I’ll be honest: I only reviewed Super Metroid as an excuse to play one of my favorite games for a day. With time being as scarce as it is, it was nice to put aside a few hours to devote my full attention to a game that has influenced me in so many ways.
So does it hold up?
I thought I’d seen it all. When every Super Nintendo game was right there, at my fingertips, I thought I’d tried every last one of them. A friend of mine bought a SNES, and slowly started picking up games here and there, and one night he showed me Wild Guns.
This game is a relic – an exemplar of the time when arcades were the norm, and many games were simple ports to home consoles. Back when games had things like cheat codes and lives and the option for a second player to punch in any time after dropping a coin into the machine.
Blackthorne, known as Blackhawk or Blackfist or something in Europe, is a little-known cinematic platformer for the Super Nintendo, made by Blizzard in their early years.
Blackthorne is a very straightforward and distinct personality, but it’s a hard game to categorize. It’s a combination of platforming, puzzle-solving, exploration, and combat, with a unique take on each.
As far as 2d fighters go; Killer Instinct wasn’t much of a contender. Don’t get me wrong, KI is a great game in almost every way; but from the start we all knew it wasn’t going to knock Street Fighter, Tekken or Mortal Kombat off their pedestals.
When I think about it, KI probably had its work cut out for it. It’s a game for fans of the genre, and there aren’t exactly many fans that’d pick up and play multiple fighters. Still, of all the “second-tier” fighting games, Killer Instinct is one of the most memorable.
Star Wing is what we call Star Fox in Australia. It’s the first entry in the Star Fox franchise, and while it’s far from being the best, you can see why it earned the success it did.
I was crazy about this game when I was maybe ten or eleven. No one I knew had Star Wing, or had even played it; probably because they were all playing Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64 for Australians) instead. Whatever, I thought Star Wing was great.
Mortal Kombat 3 came out right as I was first discovering Mortal Kombat. It would be a year or two before I finally played it, so for much of my childhood, it was no more than an exciting myth. The world wasn’t so small back then.
I can still remember my first real exposure to MK3. Family friends of mine had it, but we saw them maybe once a year, if that. Their dad got the codes faxed to him from the Nintendo Hotline, I remember thinking that was so cool.
Continue reading Looking Back On MK; Part 3: Mortal Kombat 3, UMK3, MK:T
Video game music is something I’m very passionate about. Don’t ask me why, but I am. It’s sort of like that last but vital piece of the puzzle that really brings you into the game. To me, at least.
You can find the first half of the list here, the second half, in no particular order, is below.
Video game music is awesome. It often rivals the best of contemporary music in terms of quality and emotion, and it shits all over the current Top 40. Despite having quite a dedicated Internet culture (check YouTube or OverClocked Remix to see just how massive it really is), the best of video game soundtracks still go mostly unappreciated.
If you’re reading this then I’m sure that thought has already occurred to you. I’m also sure you’ve probably heard at least some of these songs before. Even so, here they are, in no particular order:
Recently I’ve been playing through A Link Between Worlds on the 3DS. It’s a great game, very faithful to A Link To The Past as a gameplay template and source material, but not reliant on it. The 3d effect works really well, and the dungeons are possibly the most well-designed in the Zelda franchise.
It’s got me thinking about those early Zelda games. Specifically, what about them that stood the test of time (ha!), and what got left by the wayside.
A Link To The Adam. 