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TL;DR, Online is underwhelming, Super Mario Bros 3 is still excellent.

Super Mario Bros 3 (Nintendo Switch Online)

If there was going to be a game to make sense of Mario’s role as a plumber-become-princess-rescuer, Super Mario Bros 3 wasn’t about to streamline anything. Not that we were asking questions as kids, anyway. We were quite content with our plump assortment of pixels hopping about in the search for the spike-shelled Big Bad himself, Bowser. Nintendo had a winner on its hands, and as cheesy as associated media may have been, I think they knew it well before launch.

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...and I really do have a soft spot for it.

I had some hope for the PlayStation revival mini machine pulled out of an ear proudly like 22 year old wax. Outwardly it's a tidy device, evoking the nostalgia of physical interactions with the unit. It's cute, and I'm quite fond of it. Even the controllers are forgivable for their curious lack of analog thumbsticks.

Unfortunately there are just two of the twenty games it ships with that I wanted to spend any time with at all. I bought it because it was official, but foremost cheap, and easily moddable. Hackable. Whatever. The latter is very much the feeling I get from the whole marketing experience and pitch of the maligned attempt to capitalize on Nintendo's very successful scheme.

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Joining Stadia will be AntStream and Disney... my digital cup runneth over.

The Future of Retro Gaming Is

...

Give it a minute to sink in. GameHut - or Jon - is a perfectly personable fella who has been a part of some amazing technical achievements on classic retro hardware, specifically the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. In a nutshell he proposes to offer yet another game streaming services that are an extremely questionable value proposition. According to the video, two thousand of them.

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Whoops! But hey, this is what I sound like two years later reviewing the same game.

So I accidentally wrote a second review of Portal for PC. I was so caught up in the idea of reviewing it I ignored the nagging in my head that I already had done so. Okay, so oops. Big deal. It was a good hit of nostalgia and a bit of perspective when I can compare it to the review I wrote less than two years ago. Consequently I'm posting it here since it's unseemly to try and do anything unethical.

Thankfully, this has the upside of making me aware of the fact that I haven't yet reviewed Portal 2 - and it gives me a little break from the Bomberman franchise. Expect the aforementioned review soon.

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Portal (PC)

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Asking for a friend.

Starcraft became something of an obsession when I finally owned a computer fast enough to run it in conjunction with the spare time to play it. I played through the first three campaigns without too much trouble, but Brood War stepped things up quite a bit. It may have been the complexity of the game that finally got to me in addition to the outright intensity of the last chapter.

But who am I kidding? I started using cheats in the fifth chapter when I was playing the Zerg. I'll be the first to admit I'm a mediocre Starcraft player, but I enjoy the lore and characters thanks to Blizzard's signature worldbuilding. I'm no fanboy, but I thought the World of Warcraft movie was pretty good.

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...and for some reason my cursor doesn't tint with Night Light.

I groaned pretty hard when I saw what Google had in mind for their solution to gaming. As expected there's a lot of marketing hype, but have we so quickly forgotten the Google Fiber debacle? I'm in Canada, and I'll make no bones about it, but we just got fiber internet in our neighbourhood. Y'better believe I pounced on that - it's twice as fast as our cable connection. Lower latency, besides.

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...but boy does the nostalgia feel good.

I guess I can understand why Nintendo is having such a hard time deciding how to handle their Online service as a value prospect for players who only will use it occasionally. The options that are available to the average person for experiencing retro classics are staggering, and it was impressive that Nintendo was able to make a dent at all with their "Classic" systems.

Anyone banking on the N64 Classic? I'm genuinely curious. It's not the most friendly of systems to emulate, given the way games were coded for it, support even with the best of emulators is spotty, and the games are magnitudes larger than modest SNES and NES carts. How many N64 games could you fit on... say... 4GB of flash memory?

Not many, though quite a few more than PSX games.

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