What can be said about the Mario game that birthed its series’s future? That it took the original’s arcade setup and turned it into a canvas of impeccable level design, boundless creativity, and point-precision control? That it codified almost all things about Mario till the time of this writing, down to which theme of worlds regularly happen in which order? That Miyamoto refused to recognize it as an achievement even as the best he could think of for a followup was this game’s copied homework? Mario 3 was a toybox of infinite lights. What better praise can it get than that, even thirty years on, we are still happy to play with what we found inside?

Super Metroid is probably the most frustrating game I will ever give full marks. It summons in me a sort of guttural fury to even think about. Have you ever thought about what it would actually be like to control a space suit? Super Metroid has. It has thought so much about what that’s like. It’s thought about the most minute ways the physics of a space warrior woman in a full suit of armor somersaulting through water in a cave in the dark is not only frustrating, but REALISTICALLY frustrating. It’s thought about the ways in which you will scour a map for hours looking for a solution to your progression that is HORSE PISS and so has made traversal back and forth not only rewarding in resources, but filled rooms and rooms of different scenarios to practice your mastery over a difficult game. It’s thought about the ways in which its power curve basically acts as an increasingly audible Fuck Off that the player can give their hostile and bizarre opponents, whose buglike erraticness and fucklike damage capabilities make you viscerally FEEL like you’re on a planet of horrible bugs in a way that bypasses appreciation of art and becomes a performance art of the world’s smallest and most pathetic PTSD. Being Samus Aran seems miserable until at last you overcome. And Super Metroid, perhaps more than any game in its series, paints a sneering picture vividly.

New Horizons is probably the most complex and warm empty game I’ve experienced in a long time. It is deeply imaginative and iterative on a mechanical level with the series that deserves genuine praise— things down to the color choices feel extremely well-considered an addition to the whole. In exchange for this practical upgrade, which clearly cost man hours and detailed focus, the experience feels strangely heartless. The actual animals that the series ostensibly concerns itself with are at best mildly charming wallpaper and at worst a vehicle for players to have an almost consumerist possessiveness and empathetic disinterest in what were allegedly your friends and neighbors.

It all feels so long ago that I walked home in the original Gamecube release, dressed in my work uniform, and, in the middle of being tossed this way and that trying to make ends meet and relieve myself from my debt, had a pleasant little animal come up to me, offer me wallpaper for nothing, and hope to see me again sometime. It would be the only wallpaper I had, as all my money went to paying off my loans. In a moment that would presage future bleakness in my life in ways my childhood self could never understand, being given a basic commodity in dire poverty made it feel like gold in my hands. Made me feel, for a moment, like the love given to me would make me invincible.

In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, villagers have been bought and sold for real world dollars. They are gacha figures. But they are lovingly painted.