The Nerd Next Door

Yes, Super Mario Bros. , the classic Nintendo platformer, why? Because I feel its a game everyone should play at least once and it had been a few years since I played it front to back, last time was in 2014 on the Wii U when they dropped it on the NES Virtual Console. So I decided to give it another shot by playing the All Stars version released on SNES in 1993 and actually review it this time, bit of a writing exercise here. I'm emulating this on higan, the most accurate SNES emulator out there so far, save states were used sparingly, and I'll cover why I did towards the end. But first, story, which I think we all know the low down; firey turtle King Bowser rescues plumber Mario from the tyrannical Princess Toadsto- no, wait, sorry. Plumbing Brothers Mario and Luigi seek to rescue Princess Toadstool form the tyrannical turtle King Bowser. Of course every time Mario and Luigi beat the four levels that constitute a world and think they succeed in their quest Toadstool...

The Nintendo Playstation sounds to the common gamer like a statement that a troll on reddit or Twitter would come up with as joke. But many hardcore gamers know the story that Nintendo and Sony initially were going to make both a CD add-on for the Super Nintendo and an all in one console called the Nintendo Playstation. The project died in 1991 and has been regarded as Nintendo's worst failure, giving rise to their own competition. But what if I told you that through emulation and flash carts, the Super Nintendo CD lives in a very odd fashion? It's an odd thing, I'll need to explain further. We need to go back to the original SNES CD concept and how it sprouted from the Super Nintendo development. In 1988, Sony approached Nintendo with a brand new audio chip for the upcoming Super Nintendo project, a chip created by future Playstation creator Ken Kutaragi. Nintendo bought the chip, which allowed for sample based music to be created and boosted the SNES' audio bey...

I'm two months late but I beat one of the four routes of Fire Emblem: Three Houses on the Nintendo Switch. Overall I found it a great game with a good story, good characters, decent writing, great gameplay, and not wallowing in the waifu oversexualization/dating simulation that pained Fire Emblem Fates . But one thing I noticed is how much Intelligent Systems borrowed from a long forgotten Fire Emblem, a name that rarely reaches western ears due to its Japanese exclusivity; Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War . Which also leads me to question if we're gonna see the long forgotten 4th game get the Echoes treatment like Gaiden did in 2017. But in order to understand what I mean, we need to look at what is borrowed to understand. Of course, the first and perhaps most important of these ideas is in story. Three Houses follows three heirs, Dimitri, Edelgard, and Claude; all at an officers academy for training. Of course in actuality you play a side character who I named...

So now we are at the end of the line, all the mainline Halo games have played and now the wait begins for Infinite and the MCC port on PC. A wait that honestly is taking longer than expected, but I can wait, I'm a patient lil sausage. But there is a path here, one I've seen over my journey through Halo , one that in my opinion can perfectly explain what the hell happened here and we can find out jsut what the hell happened to cause the rise and fall of Halo. In my opinion and in terms of single player, what made Halo stand out from games like DOOM, Quake, and Duke Nukem was it's ability to flawlessly switch from hallway style linear shooting to big outdoor arenas with lots of vehicles and weapons, all of which encouraged experimentation and approaching things how you want to. It also had a sense of humor about itself, the stakes were big, epic, and serious, but the tone of at least the human characters indicated that they were having a bit of fun with the wh...

We're not exactly done yet, if you haven't noticed I didn't talk about Halo's mobile spinoffs, remasters, ports, and fan games. Well I was saving this for an all in one encompassing look at all the other ways to play Halo beyond the games that defined the series' legacy. The mobile games, fan works, ports, and remasters that tend to follow a series as storied as Halo , let's have a chat about it. Ports First up is Halo 1 on PC, released two years after Halo 1 on Xbox and oh boy this one is special. On one hand the game's visuals are butchered with various effects that helped pretty up the game missing, leading to a worse experience overall compared to the Xbox version. On the other hand this version has online multiplayer and mod support along with having all of the engine tools released for Halo 1 . This has in turn inspired some magical works we'll mention later. So if I were to recommend this game, it would probably be for the mod support ...

Halo is in sort of a rocky place right now, the franchises entire hopes ride on a return to the classic style with Halo Infinite after the disaster that was Halo 5: Guardians . But Infinite won't be the first return to a classic style, as little more than a year after Halo 5 , Halo Wars 2 dropped on Xbox and PC. With a more simplified premise, a return to a classic world in the series, and a new villain, does Halo Wars 2 outshine the first one? Halo Wars 2 is set 28 years after Halo Wars and about 6 months after Halo 5:Guardians ; after being lost in space at the end of Halo Wars , Halo Wars 2 sees the crew of the UNSC Spirit of Fire being awoken in orbit around a restored Ark from Halo 3 . However, the crew quickly discovers a Brute dominated ex-Covenant faction called the Banished in possession of the Ark after slaughtering the scientific survey outpost and Spartan escort that previously occupied it.  The Spirit of Fire, along with a new AI named Isabel, finds itself a...