Throughout the history of video games, those that have focused on western comic book superheroes have not been particularly good. I'm framing this as a (purposefully) broad and easily-expandable idea; Some have terrible stories, some have terrible gameplay, or a mix of both. The first game that I ever played that didn't follow this predictable format was Batman: Arkham Asylum. Ten year old me at the time knew nothing about video games, but I knew that this game was a lot different from how Superman: Shadow of Apokolips felt.

It's easy to blame studios like THQ, Activision, hell, even LJN (if we're going way back) for all of the seemingly low effort superhero games that were made revolving around the superheroes that we grew up idolizing. These were essentially cash-grabs for the companies at play- consumers are bound to buy a product if it has a recognizable character on it's packaging. Marvel and DC are guilty of this throughout it's nearly decade plus run of MCU films; Why sink in unnecessary amounts of effort when the launch of the product is bound to make money, regardless of it's quality?

Marvel's Spider-Man breaks this doom loop combo of bad writing and gameplay, and capitalizes on both of them. This game's story roped me in a hell of a lot more than I ever expected it to; I am already a fan of Spider-Man himself, but I've witnessed a shocking amount of people play this game who could give less of a shit about Spider-Man (or Marvel in general). This is how you get people invested into a character or story. When a company/studio shows us this potential that they could care if they wanted to, it makes it even more upsetting to see the shitty low-effort products that are inevitably released going forward. It seems that as long as Disney keeps their paws off of Marvel Game Studios, we might be able to have a period of time where superhero games are not only good, but great.

I'm stoked to play Miles Morales and Spider-Man 2 this year. I knew I was going to play them eventually, but finally playing this game made me realize what this hype around these games actually were. I get it now!

Edit: within the next few days I'm going to write more about this game's story, and talk about it in this review

I finished this a month or two ago but just now realized I had forgotten to write something up. Mario Bros Wonder is seriously a blast and easily the best 2d Mario game since NSMBDS. There's so much soul and creativity here that at times it didn't even feel like I was playing a Mario game, and I mean that in the best way possible. Wonder was not your run of the mill 2d Mario game that had been coming out time after time again ever since NSMB: Wii, and that's the best thing to happen to this franchise since then, as far as I'm concerned. If this is the blueprint for 2d Mario to come, I cannot wait to see what comes next.

This is a franchise that I cannot wait to get to the end of. I don't mean that in a bad way, either; I hear how people talk about Uncharted as a franchise and the amount of respect and solidarity that they have for something that, relatively speaking, the modern-era Naughty Dog created (except for TLOU, obviously) gets me excited. They've always been a well respected studio as I understand it, but to be able to play the first Uncharted game - one of the lowest rated in the franchise! - and think "this writing is actually good" either says a lot about the quality at play, or the lack thereof in the rest of the industry.