Author Profile
Alan is a feature writer who has contributed to Kotaku, Nintendo Life and other prominent gaming sites. He has a background in psychology research, the science of creativity, and over 30 years of Nintendo gaming behind him.
Hands On 'Royalty Free For All' Looks To Smash It With A Cosy Fighting Format & Timeless Roster
Domain game
Over the course of 20 years and five games, Nintendo-employed game director Masahiro Sakurai wove together five decades of video game lore to build the ultimate fighting game franchise: Super Smash Bros., more or less inventing the 2D platform fighter genre in the process. And look, it’s a madcap concept right off the rip to...
Here comes the boom
Lena Raine has so much to say, and she’s figured out a lot of different ways to say it all. Of course, avid game players have been listening to her musical scores for over a decade now, which includes music for Minecraft, as well as the soundtracks for Chicory: A Colorful Tale and the BAFTA-nominated Celeste score. She’s...
Feature Here’s How Trading Card Companies Could Stop CT Scanning In The Future
"They really want to fix it"
Collecting trading cards, especially vintage cards, has gotten considerably dicier — seemingly overnight. Over the past month, multiple people have come forward to demonstrate how various X-ray technologies can reliably see inside unopened trading card products. The concept of X-raying packs has been rumored for as...
Feature The Company You Can Pay To X-Ray Unopened Pokémon Card Packs Speaks Out
"The technology is not going away, and people know what it can do"
The entirety of the trading card community — that is, people who collect, buy, and sell the Pokémon Trading Card game, sports cards, Magic: The Gathering, Disney, or literally any trading card game you can think of — has gradually become aware of what might be an existential...
Feature 'The Art Of Nintendo Power' Exhibit - A Guided Tour
"The whole mission is to share the work"
Have you ever seen an original Contra up close? What about an original Mario Kart? For Stephan Reese, organizer and showrunner for the non-profit Interactive Art Collection (and a Senior Producer at video game developer Bungie when he’s not busy doing that), it’s his life’s mission that you might have...
Feature What Video Game Consultants Actually Do, And Why ‘Kit & Krysta’ Are Doing It
Never A Minute consultants assess our killer game idea
I have an idea for a video game. Actually, I’ve been making it for about six months now. My video game is a rhythm-based game. It’s also an American football game. To play it, you choose between plays, just like any sports game … but your play only succeeds if you push the buttons in...
Feature Meet The 'Arzette' Dev Salvaging The Zelda CD-i Games' "Genuine Potential"
"I didn’t make this game as a joke"
The year is 1991. 'Video games' — plastic, square-shaped cartridges that millions of people blow into every day — grip early-adopting proselytizers. Yet they don’t know their precious cartridge’s days are numbered. A mighty company from Kyoto rules the industry today, but a new laser-based challenger is...
Feature From Piston Hurricane To Today: Why Latinx In Gaming Exists
And why it needs your help to change the industry
Joe Tirado, a Latino game developer, has imposter syndrome. He said as such, during his own talk on Latine representation at this year’s Game Developers Conference. In response to a question about his feelings on being Colombian in an industry where he largely lacks compatriot peers, he confessed...
Feature 'Impossible' Port Master Randy Linden Talks Jurassic Park, BOTW, And His Favourite Ports
"Nintendo has both style and substance"
Randy Linden (centre) and Alena Alambeigi (left) from Limited Run with the Nintendo Life PAX team If there’s one thing you should know about art, it’s that changing it after a long time is really, really hard. Just look at classicist Emily Wilson, who in recent years became the first woman to ever...
Hands On Super Mario Bros. Wonder Lives Up To Its Name In The First Hour
Isn't it a wonder
A funny thing happened at (well, near) PAX West 2023. Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the latest two-dimensional Mario game — and the first original one in over 10 years — was surprisingly made fully playable for Nintendo Live attendees and media alike ahead of its October 20th release on Nintendo Switch. Anyone who’s watched...
Report Ex-NFL Player Blake Martinez Banned From Reselling Pokémon Cards On Whatnot
"We have decided to permanently remove the seller from our platform"
On the heels of a meteoric rise, a notable Pokémon and sports trading card re-seller is suddenly grappling with a potentially similar meteoric fall. The streaming trading card resale company Blake’s Breaks, which is helmed by ex-NFL player Blake Martinez, has been embroiled in...
Feature Pokémon TCG Community Engulfed In Potential Fraud Scandal
Conflicting details have been shared online
The Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) community is knee-deep in the biggest scandal it has ever known. Over the weekend, a picture was posted on the subreddit r/PokemonTCG by user GuavaWave, along with the caption, “Saw this on a (Facebook) group.” The image depicts what appears to be an unruly amount...
Guide Super Nintendo World: Is It Worth It? Survival Tips, Budget Advice, How To 'Play' The Park
Get the most from your visit to Hollywood, CA
Super Nintendo World in Hollywood, California is open to the public, and we've been exploring the park to uncover its secrets. Today, Alan will be your guide as he proffers essential tips for making the most your visit, including basic info concerning entry and queue times and the like, plus exactly how...
Feature "Unfinished Business" - Why Gilbert & Grossman Returned To Monkey Island
Working with Disney, Devolver, and fans
Does Guybrush Threepwood still want to be a pirate? This, after all, was the Monkey Island protagonist’s very first proclamation 32 years ago: “My name is Guybrush Threepwood, and I want to be a pirate!” But given the fact that he’s only set sail in five previous Monkey Island adventures sprinkled...
Soapbox I Somehow Bought Over $800 Of Animal Crossing Crap In One Year
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, stop foolin' me.
Soapbox features enable our individual writers to voice their own opinions on hot topics, opinions that may not necessarily be the voice of the site. Today, Alan grabs his accountant visor and tots up how much money he wasted wisely invested in the Bank of Nook over the past year. On the...
Feature The Legend Of Zelda Is The Robinson Crusoe Of Video Games
We start our 35th anniversary feature series at the beginning... and the end?
To celebrate the 35th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda, we're running a series of features looking at a specific aspect — a theme, character, mechanic, location, memory or something else entirely — from each of the mainline Zelda games. Today, Alan looks back at the...
Soapbox If The Smash Community Wants To #SaveSmash, It Needs To Start From Within
The community needs to deal with the abuse scandals of 2020 first
Soapbox features enable our individual writers to voice their own opinions on hot topics, opinions that may not necessarily be the voice of the site. In this piece, Alan Lopez discusses the recent online campaign to "save" Super Smash Bros., and why it's papering over a far more...
Do Luna, Stadia and Project xCloud mean the end of unique gaming experiences?
This week, Amazon, the world’s biggest online company, launched a new cloud-based gaming service called Luna. For $5.99 a month (to begin with, at least), anyone will be able to play over 100 popular video games streamed directly from an app you can install on your...
Talking Point What Do Abuse Scandals Say About The Smash Bros. Community, And Its Future?
Where now for Smash, and esports as a whole?
Before we begin, we'd like to point out that this article discusses sexual coercion, sexual assault, rape, and sexual abuse of minors, and links to stories of these accounts. We appreciate this might be outside of our usual remit but we feel very strongly that this is a topic we simply could not ignore...
Feature Game Of The Decade Staff Picks - Miitomo
Yes, really
Following on from our reader-voted Top 50 Games of the Decade, Nintendo Life staff members will be picking their personal favourite Nintendo games between the years 2010-2019. Today, Alan sums up what made Nintendo's short-lived mobile experience so gripping... Miitomo is not just my Nintendo Game of the Decade, it’s Nintendo’s...
Feature One Year In, What do the Pros Think of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate?
"We need developer support. I can’t stress this enough"
Traditionally, a one year anniversary is celebrated with paper. That definitely won’t be a problem for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s own one year anniversary; with a couple of months to spare, Nintendo’s mascot fighting game is already the best selling fighting video game of all time...
Feature How Super Smash Bros. Became The Ultimate Fighter
The path of a champion
What do you do if you’ve been fighting with the same people for 20 years? If you’re Nintendo, you hand out some weapons, get an announcer, and invite your friends over to watch. The Super Smash Bros. series, Nintendo’s perennial Saturday-morning-cartoon take on how fighting video games can work, turns a whopping 20...
Feature How Fangamer Changed The World Of Video Game Merchandise Forever
"We created the merchandise that Nintendo never made for us"
Before the turn of the century brought with it online communities, before the standard for monetary transactions became digital, and not to mention, before good old-fashioned globalism, being able to officially declare your super fandom for almost anything you can think of meant frequent...
Feature The Best Nintendo Switch Games Of PAX West 2019
Luigi's Mansion 3! Super Meat Boy Forever! Haven! Windjammers 2!
The Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle is one of the biggest expositions of gaming on the planet, and we were there, hunting out the best Nintendo-related games for your viewing pleasure. The only stipulations were that it couldn’t have already been released before PAX, and it had to be...
