The erasure of the early Wario Land games in the wider discourse just sucks. WL4 gets propped up like it’s the true perfect Wario Land formula but it was just one variation. The earlier ones get treated like a clunky beta of WL4 and not.. their own cool games with unique selling points

Trey and Parker are the Nostalgia Critic of animated TV:
They never get any better at what they do and peddle the same juvenile humor for decades.
They are deeply incurious and uncreative people and anyone else in animation with a real vision would do so much more with those resources.

Also thank god seemingly Nintendo did procure the entire NES Ninja Gaiden trilogy. They also should definitely be on there, really great action games

The game also looks and sounds phenomenal and was a strong showcase for what the next generation could do that GameCube/ Xbox could not. Steve Burke’s soundtrack is criminally under appreciated in the pantheon of “great Rare soundtracks” and conveys the game’s magic so well youtu.be/iySJlUv9WzQ?...

This game’s character swapping/ beat ‘em up style is truly unique and fun if you can get into it. All the elemental warriors are so creative and their numerous moves are fun and toyetic to play with. Just don’t come in expecting DMC caliber juggling combat or anything

Tooie provides the player with some really fun/ compelling tools such as Kazooie’s glide or the Clockwork eggs that really sell that Metroid-style exponential power progression. It feels so good to cheese item pickups with your late-game abilities which you couldn’t do in Kazooie.

Tooie often gets slagged off for being a Bad platformer but the platforming is a means to an end for the adventure game it’s trying to be. It’s a Zelda style big interconnected world full of characters that you can jump around. I still find that fun even if the level design can be a bit flat

Eventually I fully gave into Tooie’s madness and really appreciated the more technical and esoteric playstyle. A lot of Tooie feels like playing chess as a 3D platformer: moving the pieces/ characters around very deliberately across the levels to unravel the puzzles.

Part of why I like it so much is that it really had to win me over. I went into it right after playing Kazooie with a lot of negative preconceptions. At first I was frustrated I couldn’t collect all the items in each level in one go, until I got comfortable with the more Metroid-y structure

I like Teleroboxer more than a lot of the actually great legendary retro games people like to talk about so I may be uniquely positioned to get full value out of this. But also.. damn that’s a lot of money and it’ll be even more to get a flashcart/ collect more games

Other M is like a bad Famicom Detective Club game and all the hallmarks of that series (weird handling of women, ridiculous dramatic contrivances, obtuse “look at this one specific thing” gameplay) just hit absolutely wrong in Metroid

I feel like there are definitely cases of “this franchise has become a husk of its former self” but it feels like every fan is so quick to jump to that conclusion and dig their heels in. In niche communities like Metroid, that doomerism can be so exhausting

Also it minimizes the people still left at Retro from those days who are working on Prime 4 and the devs from Nintendo’s side like Tanabe who were always very important to the Prime series direction.

Saw a post that was like “this isn’t Actually Metroid Prime 4 because it’s not the original trilogy dev team” and like.. there would be no Prime 4 without new people making it. Those Retro guys were burnt out after Prime 3 and had no desire to keep making Metroid, a lot of them left.