saladflute
1988
Pretty good fast-paced take, and actually one of the better keyboards for a console Jeopardy (having multiple rows instead of a single left to right thing makes it quicker to navigate).
Sucks that you can't see the other players' scores while making wagers (and the CPU players' wagering strategies make no sense, though tbf that's kinda realistic). Also i'm pretty sure one time i got two Daily Doubles in the same category?
My favorite part -- similar to another Rare-developed game, Anticipation, CPU players sometimes buzz in with an incorrect response which has a scattering of letters from the real response; if you're right on the edge of thinking you know it, those letters might jog your memory enough to get it yourself on the rebound, while usually not being enough to just give you the answer flat out. Very clever and effective way to simulate that.
Being able to buzz in as soon as the clue is revealed (as it was on the actual show until the second season of the Trebek version) can make things pretty unfair, either in your favor if you're playing computers (as they'll always politely give you a few seconds to read it), or against you if you're playing against a human who's played before. Notably, there's no way to reshuffle the categories if you get a board you've seen before, as later versions would add. The manual just recommends resetting the console, but that's obviously not an option once you're in Double or Final (i got a repeat Final question on only my third playthrough; there are more clues than that, but it seems their RNG seeding isn't as random as it could be).
Sucks that you can't see the other players' scores while making wagers (and the CPU players' wagering strategies make no sense, though tbf that's kinda realistic). Also i'm pretty sure one time i got two Daily Doubles in the same category?
My favorite part -- similar to another Rare-developed game, Anticipation, CPU players sometimes buzz in with an incorrect response which has a scattering of letters from the real response; if you're right on the edge of thinking you know it, those letters might jog your memory enough to get it yourself on the rebound, while usually not being enough to just give you the answer flat out. Very clever and effective way to simulate that.
Being able to buzz in as soon as the clue is revealed (as it was on the actual show until the second season of the Trebek version) can make things pretty unfair, either in your favor if you're playing computers (as they'll always politely give you a few seconds to read it), or against you if you're playing against a human who's played before. Notably, there's no way to reshuffle the categories if you get a board you've seen before, as later versions would add. The manual just recommends resetting the console, but that's obviously not an option once you're in Double or Final (i got a repeat Final question on only my third playthrough; there are more clues than that, but it seems their RNG seeding isn't as random as it could be).
2023
The other reviews that say "eh i guess there could've been a BIT more single-player content" are being very generous. There's no single-player content. No side games that are more fleshed-out versions of microgames, no collection of souvenirs/toys, no mission mode, no replaying individual microgames in the album to unlock anything (the section where you play the individual games is just to practice them once on each difficulty; no endless play with target scores), no leaderboards, no unlockable cosmetics. Play through the story mode once (which will take maybe two hours), play each stage one or two more times to see the 7 microgames on each stage that you didn't get the first time, play the three elevator stages, and then all that's left to do is get high scores.
The original Warioware was a passion project developed in secret, and most every game since then still kept that spirit, with all of them having a bunch of extra stuff thrown in that was clearly the developers having fun with every little idea they had for the new hardware. This feels like they were told they had to make a new Warioware -- and one that plays more like the best-selling one on the Wii instead of going in another new experimental direction -- and get it out for the last holiday season before the Switch 2 comes out. I guess ironically it feels like the first one that was actually made by Wario.
The multiplayer is probably good; i haven't had a chance to try it yet. And maybe it's unfair that i'm rating it before trying the multiplayer, but Warioware was never a series that only cared about multiplayer; there was always plenty to do in single player to keep you coming back. I think even Mega Party Games had more single-player content than this (and it also had more multiplayer content btw).
The games are good, and that one afternoon i spent going through the story mode was very fun, but i can't recommend this at full price if you're not getting it as a multiplayer party game.
The original Warioware was a passion project developed in secret, and most every game since then still kept that spirit, with all of them having a bunch of extra stuff thrown in that was clearly the developers having fun with every little idea they had for the new hardware. This feels like they were told they had to make a new Warioware -- and one that plays more like the best-selling one on the Wii instead of going in another new experimental direction -- and get it out for the last holiday season before the Switch 2 comes out. I guess ironically it feels like the first one that was actually made by Wario.
The multiplayer is probably good; i haven't had a chance to try it yet. And maybe it's unfair that i'm rating it before trying the multiplayer, but Warioware was never a series that only cared about multiplayer; there was always plenty to do in single player to keep you coming back. I think even Mega Party Games had more single-player content than this (and it also had more multiplayer content btw).
The games are good, and that one afternoon i spent going through the story mode was very fun, but i can't recommend this at full price if you're not getting it as a multiplayer party game.
i've tried giving this a chance several more times since beating it when it came out, and after ten years i still can't understand how anyone could think this is okay, even without the context of the first decade of the series. none of this is fun. i don't know, i guess if you'd never played any rpg or any story-based game before and you're just coming in like "ooh, it's the guy from new super mario bros wii, but there's dialogue! neat!" and you just power through the obtuse puzzles and unrewarding gameplay because of the novelty of talking toads.
also frustrating that people still respond to this like "oh you just don't like it because it's not exactly like ttyd" like no fuck off, i don't want another ttyd, i want the paper mario game they should have made after years of learning from and building off of ttyd and spm; instead they completely threw everything out and started the entire "mario... but he's paper!" concept from scratch and it took them three/four games over eight years to muddle their way into something almost as good as the first time they did it 20 years earlier.
also frustrating that people still respond to this like "oh you just don't like it because it's not exactly like ttyd" like no fuck off, i don't want another ttyd, i want the paper mario game they should have made after years of learning from and building off of ttyd and spm; instead they completely threw everything out and started the entire "mario... but he's paper!" concept from scratch and it took them three/four games over eight years to muddle their way into something almost as good as the first time they did it 20 years earlier.
1994
The first dozen or so times I tried to play this i kept falling off of it, and i think a big part of it was the controls. Fusion was my first 2D Metroid, and i kept trying to find a way to make this feel like that. Even after playing all the way through and loving Metroid 1 and 2 i still had a hard time with this, i guess as kind of an uncanny valley thing where the controls are similar enough to modern Metroid that it feels off, while 1 and 2 are different enough that they're clearly their own thing.
While i do still think it would be interesting to have a modern remake of it to stand beside the rest of the series, this time i stopped trying to make it feel like modern Metroid and had to get myself into the same mindset i did with 1 and 2 -- i need to sit down and invest my time into this old game and let it be what it is. And making a map -- the game kinda tricks you into thinking you don't need to make a paper map, but you kinda do. (the ingame map shows you where rooms are, but not where doors are; when you have your own map where you've marked how to actually get around and can see all areas at once (fitting all the pieces of graph paper into one big connected thing at the end was really satisfying), the backtracking (which there really isn't a lot of as far as i can remember?) is a lot less frustrating). With that in mind, this time i really got into it and loved it.
Half star off because jumping controls could be better. Wall jumps still feel finicky for me, especially since pressing up or down takes you out of the spin jump and forces you to fall all the way back down and try again (in modern Metroid you can get back into the spin by pressing the jump button again). The controls in general also still feel kinda clunky to me, but the game is slow-paced and easy enough that it doesn't really hurt it.
But i have to say i really don't understand the mindset among a lot of Metroid fans that 1 and 2 are the bad ones that no one should bother with anymore and just play the remakes, and Super is the timeless one. Zero Mission and Samus Returns are both very good games, but the idea that they actually replace 1 and 2 in terms of gameplay makes no sense to me; they're very different games (and especially the idea that a newcomer to the series should play Zero Mission, then Samus Returns, then Super is just completely bonkers; going directly from the newest game to the oldest game is going to cause severe whiplash). Super is the kinda-awkward transition stage between Classic Metroid and Modern Metroid, and all three Classic Metroids are very good games that need to be approached as products of their time and appreciated in context.
While i do still think it would be interesting to have a modern remake of it to stand beside the rest of the series, this time i stopped trying to make it feel like modern Metroid and had to get myself into the same mindset i did with 1 and 2 -- i need to sit down and invest my time into this old game and let it be what it is. And making a map -- the game kinda tricks you into thinking you don't need to make a paper map, but you kinda do. (the ingame map shows you where rooms are, but not where doors are; when you have your own map where you've marked how to actually get around and can see all areas at once (fitting all the pieces of graph paper into one big connected thing at the end was really satisfying), the backtracking (which there really isn't a lot of as far as i can remember?) is a lot less frustrating). With that in mind, this time i really got into it and loved it.
Half star off because jumping controls could be better. Wall jumps still feel finicky for me, especially since pressing up or down takes you out of the spin jump and forces you to fall all the way back down and try again (in modern Metroid you can get back into the spin by pressing the jump button again). The controls in general also still feel kinda clunky to me, but the game is slow-paced and easy enough that it doesn't really hurt it.
But i have to say i really don't understand the mindset among a lot of Metroid fans that 1 and 2 are the bad ones that no one should bother with anymore and just play the remakes, and Super is the timeless one. Zero Mission and Samus Returns are both very good games, but the idea that they actually replace 1 and 2 in terms of gameplay makes no sense to me; they're very different games (and especially the idea that a newcomer to the series should play Zero Mission, then Samus Returns, then Super is just completely bonkers; going directly from the newest game to the oldest game is going to cause severe whiplash). Super is the kinda-awkward transition stage between Classic Metroid and Modern Metroid, and all three Classic Metroids are very good games that need to be approached as products of their time and appreciated in context.
Initial thoughts after finishing: About as good as a modern Paper Mario game can be with the weird restrictions they've placed on themselves (and I don't mean that in a damning-with-faint-praise way; I legitimately enjoyed it a lot), but i really hope they pick a direction in the future -- either go back into the Mario RPG-shaped void left by the end of Alphadream and the apparent death of the Mario & Luigi series, or go all the way and get rid of the vestiges of the series' RPG roots that don't make sense anymore.
Never really liked the lonely and kinda mean vibe that the game world has. Plot and characters are focused on humor above all else, meaning a lot of things don't really make sense (and feel like they were made up as they went along) and characters pop up just to serve their role in the story and then you're not supposed to care about them anymore. It's not like SMRPG or an old-style Paper Mario where you meet all these people from around the world and all of them have a stake in you beating this big bad and at the end you get to see how you've helped everyone; the story is just a series of weird things that happen to the central characters of some monarchs and their friends.
Honestly i think the game kinda tricked me into liking it more than i actually did for 18 years by having some music that sounds like SMRPG. Not a bad game, but doesn't really live up to the potential of what a Mario RPG can be.
also let Luigi kiss Peasley
Honestly i think the game kinda tricked me into liking it more than i actually did for 18 years by having some music that sounds like SMRPG. Not a bad game, but doesn't really live up to the potential of what a Mario RPG can be.
also let Luigi kiss Peasley
This review contains spoilers
- Graphics are nice, despite removing some personality (and also they're the same graphics from the other dozen M&L 3DS games).
- Joke's End music is better.
- Minimap on the bottom screen is a nice touch.
- The new field controls tried to make things less confusing for new players by making A always Mario and B always Luigi and in the process made them a thousand times more clunky. There's an elegant logic to the original field controls that take a little getting used to; in here you just keep mashing R to go through the ten different combinations (or use the touch screen, but then you can't see the map), and it doesn't even implement any of the streamlining (if A is always Mario and B is always Luigi, why do High Jump and Spin Jump have to be separate things? They could both be on the same one and you just press A or B; same for hand powers and back-bro hammer powers, especially since X always makes both of them do a normal jump) or quality-of-life features (being able to choose how many gulps of water to swallow and seeing remaining spit ammo on the HUD) that Partners in Time added over a decade earlier.
- Harder to overlook the casual transphobia coming back to the game 18 years later. The Beanstar, which can only be awoken by a voice of pure beauty, reacts violently when it hears the voice of Birdo -- and the reveal that underneath that dress was actually a Birdo (incidentally, the question of whether she consented to this plan to permanently lose her voice is not addressed at all; she's not really treated as a sentient being in this scene despite another Birdo having full lines of dialogue a few hours later) is immediately followed by her chasing a horrified Toad offscreen trying to kiss them. Then later another Birdo shows up (presumably not the same character? since this one still has her voice? but that could just be this game not bothering to make sense), and once again the joke is that the male character she's with (who hesitates before calling her a woman and arguably deadnames her) is uncomfortable with her romantic advances, at least publicly, and she refuses to back off. Queen Bean refers to Bowletta as "he... she... uh, IT!" The Luigi scene isn't that bad but the part where Cackletta and Fawful see Luigi's mustache and it's just a big joke can definitely be a bit uncomfortable. Most of this could have been fixed for the remake -- the Birdo whose voice was stolen could have been replaced with a Goomba or a Beanie (simultaneously avoiding questions of "wait why is this Birdo talking now? is this a different Birdo?") and some dialogue could have been altered a bit. They changed the Donkey Kong skeleton to a regular skeleton, changed Kamek to Dr. Toadley, and changed a line of Bowser's dialogue to remove a British slur, so they could have turned down the transphobia a bit if they wanted to but instead a localization team of twelve people in 2017 looked at this and said "yeah, this is all still fine."
- You can save after the final boss now, but not actually. The game state is still where it was before the final battle, with the castle town still permanently under attack. What's the point of that?
- Haven't played Bowser's Minions / Minion Quest yet; not sure if i will.
- Still a pretty good game overall, but this version doesn't do much to justify its existence, with any changes being a roughly equal mix of slightly better, slightly worse, and neutral (and some things that should have been changed being left alone).
- Joke's End music is better.
- Minimap on the bottom screen is a nice touch.
- The new field controls tried to make things less confusing for new players by making A always Mario and B always Luigi and in the process made them a thousand times more clunky. There's an elegant logic to the original field controls that take a little getting used to; in here you just keep mashing R to go through the ten different combinations (or use the touch screen, but then you can't see the map), and it doesn't even implement any of the streamlining (if A is always Mario and B is always Luigi, why do High Jump and Spin Jump have to be separate things? They could both be on the same one and you just press A or B; same for hand powers and back-bro hammer powers, especially since X always makes both of them do a normal jump) or quality-of-life features (being able to choose how many gulps of water to swallow and seeing remaining spit ammo on the HUD) that Partners in Time added over a decade earlier.
- Harder to overlook the casual transphobia coming back to the game 18 years later. The Beanstar, which can only be awoken by a voice of pure beauty, reacts violently when it hears the voice of Birdo -- and the reveal that underneath that dress was actually a Birdo (incidentally, the question of whether she consented to this plan to permanently lose her voice is not addressed at all; she's not really treated as a sentient being in this scene despite another Birdo having full lines of dialogue a few hours later) is immediately followed by her chasing a horrified Toad offscreen trying to kiss them. Then later another Birdo shows up (presumably not the same character? since this one still has her voice? but that could just be this game not bothering to make sense), and once again the joke is that the male character she's with (who hesitates before calling her a woman and arguably deadnames her) is uncomfortable with her romantic advances, at least publicly, and she refuses to back off. Queen Bean refers to Bowletta as "he... she... uh, IT!" The Luigi scene isn't that bad but the part where Cackletta and Fawful see Luigi's mustache and it's just a big joke can definitely be a bit uncomfortable. Most of this could have been fixed for the remake -- the Birdo whose voice was stolen could have been replaced with a Goomba or a Beanie (simultaneously avoiding questions of "wait why is this Birdo talking now? is this a different Birdo?") and some dialogue could have been altered a bit. They changed the Donkey Kong skeleton to a regular skeleton, changed Kamek to Dr. Toadley, and changed a line of Bowser's dialogue to remove a British slur, so they could have turned down the transphobia a bit if they wanted to but instead a localization team of twelve people in 2017 looked at this and said "yeah, this is all still fine."
- You can save after the final boss now, but not actually. The game state is still where it was before the final battle, with the castle town still permanently under attack. What's the point of that?
- Haven't played Bowser's Minions / Minion Quest yet; not sure if i will.
- Still a pretty good game overall, but this version doesn't do much to justify its existence, with any changes being a roughly equal mix of slightly better, slightly worse, and neutral (and some things that should have been changed being left alone).
2015
They intentionally force you to use touch controls so you hit the wrong squares on accident and use up energy and have to buy more
i do wanna get back to this at some point because it was pretty fun but god it was just getting so aggressively heterosexual and you can't even take the guys' shirts off like you can in the other two xenoblades
2008
never liked the shiny models, though i do like how muppet-like donkey kong looks
i like the idea of the subspace emissary but the controls don't work that great for a platformer and the story is more boring and less actual-crossover-y than a smash bros story written by a kingdom hearts writer has any right to be
2018
some of the best gameplay and worst amount of content ever in a mario sport. a land of contrasts. also i let myself get my hopes up for the story mode based on the trailers, which is partly on me i guess.
wish i'd played it before adventure 2
really need to do this with multiplayer someday. put it on the switch with online already ffs.
1988
you should be able to duck under birdo's eggs