates in flash games like Stick RPG or Swords & Sandals 2. The reactions when I entered a comma at the end of my character's name and clicked randomize made me feel so proud of tapping into the hidden knowledge of how to break some silly Newgrounds game. Putting a flash drive with SNES emulators inside the school's PC... I'll never forget the time my classmate saw me struggling with the button mashing minigame in Chrono Trigger. Mainly since it led to him mashing the spacebar so hard he finished it with plenty of time to spare while half the class stared at him due to the noise he was making. Hell, I even remember making a visual novel for my senior project. I wish I had saved it outside of class in hindsight, but what can you do?

Anyways, on one slow day my teacher let me play Oregon Trail after proclaiming it was an edutainment game I would enjoy. All I could wonder was how it would be possible to learn a lesson and play a game at the same time.

Needless to say I was in awe. It was like getting a crash course on money management, American history, and arithmetic all in one. At the time, it never occurred to me how silly the game was. I never stopped to think about how goofy the idea of going to sleep and getting SIX FUCKING OXEN stolen from me was. I never stopped to wonder if the prices actually made sense for the time period. Cus, frankly, none of that was too important to me. None of that is important to me right now.

To me, games are so much more than the graphics, the music, the text, the data occupying the screen. Oregon Trail is more than some silly edutainment game I played half a lifetime ago. It's a connection.

I can't remember my classmates' names. I can't remember my teacher's name. I can't easily Google "what school did I go to in 2010" or anything. I can easily Google Oregon Trail. Every year, our memory fades more and more. The digital footprint of Oregon Trail, however, hasn't faded.

I almost vividly remember naming my Oregon Trail party members after my classmates and my teacher. I recall wondering what the fuck dysentery was and being upset I let "my classmate" die. I know how accomplished I felt to have beaten the game in such a short timeframe. Every 4th of July, I run a simulation of this game with my friend group and save some screencaps. I like to think it helps somehow.

I could sit here and tell you about how Oregon Trail is the longest running game franchise. I could tell you how Oregon Trail started as a random teacher's indie game before becoming the most impactful edutainment game ever made.

But the truth is, none of that is important to me. My memories with this game are important to me. I don't even know if I can really rec this game unless you're a nerd like me who plays notable games academically. At least it's an hour long tops?

And as Alek Wek once said, the most beautiful things are not associated with money; they are memories and moments. If you don't celebrate those, they can pass you by. The creator of Oregon Trail said in an interview that even if he didn't get to buy his own private island from all the money Oregon Trail made, he doesn't care since he's still so happy a game he made in 10 days is still so celebrated. And that's just beautiful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QbjlHeoLdc

Next time: Pong (1972)

While it hadn’t gotten as much love as other Nintendo franchises at this point, like with Mario, Zelda, Kirby, and others, the Metroid series was still considered to be one of their big IPs at the time, and had a bit of a reputation at that point. The original Metroid and Metroid II: Return of Samus, despite not reaching the same level of quality as future titles in the series, were still good games in their own right, and were a pretty good launch point for this series as a whole. Not to mention, they were pretty successful, selling 2.7 million copies and 1.7 million copies respectively, so naturally, a sequel was going to be made… but not right away. There would be somewhat of a gap in between releases, primarily because the devs were waiting for just the right time, the perfect time, to bring Samus back into the limelight once again. This perfect time would come in 1994, and with the help of Intelligent Systems, who had developed plenty of games with Nintendo before (including the original Metroid), they would then release the long-awaited next chapter in the Metroid saga, Super Metroid.

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t go onto sell as well as its predecessors, but it would go onto garner universal praise from fans, die-hard or otherwise, and critics alike, with it now considered to be not only one of, if not THE best Metroid game of all time, but also one of the greatest video games ever made. Many have sung its praises over the years in many ways, it would get plenty of mods later down the road supporting replayability, it would become a favorite amongst speedrunners, and it would help go onto establishing an entire sub-genre of video games as a whole. As for myself though, I wouldn’t jump onto the Super Metroid bandwagon for quite some time, despite watching plenty of videos about it that would praise the game and go into great detail about why it was considered a masterpiece. When I eventually did decide to give the game a fair shot, I immediately understood why, as it is an incredible game, and absolutely deserves the reputation it has garnered over the years. While it may not be my personal favorite Metroid game, it is clear when playing the game that the devs put plenty of love, detail, and care into this game, making it one of the best games you could ever play not only from this era, but from any era.

The story continues on from where Metroid II ended off, where Samus Aran, now with a baby Metroid in her possession, brings it to a team of scientists at the Ceres research station to conduct further study on the specimen, but shortly after she leaves, the station is attacked by Ridley, back in the flesh after his defeat in the original game, killing everyone inside and stealing the baby Metroid, and fleeing back to the planet Zebes, so it is up to Samus to travel to Zebes once again, get back the baby Metroid, and uncover what is really going on here. It is a fairly simple premise, one that is easy to understand for new players, but also complex enough to create intrigue for those that are wanting to learn more about this game and its universe, making it very pleasing to experience and ponder about.

The graphics are absolutely phenomenal, not only bringing Samus to the 16-bit era in the perfect way, but also creating plenty of iconic locations, enemy designs, and atmosphere that still holds up tremendously well almost 30 years later, the music is wonderful, creating a perfect balance of being moody, setting the tone for many of the environments you travel in, yet still being filled with plenty of life, while also being tense and action–packed when it needs to, the control is perfect, feeling like the perfect evolution for how Samus should control in one of these games, while giving plenty of new things to mess around with right from the get-go that give you more versatility than ever, and the gameplay is pretty similar to the last two titles in the series, but now it has been made to be a lot more exciting, approachable, and memorable.

The game is a 2D action-adventure game, where you take control of Samus Aran once again, go through the depths of the planet Zebes once again, this time with much more detail, life, and secrets to find, defeat plenty of creatures, big or small, that inhabit the planet and want you dead as you go deeper and deeper into the planet, gather plenty of upgrades to Samus’s arsenal to make her into the ultimate warrior, such as with health upgrades, beam power ups, or regular power ups that give you new abilities, and take on plenty of bosses, both new and old, that will provide a challenge to those unprepared for what is to come. It has all the same elements that the previous two games had, not really introducing anything that majorly different for the series at the time, but there is one thing that it does manage to do above all else: perfect the formula.

As I mentioned earlier, Samus is now more capable then she has ever been before, not only having the same basic abilities and powers that she could get from the previous game, but she is now also able to aim in eight separate directions, she can crouch, and she even now has a wall jump, where you can continuously scale up a wall if you press the right sequence of buttons, allowing you to ultimately make the game YOUR BITCH. It is the perfect way to naturally evolve not just Samus and her capabilities, but also how the game plays, because when compared to the original game and Metroid II, this is just perfect in every way. Not only that, but the arsenal of weapons that she can acquire throughout the game is just as helpful as before, with classics like the Missiles, the Morph Ball, the Hi-Jump boots, the Screw Attack, and the various beam powers making a return, and each of them are incredibly helpful in plenty of situations.

Not only that, but there is also a good amount of new power ups for you to mess around with in the game as you go about finding them. There’s the Speed Booster, which allows Samus to run extremely fast and make her an unstoppable bullet train, the Shine Spark, which allows you to fire yourself through hard structures while using the Speed Booster, the Grapple Beam, which can be used to latch onto certain surfaces and swing around all over the place to reach new areas or more goodies, and the X-Ray Scope, which allows you to scan nearby areas to see if you can find any hidden passageways, power ups, or otherwise. Most of these new additions would become staples in the series in the coming years, and all of them are extremely useful and wonderful to test out in plenty of locations… with the exception of the X-Ray Scope, which I barely used at all, but hey, it is there for newcomers, so that is good.

And speaking of newcomers, like I mentioned before, this game is much more approachable when compared to the previous two titles, not just in terms of what it provides the player, but also in terms of design. In the first two Metroid games, there was always the possibility of getting lost or confused while traveling through these corridors, because not only did you not have any way to track where you were in the game, but also because a lot of the hallways look almost identical to each other, meaning you could think you are in a whole new area, but instead are stuck back-tracking when you didn’t want to so that.

Thankfully, with Super Metroid, not only do you now have a map which can track where you have been, making it a lot easier to decide where you want to go next, but every single area in the game, big or small, now has a distinct look and design to it, making it so that you will always have new things to discover, and even if you haven’t fully explored one area due to a lack of tools needed to do so, you can always find your way back in order to do so later. With that being said though, even though you do have a map, it doesn’t automatically point out every single thing to you, encouraging you to explore around more and see where more items and secrets can be hidden, which is always a great thing to have when it comes to any video game.

One last admirable quality about Super Metroid that I really admire, especially when it comes to video games of this era, is in terms of its storytelling. Most games around this time either don’t give you too much story at all, or they are all saved for cutscenes and the instruction manual, which is fine on its own, but it doesn’t give you much opportunity to really connect with the game’s world as a whole. Super Metroid, however, manages to do this flawlessly, starting off with an intro sequence that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know, or about what happened in the previous two games, but they tell you enough to where you get ready to go and want to learn more. Even when you land on the planet of Zebes, you can tell that it’s gone through plenty of changes, with the first areas looking all desolate and destroyed, no doubt a result of your actions from the original game. However, after you get the Morph Ball, this beam of light shines on you from the corner of the room, and suddenly, all kinds of baddies are up and at 'em, ready to take you down, which is a really nice detail.

Everything else remains relatively normal and simple from there on out, until you end up fighting Ridley, where after you defeat him, you end up finding the capsule that the baby Metroid was sealed in… but it is now shattered, and the baby Metroid is gone. You have no clue what could’ve happened, so you end up going about the rest of your business, getting more items, fighting more guys, and breaking the game to your heart’s content, until you reach the final area of the game, where you descend down further into the core of Zebes, and that’s when the final events of the game start to kick off. Oh, and by the way, spoilers for the final act of the game are coming up, so if you haven’t played or seen through that part of the game yet (even though you have had 30 years to do so), then just skip to the final paragraph of the review.

As you enter this area, you notice that it is surprisingly… quiet. There isn’t that much going in with the environment, and the only enemies that you find in this place are Metroids and those weird ring things that shoot out from the walls. Eventually, you find more enemies later on, but they appear to be… drained of their life, disintegrating upon contact, leading you to suspect that something weird is going on here. You then find another one of these enemies, alive and well, seemingly impossible to kill as you try every single weapon on it, but nothing works. Before you can think of what to do next, all of a sudden, this GIGANTIC Metroid comes out of NOWHERE, and latches itself onto that creature, draining it of its energy, and probably scaring the shit out of whoever is playing the game at that point.

After it finishes off this creature, it then heads straight for you, starting to completely drain you of all your energy as well, with you being able to do anything about it, as you fidget around in an utter panic. However, before your health bar drops to zero, all of a sudden… it stops. It stops draining your health, and it detaches itself from you, letting out some cries, until ultimately fleeing the scene. It is then you realize that this giant Metroid that almost killed you was the baby Metroid that you got from SR388, and it had one HUGE growth spurt, but even after becoming the ruthless killer that all Metroids naturally are, it still cares deeply about Samus, and wishes to bring no more harm to her.

Once that is all over with, you once again go through the game like normal, finally reaching Mother Brain, back once again from the original game, right alongside a fight that seems like it was ripped straight from that game, with you needing to defeat her in the exact same way. However, when it seems like she is destroyed, she then rises up from her defeat once again, now rocking this brand new body. Naturally, you start to throw everything at her, but it doesn’t seem like anything is really doing all that much to her, as she fights back and then starts to charge up something. This then leads to her firing this gigantic rainbow laser beam of death at you several times, which not only starts draining away all of your health like crazy, but it also takes away all of your missiles and bombs too!

At this point, you are now stuck, unable to move, and getting continuously beat up by Mother Brain, wondering how the hell you are going to get out of this one. However, before Mother Brain can land the final blow with one more laser beam attack, the full-grown baby Metroid then suddenly barges in and starts draining Mother Brain of all her energy, causing her to start to stagger and cry out in a panic, until she is left petrified for a brief moment. The Metroid then goes towards you, latching onto you once again, but instead of draining your health again, it then starts to… heal you? No clue how the hell they are supposed to be doing that, but at this point, you’ll take it. But then, while the Metroid is starting to heal you, Mother Brain gets back up.

It then starts to fully attack the Metroid non-stop, causing it to grow weaker and changing to a much weaker shade of purple and yellow, until the Metroid then unlatches itself from you, and then goes in for one final attack. Unfortunately though, before it can land that final blow, Mother Brain gets the upper hand, killing the Metroid, and causing it to explode into dust. You may not have known him for long, but you are probably feeling pretty saddened and angry about Mother Brain killing your baby, but fear not, because from the ashes of the Metroid, you gain one final upgrade to your beam that is capable of killing Mother Brain: the Hyper Beam.

You then unload plenty of shots from your own rainbow laser, right into Mother Brain’s dumbass face, until it ultimately crumbles to the ground, ending your mission, and leading you to quickly escaping from the planet. This entire sequence of events, from where you find the destroyed capsule all the way up to when you kill Mother Brain, is executed flawlessly. It is such a simple sequence of events, but they are presented to the player so naturally, without any real pauses in the gameplay, allowing you to fully get absorbed in these moments, which make them all the more surprising, jarring, heart-breaking, and satisfying. Of course, you probably already knew about all this, and you may not think it is such a big deal, as did I when I went into this game, but even when I knew all of what was going to happen, it still made it so that those emotions were rushing through me by the end, and if a game manages to do that even when you already knew it was coming, then that deserves only the highest regards.

Overall, while it still isn’t my favorite game in the entire series, or even my favorite 2D Metroid for that matter, I can’t help but fully admit that Super Metroid, on its own, is almost completely flawless, giving a natural evolution for this series that excels it to new heights, and providing so much fun throughout all that it offers, whether it be through gameplay, presentation, story, or otherwise. I absolutely recommend it for anyone, those who are big fans of the Metroid series, or if you are someone that is wanting to get into the series yourself, because it is not only a perfect starting point for newcomers, but also a title that has held up masterfully after all this time, and it is clear why it is still so prevalent in plenty of gaming communities to this day. Although, I will say one thing, for those of you who are planning on playing this at some point… make sure to save the aliens. You may not know what I am talking about, but trust me, you will want to remember that, so that you won’t get shunned by your peers for doing something wrong.

Game #492