It’s time for Merve’s Alternative Weekend Prompt (MAWP). This week, I’ve been playing Super Mario Odyssey and thinking a lot about what makes it fun to travel through a video game world. The levels are large, and you can spend a lot of time just running (or rolling) if you don’t want to use fast travel. So my question…

I’d argue that the sequence of trailers before a movie plays in a theatre serves as a “Hollywood showcase.” We’re just so inured to it that it doesn’t register as such. Nowadays, it sometimes even features brief segments where actors, writers, directors, or producers talk up the trailers.

I just don’t understand the point of cinematic trailers at all. I’m going to be playing the game. If you want to market it to me, show me how it plays. To be clear, I’m not against cutscenes, but I don’t they’re good marketing tools for an interactive medium.

It would be a shame for the big-budget 2D platformer to go the way of the dinosaur. The new Bubsy game is reportedly garbage, and it’s been a few years since the last Rayman game.

It still pops up for me, even with an adblocker. Kinja has completely ruined this site’s layout.

It disgusts me to my very core that adults target vulnerable children whose careers they can make or break for abuse. It layers the power imbalance of employment on top of the already significant power imbalance of age.

Immediately after finishing Mario + Rabbids last night, I downloaded Golf Story. I started it this morning on my daily commute and finished the intro. So far I’m enjoying this bizarre little world and its equally bizarre sense of humour. (“Sucked in!”) But I don’t really have a hang of the golfing mechanics yet. In…

I give recommendations to both What Remains of Edith Finch and Tacoma (though the latter is so very clearly written by well-meaning white people who want to be “good allies” that it made me, a brown person, cringe a bit). If you want something with some mild puzzle elements in addition to a branching narrative, then…

I feel pretty confident that Makoto was written as the “canon” waifu, because Futaba gives off a bit of a sisterly vibe to some people (not to me), Hifumi is mostly a non-entity, Haru arrives too late in the game, and Ann and Ryuji clearly have crushes on each other.

With Kimishima in charge of the company, I can see him looking at Odyssey’s sales figures and asking his development teams to make Odyssey 2. If they do, I hope they do something bizarre and unexpected with the plot, not just another damsel-in-distress scenario.

Maybe I’m just blind to romantic subtleties, but I thought it was pretty easy to have a friendly, platonic relationship with Delilah. (There are some cases where non-response is the appropriate action to take.) If you pursue that route, then Delilah withholds information about her personal life from Henry.

I finished Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle last night. Overall, I loved it. Occasionally, difficulty spikes felt a little unfair, but after failure, it was generally pretty easy to see where I went wrong and how to fix it on the next attempt. The mechanics are solid and give the player a lot of choice in how to…

They’re slightly similar in appearance, but completely different in personality.

I’ve thought we were in the Bad Place since November of last year.

Jake Johnson has a more tightly wound version of Jason Mantzoukas’s energy, so that would work really well.

Except Gamers doesn’t do that at all, so I don’t understand the author’s dig at it.

If you want to post that in the comments section of every Newswire, I’m not going to stop you.

Analogies have to make sense.

Does anyone care what Gavin Rossdale thinks about 9/11?

Sure, if 9/11 were a tragedy that affected Bush and only Bush.