In being a love letter to the entire Bomberman franchise up to this point, this is the most safe Bomberman game ever, but is that really such a bad thing?

Super Bomberman 5 can hardly be called Super Bomberman 5. It's more akin to Super Bomberman 1 + 2 + 3 + 4, more than the sum of its parts. Everything to love about the previous entries is here. The snowy world complete with an igloo that has its top blown off to comedic effect. The rooeys of all different types, including the overpowered as hell pink one that literally cannot die if the mine bomb detonation button is mapped to the same key as the jump button. Several pieces of music including the iconic series' theme. It just goes on and on.

The story mode is an absolute behemoth in the best possible way. The player can easily obtain a normal ending by just playing naturally, or use a route map to 100% it through a million levels. It always feels like there's something more to play, even after 100%ing it. After all, the battle mode is one of the best in the franchise especially up to this point.

Want a regular match? Have the NES styled arena. Want to throw in snowboulders? Pick the ice level. Want to play a team of humans VS cpus? The tag system has everyone covered.

After the hilariously brutal dog boss, the story is honestly smooth sailing. There's no massive difficulty spike near the end like in 2 or 3, and there's no feeling that anything is insurmountable after losing powerups like in 4.

Super Bomberman 5 is an overly safe game. But sometimes, that's all you need for a rainy day. One of my ultimate comfort food games.

surprisingly good.

a step above DKC2 in a lot of ways. felt way more fine-tuned. had a fair amount of unique gimmicks to it, even if some were only for a level. the boss battles were also pretty striking, and memorable. even if the urchin one had me pissed off.

i also really like that it functionally felt closer to DKC1 than 2. Kiddy is the Donkey Kong archetype. DKC2 just had Diddy and Diddy who can fly jump. certain enemies couldn't be killed by Dixie but she makes up for it with better mobility.

the usage of 3D space was also really clever. you can tell they were wringing the SNES cart for all it had considering the 64 had been out for a few months by the time this released.

Technically I played this on the Switch NES Emulator. Full disclosure: I rewound a LOT.

I am about ready to go finish Tears of the Kingdom. I've done ~75% of the game, all the shrines, all the lights, most of the quests, all the stuff that I loved the most. I just need a dedicated two hour chunk to get in there and wrap that thing up. So of course instead of doing that, I played Zelda 2.

It's nearly impossible to actually rate Adventure of Link in 2023 because it exists outside of its context, and its context matters.

It's hard to remember that there used to be a time when there were no video game sequels. At that point, a few arcade games had sequels. You had your Ms Pac-Man and Stargate, but all those did were take the originals and add a new system or two. Ms Pac-Man added new mazes. That's it.

Zelda 2 was the first of the NES sequels in America (Japan got Real Mario 2 in 1986), and it blew our little minds. We didn't know what a sequel to Zelda would look like, let alone a sequel to any of the games we'd been playing. How do you make a new Zelda?

Well, the answer is you make something completely new, and for what this game is, it is pretty amazing. Yes, it's infuriatingly difficult, yes it's incredibly unfair, yes I never beat it as a child (friends did, and sometimes that was enough back then).

Zelda 2 tries to create a swordfighting focused video game. Instead of being able to swing your sword around wildly, you have to calculate the right time and level (high or low) to strike.

The world is much bigger than the Hyrule of the first game, but it's also much more fluid. Items you find in dungeons aren't meant to be used in the field, they are all keys to doors, and the flow is really elegant.

To get to the first dungeon, you have to go through a dark cave. There's a single beastie in there that you can't see, so you navigate the dark cave and take a single hit. You learn that the dark is bad (if you managed to miss this cave and explore too far, you'll find another dark cave that is much longer, nudging you back to the path). The first dungeon gives you the candle, which opens up the next cave, to a point.

You can't actually get through the second cave without the Jump spell, and to get that, you have to explore the limited world you have available to you to find a trophy. Someone in the second town needs that trophy, and once you give it to them, you get the Jump spell. This teaches you that people in town want things that will give you other things.

The whole game continues like this. It's really elegant design. Go to a place, get a thing, trade it for a spell, get to the dungeon, get the item, open the path to the next place.

What I truly love about the world map in Zelda 2 is that, once you get through it, it takes no time at all to get from one side to the other. The longest path is from the Temple to Death Mountain, because you have to go through the cave, then the swamp, but even that isn't long. After Death Mountain, the hammer will take you from the Temple to the Raft dock in under a minute.

Palace design is not as obtuse as the Dungeon designs of the first game, with fewer hidden or one-way paths, and the many forked paths encourage map drawing. Within the palaces are some solid platforming puzzles, ones that encourage magic use for full navigation. Enough enemies drop magic jars and there are a few red jars within each palace that you don't need to be too careful (but do be KIND OF careful!) with your magic use.

The escalation in the enemies is very well done too. Initially you meet slow moving guys that don't really stalk. This turns to quicker guys with weapons, then guys that can block, then faster guys that can block, then guys who throw but you can block, then guys who throw that you can't block, then guys who throw that you can't block but their <i>weapon comes back</>, then guys who block and throw and jump.

This is really where the design falters, because these guys are really fucking infuriating. They move fast and can block almost anything you try, so fights towards the end get tedious and are incredibly unfair (again, I rewound a LOT), but again, it was 1987 and this was the first sequel ever. They tried something new with very limited resources.

And that's another thing! The NES couldn't do a lot! Battery saves were a huge deal, but all they could save was player status and inventory. It's why these games don't start you back from where you left off, why you have to go back to the Temple when you get a Game Over or when you reset the game.

But within those restrictions, Nintendo was able to create eight very large temples, an overworld, multiple types of building exteriors and interiors, five different types of random battle areas (field, forest, desert, swamp, road) with four of those offering multiple enemy sets, including hard variants when you hit a big monster.

This game is an impressive achievement that is very easy to dismiss almost 40 years later because nothing on the NES aged well. I'll still play this again before I replay Skyward Sword.