How do you make a sequel to Breath of the Wild and channel even an ounce of the "wow oh gosh" the first game had?  This kind of systems-driven open world with unprecedented freedom in its traversal, you can't just throw in "more systems" and "more world" and achieve that kind of impact.  But if we distill the game's primary message to one of "freedom," there's a natural next step: put that fancy boy in the sky. This wouldn't be the first time the series has dabbled with flight, obviously.  Skyward Sword's overworld was a giant playground for Link to flap around in on the back of his own oversized...

We all had that nightmare, years ago.  A fevered, flop-sweat vision of a future we dared not believe could come to pass. "Nintendo making mobile games." Jesus!  I still shudder.  The benefits of Nintendo sticking to their own hardware have been well argued, and at the very LEAST we enthusiast game-doers place value on buttons.  The notion of Nintendo going multi-platform in the very worst way was not a pleasant one. But fret not!  They didn't put Nintendo games on phones.  They made mobile games with Nintendo characters in them.  Microtransactions!  Subscriptions!  Gacha!  Twelve pages of notices...

Nintendo sometimes makes a big deal about milestones—Mario's 30th, Zelda's 25th, and the "Year of Luigi" are all recent examples that come to mind—but one thing you won't usually hear them mention is how long it's been since something went away. Luckily, my encyclopedic knowledge of pointless factoids stands at the ready! You see, today, February 19, 2019, marks the 25th anniversary of the very last games that Nintendo ever released for the Famicom, the system that enjoyed new releases for nearly 11 years and put them on the map as a home video game publisher. The two final Nintendo-published...

So hey did y'all see this Link's Awakening or what. Man pretty rad huh.  I love that we've finally hit a point where 2D remakes like this aren't trapped on the 3DS, and can really benefit from the processing power of modern console hardware.  Behold!  Nintendo's flagship box cranking out this... rinky-dink lookin thing? I mean let's be real, this is gorgeous, so bright and smooth with this slick tilt-shift blur going on.  But it's also not really what you might expect from a modern remake of a beloved classic, with its almost plastic-looking characters and a Link who looks like he popped out...

My kid's favorite word right now is "ow" and it's what she says instead of "meow" which the cat says, cause she can't say meow. She says it whenever she sees any animal, I guess, but I haven't been paying super close attention or anything because I'm trying to get the fucking nukes in Civilization VI, which is a game you can play now on the system that goes away from the TV so you can play it while ignoring your kids but at least you’re both in the same room. Civilization VI, which should have been named CiVIlization if a capital i didn't look so close to a lower case L, is a game that I played...

Things are about to get M'm! M'm! Good! for gamers who have long been clamoring for the inclusion of fan-favorite Campbell's Soup in the Super Smash Bros. series. The hotly-anticipated can of soup was announced as the newest character to join the already jam-packed lineup in a special Nintendo Direct released on the company's YouTube channel this week. Normally coy series mastermind Masahiro Sakurai seemed to enjoy teasing fans about the addition of the inanimate aluminum can of soup for months prior to the announcement, routinely hiding red and white colored objects in the backgrounds of videos...

I wasn’t raised on RPGs.  Platformers and puzzle games, these were my bread and butter.  I grew up focused on mechanical precision, on timing and finite challenges.  So when my little brother bought Final Fantasy VII for the PC I remember chiding him for it.  Ha ha, those stupid movies posing as games!  What do you think you’re doin with that, that’s not a jumping simulator. I ended up playing it anyway.  Our computer was barely a machine, it ran the game in a quarter-sized box in the middle of the screen at like ten frames per second.  I remember Chocobo racing being a psychedelic slow-motion...

Somehow, this finally happened! Don't let the last four posts fool you—mere blips in a five-year span—our hiatus has been in full effect.  Until now!  Look at this friggin thing!  The site I've been meaning to make for upwards of six, eight, some absurd number of years.  Laid bare for your judgement.  So let's chat a little about what we came up with. I've said this before, but it bears repeating: it's hard to find the time to run a regularly-updating fansite.  We're adults, we've got jobs, houses, children.  But we still love this world, and having our voices in it.  So the challenge was to...

My daughter is literally two weeks old, I put her in a bassinet next to me, it is a word I just learned, it's a basket on wheels that you put your fresh baby in because they are fragile and important and about as mobile as a zucchini. All I want, for the love of god, is to get an hour or so of time that is unpunctuated with shocking emissions of any sort, from the ass, mouth, or butt. That's because I have decided that babies are boring, but setting my virtual baseball team to double-speed autopilot and watching their statistics simulate an inconsequential game so that I might win a modicum of...

Something weird called out to me today from just outside the boundaries of the miasmatic illusion I call my life and the name of it is Nintendo Labo. Labo is a normal word in English. Nintendo Labo is a thing that—like so much of Nintendo's best work—we cannot understand or comprehend until the moment they show it to us. Nintendo Labo is straight up Nintendo, who just sold ten million of their newest hottest electronic gizmo in town and of course have decided they'd like to say "hey watch me papercraft." It is a misdirect, a perfect juke, and yet very much not only in the vein of...