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I've never played it, but Mario vs Donkey Kong on the GBA is also supposed to be very much in the same vein as Donkey Kong 94, a puzzle platformer that greatly expands on the original Donkey Kong concepts. Mario vs Donkey Kong 2 is where it sort of flies off the rails and becomes a disappointing Lemmings knock-off. It still more or less retains a lot of recognizable elements, but you indirectly control a small army of mechanical toy Marios instead of playing as Mario himself. (Also, a third Mario vs Donkey Kong game that has you indirectly controlling the mini-Marios again is available on DSi Ware.) That's a good question, can anybody answer that?

It's Donkey Kong 94, it's a derivative of the original arcade game and pretty much the best classic Donkey Kong game Nintendo has made. It's really a phenomenal puzzle platformer, and i would also really recommend it.

Man, how long has Robin Williams been rocking that beard? That is an impressive display of facial hair.

Yeah, it's from them, Q Games. (Not to be confused with Q Entertainment, another Japanese developer of cool niche games.) Here's a trailer for X-Scape, since you really kind of need to see it to understand. The visuals are incredibly striking. f3k-PhoJXQA Edit: Since i'm at it, here's Metal Torrent too. 3vrGrVMU7vA

Heheh, yeah, sure, i suppose that's how you should read my exasperated sigh.

It's such a strange artifact, it's stuck in a different era and it's not self-aware about it at all, that whole game is so out of touch with reality. Not even just tonally, it's striking just how old the entire thing feels. It's cribbing tricks from games that were newer than Duke 3D was, but are themselves now tired and old. You have Half-Life 2 physics puzzles, what is literally just the health system from Halo 2/3, CoD-style off-handed grenades, etc. There's nothing invigorating or new about Duke Nukem Forever. It's just... Eggghhh...

It's out, Giant Bomb has another quick look, it looks crazy. Anybody have it? I plan on picking it up at some point.

I don't think you even read what i said, i wasn't defending the misogyny at all, it is pretty fucking tasteless and weird. I have a hard time imagining how all it survived its development intact. As for Gearbox's involvement, by all accounts, the campaign was content complete by the time it arrived in Gearbox's hands, and the amount of actual work they did on this thing minimal. Are you saying those guys should have held it back and redesigned it again? That would have been a ludicrously stupid thing for them to do, and in the long-run the controversy generated from this is only going to help the game. This game is average, that is worse than being bad. Without the built-in history and the controversy some individuals are generating around it, it would have been forgotten in a week. Instead, it will probably go on to be fairly successful.

I bought and played Duke Nukem Forever out of curiosity, i just really needed to see what this game is. Not really a big fan of the series or anything. So first let me play Devil's Advocate - It's not that bad. This is not a Daikatana-like disaster, this is a functional and adequate game. I have played quite a few shooters even just on the 360 that are considerably larger failures of design. The shooting action here is reasonably capable, the game is filled with honestly kind of clever puzzles, there's a few tolerable vehicle sequences, the campaign is long and varied. I've actually found it kind of fascinating for being such a bastard mess of ideas from different eras of FPS game design. It's also a little bewildering to play this game and recognize set pieces from decade-old trailers when it was, with no exaggeration, a completely different product. They must have just had this one defined design document that they've been iterating on endlessly this whole time, rather than completely rebooting the project when moving over to new technology. I've seen a lot of people decrying the game for being a glitch ridden mess, which reeks of people just pulling out all the stops to shit on this game. The framerate is reasonably stable, and the game also certainly doesn't have any noticeable bugs, and it hasn't crashed on me. Load times are interminable though, oh my god. You die, and you wait like two minutes to restart. It would also be a fairly easy argument to make that it is the ugliest FPS on any of the current consoles. Just shiny, blurry textures and limp particle effects everywhere. All of that then lit by nothing but harsh, uniform lighting. It's actually hard to look at sometimes. A lot has also been made of that hive level, and i think the people who made this thing seriously lost some perspective. The whole thing about aliens impregnating the women was in in those previous Duke Nukem games, but in a very abstracted and cartoonish way. I mean, here the way it's presented just makes it seem like something you would expect to see on some idiot teen's vile deviant art page. It's like those guys just took what they had in Duke 3d and dialed it up without thinking about the implications of doing that. 3D realms must have been so closed off and isolated from the world for that shit to get through enough hands to be okayed for the game without somebody going "Guys, guys... What the fuck?" Eggghhh... The game isn't funny, and all the low-fi nudity is just an extreme example of uncanny valley nastiness. The multiplayer is pretty worthless. Eggghhh... It's just a rather below average game that is trying really hard to be really offensive. I think the incredibly negative reaction boils down to people having already decided that they want to hate this game, and that being the story they want from this game, that it was a catastrophic failure. And that's it. I don't want to think about this game anymore. So now George Broussard's monstrosity is out and done with, will we see Randy Pitchford's Duke Nukem game? I wonder if the Duke Nukem license will have any value to Gearbox after this is all done with, getting the license was clearly why they took this project on at all.

I'm just saying the gameboy color's DX version isn't as buggy as the original gameboy variants were. Link's Awakening is notoriously glitched, there were multiple revisions of the gameboy cart, all fixing and breaking weird things. Hey, If you played that game as a kid and couldn't finish it? It probably wasn't your fault. Ask around though, you'll find a lot of people who played it on the gameboy will have never finished it, and will just have assumed it was their feeble child brain unable to cope with the game.

Yeah, the 3D classics remakes like the Excite Bike thing are separate from the Virtual Console stuff, which are still just cleanly emulated ports. The version of Link's Awakening that they've made available is the final DX version. (That game is so buggy that it would be cruel to expose anybody to any version older than that.)

Metal Torrent and X-scape are two games i would strongly endorse. Metal Torrent is just a really tightly designed bullet hell game with randomized levels. X-scape is kind of this incredible, gorgeously stylized open-world Battlezone-style tank game. (It's a sequel to a gameboy game that was never released in America, that is probably best known for the awesome tunes it has representing in the Smash games.)

So I got my free Excite Bike. I don't even like Excite Bike. I have to say though, that's cute, Nintendo. The thing with the tricky 3d slider mapping, i see what you did there. That's not enough to make me like Excite Bike, but it is enough to make me interested in what Nintendo does with other 3D remakes. Also, the firmware update apparently breaks Ridge Racer 3D, as explained to me by the spotpass notice telling me to update. (The same notice explains that a later update will be issued to fix the firmware update said notice is telling me to install.) Nintendo!

I just finished Red Faction Armageddon. It's a pretty average game from a critical standpoint, terrible story and all that, but on a more gut response level, i really loved it. Just a big dumb corridor shooter where things explode spectacularly, really phenomenally ridiculous levels of environmental destruction to see. (With a fairly cool gimmick that lets you reconstruct destroyed bits of the environment, either for cover or just to allow you to keep moving forward.) Seems like there's a lot of pretty divided opinion on the game though, but there's a demo on X-box Live, if anybody cares. It was what sold me on it, and having played the full game, i think it's a reasonably good representation of what that thing is.

Well hey, Master Quest eventually saw the light of day, and that was a cancelled 64DD project.

You're probably thinking of this guy right here. Also, here's the wiki page for the VMU.

Something like three entire dungeons were cut from Wind Waker, it's why the last third of the game just kind of devolves into "AND NOW FETCH QUESTS."

Yeah, that was the vmu, the crazy little gameboy-like memory card that slotted into the controller. Only a handful of games ever really took advantage of it.

Seriously, did that ad bot threaten him? I think it did. The great ad bot uprising of 2012, predicted first here.

I remember almost 100%'ing Majora's Mask, but there were ultimately a few side-quests i couldn't complete. None of the Zelda games are especially difficult, but Majora is probably one of the more challenging outings. Still, when people bitch about it being hard, i think it usually just comes down to most people not taking the time pressure in that game seriously, and then just going "fuck this game" when they run into the limit and have to restart whatever they were doing. Majora is one of the most divisive games among fans, but Nintendo has never neglected it, it's already been re-released both on the Gamecube and again on the Virtual Console. If the 3DS remake of Ocarina does well, Majora's Mask is an obvious place to go next. Microsoft announcing Halo 4 for 360 in 2012 probably means we're going be playing 360 games until 2014 at least.

Nobody here was even making that argument though, the Zelda games have never been about story.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/35015/Electronic_Arts_Back_Catalog_Comes_To_Good_Old_Games.php This is kind of a big win for GoG, EA has been one of the big holdouts. Still no System Shock, but i am very delighted to see Crusader on the service. IMDDYMtfo94 I absolutely love the Crusader series, even with the clunky tank controls. They were such deep and interesting action games, like an isometric Deus Ex.

I'd say five hours is a fair shot, and you shouldn't feel forced into giving a game you don't like another look, but if you really feel like giving that series another chance, i'd recommend A Link to the Past. It ages well, and it's not too much of a big time investment, some of the later games are easily 30-40 hours. Anyways, I think Miffy is fairly spot on. The Legend of Zelda series does have some pretty firm roots in japanese action RPG's, but Nintendo classifies those games as action-adventure games, and it's more accurate to what those games try to do. (Puzzle solving, really.) Zelda is about exploration and solving the challenges an environment has presented you with. I've always felt they're kind of akin to Metroid in that way, just with an additional layer of there being defined quests and an overworld with towns. I do disagree with Miffy about the way the recent Zelda games have integrated the newer Nintendo control schemes. I've always felt that motion control was the worst thing about Twilight Princess, the gesture recognition is just so creaky and unreliable. (Somewhere out there is a rare alternate Gamecube version without any of the motion control, and that is probably awesome.) The point i would make, kind of one of the points i was trying to make earlier, is... just what publisher wouldn't take advantage of their flagship franchises like this? I mean, these are businesses, but Nintendo treats its properties with a lot of care. Nintendo famously gives games however much development time they need, and they are always trying to do something meaningfully new and interesting within the frameworks that people expect. They're not just shitting games out year-to-year with minor iterative changes. Hey, Mario has been around for over 30 years now and his face is all over a million damn games, but the crazy thing? There are only just over a dozen Super Mario games, and they're all really, really different from each other. Super Mario Bros is not Super Mario Bros 3 is not Super Mario 64 is not Super Mario Galaxy.