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Review – Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
While the Game Boy was released in 1989 to near-instant popularity, it would take developers a few years to actually come to grips with the little grey brick’s eccentricities. Early games on the handheld tended to be either single screen puzzle or arcade games, and attempts at porting the gameplay of existing NES licenses. This resulted in games like Castlevania:…
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Review – Pilotwings
When the Super Nintendo finally landed on Western shores in 1991, it brought with it three games. Super Mario World and F-Zero have gone on to be legends in their own rights, but the third game is a little more obscure. Pilotwings may seem like the less exciting choice when stood up next to a Mario game and a hyper-fast…
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Review – Earthbound Beginnings
Earthbound is an extremely meaningful game to me, so of course it feels right to branch out to the other games in the series. Mother (Earthbound Beginnings) was the first game I ever imported on Famicom. However, whether or not I like it is more complicated than just yes or no.
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Review – Pikmin 2
Pikmin 2 brings back the armies of weird carrot people, in an adventure that is bigger than the first one. Bigger and better? Nope. Just bigger. But at least we have purple Pikmin this time. The best kind of Pikmin.
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Review – Pikmin
Nintendo has maintained a reputation as a company that never releases new properties. The common thought is that they only constantly rehash their staples: Zelda, Mario, and some others that variables that change over time. That’s never been very accurate, and it seems to be a little less repeated these recent years, but to demonstrate how long this belief has…
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Review – Metroid Prime
After an eight year haitus, Metroid returned in a big way. On the same day in 2002, Metroid Fusion for the Gameboy Advance and Metroid Prime for the Gamecube were released in North America. Fusion was a traditional sidescroller developed internally at Nintendo and closely follows the gameplay of Super Metroid. Prime, on the other hand was given off to…
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Saturday Morning Scrutiny – The Legend of Zelda
It’s funny to think that there was once a time when video games were looked at more as something for the kiddies, rather than the “serious business” it is today. It was yet to be seen as a medium ripe for storytelling, and I can only imagine that few people thought their works would blossom into the titanic franchises they…
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Review – WarioWare Gold
A gentle nudge from a high school buddy sent me to the original WarioWare on the GameBoy Advance. I remember the day I bought it pretty clearly; from picking it up in the mall to trying it out at a table at Red Lobster with my mother. It started a love affair with the series which, judging by the excitement…
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Review – The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The original Legend of Zelda is one of the earliest games I remember experiencing, and the one I often cite as my gateway into the hobby. It’s a landmark title for me. For most of my gaming career, it remained one of my favourite series. However, my enthusiasm has waned after the last few entries disappointed to differing degrees. Twilight…
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Review – Super Mario Odyssey
The Mario series has gone everywhere; from single-screen arcade games, to super, to lands, to worlds, to… 64’s and sunshines. Anecdotally, a lot of people were wondering where Mario could possibly go after Super Mario Galaxy. Super Mario Universe? Super Mario Continuum? We got Super Mario Galaxy 2, which coyly avoided the question; how do you go bigger than the Galaxy?…
