I think there's a brontosaurus in there. I don't know, it's not so much experimental. In any other game it'd be substandard, cliched theming, but it just felt… out of place in MK somehow. Especially when everything else is a Peach Garden, Bowser Castle or DK Jungle in MK7.

Wrapped up 150cc in Mario Kart 7. Since I honest to gravy fist slammed the floor because I was lightning bolted over the last jump in Rainbow Road four times in a row, I'm going to say that's a wrap for my Mario Karting.

So far both of those features are absent from 7 and I'd say it's all the worse for it.

To be honest I think Mario Kart DS held up rather well gameplay wise, and some of the courses are absolutely fantastic. I'm just too tired to write up something longer, as well as the fact that I'm working my way through Mario Kart 7 right now.

The trip to the village is just great in that absolutely nothing of note happens. It's just this wonderful relaxing train ride.. Strangely enough it was the most memorable part of the game for me.

I was once heading to the bathroom in a tiny bar in Australia when some middle aged guy with a small suitcase and crazy sideburns sitting alone on a sofa yells out 'are you heading to the bathroom?' to which I replied 'what's it to you?' to which he replied 'i just got off a plane' and the conversation ended right…

I finished New Super Mario Brothers 2, Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart DS in the past few weeks.

I have to leave the Wii entries unless they pop on up on NX by some miracle. Skipped the Wii U thinking the NX wasn't going to be delayed, and now I wake up every day in a feverish sweat regretting what could have been.

I know Skyward Sword gets a lot of understandable flack for its opening, but personally I was giddy going around the village taking in all the detail and care lavished on it. I can still remember pretty much every inhabitant vividly, which I'd say is due to, like you said, great character design and animation.

I definitely had fun with it half the time. Worlds 4, 7 and 8 were a delight for me - especially 7, where it felt like the creators were really letting loose on the level design rather than checking off boxes. Mega Mario would have been fun but since I was obsessed with getting the star coins I was always too cautious…

Haha yeah I forgot to mention that 'blasphemously bored' review ended in an 8/10.

I finished New Super Mario Bros (DS) and well, ugh. Eurogamer's review for the sequel has this lovely sentence stating that while it's 'a high-quality game by anyone's standards' he still spent a solid amount playing it 'feeling blasphemously bored.'

i'll warn you that the gameplay formula doesn't really change to any dramatic extent, it just grew on me as sakurai and co. tweaked and escalated it further and further. there's also a meta streak to the game and story that stacks and deepens in equally interesting and hilarious ways

I finished Kid Icarus: Uprising last night and despite being underwhelmed for the first sixth of the game (so much so that I just plain let it rot on the shelf for a few months) it picked up the slack and by jeez, it must be one of the better games on the 3DS, which I'm sure you all know means something. It's a…

I know it's both false equivalence/a shitty argument, but I often sympathise with the 'video games aren't art crowd' when I have to spend said 20 hours slugging through some dire RPG to get into the 'good stuff'. I sit back and feel like I just engaged in some brutal sado-masochism (and didn't even get off) when…

That Jak 2 level times a million. That game was fucking brutal at times.

Okami might pull me back in! I haven't tested Nyanta in multiplayer but I think that's where it will shine; it's definitely got a few hours of drunken shits and giggles in store there. I absolutely love dressing up my cats though, and they've got a much more streamlined system for MonNyanting (sending out your cats to…

I don't know, I've had perhaps even more difficulty branching out. I've killed the same monster a good 3 or 4 times and still can't upgrade my main weapon. There's supposedly a system where you can just use any component from the monster in place of one part you might not have, but I can't seem to get that to work. On…

60 hours and Monster Hunter X's singleplayer is.. done? The credits rolled, but that just means I have another 200 hours to sink into multiplayer.

Yes, yes, yes! While I respect the ambitions of MH4 and MHX it just doesn't capture that feel of constructing a home that MH3 does so well. Subsequently the feel of saving just that one village outweighs the more substantial world threat of MH4.