The erasure of the early Wario Land games in the wider discourse just sucks. WL4 gets propped up like it’s the true perfect Wario Land formula but it was just one variation. The earlier ones get treated like a clunky beta of WL4 and not.. their own cool games with unique selling points

Trey and Parker are the Nostalgia Critic of animated TV:
They never get any better at what they do and peddle the same juvenile humor for decades.
They are deeply incurious and uncreative people and anyone else in animation with a real vision would do so much more with those resources.

Digital art of a bloomdeer from Everwild, as a ghost. It strides through a quiet savannah at nighttime. Signature reads "0wl"

Foreverwild 💜

#art #digitalart #drawing #animalart

I’m really happy every single time a Rare game makes it onto Nintendo Classics because it just feels right to see them acknowledged as part of the back catalogue. Battletoads in its all its infamy is still an important NES game that is worth having alongside your Mario’s and Zelda’s

Also thank god seemingly Nintendo did procure the entire NES Ninja Gaiden trilogy. They also should definitely be on there, really great action games

BATTLETOADS IS REAL, that’s one that 100% needed to be on there. Can’t wait to get my nuts stomped by it again

A Nintendo Switch 2 with a custom Donkey Kong Bananza themed stand

Nintendo Switch 2 “Oh Banana!” Edition

YouTube video by BanjoGate Kameo OST: Warrior Trainer Cave

The game also looks and sounds phenomenal and was a strong showcase for what the next generation could do that GameCube/ Xbox could not. Steve Burke’s soundtrack is criminally under appreciated in the pantheon of “great Rare soundtracks” and conveys the game’s magic so well youtu.be/iySJlUv9WzQ?...

This game’s character swapping/ beat ‘em up style is truly unique and fun if you can get into it. All the elemental warriors are so creative and their numerous moves are fun and toyetic to play with. Just don’t come in expecting DMC caliber juggling combat or anything

Kameo: Elements of Power cover art

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Xbox 360 launch and with it the release of Kameo: Elements of Power! This is one of the best single player games Rare put out in that era with a short but decently replayable campaign, 10 playable monsters and plenty of cheats/ extras/ cosmetic skins to enjoy.

25 years since we released Banjo-Tooie! Have a boss-montage. Bosses are always the most fun to make. See how big and strong Mr Patch is!

Tooie provides the player with some really fun/ compelling tools such as Kazooie’s glide or the Clockwork eggs that really sell that Metroid-style exponential power progression. It feels so good to cheese item pickups with your late-game abilities which you couldn’t do in Kazooie.

Tooie often gets slagged off for being a Bad platformer but the platforming is a means to an end for the adventure game it’s trying to be. It’s a Zelda style big interconnected world full of characters that you can jump around. I still find that fun even if the level design can be a bit flat

Eventually I fully gave into Tooie’s madness and really appreciated the more technical and esoteric playstyle. A lot of Tooie feels like playing chess as a 3D platformer: moving the pieces/ characters around very deliberately across the levels to unravel the puzzles.

Part of why I like it so much is that it really had to win me over. I went into it right after playing Kazooie with a lot of negative preconceptions. At first I was frustrated I couldn’t collect all the items in each level in one go, until I got comfortable with the more Metroid-y structure

Happy 25th birthday to one of my favorite games, Banjo-Tooie!

I’m always happy to see people discussing and appreciating it because it tends to get lost in the Banjo/ Rare platformer discourse.

teleroboxer february

The (Virtual) boy is mineee

I’m gonna be spreading pro Virtual Boy propaganda so hard

I like Teleroboxer more than a lot of the actually great legendary retro games people like to talk about so I may be uniquely positioned to get full value out of this. But also.. damn that’s a lot of money and it’ll be even more to get a flashcart/ collect more games

Having a real angel and devil on my shoulder moment today, I saw a listing for the Virtual Boy that seemed extremely reasonable for the price.
One on hand, I can probably get a lot more out of it than most folks because I like R&D1 games. On the other hand.. it’s pretty expensive for so few games.

Other M is like a bad Famicom Detective Club game and all the hallmarks of that series (weird handling of women, ridiculous dramatic contrivances, obtuse “look at this one specific thing” gameplay) just hit absolutely wrong in Metroid

I feel like there are definitely cases of “this franchise has become a husk of its former self” but it feels like every fan is so quick to jump to that conclusion and dig their heels in. In niche communities like Metroid, that doomerism can be so exhausting

Also it minimizes the people still left at Retro from those days who are working on Prime 4 and the devs from Nintendo’s side like Tanabe who were always very important to the Prime series direction.

Saw a post that was like “this isn’t Actually Metroid Prime 4 because it’s not the original trilogy dev team” and like.. there would be no Prime 4 without new people making it. Those Retro guys were burnt out after Prime 3 and had no desire to keep making Metroid, a lot of them left.

I feel like people should become a bit more comfortable acknowledging that their favorite franchises/ IPs are Ships of Theseus with people coming and going constantly. That’s just inherent to these long running franchises and shouldn’t automatically invalidate new entries compared to old ones.

I’m saying all this because I gave into this kind of behavior in the past and I regret it. The creators of all the things we love are people just like us and they are not put on this Earth just to please us. You may think you want a product that is 100% customer centered but you really don’t.

I’m not saying you have to agree with or enjoy every decision these creative figures make but there’s so rarely any attempt to understand why certain choices were made. No empathy either, just complete vitriol over the creator having different views/ motivations than their audience

I see it EVERYWHERE in Nintendo discourse, people just love running with narratives about figures like Miyamoto or Tanabe with this attitude of “look at these Clowns, they don’t Get It like we do”. It’s such a weird and mean way of thinking about people who made a thing you really like

It’s a weird fandom behavior to hold up a piece of art as like this perfect thing that means everything to you yet you hold the creator(s) of that art in contempt and feel like you “get it” more than them. It’s like.. being parasocially possesive

I personally find it tiring how every Metroid conversation revolves around putting Super/ Prime 1 on a pedestal and anything deviating from them is “doing Metroid wrong”. It just erases how/ why the two series have evolved and is implicitly like “they grew this franchise Wrong”