The Final Days of Nintendo Online

It is once again a dark day for gaming.  Nintendo’s last bastion of online gaming, the WiiU and 3DS, has now been shut down like the Wii and DS before it.  The only thing keeping Nintendo in people’s good graces is no more and this time there’s no excuse like the shenanigans with Gamespy that I’m aware of.

Mario Party: The Top 100 Review

Even though I have almost nobody to play with anymore, I still love the Mario Party games.  They’re games of variety, testing skill and mild strategy with ever-changing variables due to its many colorful locales in the Mario universe.  I’ve played a lot of them, but the ones I’ve played the most and actually owned are the original Nintendo 64 trilogy, 6 and DS.

Nintendo seeks to appeal to the longstanding fans of this almost two-decades long franchise with their new compilation of its 100 best minigames from the main games: Mario Party: The Top 100.

This is hot off the heels of the previous game, Mario Party: Star Rush.  I have Mario Party: Star Rush and I really enjoy it.  It has some fun side activities and its main activities are all creative and faster-paced than the other games without losing the core elements of what makes Mario Party fun.  It did however emphasize the (non-boss) minigames a bit less than previous entries, with only a little over 50 as opposed to other games with at least 70.  Mario Party: The Top 100 seems to be trying to invert that.  Instead of prioritizing the main game part and making the minigames around it, they’re now prioritizing the minigames and building the main game parts around that.  That can be a really good idea or a disastrous one.

Top 10 Final Battles: #9: Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga

My favorite brand of RPG is the Mario RPG (that doesn't have the word "sticker" in it).  They're self-aware, imaginative and hit the right balance of simplicity and complexity by rewarding both strategy and reflexes.  The imagination and challenge is shown through the many bosses that rarely appear outside of the RPGs, with big baddies like the Lava Piranah, Rawk Hawk, Midbus and Sunnycide.

But Mario RPGs have always stumbled when it comes to their final bosses.  There's usually something about them that makes them unmemorable.  Paper Mario's is just Bowser, the first Mario RPG's on the Super Nintendo and Bowser's Inside Story's weren't established well and the final boss of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door comes right the hell out of nowhere even with foreshadowing and drags on for far too long.

Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, even though it's one of the earlier RPGs, does it right.

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins Review

I try not to be blinded by nostalgia.  A game that held up back when there were few games that even tried what it did can very well be total crap now thanks to developers having a much stronger grasp on what they’re doing.

But it’s hard not to be blinded by nostalgia for Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins.  It was one of the big games of my childhood I had on the original Game Boy alongside The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and the Game Boy version of Donkey Kong.  Of the three, I only beat Link’s Awakening and they were all lost to the cruel forces of time and ignorance.

Now a grown man who’s beaten the Viewtiful Joe games on V-rated mode, I felt there was unfinished business with these games.  Now that Super Mario Land 2 is on the 3DS virtual console, I sought to finally close that chapter on my childhood and see how the game held up after all these years.