marsbitrona

I can say if they released it as Probotector with a robot on the cover, I probably would’ve owned this game as a kid. This has less to do with graphic design and more to do with liking robots way more than army guys.

Grow Home and Grow Up have always been criminally overlooked and I’m thrilled at the possibility of seeing it reintroduced to a new audience. Two of my all-time favorites.

I’ve always felt Metroid II is the series at its purest. While the map screen and more deliberate design make the later games more accessible, the unwelcoming alien environments and lack of guidance in the Game Boy game create a uniquely affecting horror experience that, despite many efforts, cannot be accurately remade. I adore the later Metroid games, but the moment Metroid Prime put the spider ball on rails, I knew we’d never see anything like Return of Samus ever again.

The disrespect for the arcade games is pretty shocking. They don’t play like modern games, but the mechanics and design are masterful, and they’re still a joy to play if you take a few minutes to get used to their controls. For what it’s worth, Donkey Kong Junior is at the top of my list (though Bananza isn’t far behind.)

It also includes fully functional gyro controls, which really opens it up for other Switch games.

It wasn’t until I tried playing F-Zero GX with Joycons that I remembered how much I love that centralized A button. I much prefer a controller that invites clever design over the one-size-fits-all approach of most modern controllers.

This confirms my suspicion that Donkey Kong in the Mario movie was based on the Bananza design and not the other way around.

Puppets. It has to be puppets.

The inspiration for the world of Star Fox was puppet shows of the 60s like Thunderbirds. The promotional images from the original Star Fox were all beautiful handmade puppets. The character animations in SF64 are clearly puppet inspired. Get the folks at the Jim Henson Company that made Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and give us the dazzling Star Fox puppet movie we need.

The European box art is definitely cheap and quickly produced, but I can say with no irony that I like way more than the other options. The design for the NA and Japan box art is an enormous mess of unrelated character art that gives me almost no idea of what the game is. They’re so busy that I would not even consider investigating further. The Europe one is certainly unrefined, but it wins because it’s showing me a video game and not a nonsense collage of anime characters.

Nintendo World Championships is BY FAR my most played game of 2024. On paper, it looks pretty thin on content, but this game is a master class on how smart presentation and design can elevate a novel premise to a can’t-miss weekly event. If nothing else, NWC is certainly the most underrated game of the year.

Been looking through the comments and I’m so confused. Do people think this Croc is bad? I’ve been playing this game on Saturn for nearly 30 years and it never occurred to me that somebody could not love the world’s most lovable game.

@Austrian Yoooo! I would buy Elite Force Remastered in a second. Considering how quickly Nightdive is putting out these stellar FPS remasters, I’m kind of surprised they haven’t made it yet.

The Japan box art really sums up the experience of Hatris by asking “What is it?” I’ve played so much Hatris and I still have no idea.

My Wii U is hooked up right now for Nintendo Land and the Star Foxes, the three Nintendo games that really showed what the console could do. The Gamepad was never intended to only be for off-TV play. It’s a dual screen console.

Also Amiibo Festival, which doesn’t require two screens. I just really love it.

Headline of the year.

I wasn’t really into Contra as a kid, but that would have been very different if it was Probotector. I know the gameplay is identical, but I’ll take cool robots over army guys any day.

While I do love the classy approach of the NA box, I gave this one to the Japan box art because it’s the only one that gives Four Swords adequate billing as a main event and not a bonus feature.

Classic Game Boy all the way. The most important reason being the plastic cases that came in the box with every game. They switched to loose cartridges with starting with GBC, but my original Game Boy games are all still in stellar condition thanks to those free, high quality cases.

I chose the North American option but I admit I cannot be unbiased. I grew up on Game Boy and this is one of my favorite games on it, so the nostalgia runs deep. My love for the adventure-pinball genre runs deep and it’s all because of this absolute gem.

I could fill pages with how the question “is it what the fans really want?” has been choking the creativity out of art for decades. But I’m so over-the-top excited for Heist 2 that I’ll just say YES OBVIOUSLY IT IS! It’s my most anticipated game of the year and I want it.

Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero is actually a fantastic game with a dismal reputation. But if they put it on NSO, my whole life would become trying to defend a game I really like from an onslaught of hate, and that just sounds exhausting.

There has never been a game that needed a remake less than Chrono Trigger. Changing a single detail of this game would only make it worse because it would be less like Chrono Trigger.

We need to chill with the remakes.

The original Heist is a game I keep coming back to, and it’s become an all-time favorite. I’m losing my mind! This sequel is the most exciting possible announcement for me that could’ve possibly come from an Indie Showcase.

I would love to see them team up with Farsight Studios for an entry on Gottlieb pinball. Farsight was making one of the best historical documents in gaming with The Pinball Arcade, so digging into these classic EM pinball tables with full historical context would be a dream. Most of these early pinballs were not based on famous properties, so it wouldn’t be the licensing nightmare of modern pinball collections. Gold Master Series: Gottlieb Pinball, please!

Does anyone have any first-hand experiences with getting a headache from Virtual Boy? I played mine extensively and know quite a few people who played it, and have never heard any actual accounts of these supposedly horrible headaches. I’m honestly starting to think Virtual Boy headaches are a myth.

I’m pushing back on the narrative that anybody was confused about Wii U being a new console. I haven’t seen any evidence to back up that extremely common claim. That said, I think they’ll come up with a new word and break away from the Switch name entirely. But please, for the love of god, anything but Switch 2.

The Arcade Archives version of Pinball is so much better than the NES original. A huge speed boost and improved physics turn a pretty bad pinball game into one of my favorites. It’s a heck of a glow up.

All that said, Metroid Prime Pinball is the best on this list and one of the absolute best games on DS.

Selling a bad game does not constitute a scam. People are throwing the word scam around way too much and I’m taking a stand. Words have meaning.

Oh, and this game looks like an absolute riot. I kind of want it.

Not a huge Tomb Raider fan, I played a bunch of Guardian of Light and had a great time. They’re fun, small-scale games. Plus they have Legacy of Kain skins for the characters, and I’ll take every bit of that series I can get.

Kamek is from Super Mario Kart R on Nintendo Ultra 64 and nobody can convince me otherwise. It’s been over 25 years since he was replaced with Donkey Kong, but Kamek’s time has finally come.

I was hoping Good-Feel were the ones making that Princess Peach game, but I’m excited they have their own thing going on.

Now we know it’s by the same dev team that made Rayman Origins, Rayman Legends, and Beyond Good & Evil. This is going to be a big winner.

It looks fantastic. It’s clearly not a mega-budget game, but lower budget games are where Ubisoft shines (like Grow Home, Rayman Origins, Child of Light.) I’m thrilled to see the series return with a fresh take.

Very tricky. I managed to get them all, but it kept me on my toes. Well done.

Really disappointing coverage from Nintendo Life on this game. Smartphone implementation on a first party Nintendo game is new territory, but no analysis or speculation, just a press release and an editorial about how stupid it is. I didn’t think a Nintendo focused site would still be peddling this kind of late 2000s anti-casual cynicism.

I thought it was pretty wild that they would adopt Purah’s look from a Hyrule Warriors game for the new Zelda game, until I realized that Age of Calamity released years into TOTK’s development and the spin-off just used the design from the unreleased game.

1996, not for a list of games, but because nothing in the years since has been half as exciting as the launch of the Nintendo 64 with Super Mario 64. I will always remember waiting in line at Toys R Us to get a brief taste of a new kind of gaming that was so much more than I could have ever imagined.

Outrun has the best 3D effect on the system on top of being one of the best games ever made. The 3D versions of Sega arcade games are all top shelf 3DS games.

I almost always prefer a box art that creates a scene over one that jams a bunch of character art together.

This was the first game I played when the Game Boy NSO service launched. I love when they add unexpected games that I’ve never played before. Those picks give the service so much more value than being my fifth repository of the same ultra-famous games.

I kind of love the Japan box art. It’s striking and inexplicably bizarre, which is exactly how I would describe the game.

The extra Bond face textures were not compatible with any of the head models that appear in the game, so even if they legally could “just put them in,” it would take a lot more work to make it happen. But the reality is they removed the characters back in 1997 because they couldn’t get the rights to the actor likenesses, and that would be no easier today.

I would love to see Viewtiful Joe come back. A game about movie superheroes would likely work even better today.

The Xbox version emulates fog wrong, similarly to Ocarina of Time when it first released on Switch and people were outraged. Nobody seems to care this time.

The narrative of the characters being designed by “a VTuber designer” is really reductive. Clearly this is a professional illustrator with a history of character design in video games that extends far beyond whatever projects they worked on for streamers. Regardless of how you feel about their work, portraying them as a VTuber designer first and foremost is, at best, misleading.

My suspicion was always that the parts shortage did in any plans for a Switch Pro, since they wouldn’t be able to make enough and boy does Nintendo catch hell when they can’t meet demand, but they could still get the OLED screens.

What a shame. Chocobo GP was one of my most played games of 2022, and it is absolutely wonderful with no qualifiers. I payed $50 on launch day and not a penny since, and I’ve gotten every character and every costume I wanted. It was essentially free content disguised as a season pass. Even with no new updates, the game still has a wealth of content, and I’ll keep playing it until they shut the servers down.

I’ve played them all on PC and they are excellent. I will absolutely be buying them again.

To people complaining about the price, it’s six games. Six long, fully remastered games. Just because the games have a small enough file size to fit on one cart doesn’t mean they’re worth less.

Outside of differentiating Smash Bros characters, I’m not sure why this one Link needs a special name when the rest of them are all referred to by what game they appear in. It feels like a flimsy attempt to delegitimize this version that’s just as much Link as any other, a sad remnant of the early pushback to Wind Waker’s art style.

I’m so happy that Miyamoto got to reclaim Donkey Kong’s design after nearly 30 years.

Games I’ve fallen in love with after a solid day with Atari 50: Ninja Golf, Turbo Sub, Scrapyard Dog Lynx, Caverns of Mars, I Robot, Tempest 2000, Akka Arrh, Yoomp!
That’s on top of existing favorites like Major Havoc. Between the lineup packed with delightful surprises and the history-first presentation, Atari 50 is the new gold standard of retro compilations.