One thing that's great about Zero Mission is that as much more fun (at least, in a "normal" sense) and accessible as it is compared to the original Metroid, I also don't think it supplants or replaces that game. It's so different in the way you can really engage with it, and the original is always available to…

I've not played a single game this week (other than flash versions of Tetris and Solitaire, but it seems iffy on how much we even count flash games as "real games"). This might be the first week in well over a year where that's the case, and all because I've just been busy.

I think where Miyamoto is wrong when it comes to Mario is that the character can sustain both a narrative heavy and empty approach. The RPGs are a great example of the latter - I'd argue that The Thousand-Year Door has tremendous world building - but while I found Galaxy's storytelling really strong, it isn't…

I'll agree. The world definitely felt smaller, but I liked the uniqueness of it being more thematically cohesive; it's not what I'd like to see from most Mario games, but it's more than a valid way to approach level design in the series (it'd be nice to see another Mario game tackle it, though Color Splash arguably…

I maintain that the Uncharted games would be vastly better if you only killed about six people per game, with each one being effectively a unique kind of boss fight. Almost closer to something like Die Hard than a conventional action-shooter.

We have lost a fairly large amount of older first and second generation games - partially through things like the myriad of unlicensed Atari games - but a lot of them have still been preserved; there aren't so many "lost" games that have as much importance in the medium. Though someone could argue that flash games are…

We've gone pretty far from Kratos' sex mini-games and Itagaki's prevalence in the medium.

I definitely agree, especially with regard to the season. It reminds me of how the Bakers in Resident Evil 7 had a lot of really vulgar, awful language that was far afield of even the most grim of the series' prior games (or the movies, for that matter). I get why it was used there, to create a sense of place and…

So the latest Game Maker's Toolkit video is out, on how Dark Souls has created a cottage industry of clones, to the point where we may need to ask whether it has become its own sub-genre. Normally I don't highlight videos, but beyond how much I like Brown's work in general, the discussion of genre in games is near and…

I think a lot of it may have to do with the possibility that the games were…maybe kind of a dead end, in a way? They were mostly very good brawlers, a genre that really came into its own in that generation with the Clover and Team Ninja games, but they largely stayed the same with next to nothing in the way of…

I like the first Castlevania: Lords of Shadow alright, but it also showed the holes in the formula. Less satisfying enemies, a combat system that's really satisfying but never evolves (I never felt a need to replace Kratos' fishhooks) and a length that stretches that combat far past the point of repetition.

Holy shit; I didn't even realize that.

There are a few I think still hold up: Mario 64, the Zelda and Banjo duo, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, and probably the Spyro games. I think a lot of that was due to those being experimental and thinking about how space and movement worked in 3D (I'm not counting stuff that avoided being a fully fledged 3D game…

Probably because it was the seminal 3D platformer, I keep thinking about Mario 64. Because that's a really challenging game, but it's also satisfying from more than just raw difficulty thanks to how great the movement itself is. Games are more than just a mechanical challenge, and I think it's only a net positive that…

I'm also very much not a fan of their version of the D-Pad. It's just so inelegant and unwieldy.

I've talked about it a bunch here, but taking that idea and springing it into an actually good game could basically be a Superman version of the first Arkham game: something that strips down and rebuilds all the interesting ideas down in ways that feel so obvious only in retrospect. Have a Metropolis that changes…

For whatever it's worth, I love plenty of gory films and find Spawn to be either noxious or boring.

I want it to start being the Universal monsters, and then halfway through Cthulhu, Slogra and Gaibon, and Gergoth show up.

Oh, they've gotta save Grant for Sweeps Week.

Even if they weren't going to do those same compositions, it'd have been really great bringing Michiru Yamane back as composer.