Metroid Dread is a 2D Metroidvania game developed by MercurySteam and published by Nintendo. It was released in October 2021 as a Nintendo Switch exclusive. MSRB is $60. For the sake of avoiding spoilers, I'm mostly going to show screenshots from the first 3 areas of the game and only talk about the early plot. … Continue reading Metroid Dread: A Modern Classic
We're in the home stretch, and it'll be a double-header this time! Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission were both Game Boy Advance games developed within 2 years of each other, and were released during the series' brief renaissance of the early 2000s. Metroid: Zero Mission is a remake of the first NES game with … Continue reading Fusing The Best Parts of Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission
Super Metroid sits on a golden pedestal, inside a sacred chamber, deep within the revered temple of Retro Video Game Classics. To approach, one must meditate for seven days, chanting the ancient mantra: atmosphere, exploration, powerups, backtracking... atmosphere, exploration, powerups, backtracking... once you've cleansed yourself from the impure, hand-holding world of Modern Gaming, you may … Continue reading Super Metroid: A Critical Second Look
Press Reset is a nonfiction book documenting the closings of several different video game studios across the United States during the 2010s. It was written by video game journalist Jason Schreier and published by Grand Central Publishing in May 2021. Another book review! If you remember my review of Jason Schreier's Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, … Continue reading Press Reset Book Review: The Creative Business Oxymoron
So you saw the E3 trailer for Metroid Dread and you're interested in trying it out, but you've never played a Metroid game before. Allow me, a long-time Metroid fan, to help! Metroid is one of Nintendo's oldest and most important franchises. Among critics, it stands proudly on Nintendo's podium of their best video game … Continue reading A Newcomer’s Guide to the Metroid Series
Stardew Valley: The Board Game is a tabletop co-op game for 1 to 4 players designed by Eric Barone and Cole Medeiros, published by ConcernedApe. It was released in March 2021. MSRB is $55. You probably don't know this about me, but I'm actually a big fan of board games. Some of the first dates … Continue reading Stardew Valley: The Board Game Review
Eric Barone is the Cinderella of indie game developers. He started out working in a basement with a cardboard box for a desk to selling 10 million copies of his game, Stardew Valley, worldwide. Oh, and he did it by himself. 10 million in sales is a number usually achieved by AAA studios with hundreds … Continue reading Eric Barone’s Baa-rilliant Stardew Valley
I once wrote a post about games I thought I'd never want to play. In this post, I claimed that I'd never want to play a game so ugly as Skyrim or Dark Souls. I elaborated about the overblown set pieces of cinematic games like Uncharted, sacrificing meaningful gameplay for a B movie plot. I … Continue reading My Gamer Palate
The featured image above is a screenshot from fan animation project Glitchtale: Season 1 Episode 1, animated by jakei and superyoumna and uploaded by Camila Cuevas. All artwork will be credited with links in the Further Reading / Sources section. Undertale is one of the most popular indie game of the 2010s -- after Minecraft, … Continue reading Toby Fox’s Undertale: The Birth of a Sensation
In 2012, three AAA video game developers left their jobs and started an indie studio in Portland, Oregon. They called themselves Fullbright. Their goal was to create a new way to experience video game stories. Their games Gone Home and Tacoma would help lay the ground work for a new controversial genre, the bane of … Continue reading Gone Home: A Featureless Game, or an Avant-Garde Story?
